by John Baxter
We hid inside the house, not even taking down the heavy wooden shutters and hardly daring to turn on the lights, as if they might attract the wrath of the storm. Twenty–eight people died in France that weekend, and many more in the rest of western Europe, but we were oblivious. That night, in a wide bed tucked into an alcove surrounded by tall shelves of books, as the wind slammed at the shutters, our daughter, Louise, was conceived, a child of the hurricane.
11
Tock . . . Tock . . . Tock . . .
Church of Saint–Sulpice, Paris 5me. July 1994. 2 p.m. 12°C. Afternoon light, tinted an oceanic chartreuse by the stained–glass windows, spotlights the dust, which swirls in a Brownian movement each time it’s agitated anew by the thump of the wooden door admitting yet another tourist. As each new arrival fails to remove his hat or make the sign of the cross, the holy–water fonts, created from two halves of a giant clamshell, evert their silver lips in contempt.
UMBERTO ECO WOULD HAVE APPROVED OF MY DECISION TO MOVE to Paris to join the woman I loved. After all, hadn’t I in a sense just chosen his second option, and instead of writing a novel, run off with a chorus girl?
That was certainly how it appeared to people in Los Angeles. One of the acquaintances I’d made there, more bitter than the rest, growled, “Is this what you do? Come to town, make friends, then leave?” Of my apologetic explanation of a whirlwind romance, which the French call a coup de foudre, “thunderclap,” they were as incredulous as the director’s assistant in Day for Night—François Truffaut’s fable about the tribulations of moviemaking—when she learns that the star’s girlfriend has decamped with a stuntman. “I can see leaving a guy for a movie,” she says, “but leaving a movie for a guy . . . ?”
Though not by intention, Eco also provided another clue to the puzzle of France. In 1988 he published a second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum. I read it in Los Angeles, soon losing myself in its winding byways, its alleys of speculation, its cabinets of mystical curiosities, and its rag–and–bone markets of occult lore. Eco wrote once that “entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains; you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.” I made it to the end of Foucault’s Pendulum, but not without a sense of having conquered a literary Everest.
The novel begins in a vast building in Paris, where a wire, attached high in a dome, supports the pendulum of the title, a weight that swings back and forth ceaselessly above some sort of mystical diagram sunk into the marble floor.
Eco specifies a wire sixty–seven meters long and a pendulum weighing twenty–eight kilograms. Only a cathedral could accommodate something so cumbersome, and even if some archbishop agreed to house it, the chaos among his worshippers could only be imagined; one visualized whole pews full of parishioners mowed down by its swing. And what use would such a device fulfill? In the novel, it somehow proves that the earth rotates. The whole thing was obviously one of the wilder flights of Eco’s imagination.
On one of our first walks around Paris the spring after I arrived, Marie–Dominique and I strolled up to the highest point of the Left Bank. It’s dominated by an enormous building of ecclesiastical character with an imposing Roman–style colonnade.
“What church is that?” I asked.
“It’s not a church,” said Marie–Dominique. “It’s the Panthéon.”
When I looked blank, she continued, “In London, great poets are buried under the floor of Westminster Abbey? Well, this is our version. All sorts of people are buried in the crypt. Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, Dumas, Hugo, the Curies. Even Jean Moulin, the resistance leader—though his body was never found.”
“What did they bury, then?”
“An empty coffin, I suppose. The same with Antoine de Saint–Exupéry. His plane crashed in the sea. The body isn’t the point, it’s the idea . . .” Seeing my interest, she asked, “Do you want to go in?”
“Sure.” (How different everything might have been had I refused. For one thing, you would not be reading this book.) We walked up the steps, through the Corinthian columns with their acanthus–leaf capitals, under the inscription “Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante”—roughly “The homeland is grateful to its great men”—paid our admission, collected a brochure, and entered the vast, domed space.
I should have been admiring the heroic statuary, twice life–size, or the murals celebrating the achievements of France’s past. Instead my eyes fixed on something across the marble floor: a circular diagram, above which lazily swung a golden sphere supported by a wire stretching out of sight overhead.
“It’s the pendulum!”
Marie–Dominique looked puzzled. “Yes. Le pendule de Foucault. So?”
“But I thought . . .”
“What?”
“Never mind.” To confess I believed that Umberto Eco made it up would just add to her doubts as to whether she’d made the right decision about me.
As she left to admire the murals, I rapidly skimmed the brochure.
The Panthéon started life as a cathedral, but because the revolution of 1789 disapproved of religion, it was never consecrated. Instead it became a shrine to the nation’s great thinkers and creators. France could hardly have had a better symbol than a temple dedicated to secular saints. Unlike Rome, Paris was never a sacred city. Almost all its monuments are to intellect and reason, not the soul of man but his mind.
In 1855 a physicist named Léon Foucault, looking for a way to demonstrate visually that the earth rotates, was given permission to fix a pendulum to a swivel in the Panthéon dome. On the floor below, he laid out a 360–degree diagram, like the face of a compass. As the pendulum swung through an unvarying ten–second arc, independent of the earth’s motion, the diagram itself seemed to move, making a complete turn every thirty–two hours.
