My Life in France Read online

  He’d heard that when you’re a PAO the weekends are sometimes your most concentrated forty-eight hours of work in a week. “I don’t think I’m going to like this job,” he wrote Charlie. “When do you pause? When do you paint or pant? When write family, loll on moss, hear Mozart and watch the glitter of the sea? . . . Clearly, I am softened by the luxurious style of our Parisian life: comes Friday night in Paris and down comes that iron curtain between job and what I really like doing. Wham!, and I’m off with Julie on the flying carpet. . . . No backing-out now . . . Slide’s all greased, and they’re almost ready to give me the Old One-Two. . . . Hold yer hats, boys—here we go again!”

  ON FRIDAY THE SIXTEENTH, we received a magnificent six-page gusher from Avis. Bernard was a meat-and-potatoes man, she wrote; he loved spicy food (especially Mexican and Indian), and wines, but was essentially wedded to the martini. Avis had secondary anemia, but was able to control it through diet; her tastes in food and drink were much like ours. As for our manuscript and Houghton Mifflin? Cautious optimism. Avis’s impression was that our sauce chapter had been well received and there was a good chance they’d want to publish our book. But it was too soon to break out the champagne.

  We still hadn’t received so much as a postcard from Sumner Putnam.

  I wrote to my fellow Gourmandes: “If HM [Houghton Mifflin] does happen to like our book and want it, we shall have some delicate dealings with Putnam if he also wants it. My great inclination would be to have ourselves with the HM Company, as they are one of the best. . . . I’m sure [Putnam] is a terribly nice man, but I don’t feel he is able to bring up our baby the way the other chaps could.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Simca arrived in my kitchen with Chef Claude Thilmont, one of the great pâtissiers-en-chef de Paris, and a fine, honest, salty technician with a ripe accent. He came to teach, not to eat. We pupils showed that we could bake a cake and decorate it, too. But old Thilmont was tough, just as he ought to be, with high standards and a thorough teaching method.

  “Good,” he judged our first efforts at cake, “but not nearly good enough!”

  Soon we had Chef Thilmont making a guest appearance at L’École des Trois Gourmandes. He had a magical touch with piecrusts. And when you saw him squeeze decorations onto a cake, you came to appreciate the famous saying “There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry—architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter.”

  That January, when I made Paul a fifty-first-birthday cake using my new skills, my husband lauded it as “a mistresspiece.” Thilmont himself described it as “not bad,” which was just about his highest form of praise. I puffed out my (modest) chest in pride.

  THE MISTRAL was a luxurious and speedy Paris-to-Marseille special train, and in mid-February 1953 it rocketed us down the length of France—a rainy, half-flooded, snow-speckled, khaki-colored landscape—in seven hours. We arrived in Marseille at 11:00 p.m. for a preliminary scouting trip.

  The venerable port city spread out and slanted down to the Mediterranean under a clear, star-spangled sky. We were met at the station by Dave Harrington, the man Paul would replace as public-affairs officer. He took us on a long hike around town that ended at a bar, where we drank beer and learned about the consulate and the many duties of a PAO. Then we went to another bar, for more beer and talk. Harrington was charming and easygoing and had made wide-ranging local contacts. But something, evidently, had poisoned his relationship with Consul General Heywood Hill. This gave us pause. Harrington didn’t seem like the type to make enemies. As we walked back to the hotel, Paul and I reassured each other that CG Hill would turn out to be a nice guy.

  The next morning, we awoke to a bright, sunny day filled with noise. “I always forget between visits what a raucous, colorful city this is,” Paul wrote. “There seems to be 10 times as much horn-blowing, gear-clashing, shouting, whistling, door-banging, dropping of lumber, breaking of glass, blaring of radios, boat-whistling, gong-clanging, brake-screeching, and angry shouting as anywhere else.”

  I didn’t agree that the locals’ shouting was “angry.” It seemed to me that the Marseillais were having a wonderful time communicating, and they liked to do it at the top of their lungs. The people were extremely friendly, the food was highly seasoned, and the wines were young and strong. In other words, Marseille was everything you’d expect in an ancient Mediterranean port city.

