My Life in France Read online

  But this wasn’t real travel, as I saw it. Phila liked to go to all the gay places she’d read about in American magazines, but she didn’t really care where we were. Pop was interested in how the French made money, and he preferred the country to cities, but he was stiff in the joints and couldn’t walk much, and had zero interest in ruins or culture or food or wine. When we roared past the Roman arch at Orange, he mumbled, “Oh yes, Roman, you say? Hmm.”

  Dort and I grew restless on those days of driving and driving and eating and driving and eating at the biggest-best restaurants and sleeping at the biggest-best hotels. To hell with it! It seemed like we’d never really been anywhere or done anything and the whole point of the trip was for Philapop to get back to Pasadena and say, “I’ve just been through France and Italy.” In fact, I didn’t like traveling first-class at all. Yes, it was nice to have a bathroom in the hotel and fine service at breakfast, and I’d probably never visit those grand hotels again, but none of it seemed foreign enough to me. It was all so pleasantly bland that it felt as if I were back on the SS America. I don’t like it when everyone speaks perfect English; I’d much rather struggle with my phrase book.

  One exception was the Hôtel de Paris, in Monte Carlo. It was an enormous, old-fashioned, ornate building across from the Casino. What a treat! It had a splendid Louis XVI–style dining room, with black-and-white Carrara-marble pillars, gilt molding, Cupids, murals of virginal nudes willowing about forest-glen fountains, splendiferous eighty-foot chandeliers, a string orchestra playing Viennese waltzes, and so on. In detail it sounds insane, but the effect was nostalgic elegance. Our dinner there was superb, and the service—provided by a headwaiter, two sub-headwaiters, two waiters, and a busboy for each table—was faultless. It made us feel as if we had been transported back in time to the Gilded Age.

  Italy was nice, with a tremendous shining yacht in the harbor at Portofino, except that the entire coast was still shot up from the war. Even the big Autostrada from Pisa to Florence remained a wreck, with many bridges and overpasses not yet repaired. The country seemed poverty-stricken. The food didn’t strike me as anything special, either; it didn’t have much finesse. Maybe that’s why Italy didn’t hit me with the same vibrations that France did. Or maybe it was because I hated being without my husband.

  Paul and I liked to travel at the same slow pace. He always knew so much about things, discovered hidden wonders, noticed ancient walls or indigenous smells, and I missed his warm presence. Once upon a time I had been content as a single woman, but now I couldn’t stand it!

  I really wanted Philapop to enjoy their super-deluxe trip, though, and I was trying my damnedest to be the way they wanted me to be: nice and amenable and dumb, with no thoughts or feelings about anything.

  We whizzed through Florence, Rome, Sorrento, Naples, and Lake Como. After thirty minutes at the Pitti Palace, Pop announced he was “educated.” The poor man couldn’t wait to return to California. “I can’t talk to these people, I just poke around the streets,” he grumbled. “I’m so happy at home, where I’ve got my nice house, my friends, and I can talk the language.” It struck me how utterly divorced I had become from old Pop and his type—moneyed, materialistic, not at all introspective—and how profoundly, abysmally, stupefyingly apathetic his world-view had rendered me. No wonder I had been so immature at Smith!

  When we returned to Paris on May 3, I fell into Paul’s arms and squeezed him tight.

  BACK AT THE Cordon Bleu, I picked up my routine again, beginning at 6:30 a.m. and ending around midnight every weekday. But I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the school. The $150 tuition was expensive. Madame Brassart paid little attention to the details of management. Many of the classes were disorganized, and the teachers lacked basic supplies. And after six months of intensive instruction, not one of the eleven GIs in my class knew the proportions for a béchamel sauce or how to clean a chicken the right way. They just weren’t serious, and that irritated me.

  Even Chef Bugnard was beginning to repeat such dishes as sole normande, poulet chaud-froid, omelettes, and crêpes Suzettes. It was useful practice to do these dishes over and over, and at last I could make a decent piecrust without thinking twice. But I wanted to be pushed harder and further. There was so much more to learn!

  Bugnard, I suspect, had been quietly monitoring my progress, and had now gained enough confidence in me that he began to take me aside and show me things that he didn’t show “the boys.” This time when he took me around Les Halles, he personally introduced me to his favorite meat, vegetable, and wine purveyors.

