My Life in France Read online

  I paced around our little hotel room. It was cute, but we needed more space. To get rid of my restless energy, I decided to look at rental apartments. The first one I saw struck me as a fake Art Nouveau gnome’s-hut type of place. Then I saw a tasteless circa-1900 stinker. Then I saw a small apartment on the fifth floor of a building on the Vieux Port, overlooking the fishing fleet. It was owned by a Swedish diplomat who had gone home to recuperate from tuberculosis; the caveat was that once his health improved he could return to Marseille at any time. That didn’t appeal. But after a few more days of living out of a suitcase in that dim, cramped hotel room, we decided to take the tubercular Swede’s apartment while we looked for a more permanent roost.

  I was beginning to learn my way around Marseille’s labyrinth. I had stumbled into an exciting street devoted entirely to brothels. I had learned that the wide avenue leading from the train station down to the harbor called La Canebière was known to American GIs as the “Can o’ Beer.” And I had discovered two nice little restaurants that specialized in fish.

  One of them, Chez Guido, was the very good restaurant on Rue de la Paix of the eponymous and charming Chef Guido. He had been dans le métier since he was ten years old. He was a real gentleman, an absolute perfectionist, and he deserved at least two stars from the Guide Miche, though he hadn’t been open long enough to earn any at all.

  Guido was proud and delighted to tell us all about the local cuisine. He gave me the name of his butcher, and when Paul noted that some of the local wine tasted like vinegar, Guido put us on to an excellent vin-fournisseur. One of the most charming things about Guido was his eight-year-old boy, Jean-Jacques, who was crazy about the cowboys and Indians of “Le Veeld Vest.” This got us thinking. Guido had been very kind to us, and we wanted to pay him back, but indirectly. So Paul asked Charlie to send us either a Sioux war bonnet or a ten-gallon cowboy hat for little Jean-Jacques.

  IN OUR FIRST MAIL delivery in Marseille came a letter from Avis De Voto. In responding to some photos we’d sent of ourselves, she wrote: “I am very pleased with your looks, so warm and vigorous and handsome. I am rather astonished that you are such a big girl. Six feet, whoops. I adore height in women. . . . I think you both look absolutely wonderful.”

  Then she addressed our sauce chapter: “I have now got beurre blanc licked to a frazzle and I am getting bilious. Also have put on 5 lb. which on a figure like mine aint good. It looks all right, but I like to be able to wiggle freely in my clothes instead of bursting out the seams. Also I have made yr top secret mayonnaise with great success in spite of the fact that both my electric beaters broke down and I had to shift to the whisk. It’s delicious and lovely and I am pleased. But I do so hate to diet. Blast you.”

  We had grown really fond of Avis. Odd, to feel as though you knew someone quite well whom you had never met.

  II. TOP SECRET CONFIDENTIAL

  ALTHOUGH OUR MOVE to Marseille was wildly disruptive to my bookwork, it also opened up new avenues of research that I wouldn’t have been exposed to in Paris. In addition to soups, Simca and I were now plunging into fish, a subject I didn’t know much about, but was quickly becoming passionate on, especially since one ate it constantly in Marseille.

  I devoted myself to piscatory research, as we tried to systematize the nomenclature and cookability of French-English-American fish for our readers. The translation wasn’t always obvious. What we call a “catfish” the Brits called “dogfish.” Or take le carrelet, which in British English is plaice, but in American English can be sand dab or lemon dab or lemon sole. If you look up “dab” in an English-French dictionary, it gives you not only carrelet but also limande, calimande, and plie. I found that even Latin names, which were theoretically universal, could vary between the three nations. It was a great help when Paul bought me a two-volume 1,488-page English-French, French-English dictionary with sources from both England and America.

  There were also cultural translations to be worked out. Creatures that were considered positively delectable in both France and England were sometimes regarded as poisonous in the U.S.A. Many types of European fish did not exist in the States, and vice versa. Our problem was to find equivalent ingredients in the U.S. for, say, the little fish like rascasse that the French used in their fish soups.