  While I stayed in the hotel feverishly typing our culinary research, Paul went to the consulate to meet people, ask questions, and go over papers, reports, and figures. In his brief meeting with Heywood Hill, the consul general did not ask Paul a single question and hardly let him get a word in edgewise. Instead, he treated his new PAO to a treacly monologue, along the lines of: “Our little consular family is probably one of the most cooperative and smoothly working teams in the whole Foreign Service . . .” etc. Paul described his new boss as a twitchy fussbudget who had survived twenty-five years in the Foreign Service by being careful and mediocre. But this was based on only a seven-minute meeting, he admitted, and perhaps Hill would turn out to be an excellent boss after all.

  On Friday the 13th, we woke to find the tropical palm trees, red-tiled roofs, and stony Mediterranean beaches covered with snow! It was beautiful but barmy. Paul drove off on the slushy road for a whirlwind of meetings with local mayors, university presidents, music-festival directors, newspapermen, real-estate agents, and other muckety-mucks in Aix, Avignon, Nîmes, and Montpellier. In subsequent days I’d join him for trips to meet another slew of mayors and editors and academics all over the hill and dale of his new terroir. We ranged as far west as Perpignan, near the Spanish border, and as far east as Monte Carlo, and along the way I was falling in love with the Côte d’Azur.

  The people were hearty and idiosyncratic, the Mediterranean lent its salty-sparkly charm, the mountains were rough and rocky, and there were kilometer after kilometer of vineyards. (The French government subsidized wine-growers. Result: too many people grew grapes, and not enough of them made money, thus requiring more subsidies. A crazy system.) The weather was constantly changing. One day, the skies were piercingly blue and the wind was chilly. The next day, we’d be baking in the hot sun as we ate lunch under an orange tree and basked in the glow of a field of mimosas. And the day after that, a freezing wind called a tramontane whistled and buffeted the bony landscape, ferociously whipping the trees and bushes and grasses and grapevines this way and that.

  “God, what a pile of stuff!” Paul exclaimed, as we began to pack up at 81 Roo de Loo. Sorting through our accumulated this and that, I wanted to keep everything while Paul wanted to toss it all out. (In one of our throw-away moods some years back, we threw out our marriage license, which was going a bit far.) We cursed and sweated and eventually compromised, with only a few misgivings. We were a good team.

  My biggest challenge was to pack up The Book—pounds and pounds of manuscript pages, reference books, file boxes, and loose notes. It filled two wretchedly heavy steamer trunks, and then there was my typewriter and kitchen equipment. There was no room for all of this inside the Tulipe Noire, so Paul had to use a sort of weightlifter’s technique to hoist the trunks onto the roof rack: ground to knees, breathe; knees to shoulder, breathe; shoulder to rack, gasp.

  To get Madame Perrier’s apartment looking the way it had when we moved in, we had to remove from storage every stick of moldy furniture and rehang every gewgaw and gilt-edged mirror in the salon, reinstall the fifty-seven objets d’art in our bedroom, neaten and clean, label every packing box, and fill every little scratch on the parquet floor with brown shoe polish. Every key had to be returned, and every clause of the lease gone over once more. Looking at the old apartment now, with its red velvet chairs, rickety tables, cracked china, torn rugs, and rusted or dull kitchenware, I wondered how we ever found it so “charming” in the first place.

  The Perrier/du Couédics were an adorable family, with honor, principles, and lots of mutual affection.
But we worried about them. Madame Perrier owned the building, and since the general’s death had made all of the decisions about it. She was eighty-two, and growing vague and forgetful. To make matters worse, her son-in-law, Hervé du Couédic, had suffered a bizarre accident the previous summer, when, at their house in Normandy, a tree fell on his head and badly injured him. Now his speech remained thick, his walk halting, and his mind cloudy. He was fifty-five, too young for retirement. Although he continued to go to the office three days a week, the poor chap knew it was useless and had basically given up.

  What this meant was that the brunt of the family’s weight fell on poor Madame du Couédic. She had to support the family and keep up the building, but for the sake of family pride had to pretend it was her mother and husband who were in charge. It was awfully tough. She had lots of character, but could be oddly shy and insecure at times. To add further worry, Michel, her youngest son, a naval officer, was about to ship out for the war in Indochina. It was common knowledge that France was losing as many officers there every year as were graduating from military academies.

