My Life in France Read online

  His French staff was increased to ten, and by all accounts they loved “M’sieur Scheeld.” But his American colleagues were not quite sure what to make of my husband. Paul was a very accomplished exhibits man, took great pride in a job well done, and knew the importance of establishing reliable channels of communication (“the channels, the channels,” he’d mutter). But he wasn’t professionally ambitious. For those who cared about vaulting up the career ladder, having lunch or socializing with the right people was terribly important; Paul often had a sandwich alone with his camera on the banks of the Seine. Or he’d come home for leftovers with me—chicken soup, sausages, herring, and warm bread—followed by a brief nap. This habit was probably not good for his career, but that wasn’t the point. We were enjoying life together in Paris.

  Paul was ambitious for his painting and photography, which he did on evenings or weekends, but even those ambitions were more aesthetic than commercial. He was a physical person, a black belt in judo, a man who loved to tie complicated knots or carve a piece of wood. Naturally, he would have loved recognition as an Important Artist. But his motivation for making paintings and photographs wasn’t fame or riches: his pleasure in the act of creating, “the thing itself,” was reward enough.

  Understaffed, running out of film, and facing a raft of promises unkept by the State Department, Paul was forced to cancel an early-winter vacation in order to cover for others at the embassy. In the meantime, I had volunteered to create a cataloguing system for the USIS’s fifty thousand orphaned photographs. I had done similar file-work during the war, but this was a real struggle. Not only was cross-referencing all of the prints close to impossible, I was trying to design an idiot-proof system for other people—French people—to use. In the hope of finding a standard approach to cataloguing, I visited five big photo libraries, only to discover that no standard existed. Photo cataloguing in France was generally left to ladies who’d been doing the job for thirty years and could recognize every print by its smell or something.

  OUR DOMESTIC CIRCLE was completed when we were adopted by a poussiequette we named Minette (Pussy). We assumed she was a mutt, perhaps a reformed alley cat—a sly, gay, mud-and-cream-colored little thing. I had never been much of an animal person, although we’d had small dogs in Pasadena. But Paul and Charlie liked cats and were devoted to the briard, a wonderfully woolly, slobbery French sheepdog they referred to as “the Noblest Breed of All.” (We’d had one in Washington—Maquis—who had died tragically young by choking on a sock.)

  “Mini” soon became an important part of our lives. She liked to sit in Paul’s lap during meals, and paw tidbits off his plate when she thought he wasn’t looking. She spent a great deal of time playing with a brussels sprout tied to a string, or peering under our radiators with her tail switching. Once in a while, she’d proudly present us with a mouse. She was my first cat ever, and I thought she was marvelous. Soon I began to notice cats everywhere, lurking in alleys or sunning themselves on walls or peering down at you from windows. They were such interesting, independent-minded creatures. I began to equate them with Paris.

  IV. ALI-BAB

  PAUL AND I were intent on meeting French people, but that was not as easy as one might think. For one thing, Paris was crawling with Americans, most of them young, and they liked to cling together in great expat flocks. We knew quite a few of these Yanks, and liked them well enough, but as time went on, I found that they grew less and less interesting to me—and I, no doubt, to them. There were two ladies from Los Angeles, for instance, whom I once considered “just wonderful,” and who lived not far from us on the Left Bank, but who completely faded from my life within a few months. This wasn’t an intentional separation from my past—it was just the natural evolution of things.

  Upon departing the States we’d been given many letters of introduction to friends-of-friends we “must meet.” But we were so busy, and so excited, that it took a long time to get to the list. Plus we didn’t have a telephone.

  You forget how much you rely on something as simple as a phone until you don’t have one. After we’d moved into 81, we had placed an order for a phone, and waited. First a man came by to see if we lived where we said we did. Then two men visited to make a “study” of our situation. Then another man appeared to find out if we really wanted a phone. The process was very French, and made me laugh, especially when I thought of how quickly such a transaction would have taken place in the States. In the meantime, I was making phone calls at the post office, the PTT (“Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones”), where there were only two pay phones, and one could only buy one jeton, or token, at a time. It took hours to make a three-minute call, but I enjoyed it because I was able to practice my French on the two ladies at the counter. They were curious about how things were done in America, and filled me in on all the local gossip about who had done what during the war, how la grippe (the flu) was spreading like wildfire, and where to find the best prices in the quartier.