  I loved this kind of research, and it led to all kinds of interesting discoveries. Writing to the French and American fisheries experts, I learned that both governments were working on solving these very problems themselves. (I also discovered that the U.S. government employed a “deputy fish coordinator,” a marvelous title.) Apparently, the fisheries people were receiving hundreds of letters a year from chefs, fish hatcheries, cannery operators, and so on, who were confused by the lack of international standards. Perhaps UNESCO would make sense of this Tower of Babblery; in the meantime, we Gourmandes were on the case.

  I WAS DISAPPOINTED when our new editor, Dorothy de Santillana, allowed a friend of hers, a Mrs. Fairbanks, to try a recipe from our sauce chapter without first asking our permission. We had worked so hard to develop those recipes, and I considered a number of them to be real innovations, not to mention our intellectual property. Given Irma Rombauer’s stories, and my colleagues’ experience with Mr. Ripperger, I felt we had every reason to worry that our hard work could be stolen.

  Perhaps it was my old OSS training kicking in, or just my natural protectiveness, but when I sent Dort recipes to try out in her San Francisco kitchen, I wrote:

  Enclosed is a part of our cook book, a section of the chapter on sauces. We are so much bemused by our own petard, that we are unable to look at things objectively. And, besides, we very much need some intelligent American comments, from people like your own self, as to how it appeals to YOU.

  Naturally, it must be shown to practically nobody, or it will become old stuff. The form, we think, is new, and certainly some of our explanations, such as that on our beloved mayonnaise, are personal discoveries, etc. You might show it to one or two of your very closest friends, in whom you have absolute confidence, and know beyond the shadow of a doubt that they are not, never have been and won’t never have anything to do with the publishing business, or who are not sullied by any publishing connections of any sort whatsoever. . . . Please never let it out of your hands, or leave it lying around, or lend it to no one.

  This may sound overly cautious, but I don’t want to take no chances, after all the work we’ve put in.

  And please be brutally frank, perhaps it will not appeal to you at all, in which case we want to know.

  With that letter I included a number of “regular” recipes, but also a special batch of three recipes that were hidden between pink cover sheets and labeled “DOROTHY COUSINS—EYES ALONE—CONFIDENTIAL—to be kept under lock and key and never mentioned.”

  These were the Top Secret Confidential Censored pages: our revolutionary recipes for hollandaise, mayonnaise, and beurre blanc. We’d never seen these recipes published before, and the methods for making the first two were revolutionary. We were curious to know if their directions were clear, and if a typical American home cook could follow them successfully. As for the third sauce, the beurre blanc that I’d based on my visit to Mère Michel’s, it was perfectly delicious and had never been decently explained in a book.

  Some miscellaneous pages from our work in progress follow

  I sent the package off with a bit of anxiety in my gut, but knew I could trust my sister. And just to be sure there were no leaks, I reminded Simca and Louisette to treat the pink-sheeted recipes as “top secret—like a war plan.”

  ONE DAY I JOINED Paul for a business trip to Cannes, which was about four hours east of Marseille by car. We took six hours, in order to explore the windy side roads. What a beautiful countryside. The hills rising from the coast were all golden with flowering mimosa. In a little beach town called La Ciotat, where Charlie and Paul had visited in the 1920s, we stopped for a picnic lunch on the edge of the sea. We sat in the hot sun on flat rocks in a strong
breeze. Not far away stood two large casements built of reinforced concrete by the Italians or Germans as defenses against an Allied landing. Rusting rolls of cruel wartime barbed wire lay in the grass behind the beach. Nearby lay the rubble of destroyed houses. Everywhere around these war relics, almond trees were in lovely pink bloom.

  The next day, after a visit to the American consul at Nice, hearing a lecture by an American diplomat, and having our picture taken for Le Nice-Matin, we drove back to Marseille through the arrière-pays of scraggle-topped crags—their tops powder-sugared with snow—and forests of pine and cork oak.