  From what we could tell, our landlords had little outside income, and would be subsisting largely on the rental of our apartment. We had been trying like crazy to find someone to take the place, but without luck. When a young American couple dropped by, they spent four horrified minutes gawking at the decor and said, “We could never stand it!”

  Paul and I sat down with Madame Perrier and Madame du Couédic and said, in effect, “Look, kids, if you’re going to raise the rent and want to get foreigners in here, then you’ve got to clear out some of this floozy stuff, put in some new lights, and get a telephone.”

  “But those red velvet chairs are from the Belle Époque,” Madame Perrier protested, “and the velour, tout cela va ensemble!” She simply couldn’t fathom why we young American whippersnappers didn’t see the quality of the dark-green moth-eaten velvet-on-mahogany that, back in 1875, had been the chicest thing in all of Paris. And General Perrier, she added, he never wanted more light than what a twenty-five-watt bulb gave off. And this “need” for a telephone was utter nonsense—“Mon grand-pe`re n’en a même pas eu un, vous savez”—and if renters wanted one, they could just go get it themselves.

  “Well,” we said to each other, “we tried.”

  What to do with Minette Mimosa McWilliams Child was our last bit of business. I hated to leave her behind, but we simply didn’t have room to take her to Marseille, where we didn’t yet have an apartment. In search of a good home for her, I went to la Rue de Bourgogne to consult Marie des Quatre Saisons, who knew everyone and everything and was one of my most favorite women in Paris or anywhere. She knew exactly what to do, of course. She took me to see Madame la Charcutière, who had just lost her cat to old age. Madame took a look at Mini and smiled. I felt good about the arrangement, because Madame lived right above the charcuterie, along with a nice old dog, and Mini would be treated to all sorts of heavenly meat scraps.

  When we were finally ready to move, les emballeurs arrived at Roo de Loo at 7:30 Monday morning, and inside of an hour the place looked like Ali Baba’s cave after an explosion. We were knee-deep in excelsior, crates, paper, trunks, furniture, art materials, wine bottles, paintings, photographs, bed linens, Venetian glass, Asolo silks, and cookware. Twelve hours later, the movers and I called it quits. I was exhausted. Paul had spent the day wrapped in red tape—filling out things like Form FS-446, “Advice to the Department of Initiation of Travel,” turning in our gas and PX cards, arranging for the shipment of household effects, the disbursement of paychecks, etc.

  All of this frantic activity drove home the sensation that we were truly severing our umbilical ties to Paris. Woe!

  Simca and Louisette threw a farewell dinner party for us, chez Bertholle. There were a dozen guests, including a special surprise: Curnonsky! When the old buzzard and I spotted each other, we hugged fondly. Simca and Louisette had begged Paul to bring his camera that night, but wouldn’t tell him why. Now it was clear: they wanted him to take photographs of Les Trois Gourmandes with le prince. So he snapped off a few, using a new gizmo called a “flash gun.”

  The tone that night was celebratory rather than melancholy, for Paul and I had convinced ourselves that, rather than focus on the fact that we were leaving our beloved Paris, we were embarking on a grand new French adventure. Most important, Dorothy de Santillana had written to say she was “thrilled” with our manuscript and that Houghton Mifflin was prepared to offer us a publishing contract—whoopee!

  In the nearly two months since we’d sent Ives Washburn the manuscript, we hadn’t received a single word of any kind from anyone there, which was highly unprofessional. At the end of January, we sent them a letter-of-dismissal by registered mail. A few days later, I received a blustery letter from Mr. Putnam, although he ended it with a gracious note: “I wish you luck.”

  Houghton Mifflin would pay us an advance of $750, against a royalty of 10 percent, to be paid in three $250 installments.

  “Don’t worry about Ives Washburn,” I told my nervous colleagues. “This isn’t a loss, it’s a gain. Houghton Mifflin is a much better publisher.” Simca and Louisette nodded warily.

  THE NEXT DAY, the air was warm, the sky was a moonstone-blue, and we drove south against a constant stream of traffic—mostly cars with ski racks returning from Switzerland. Patches of snow lay along the shady north sides of ditches and forests, but the fields were sunny and already dotted with peasants seeding the ground.