  When we finally did get to calling on our friends-of-friends, one of the first couples we met was Hélène and Jurgis Baltrusaitis. He was a taciturn, inward-looking Lithuanian art historian who had just returned from a sabbatical year at Yale and New York University. Hélène was an outgoing enthusiast, the stepdaughter of Henri Foçillon, a famed art historian who had been Jurgis’s mentor. They had a fourteen-year-old boy named Jean, who distressed his parents by madly chewing American bubble gum. We hit it off immediately, especially with dear Hélène, who was a “swallow-life-in-big-gulps” kind of person. Whereas Jurgis saw Sunday as an opportunity to burrow deeply into his books, Hélène couldn’t wait to join Paul and me for a jaunt through the countryside.

  One December Sunday, the three of us drove out to the Fontainebleau forest. The cloudy gray sky broke open and turned blue, the air was vigorously cool, and the sun shone brightly. After an hour or so of hiking, we broke out a picnic basket brimming with sausages, hard-boiled eggs, baguettes, pâtisseries, and a bottle of Moselle wine. We ate lying against twisted gray rocks covered with emerald-green moss. Except for the yawping crows in the beech trees, we were the only ones in that enchanted place. On the way home, we stopped in the little town of Étampes. At a café next to a twelfth-century church, a mob of locals, all red in the face from wine, were celebrating something with expansive singing in hoarse, quavering voices. It was a lovely scene.

  The longer I was in France, the stronger and more ecstatic my feelings for it became. I missed my family, of course, and things like certain cosmetics or really good coffee. But the U.S. seemed like an increasingly distant and dreamlike place.

  The Baltrusaitises—the Baltrus—introduced us to le groupe Foçillon: fifteen or twenty art historians, many of whom had been disciples of Hélène’s stepfather. They met once a week chez Baltru for wine, a nibble of something, and impassioned debate over, say, whether or not a certain false transept in a certain church was built before or after 1133. Regulars at these meetings included Louis Grodecki, a violently opinionated Pole, and Verdier, a smooth and witty Frenchman, who were constantly attacking and counterattacking each other over medieval arcana; Jean Asche, a husky former Resistance hero who’d been captured and sent to Buchenwald by the Nazis, and whose wife, Thérèse, became a dear friend of mine; and Bony, a university lecturer. It was a sociable, intellectually vigorous, and very French circle—exactly the sort of friends Paul and I had been hoping to find, but would never have discovered on our own.

  Among all of these accomplished art historians, Paul was the only practicing artist. He had learned stained-glass making in the 1920s, when he’d worked on the windows at the American Church in Paris. Although he suffered terrible vertigo, he had forced himself to climb high into the eaves to work on some of the trickiest windows, thereby earning the nickname Tarzan of the Apse. To show his appreciation for le groupe Foçillon, Paul designed a stained-glass medallion, about ten inches round, showing each of the group’s members in a symbolic pose. It was a characteristic gestu
re, one that helped us gain quick acceptance into this unusual group.

  SURROUNDED BY GORGEOUS FOOD, wonderful restaurants, and a kitchen at home—and an appreciative audience in my husband—I began to cook more and more. In the late afternoon, I would wander along the quay from the Chambre des Députés to Notre Dame, poking my nose into shops and asking the merchants about everything. I’d bring home oysters and bottles of Montlouis–Perle de la Touraine, and would then repair to my third-floor cuisine, where I’d whistle over the stove and try my hand at ambitious recipes, such as veal with turnips in a special sauce.

  But I had so much more to learn, not only about cooking, but about shopping and eating and all the many new (to me) foods. I hungered for more information.

