Paris in Love: A Memoir Read online

  The right aisle of our church is the province of elderly men seeking handy access to the bathroom. A worthy gray-haired burgher with a generous stomach and a walrus mustache always sits just to the right of the altar. Anyone on his way to the bathroom pauses to shake hands with him and exchange a quiet word. Monsieur la Moustache looks like the mayor in an old French movie: the Mayor of the Men’s Room, the Lord of the Lavatory.

  When you exit the station at Champs-Élysées, before you reach the commercial end of the street, you walk a long path adorned with a revolving pop culture exhibition presented on huge placards. Earlier this year, there were blowups of vintage Vogue covers. Now? Clint Eastwood. It’s odd to find the raw western antihero himself gracing Paris’s most iconic street.

  My father is recovering from a broken hip; wanting to give him something both beautiful and useful, Alessandro and I headed out to Cannes Anciennes de Collection, a cane shop with Chinese canes carved with birds, and antique French canes topped with cheerfully naked nymphs. We found a fascinating walking stick, made for a country vet around 1900. The top unlatches to reveal a secret stick, used to measure the height of a horse. My grandfather was a farmer, and my father still hankers after open fields; this will make him very happy.

  The Invalides Métro station at 8:30 in the morning smells like buttered toast, which makes me remember my mother, slathering butter onto homemade bread. Today Anna said dreamily, “I love this brand-new croissant smell.” I realized that she is creating her own buttery memories, to be recalled decades from now.

  As I was walking along the street today, my eye was caught by the gleam of orange berries hanging from two small bushes in pots on either side of the “door” of a pup tent set up on the sidewalk. Inside was a man, his tent flap half unzipped, feeding sparrows at his threshold. “Bonjour, madame!” he cried, with such an infectious smile that I waved, realizing only halfway down the block that he might be hungry.

  Florent is still disconsolate. Alessandro reports that he had been thinking of taking a leave from his job as a middle school teacher and moving to the town in Italy where the heartless waitress lives. I feel some sympathy as regards her decision. It is extraordinarily difficult to navigate interlingual relationships, especially in the beginning. I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce Alessandro’s name correctly for at least two weeks after we started dating—far too long to ask him again exactly how it sounded. Luckily a friend visited from England and coached me in rolling Rs. Somehow we survived.

  By this point in our sojourn in Paris, we’ve encountered a number of amiable protest marches. My favorite part is the coda: on the heels of the last ambling protester comes a miniature fleet of four or five green city trucks, the same public-works fellows whose comrades are often found marching at the front. The drivers have a great time doing spins on the car-free avenues while sweeping and washing.

  This afternoon Anna walked through the door, her face closed and tight. It turned out that Beatrice is having what promises to be a particularly splendid birthday party, to be held at an indoor water park—but not everyone in the class is invited, and Anna was not one of those anointed ones to be handed a precious invitation. “Right after that, my tummy started hurting,” Anna said. Mine, too.

  Boulevard des Invalides is lined with chestnut trees that lost their leaves months ago, but not all their burrs. The chestnuts hang from curling, fragile stems high in the air, creating knots of black lace against the morning sky.

  I have now turned from having rather unwelcome gold highlights to being a blonde. It wasn’t a change I wished for or welcomed (though one could say that it’s France’s revenge for my terrible language skills). Although I like to tell myself that I am not shallow, it turns out I was lying. Hair apparently ranks just below the happiness of my children and possibly above my husband’s happiness.

  When we moved into this apartment, I first noticed the windows because they are draped in shimmery peacock blue taffeta from the ceiling to the floor—very Parisian, I thought. But over the months I’ve realized that having five-foot-tall windows through which to view the world changes everything. Watching snow fall on the other side of large panes of glass makes it feel as if the snow falls in the room itself; a normal window brackets off the snow, as if it fell on a Hollywood set, far away.