  I decided to give up the Cordon Bleu for the time being. I didn’t want to lose my momentum, though, so I continued to attend the afternoon demonstrations (a dollar each), and go to as many of the pâtisserie demonstrations ($1.99 per class) as I could. In the meantime, I was constantly experimenting on the stove at home. On the QT, Chef Bugnard joined me at 81 for an occasional private cooking lesson.

  One of the things I loved about French cooking was the way that basic themes could be made in a seemingly infinite number of variations—scalloped potatoes, say, could be done with milk and cheese, with carrots and cream, with beef stock and cheese, with onions and tomatoes, and so on and on. I wanted to try them all, and did. I learned how to do things professionally, like how to fix properly a piece of fish in thirteen different ways, or how to use the specialized vocabulary of the kitchen—“petits dés” are vegetables “diced quite finely”; a douille is the tin nozzle of a pastry bag that lets you squeeze a cake decoration as the icing blurps out.

  There was, in fact, a method to my madness: I was preparing for my final examination. I could take it anytime I felt ready to, Madame Brassart said, and I was determined to do as well as possible. After all, if I were going to open a restaurant or a cooking school, what better credentials could I have than the Cordon Bleu, of Paris, France?

  I knew that I’d have to keep honing my skills until I had all of the recipes and techniques down cold and could perform them under pressure. The exam didn’t intimidate me. In fact, I looked forward to it.

  V. BASTILLE DAY

  “ÇA Y EST! C’EST FAIT! C’est le quator-zuh juillet!” That revolutionary ditty has a catchy swing to it in French, but is quite meaningless in a literal translation. I render it as something like “Hooray, we did it! The Fourteenth of July!”

  Oh, the fury of the French Revolution, where the people of the streets rushed at the hated symbols of the King, especially the Bastille prison, which they tore down, stone by stone, and distributed all over the city. Some of those stones were built into the foundation of 81 Rue de l’Université.

  In the summer of 1950, Charlie and Freddie and their three children—Erica, Rachel, and Jon—had finally come to visit us. It was a dream come true to spend time together in Paris. In the meantime, Paul and I had hired a new femme de ménage. I had once pictured French maids as chic creatures in starched white aprons—shades of Vogue magazine. Coo-Coo had changed that perception, and now our latest, Jeanne, shattered it forever. She was a tiny, slightly wall-eyed, frazzle-haired woman with a childish mind that often wandered astray.

  Jeanne was a hard worker and unfailingly faithful; she and Minette became fast friends, and when we hosted parties she became even more excited than we did. But we called her “Jeanne-la-folle” (“crazy Jeanne”), because she looked rather mad, and sometimes acted it, too.

  “Jeanne-la-folle”

  At the height of the summer, all of the toilets in the house suddenly stopped flushing. This being dear old Paris, we couldn’t find a plombier willing to rush over. Finally, after a few uncomfortable days, help arrived. After much sweat and toil over our toilet waste-pipe, the plumber discovered an American beer can lodged deeply inside. When I asked Jeanne-la-folle if she had flushed it down the toilet, she replied, “Mais oui—je rejete TOUJOURS les choses dans les toilettes! C’est beaucoup plus facile, vous savez.” Hm. Cost of repair: a hundred dollars.

  On the eve
ning of Bastille Day, July 14, we planned a special buffet dinner to precede the traditional fireworks. The pièce de résistance of our meal would be a ballottine of veal: veal that has been stuffed and rolled into the shape of a log and served hot with a luscious sauce. Two days before the feast, Jeanne-la-folle and I prepared a goodly amount of perfect, Escoffier-type veal stock for poaching the ballottine. It was the best and most careful stock I had ever made. Next we prepared an elaborate veal forcemeat that included quite a generous bit of foie gras, mushroom duxelles, Cognac, Madeira, and blanched chard leaves which would be used to make a nice pattern. We then stuffed the veal with the forcemeat, tied it up ever so neatly in its clean poaching cloth, and refrigerated it for the following day. I also used some of the veal stock to simmer up a first-class truffled Madeira sauce. The night of the thirteenth, we readied everything that could be readied, for Jeanne was setting off to celebrate the national holiday with her family in the country. She was so excited about our party that she hardly slept.