  It came, at first, from Hélène, my local guide and language coach. She was a rather knowing instructor, and soon I began to use her French slang and to see Paris as she saw it. Although she wasn’t very interested in cooking, Hélène loved to eat and knew a lot about restaurants. One day she loaned me a great big old-fashioned cookbook by the famed chef Ali-Bab. It was a real book: the size of an unabridged dictionary, printed on thick paper, it must have weighed eight pounds. It was written in old French, and was out of print, but was full of the most succulent recipes I’d ever seen. And it was also very amusingly written, with little asides about cooking in foreign lands and an appendix on why gourmets are fat. Even on sunny days, I’d retreat to my bed and read Ali-Bab—“with the passionate devotion of a fourteen-year-old boy to True Detective stories,” Paul noted, accurately.

  I had worked on my French diligently, and was able to read better and say a little more every day. At first my communications in the marketplace had consisted of little more than finger-pointing and simplistic grunts: “Bon! Ça! Bon!” Now when I went to L’Olivier, the olive-oilery on the Rue de Rivoli—a small shop filled with crocks of olives and bottles of olive oil—I could actually carry on a lengthy conversation with the jolly olive man.

  My tastes were growing bolder, too. Take snails, for instance. I had never thought of eating a snail before, but, my, tender escargots bobbing in garlicky butter were one of my happiest discoveries! And truffles, which came in a can, and were so deliciously musky and redolent of the earth, quickly became an obsession.

  I shopped at our neighborhood marketplace on la Rue de Bourgogne, just around the corner from 81. My favorite person there was the vegetable woman, who was known as Marie des Quatre Saisons because her cart was always filled with the freshest produce of each season. Marie was a darling old creature, round and vigorous, with a crease-lined face and expressive, twinkling eyes. She knew everyone and everything, and she quickly sized me up as a willing disciple. I bought mushrooms or turnips or zucchini from her several times a week; she taught me all about shallots, and how to tell a good potato from a bad one. She took great pleasure in instructing me about which vegetables were best to eat, and when; and how to prepare them correctly. In the meantime, she’d fill me in on so-and-so’s wartime experience, or where to get a watchband fixed, or what the weather would be tomorrow. These informal conversations helped my French immeasurably, and also gave me the sense that I was part of a community.

  We had an excellent crémerie, located on the place that led into the Rue de Bourgogne. It was a small and narrow store, with room for just five or six customers to stand in, single-file. It was so popular that the line would often extend out into the street. Madame la Proprietress was robust, with rosy cheeks and thick blond hair piled high, and she presided from behind the counter with cheerful efficiency. On the wide wooden shelf behind her stood a great mound of freshly churned, sweet, pale-yellow butter waiting for pieces to be carved as ordered. Next to the mound sat a big container of fresh milk, ready to be ladled out. On the side counters stood the cheese—boxes of Camembert, large hunks of Cantal, and wheels of Brie in various stages of ripeness—some brand-new and almost hard, others soft to the point of oozing.

  The drill was to wait patiently in line until it was your turn, and then give your order clearly and succinctly. Madame was a whiz at judging the ripeness of cheese. If you asked for a Camembert, she would cock an eyebrow and ask at what time you wished to serve it: would you be eating it for lunch today, or at dinner tonight, or would you be enjoying it a few days hence? Once you had answered, she’d open several boxes, press each cheese intently with her thumbs, take a big sniff, and—voilà!—she’d hand you just the right one. I marveled at her ability to calibrate a cheese’s readiness down to the hour, and would even order cheese when I didn’t need it just to watch her in action. I never knew her to be wrong.

  The neighborhood shopped there, and I got to know all the regulars. One of them was a properly dressed maid who shopped in the company of her household’s proud, prancing black poodle. I saw her on a regular basis, and she was always dressed in formless gray or brown clothes. But one day I noticed that she had arrived without the poodle and dressed in a new, trim black costume. I could see the eyes of everyone in line shifting to observe her. As soon as Madame spotted the new finery, she summoned the maid to the front of the line and served her with great politesse. When she swept by me and out the door with a slight Mona Lisa smile on her lips, I asked my neighbor in line why the maid had been given such deferential treatment.

  “She has a new job,” the woman explained, with a knowing look. “She works for la comtesse. Did you see how she’s dressed today? Now she’s practically a comtesse herself!”