  Alessandro came home with a mischievous expression on his face and an unfamiliar shopping bag in his hand. Inside, the most gorgeous hat I’ve ever seen, of mossy velvet, with a floppy flower on one side. The brim can curl up like that of a Jazz Age flapper, or rakishly down over one ear. My newly blond (and heretofore despised) hair now looks like a brilliant decision!

  I walked past the man in the pup tent again. He has built a little wooden threshold in front of his tent to support his two berry bushes; they are firethorn, perhaps. A small dish discreetly invited assistance; as I bent over to put in a coin, I saw that his tent flap was open. He was inside, sitting in the lotus position, meditating. I walked home thinking how happy he looked, with his orange berries flaring against the gray sidewalk, and his simple house.

  Last night Anna and I cooked dinner while Alessandro and Luca wrestled with algebra; there’s to be a two-hour test tomorrow. When the pasta was ready, the guys were not, thanks to mathematical complications. So Anna and I sat down to read aloud some Enid Blyton with an appetizer of a crusty baguette, delicious sweet butter, and a twist of salt from the grinder. We ate, and read. And ate. And read. By the time the boys had put the final algebra problems to rest, there was no bread left, and no room in our stomachs for dinner.

  Parisian life is small and quiet. I pack the children off to school and then think greedily about how many hours I have before they come home. I have come to the conclusion that silence and time are the most precious commodities.

  We wandered through the Hôtel Drouot auction house yesterday, and I fell in love with a fainting couch labeled “Duchesse à Oreilles, Époque Régence,” upholstered in a brocaded cream adorned with nodding heads of rosy flowers. I instantly envisioned whole cascades of my heroines gracefully swooning onto this couch.

  Parisians stand to the side of an opening train door, waiting for passengers to exit, rather than elbowing their way on. They form neat lines at the grocery store. I seem to be the only jaywalker in the city. But let one of them behind a steering wheel … everything changes. Held up in traffic for more than thirty seconds, a Parisian goes berserk and honks until the surrounding buildings shake.

  I stood for a while in the freezing cold yesterday and watched an old man play his barrel organ. His huge orange cat slept on top of the instrument, wrapped in a small sheepskin. Tourists kept giving him euros to take a picture, which struck me as so odd. I tried to imagine the slide show back home. “And here is Doris, standing next to the old Frenchman playing an organ.”

  High up, somewhere in the milky sky, the snow clings together before it pinwheels gently down in little clumps. Thousands of cotton bolls were trying to seed themselves on rue du Conservatoire.

  Anna spent last evening rearranging her room. She’s divided her shelves into “books with girls in them,” “books in which bad stuff happens” (mostly fairy tales), and “books for every day” (Junie B. and Enid Blyton). I took a look at my bookshelves. I have “books with happy endings” and “books telling me how to be happy.”

  We spent the afternoon at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, a quirky, wonderful science museum in the 3rd arrondissement, housing everything from Regency carriages to an early Apple computer. There’s an automaton doll admired by Marie Antoinette (it can play eight tunes!) and the very first satellite, which broadcast to the world Neil Armstrong’s steps on the moon. Luca was most fascinated—if slightly freaked out—by the objects such as the iPod that we use now but that have already found a place in the museum.

  All my life I’ve heard of Foucault’s pendulum, but I didn’t know what it was until we saw an original version at the Musée des Arts et Métiers. The pendulum sweeps over a table, a
nd as the earth turns on its axis, tilting the table ever so imperceptibly, the pendulum swings toward a new position, finally knocking over a small metal block. We watched … and watched … When the block clattered on its side, I felt, for just a second, as if the earth lurched below our feet.

  Mariage Frères, a maison de thé that opened in 1854, will leave you happily wiggling with caffeine. They keep their teas in huge canisters marked with fascinating names. I bought Thé des Poètes Solitaires for my father (a solitary poet), and for myself, Earl Grey French Blue in tea bags. The tea of solitary poets was measured out on big brass scales, and the tea bags turned out to be made of thin muslin.