  The morning of July 14, the seven of us Childs got ourselves up and out to the parade route early. We trooped over the Concorde Bridge and up the Champs-Élyseés to stand strategically in the front row, just beyond the Rond-Point. Fortunately, we were there in good time, before too much of a crowd had gathered along the avenue. Eventually we heard the martial music, and the troops began to sweep down the Champs in waves. There were tootling military bands of various sorts, regiments of smartly garbed French foot soldiers, groups of camels, colorful African troops in native costume on handsome horses, and French cavalry officers in elaborate uniforms, their horses prancing high. Now and then a cannon would trundle by, and a gaggle of fighter planes would swoop down and pass right over us with a deafening roar.

  The crowd cheered, clapped, and ooh-la-la-ed at each passing display. It was a real parade, a lively and seemingly spontaneous outpouring of patriotic glee. Erica and Rachel and Jon were delighted by the spectacle and the foreignness of it all.

  That evening we held our party, an informal group of about twenty people, at our apartment. A few were relics of the old days, before my time, when Paul, Charlie, and Freddie had been bohemians in the Paris of the 1920s. One such couple were Samuel and Narcissa Chamberlain. He was an etcher, a food writer, and author of Clementine in the Kitchen, the charming memoir of an American family living in a French village with a super femme de ménage, Clementine, who was also a great cook. Narcissa collaborated with her husband and acted as his recipe developer. Another visitor that night was a fleeting, wrenlike person in a tan pongee accordion-pleated skirt and wide-brimmed pongee-colored hat. She was so small that the hat hid her face until she looked up and you noticed that it was Alice B. Toklas. She always seemed to be popping up in Paris like that. She stayed only for a glass of wine before dinner.

  After a decent amount of champagne and toasts, we dove into the large buffet. The ballottine, poached in the spectacular veal stock and then allowed to linger in it a while to enhance the flavor, was an immense success with its truffled sauce. Watching my family and friends happily enjoy the meal, savoring every drop of that poaching stock, which had been further enriched by the complex flavors of the ballottine, I secretly bestowed upon myself a French culinary compliment of the highest order: “impeccable.”

  But the fireworks would soon begin! After dinner, and a dessert of a beautiful meringue-ringed chocolate-mousse cake that I had bought from the very chic pastry shop near us on la Rue du Bac, we rushed through a quick preliminary cleanup. Charlie and Paul insisted that the rest of us stay downstairs in the salon, while they took on the piles of dishes in the third-floor kitchen. When they reappeared, red in the face from exertion, we headed up to Montmartre to view the evening’s display.

  The event started off in a leisurely fashion, one rocket at a time arcing through the sky, giving us time to savor their artistry. The crowd oohed with pleasure at the glittering sparks. The pace gradually quickened, until a bouquet of rapid detonations gave way to the three tremendous cannon booms of the finale. The crowd fell into an awed silence. Then there were sighs of satisfaction, as people began to disperse into the warm night. It felt as if France herself was finally stirring again, and shucking off the nightmares of war.

  We joined the throng of celebrants walking down the Montmartre hill. As the young were bedded down at home, I went up to the kitchen for the final cleanup. The boys had done a splendid job of scraping and stacking plates in our vast stoneware sink. But where had they put all the garbage? My eyes darted this way and that. After poaching the ballottine, I had set my big stockpot on the floor, to cool off. Eyeing it with a sense of foreboding now, I just knew: they had dumped it all in there—into my precious, wonderful, unique, never-to-be-equaled veal stock!

  I sighed. There was no undoing what had been done, and I could only sob in my innermost self. I vowed never to mention it—or forget it.

  VI. AN AMERICAN STOMACH IN PARIS

  BY SEPTEMBER 1950, Paul was suffering from mystery pains in his chest and back, not sleeping well, and feeling nauseated all the time. Generally, he let his afflictions ride themselves out. But this time they wouldn’t quit. The embassy doctor diagnosed Paul with some kind of “local condition” of heart and strained nerves, probably the effects of a long-ago judo accident. “Could be,” said Paul, with a shrug, sounding unconvinced.