  CHAPTER 4

  Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise

  I. TERRA INCOGNITA

  WE ARRIVED IN MARSEILLE with our minds open, hope in our hearts, and with our taste buds poised for new flavors. It was just turning 5:00 p.m. on March 2, 1953, when the heavily loaded Tulipe Noire rolled to a stop in front of our little hotel. People at the U.S. Consulate had been aghast to learn that we were staying—by choice—in such a tiny, unfancy hotel. But we hated the big swish luxury palaces that have no local flavor at all. Working together like two steam engines, we managed to unpack the car, haul all of our gear inside, and have everything stowed away by six-thirty. Whew!

  I looked around. The dim light showed wallpaper busy with flowers, a bidet, and a modest bed. It was all we needed. Sitting on the room’s only table, surveying the mound of boxes and bags and suitcases, was our little household god, Shao Pan-Tzu, wearing a serene expression. If only I felt as calm and relaxed as he looked.

  BEFORE DINNER, we took a walk along the cobblestoned edge of the Vieux Port. The air was brisk and breezy, and the harbor was redolent of sewage and decaying fish. There were mobs of sailors, soldiers, Arabs, gamins, whores, pickpockets, shopkeepers, tourists, and citizens of every shape and size, all moiling and shouting. About half the men looked like they’d modeled themselves on Hollywood movie gangsters, and their gals looked like gun molls. The honking cars, bellowing trucks, and whining motorbikes created bedlam. The streets and gutters were cluttered with garbage. Masses of it. We decided this must be a legacy of the medieval habit of tossing refuse out the window. Along the quay, dozens of wooden fishing boats were parked, stern in, and wizened old men and enormous fishwives sold the day’s catch from little stalls or sometimes right from the back of their boats. Moving deliberately, the dark-skinned crew of a two-masted schooner from Palma de Mallorca were unloading crates of bright-orange tangerines.

  Marseille’s hot noise was so different from Paris’s cool sophistication. To many of our northern-French friends it was terra incognita: they had never been here, and considered it a rough, rude, “southern” place. But it struck me as a rich broth of vigorous, emotional, uninhibited Life—a veritable “bouillabaisse of a city,” as Paul put it.

  The USIS was based at the American consulate, a five-story, villa-like building with a garden at 5 Place de Rome, a large, open square near the center of town. Paul’s title there was “consul,” a dignity he wasn’t especially impressed with, given some of the other consuls he�
�d met; he preferred his previous title, the more mysterious directeur régional. When we dropped by, the people at the consulate were welcoming and full of suggestions about where to buy things, how to rent an apartment, and how to negotiate the city’s curvy streets and special Mediterranean habits. This was a pleasant change from the impersonal atmosphere of the U.S. Embassy in Paris. The feeling we got here was: we are in a small outpost, and must look out for each other.

  Quickly, the new PAO’s days became jammed full of decisions, nonsense, and triumphs. Paul complained of “paper poisoning”—an indigestion of the memory and cross-reference collywobbles. My natural inclination was to go out and explore while Paul was at work. But in order to get anything done, I forced myself to keep regular office hours at the hotel. There, my Royal portable typewriter was my steady companion. With no household or marketing work to distract me, I began to catch up on my correspondence and continued to research our cookbook.

  The weather in Marseille was extraordinary. At first, we’d had day upon day of California-bright skies and cool air. But one afternoon the sun was hidden behind thick, dark clouds, which made me feel gloomy and restless. With no sun, there was no point in riding a boat out to visit the famous Château d’If, or in exploring the villages-perchés (hill towns) in the arrière-pays (back country) we’d heard so much about. The movie houses were packed full. I couldn’t go home to bake a cake, as we had no kitchen. Paul couldn’t go into his studio to paint a picture, as he had no studio or paint. We couldn’t go out and see people, as we had no friends. I had written all I could write. I had read all I could read. I had slept all I could sleep. I found myself feeling . . . bored. To add to my mood, both of us suddenly had bilious tummies again. I knew that drowning my sorrows in wine and bouillabaisse would only make things worse. What to do?