  I took Alessandro to the Musée Nissim de Camondo today. I have decided that my favorite portrait in the collection is Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun’s Bacchante in the large study. Her body is glowing, curvy, nude but for a swath of leopard skin across her lap. Moïse placed another nude woman over his bed, which is snugly tucked in its own alcove. Given his love of paintings of nudes and his membership in a club for epicures, Moïse seems to have been a sensual man—which makes it all the more sad that his wife ran off with an Italian horse trainer. Alessandro insists that because the horse trainer was a baron, his nationality and occupation were irrelevant.

  Alessandro and I watched the informational video about the history of the de Camondo family and the museum, and I disgraced myself by crying, though surrounded by rows of stoic French people. After Moïse’s wife absconded with the baron, he seems to have raised their young children with the flair of a modern stay-at-home dad. But after his only son, Second Lieutenant Nissim de Camondo, was killed in the First World War, he became a recluse; he died in 1935, having donated his house to his adopted country to serve as a public museum. When World War II hit, his only daughter, Béatrice, could not believe that she and her children could be in danger; after all, her father had left his house to the nation, and her brother had given his life defending France. Yet Béatrice; her husband, Léon; and their two children, Fanny and Bertrand, were all sent to Auschwitz. None of them returned. Moïse’s fabulous collections, the silver platters commissioned by Empress Catherine II of Russia, the furniture covered with gold leaf, could not buy him the most important possession of all: the safety of his children. Writing this, I have changed my mind. There was no disgrace in my tears.

  In the deluxe department store Printemps, I stood on the escalator behind a woman wearing a dusky green coat with velvet lapels … and holding a bag. What a bag! It was a tote bag in rose, a kind of dreamy dark pink. It had the same electric effect on me that the Twist’n Turn Barbie did years ago: to see it was to lust after it. I edged up a step, determined to see the label. Goyard. Seemingly more exclusive than Vuitton, in business since 1853 … and the King of the Tote.

  Alessandro came home from his conversation exchange with Viviane and told me they compared their students, Alessandro’s at Rutgers to Viviane’s at Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée. Viviane said that hers no longer remember how to spell, whereas Alessandro thinks his were never taught. I, too, have forgotten how to spell. With spell-check at my command, I simply don’t bother anymore.

  Last night Alessandro and I went to a restaurant full of courting couples (always a charming backdrop), where the champagne tasted like apples. It should have been a perfect evening, but the food was not good. Alessandro’s risotto was more like rice soup; my duck was underseasoned; the pear clafoutis was bland and overcooked. Now here’s the surprise: it’s happened a lot here. In fact, I would venture to say that a nation of brilliant cooks tolerates a great many pedestrian restaurants—and this one hadn’t a tourist in it to excuse its mediocrity.

  Luca threw himself on the bed next to me a while ago, and is apparently thinking deep thoughts. “Double-you makes some weird words,” he says finally. “Like waaaarble.” He drawls out the sound. “Plus wanton and wonton. They sound the same.” On reflection, I think that wonton is actually a more interesting-sounding word than wanton, though you’d never know it to read my novels, given my profusion of wanton heroines.

  Today we went to Sunday brunch at one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants in Versailles, La Véranda. The entrées were fine … but the desserts! I tried nine, determined to learn, through empirical research, the very best one. The delicious, chewy passion fruit macaron? The froufrou hot pink marshmallows, the four flavors of crème, the fig tart, the delicate clafoutis? The winner was a dainty cake with a crackling top and luscious mango cream inside, because it was like biting into one of Alice’s Wonderland cakes: inside was a voluptuous surprise.

  In Versailles, we visited the Musée Lambinet, which has a curious, motley collection of household objects from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including a bed built into the wall. Anna plopped herself on the floor beside it, and with her for reference, we decided it couldn’t have been much longer than five feet. They also had fascinating brass plates used to print toile fabric. One of the designs, L’Art d’aimer, showed a canoodling young couple with a sketchy gentleman peeking through the bushes, nothing like the tame images that show up on toile these days.