  I laughed, and as I approached Madame to give my order, I thought: “So much for the French Revolution.”

  IN MID-DECEMBER, a little snow flurry sugared the cobblestones, and Paul and I were struck by the almost total lack of holiday commercialism in the streets. Occasionally you’d see a man dragging a fir tree across the Place de la Concorde, a sprig of holly over a doorway, or kids lined up in front of a department store watching the animated figures. But in comparison with the crass Christmas ballyhoo in Washington or Los Angeles, Paris was wonderfully calm and picturesque.

  We shared Christmas Day with the Mowrers. They were a good deal older and wiser than me, and I thought of them as semi-parental figures. Their big news was that Bumby Hemingway was engaged to marry a tall Idaho girl named Byra “Puck” Whitlock.

  PARIS WAS WONDERFULLY WALKABLE. There wasn’t much car traffic, and one could easily hike from the Place de la Concorde to the top of Montmartre in a half-hour. We carried a pocket-sized map-book with a brown cover called Paris par Arrondissement, and would intentionally wander off the beaten path. Paul, the mad photographer, always carried his trusty camera slung over his shoulder and had a small sketchpad stuffed in his pocket. I discovered that when one follows the artist’s eye one sees unexpected treasures in so many seemingly ordinary scenes. Paul loved to photograph architectural details, café scenes, hanging laundry, market women, and artists along the Seine. My job was to use my height and long reach to block the sun over his camera lens as he carefully composed a shot and clicked the shutter.

  In our wanderings we had discovered La Truite, the restaurant owned by the cousins of the Dorins who ran La Couronne in Rouen. La Truite was a cozy place off le Faubourg Saint-Honoré, behind the American embassy. The chef was Marcel Dorin, a distinguished old-schooler, assisted by his son. They did a splendid roast chicken: suspended on a string, the bird twirled in front of a glowing electric grill; every few minutes, a waiter would give it a spin and baste it with the juices that dripped down into a pan filled with roasting potatoes and mushrooms. Oh, those were such fine, fat, full-flavored birds from Bresse—one taste, and I realized that I had long ago forgotten what real chicken tasted like! But La Truite’s true glory was its sole à la normande, a poem of poached and flavored sole fillets surrounded by oysters and mussels, and napped with a wonder-sauce of wine, cream, and butter, and topped with fluted mushrooms. “Voluptuous” was the word. I had never imagined that fish could be taken so seriously, or taste so heavenly.

  One cold afternoon just
before New Year’s, Paul and I strolled up to the Buttes-Chaumont park. At the top of the hill, by the little Greek temple, we looked back at Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre, now silhouetted through layers of mist by the declining sun. In a little bistro, we warmed ourselves with coffee and stared at the city through dirty windows. Behind Paul’s head, a fat white cat slept on a pile of ledgers. Beside me, a large dog made up of many breeds gave a big “Woof!,” then settled into a deep snooze. Two little monkeys gobbled peanuts and wrestled furiously over a folding chair, filling the air with clatter and squeals. Three boys played dice at a nearby table. An old man wrote a letter. At the bar, a frowsy blonde gossiped with a horn-rimmed man in a beret. A fat white dog dressed in a green turtleneck waddled by, and the blonde cooed: “Ah, qu’il est joli, le p’tit chou.”

  V. PROVENCE

  “I FEEL IT IS my deep-seated duty to show you the rest of France,” Paul said one day. And so, at the end of February 1949, he, Hélène, and I drove out of cold, gray Paris down to bright, warm Cannes.

  The tone for our trip was set by lunch in Pouilly, four hours out of Paris. Paul had written ahead to Monsieur Pierrat, a well-regarded chef, asking him to fix us “a fine meal.” He did. It took us over three hours to work our way through Pierrat’s terrines, pâtés, saucissons, smoked ham, fish in sauce américaine, coq-sang, salade verte, fromages, crêpes flambées—all accompanied by a lovely Pouilly-Fumé 1942. We finished with (and were finished off by) a rich and creamy dessert called prune, for which the cheerful chef joined us. It was an extraordinary meal. And by its conclusion we were utterly flooded with a soft, warm, glowing pleasure.