  Driving in France was always a competitive sport, but driving in the south was positively death-defying. The roads were steep, built against sheer cliffs, and just barely wide enough for one monster truck and one small car to pass. There were no speed laws, no road police, and few road signs. Trucks took up the middle of the road and refused to budge. Cars would roar around them on blind, uphill curves at seventy miles per hour, blaring their horns and missing death by a hair. Nobody bothered to signal. There were sharp hairpin turns without guardrails, and it was de rigueur for aged pedestrians, women with baby carriages, bicycles, and peasants on horse-drawn wagons to launch themselves into traffic. The locals seemed deaf to the incessant horn-blowing and hardened to the brutal driving style, but poor Paul’s nerves were stretched thin by the ordeal. We proceeded in our cautious way, just hoping to get back to Marseille in one piece.

  III. HILL THE PILL

  OUR NEW RENTAL APARTMENT was located at 28-A Quai de Rive Neuve, on the fifth floor of a pale-beige Art Deco building with distinctive wave-patterned metal railings. It was a small space, but charming, and it had marvelously expansive views over the Vieux Port and its fishing fleet.

  Paul removed all the ghastly Swedish paintings from the walls and put up a dozen of his own photographs, and it began to take on the aspect of a real home. I was so relieved to have a kitchen, albeit one the size of a sailboat’s galley, that I whipped up a wizard soupe de poisson for lunch on our first day in residence. That afternoon I bought a fine, sturdy old oaken bucket in the marketplace; I just liked the way it looked, and we used it as a wastebasket.

  That night we stayed up past midnight writing letters while just below our window a tugboat went choopa-choopa-choopa-choopa.

  With time, we learned the building’s quirks. The heat didn’t work. The water pressure came and went. Paul got stuck in the elevator between floors. But that was okay: we finally had a space to call our own.

  Paul was working twelve-hour days, dashing this way and that—to meet with Consul General Hill, to interview a local physics teacher wanting to study at MIT, to assist a veterans’-affairs investigator checking up on six GIs taking classes at local universities (turns out that, as the investigator suspected, two of them were illegally using U.S.-government money to establish their wives in businesses; the GIs were unrepentant). Indeed, he was spending so much time outside now that the pale Parisian skin on Paul’s bald head was bronzed and parchmentized from the wind and sun.

  Consul General Heywood Hill—whom Abe Manell called “Hill the Pill”—took Paul to meet the local préfet, Monsieur Paira. Wreathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke behind a rococo desk outfitted with three important-looking telephones, Paira, a jowly Corsican, opened the meeting by attacking the USIS for attacking the Communists instead of informing French people about the U.S.A. Paul grew angrier and angrier at this misinformed monologue, but when he tried to speak up Paira simply raised the decibel level and rolled on. Hill sat there mutely, fiddling with his watch, gloves, and hat, “nervous as a virgin in a whorehouse,” Paul said. After Paira, they met the mayor, Monsieur Carlini, another tough guy, who surrounded himself with large-bellied flunkies wearing gold chains. Carlini rattled through the formalities in about four minutes flat. So much for America’s great diplomatic initiatives in Marseille!

  Old Hill was certainly proving to be a pill. He was a type we recognized from years of government work: feeble but perceptive, and extremely sensitive to criticism. Paul, drawing on his experience as a bureaucrat and teacher of moody adolescents, worked out a strategy to deal with him: take Hill seriously, even when he was being petulant, and back him up when he got himself stuck in a corner (which was often). So far, this approach was working. But Paul awaited the day when Hill would suddenly turn and squirt him with poison.

  Another undercurrent of anxiety was due to the congressional budget-cutters who were hacking their way through the Foreign Service system, lopping off good wood along with the deadwood without noticing the difference. Friends in Paris said that morale at the embassy had spiraled down since we’d left. As we heard more and more of these reports, we grew increasingly worried that the bean-counters were chopping their way toward our little Marseille outpost and would lop off our lovely flower.

  OVER THE EASTER WEEKEND, we drove La Tulipe Noire way up into the hills of the arrière-pays. Off the beaten tourist track, there wasn’t much traffic, and we moseyed along. There were dark gorges and bright cliffs, fields of almond trees in delicate pale-pink blossom against serge-dark mountains, purple-gray lavender bushes, tangled olive groves rising on walled terraces, beehives nestled everywhere, and silkworm farms tucked into barns. High up in the little village-perché of Gassin, we had a picnic lunch in a cork forest. Afterward, Paul took photographs of two black-and-white pussycats playing in a fig tree. The air was perfumed by the smell of resin. It was utterly peaceful and remote, and for a few hours we forgot all of our stresses and strains.