  My favorite items at Musée Lambinet were two “surprise” Easter eggs, given to Princess Victoire, daughter of Louis XV. They are, essentially, historic Polly Pockets, but made with real hen’s eggs. The tops were held on with slender chains. One had a little house scene, with a tiny housewife receiving a visitor. The other was a forest scene. In comparison, Fabergé eggs (which postdated these by over a hundred years) seem gaudy and vulgar.

  A very modish mademoiselle entered the Métro car just after me: her cherry red coat was trimmed in black and cinched at the waist with a wide elastic belt. She had bleached blond short hair, cat-eye glasses, and a leopard-print scarf over her head. She looked like a chic update of Brigitte Bardot. I was cataloging all this French fabulosity when it dawned on me that she was speaking English! And not just any English—American English. Go, red, white, and blue!

  After school, Anna met me with a lopsided smile that always means trouble. Apparently at lunch she’d offered her cheese to a boy. Rejecting cheddar as beneath him, he tossed it back; naturally, she threw it at his head. He flung it at another boy, and within seconds the air was full of winged cheese, though the teacher didn’t see because he had his back turned. Anna retrieved the cheese and threw it back at the first boy, whereupon it bounced off his shoulder and hit … the teacher. Naturally.

  This morning I dropped Anna off at school, then walked across the Seine on a lavishly gilded bridge. The wind was fiercely chilly, but the sky bright blue, and the way the sun shone on the river and danced over all that gold leaf opened a door straight from winter to a slice of spring.

  Our guardienne just came up to deliver the mail. I’m correcting proofs of my latest manuscript, so Alessandro brought Anna to school this morning, and I never bothered to get out of my PJs. Her eyes flickered from my uncombed hair down to my flannel-clad, flowery legs and then back up to my face. “Bonjour!” she said cheerily, and I knew that my sartorial choices will have been discussed with every single resident of 15 rue du Conservatoire by this time tomorrow.

  Today Luca and Alessandro were out walking and saw a delicate chocolate shoe in the window of Joséphine Vannier, “Chocolat Artisanal.” They bought it to celebrate my finishing the proofs of A Kiss at Midnight, my version of Cinderella. Every detail, from the heel to the toe, is astounding—and it is filled with gorgeous little chocolates.

  Alessandro has turned himself into a long-distance runner here and regularly goes for forty-minute runs. Last night he was poking at his muscled chest and saying, “Do you think I’m getting scrawny?” At that very same moment I realized my favorite green pants don’t fit in the thighs or butt anymore.

  Today I went to Luca’s high school to give a lecture on Shakespeare and Macbeth. Leaving embittering details aside (though I won’t forget them till death), let me just say that grades nine through twelve were gathered together in the gym; that some o
f them had had only a semester of English—though they all had electronic devices; that only one grade had read any Shakespeare at all; and that the head of the school introduced me, concluding with a plea that they behave. After which she handed me the microphone and said “Buona fortuna.” Good luck!

  Anna has leapt into a new role: romantic adviser to the eleven-year-old set. Her ex-enemy, now-friend Domitilla apparently has a crush on a young Star Wars fan. “She wanted to wear her hair in braids over her ears, like Princess Leia,” Anna said, shrugging. “But I think he has a crush on Nicole, so he wouldn’t even notice. Boys don’t.” In my opinion, nothing good could possibly come of Princess Leia hair.

  The perfect comfort food recipe for eleven-year-old girls with sore throats: boil potatoes, peel them under cold water, mash them with a fork and mix in loads of crème fraîche, then season with a little salt and watch for huge smiles. This from a child who would shriek with disgust at the idea of cream entering her mouth.

  Luca just left for a weeklong skiing trip with his classmates. I gave him a last-minute lecture—no drugs, no drinking, no sex, and no black diamond slopes—while Anna listened with some fascination. “Why are you telling him all that?” she demanded at the end. “He can’t do those things! He’s a PG-13, not an R.”