Foucault’s pendulum in 1851.
Anonymous. Foucault’s Pendulum in 1851. Author’s collection.
In 1633 Galileo, forced by the Inquisition to recant his findings that the earth revolved around the sun, was said to have muttered defiantly, “E pur si muove” (it still moves). Watching Foucault’s experiment, one savant said in satisfaction, “At last Galileo is vindicated!”
To Eco, it said something profound about the French. “The Pendulum told me,” he wrote, “that, as everything moved—earth, solar system, nebulae and black holes, all the children of the great cosmic expansion—one single point stood still: a pivot, bolt, or hook around which the universe could move.”
And that single point was here, in Paris.
Was this what the French believed also? That Paris was the hub around which all else revolved? That their values were somehow cosmic, rooted deep in the actual creation of the universe—values that went so deep and were so stubbornly held that nothing could shake them?
Perhaps the things we found most infuriating about the French—their refusal to accommodate other nations, their insistence on favoring the national good over that of the world, their fidelity to their language and culture—were also those we secretly envied.
Is that what drew us here? Was Paris, in some mystical sense, the perfection to which we all aspired?
I thought of running the idea past Marie–Dominique but decided against it. What if she replied “Of course!”?
12
Baby Time
Outside Helsinki, Finland. February 1971. 2 a.m. 4 degrees below zero C. The low sun, faint and yellow as a streetlamp, glimmers on the ice of a frozen lake and a slope crusted white with frost. A pump chugs at the foot of a jetty, keeping a few square meters free of ice and inviting the suicidal to plunge into the roiling black water. Instead, skin steaming and numbed by sauna heat, we roll naked in snow as soft and warm as wool.
A FEW YEARS PASSED BEFORE I GOT BACK TO FRENCH HISTORY. Understanding the 1789 revolution and oddities like the Republican calendar took a backseat to learning, in middle age, how to be a father.
Nothing widens one’s understanding of a society like having
a child. Though I didn’t realize this till later, some of what parenthood taught me would leak back into my search for Fabre d’Églantine.
In fact, I date my first insight to the day we visited the clinic where our daughter would be delivered. Formerly a hunting lodge of Emperor Napoléon III, it stood in baroque splendor amid the remnants of a gracious garden in the upmarket suburb of Neuilly. Framed letters of recommendation decorated the walls of the waiting room. The first I read began, under a gilded letterhead incorporating a royal crest, “His Serene Highness wishes to thank the staff . . .” I didn’t look at the rest.
Leading us on a tour of inspection, a lady in an elegant black dress opened the door to what she called “the finest delivery suite in Paris.” She did not exaggerate. Three deep armchairs were ranged around the foot of a huge bed draped with a satin baldachin and clearly fit for a crowned head, or at least the child on whose head the crown would eventually rest.
Dazzled, we signed up, only to see Louise born in a perfectly adequate modern facility at the other end of the building. Apparently only the most serene of highnesses rated the five–star suite.
At the end of that first tour we were handed over to the anesthetist, who took down all our particulars, then asked when the baby was due. When we told him the estimated date of delivery, toward the end of September, he looked dubious.
“Not a good idea,” he said. “That weekend, all our doctors will be away.”
“Why?” Marie–Dominique asked. “Is there some kind of conference?”
“No, no conference,” he said. “It’s Yom Kippur. And also the first day of the skiing season.”
At first I thought he was joking, but his expression was serious.
“And . . . that matters?” I said.
He shrugged. “Certainly, if you don’t want your child delivered by the gardener.”
In a cab back into town, I said, “The skiing season? Can you believe that?”
“Yes, it seemed early to me too,” Marie–Dominique said. “When I used to ski, the lifts didn’t open much before November.” She looked at me sideways. “What, you think it’s unusual that all the doctors would take the weekend off?”
“Well . . . a little. I hope it doesn’t happen too often.”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘often.’” She ticked off dates on her fingers. “There’s Christmas and the Réveillon—New Year’s. After that, Good Friday in April isn’t an official holiday, but most people take it off. Easter Monday falls about the middle of April. Labor Day on May 1. Eighth of May—Victory in Europe. The Ascension in May. Pentecost in June, Bastille Day July 14, the Assumption on the fifteenth of August, Yom Kippur, of course, at the end of September, All Saints’ Day on November 1, and Armistice Day on November 11 . . .”
I opened my mouth to express astonishment, but she wasn’t finished.
“When any holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, we usually faire le pont, ‘make a bridge,’ by taking off the day in between that and the weekend . . . and naturally nobody works between Christmas and the Réveillon. Plus, a lot of people are starting to observe Valentine’s Day in February. Then we all leave town in August for the vacances, so Paris more or less shuts down, particularly after the fifteenth . . .”
By now she’d run out of fingers but not holidays. “Then there’s school holidays, of course. They take up fourteen weeks of the year, so most parents try to get away for at least some of those.”
“Naturally.” (Did anyone work in this country?)