  In the slightly larger village of Moustier, we delivered—on behalf of the consulate—a stack of books to an elderly, self-taught librarian who had been patiently requesting printed matter for years. He kept all of the volumes in his musty, dark, one-room operation “protected” by wrapping them in plain brown paper (thus obscuring the titles). The books were shelved on rough, hand-hewn planks, which reached to the ceiling and were accessible only by a rickety ladder that not even he dared to climb. Lacking a card catalogue, he had devised his own system: “I organize the books by size!” he proudly announced. From what we could tell, he hadn’t had many—or perhaps any—visitors in a very long time. In the car afterward, we couldn’t help compare this sad little library with what you’d find in most American towns, where everything was bright, well organized, and bustling.

  As we descended toward the coast, a fog lifted to reveal Saint-Tropez, with row upon row of pink, yellow, white, and rust-colored stucco villas strung along the sea. It must have been a beautiful, simple fishermen’s port fifty years earlier. But now every beach and café was filled with city slickers, faux fishermen, artistes, movie types, and the leisure class trying to see and be seen. Two large buses disgorged tourists from Germany and Denmark. Gleaming automobiles with license plates from a dozen countries inched along the narrow streets. The harbor was clogged with yachts. Man had crushed Nature along the coast. We were both drawn to the simpler, more rustic interior of Provence.

  By now I had seen just about all the Mediterranean coast to the right of Marseille, and I had yet to find a spot by the water where I’d like to build my château. It had rarely been my displeasure to see such a spate of plaster-splashed neo-Med box houses and pleasure domes crowded next to an unending row of tourist traps, cheap knickknackeries, Coca-Cola signs, and sleazy bouillabaisse parlors. Phooey! I don’t think I’d have liked la belle France at all if this were all I knew of it.

  IV. THE “INVESTIGATORS”

  BACK AT THE CONSULATE, Paul waded through a pile of mail and discovered a note from one of our embassy friends, Charlie Moffley, which said, “Call me at once.” When Paul finally tracked Moff down in Paris, he breathlessly explained that all hell was breaking loose up there: two of Senator McCarthy’s investigators were poking and prying everywhere for “Reds.” Anyone, apparently, was fair game; the embassy’s halls reeked with fear and anger. That evening, we boarded Le Mistral to Paris, to finish some last-minute business.

&nb
sp; The next morning, Paris was shivering in a fifty-degree downpour as we bustled about preparing for a Trois Gourmandes photo session at the still-unrented Roo de Loo apartment. At nine-thirty, Simca and Louisette arrived with sacks full of fish, eggs, and vegetables. We got to work in the kitchen while Paul shot a series of publicity photographs for us. We three posed while he popped off twelve flashbulbs. We thought we might use these shots as illustrations for The Book.

  For lunch we all trooped over to Le Grand Comptoir, where Paul sat in the corner as isolated as a Tibetan hermit and we authors discussed cookery-bookery, our new contract, sauces, fish, and who was doing what. It made me realize just how much I missed such lively company.

  At dinner with Abe Manell, we heard more about the McCarthy investigators. They were two lawyers no older than twenty-six, named Cohn and Schine. They were typical bully boys who reminded a French friend of Hitler’s Gestapo agents. They weren’t really investigating anything, but had come to Paris to show they were “busy” collecting on-the-spot “facts.” It was a sham and a disgrace. As Abe recounted, Cohn and Schine had given no decent warning of their arrival: on Friday, a telephone call from New York said, “Stand by—they’re on their way.” They landed on Saturday, and at the airport held a press conference, in which they flung all sorts of vague, dirty, unsubstantiated charges, such as: (1) USIS was following a pro-Communist line, as proved by the kinds of books in our libraries; (2) USIS was wasting taxpayers’ money by featherbedding and empire-building; (3) the personnel of USIS was riddled by security risks, Communists, and/or sex perverts.