  He went to a French doctor, Dr. Wolfram, who happened to be a tropical-disease specialist. Wolfram looked at Paul’s medical reports dating back to Ceylon, China, and Washington, D.C., which all said there was no evidence of tropical disease. But after measuring Paul’s liver and spleen, Wolfram said that Paul’s symptoms matched the amoebic dysentery he’d seen in French colonials. The sharp mystery-pains in the chest and back were probably the result of gas buildup from the bugs in Paul’s gut. Paul was skeptical, but after more tests Dr. Wolfram discovered active amoebae in Paul’s system. The cure was a set of shots followed by a regimen of pills, and a strict diet. Paul dreamed of rognons flambés, but was not allowed wine or alcohol, rich sauces, or cooked fats. It was an exquisite torture to be living in Paris, with a cook, and to be denied any tasteful food at all.

  I, too, had had tummy troubles. Ever since our trip to Italy with Philapop, my stomach was no longer a brass-bound, iron-lined, eat-and-drink-any-amount-of-anything-anywhere-anytime machine that it had been. I had suffered bouts of feeling quite queer the entire time we’d been in France. “It must be something in the water,” I’d say to myself. But when I continued to feel suddenly sick and gaseous, I declared: “Aha, pregnant at last!”

  We had tried. But for some reason our efforts didn’t take. It was sad, but we didn’t spend too much time thinking about it and never considered adoption. It was just one of those things. We were living very full lives. I was cooking all the time and making plans for a career in gastronomy. Paul—after all his years as a tutor and schoolteacher—said that he’d already spent enough time with adolescents to last him a lifetime. So it was.

  A French doctor diagnosed my persistent nausea as nothing more than good old crise de foie—a liver attack, also known as “an American stomach in Paris.” Evidently, French cuisine was just too much for most American digestive systems. Looking back on the rich gorge of food and drink we’d been enjoying, I don’t find the diagnosis surprising. Lunch almost every day had consisted of something like sole meunière, ris de veau à la crème, and half a bottle of wine. Dinner might be escargots, rognons flambés, and another half-bottle of wine. Then there was a regular flow of apéritifs and cocktails and Cognacs. No wonder I felt ill! In a good restaurant, even a simple carrot-cream soup has had the carrots and onions fondus gently in butter for ten to fifteen minutes before being souped.

  Alas, when I lightened my diet and got plenty of rest, my gaseous upset persisted. Upon hearing this, Dr. Wolfram said it was entirely possible that I, too, had picked up something in Asia during the war. He put me on an anti-dysentery treatment and restricted my diet. No fun!


  PAUL AND THE American cultural attaché, Lee Brady, were organizing a number of exciting exhibits at the embassy, including shows of Grandma Moses paintings, dance photos from the Museum of Modern Art, and a collection of U.S. engravings and printing books. To mount these shows, he had to be a combination diplomat-hustler-bully, in order to navigate the wildly different styles of the French and American bureaucracies.

  Paul with a visitor at one of his exhibits

  The individualistic, artisanal quality of the French baffled the men Paul called the “Marshall Plan hustlers” from the U.S.A. When American experts began making “helpful” suggestions about how the French could “increase productivity and profits,” the average Frenchman would shrug, as if to say: “These notions of yours are all very fascinating, no doubt, but we have a nice little business here just as it is. Everybody makes a decent living. Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac, and my foreman enjoys his espaliered pear trees. I think, as a matter of fact, we do not wish to make these changes that you suggest.”

  The Americans couldn’t even scare the French into changing their ancient ways. Why should they wreck a small but satisfying system that everybody liked, only to have the Communists take over? The French were personally patriotic, but too individualistic to create a new system to benefit the nation as a whole, and dubious about the cost of new machinery, the hurry-hurry-hurry, the instability of change, and so on.

  This clash of cultures was quite amusing, and though Paul and I were temperamentally more sympathetic to the French than to the American approach, we were also its victims. Once, a French friend took us to a wonderful little café on the Right Bank—the kind of out-of-the-way place one needs a local guide to find—and introduced us to the proprietress. “I’ve brought you some new customers!” our friend proudly said. With hardly a glance in our direction, Madame waved a hand, saying, “Oh no, I have enough customers already. . . .” Such a response would be unimaginable in the U.S.A.