“As for the skiing season . . . well, it isn’t a holiday, of course, but you might think it is from the number of offices that close. The same with hunting. Once the season opens in the middle of September, anyone who owns some land is out with a gun.”
Remembering I was in show business gave her more ideas. “And don’t forget Cannes in May. It’s not official, but for those two weeks of the film festival you won’t find a journalist or actor or filmmaker in Paris. The same with the Avignon festival in July. Theater people never miss it. That’s where regional theaters choose their shows for the rest of the year . . . And don’t forget Fashion Week . . . and the Month of Photography . . . and the FIAC art fair . . .”
“Enough!” Just listening to this recital made me tired.
I’d already learned some other oddities of the French calendar from experience. Museums close on Tuesdays, and on Wednesdays schools hold classes only in the morning. Food and produce markets take Sundays and Mondays off, in return for opening on Saturdays. Even then, many close at 12:30 p.m. and don’t reopen until 4 p.m., but then remain open until 8 p.m. Also, for no particular reason that I could discover, our local baker closed on Wednesdays.
And somewhere behind all this, Foucault’s pendulum kept its steady tick tick tick, measuring out the hours to a timetable that only Parisians know.
13
Something to Kill
The theater Comédie–Italienne, July 19, 1777. The premiere performance of Ernestine, a new opera by the Chevalier de Saint–Georges, libretto by Choderlos de Laclos, in the presence of the queen. Midway through the first act, a minor character, a coachman, cracks his whip and shouts, “Ohé! Ohé!” This amuses Marie Antoinette. The next time he appears, she calls out, “Ohé!” The courtiers join in. Soon they are calling “Ohé!” at every opportunity. The performance ends in chaos. Ernestine won’t be performed again for more than a century.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF JULY 14, 1789, AS HIS SUBJECTS STORMED the Bastille prison, igniting the revolution, Louis XVI, twenty–five kilometers away in the palace at Versailles and ignorant of the events that would send him, his family, and most of France’s leisure class to the guillotine, updated his diary, summarizing the day in a single word—“Rien” (nothing).
To be fair to Louis, “nothing” didn’t mean the day was without incident but rather that he had not gone hunting, and had therefore killed no animals. Among people for whom it was a point of pride to do no work at all and pursue only pleasure, hunting was one of the few activities in which the nobility could honorably indulge. Louis did little else, except work with the court locksmith in tinkering together new and more complicated gadgets. Exasperated, his Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette, complained, “My tastes are not those of the king, who has none, except for hunting and mechanic’s labor.”
While medieval hunters appreciated the taste of game, the primary function of the chase was sport. The quarry, in particular foxes, wolves, and bears, were chosen as much for their cunning and speed as for culinary possibilities: Oscar Wilde mocked foxhunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”
When the hunting season ended, the courts reconvened, and young women from good families, known as débutantes, or “beginners,” were “presented” to the king. Between December and April, in the capitals and fashionable resorts of Europe, hostesses staged parties, balls, and receptions to show off the new crop of marriageable young men and women. Families from the Americas sent their daughters to Europe to be “finished,” then, ideally, presented at court, after which they were “out” and regarded as fit to participate in society. Britain’s premium such event, Queen Charlotte’s Ball, at which four hundred young women were presented at Buckingham Palace each year, was discontinued only in 1958.
For many girls, “coming out” was the first step in snaring a title. They were coached and managed by older and more experienced chaperones—sexual gamekeepers who understood the rules of the social hunt. In recognition of the fact that trapping a titled husband was as much a business as any pursuit in the wild, women who crossed the Atlantic with marriage in mind were known collectively as “the fishing fleet,” while the round of balls and receptions at which the hunt took place was called, naturally, “the Season.”
14
Starting Over
Near Fredericksburg, Virginia. May 1975. 4 p.m. 18°C. The floor–to–ceiling shutters of the antebellum mansion, folded back, trap every breath of air off the slow–flowing Rappahannock and ch
annel them across the porch, where we sit sweating and sipping bourbon. On the walls, decoratively fanned under glass, are millions in worthless Confederacy “grayback” dollars. “Gone with the wind?” I joke. Not funny, apparently.
MOST REVOLUTIONS, IN THE RUSH TO “MAKE IT NEW,” BEGIN WITH the easy stuff: a new flag, a new anthem, new faces on the currency. The French adopted the blue, white, and red tricolor, embraced the Marseillaise, and in 1794 replaced the livre and louis d’or (gold louis) with the franc, streamlined in accordance with the Revolution’s most successful innovation, decimalization.
The revolution’s achievements were remarkable. It’s been called the most important single event of the modern era. For the first time in history, ordinary people seized control of their lives and their society. They overhauled the legal and educational systems, created academies of science and arts, began the process of eradicating slavery, decriminalized prostitution and homosexuality, and paved the way for full suffrage.
They also established the first scientifically based system of weights and measures, introducing the kilogram and replacing the yard and foot (the latter supposedly based on the length of the foot of Hercules) with the meter, corresponding to a proportion of the circumference of the earth.
Reformers everywhere welcomed the events of 1789. The British poet William Wordsworth could barely contain himself:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times,
In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
