by Mary Morris
Bobby let a few friends in to see me after that. I could go out into the overgrown garden with them and walk a little, taking shaky steps to the creek where ducks swam, and then we would drink tea under a tree. They helped the time pass, which was good, because without distraction it dragged terribly. “The mortal boredom of the smoker who is cured!” wrote Cocteau. Most vivid of all, though, was the way I felt about the bed. Night after night, I had to lie on it without sleeping, until I detested it with a bitter, personal spite. I hated the very smell of the mattress. I don’t suppose it was really bad, being kapok and nothing else, but for the first time in some years my numbed nose was working, and any scent would have had an unpleasant effect on newly sensitive nerves. To me the mattress stank, and it was lumpy, besides. I knew every lump. I resolved to settle that bed’s hash as soon as I was my own master. One morning, I asked Bobby what it would cost to replace it.
“Oh, I don’t know. Twenty dollars, I suppose. Why?” he said.
“I want to buy this one when I’m through with it, and burn it in the garden. I hate it.”
“If you still want to by then, you may,” he said solemnly. “Heh-ven telephoned me today.” He paused, looking at me with a cautious expression. “It is not the first time he has tried to reach you,” he added, “but I didn’t tell you before. Now I think I can trust you to see him. He’s coming this afternoon. In fact, he’s here now.”
“Good.” I must have sounded indifferent, because that was the way I felt. I’d almost forgotten Heh-ven. When he walked in, though, I remembered how well I knew him, and how many hours we’d spent smoking together. His eyes looked cloudy, I observed, and his teeth were dirty.
He said, “I’m taking you out.”
Bobby said swiftly, “Only for a drive, remember,” and looked hard at him.
Heh-ven laughed, and held up his hand reassuringly. “Certainly I’ll bring her back. I do not want your patient, Doctor.”
“You are not going to smoke,” said Bobby, “and you are not taking her anywhere where she can smoke. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly clear,” said Heh-ven. We walked out the front door—which I hadn’t gone out of for a week—and into his car, and drove away. He was faithful to his promise. We went to a tearoom and sat there and looked at each other, and he said, “You look all right. How are you?”
“I’m all right,” I said, “but Cocteau was telling the truth—you know, about the boredom. Still, I’m glad I did it.” I was warming up, though Heh-ven still sounded and looked like a stranger.
“I tried, while you were out there,” he admitted, “and I couldn’t. It didn’t last more than about thirty-six hours. I missed the lamp most of all. I find the lamp very nice.”
“Well, that’s easy,” I answered. “Just light it and lie there.” We both giggled. It was the first time I’d been able to make a joke about opium. Then he took me back to the hospital. His eyes when he said goodbye were wet, because he needed his tray. I felt smug.
The afternoon I was formally discharged, three days before I was to go to Chungking, Bobby said, “Well, goodbye. You’re free. You’re all right now. You can go anywhere you like. I don’t want any pay but remember—if you get the chance to convince some higher-up, tell him my method is effective. You’ll do that, won’t you? I would like to have that job.”
I promised, and thanked him, and we shook hands. My bag was packed, and a car waited outside, but I hesitated. “There’s one more thing,” I said. “The analysis, remember? I’ve asked you more than once, but you haven’t told me what you found out the day you did it.”
All Bobby said was, “Oh, yes that. Very interesting.”
What’s more, I forgot all about burning the mattress.
M. F. K. FISHER
(1908-1992)
Some places remain the same no matter how much change occurs over time, and M. F. K. Fisher captures that quality in her depiction of Dijon. One of the most acclaimed writers about food in the English language, but truly a connoisseur of all the senses, Fisher was first drawn to Dijon as a student at the University of Dijon and never fell out of love with the place. “I feel I could survive there now as easily as I did the first three years, in spite of the inevitable changes that the short time of some sixty years can make in a place even as old as Dijon was and is,” she wrote in Long Ago in France. Fisher wrote numerous books about food, including Dubious Honors and How to Cook a Wolf, and two memoirs. The man she refers to as Al was her first husband, Alfred Young Fisher, whom she married in 1929, when he was a student in Dijon. She was born Mary Frances Kennedy in Michigan and she died in California.
from LONG AGO IN FRANCE
When I first went to Dijon in 1929, the rue de la Liberté was the main street in the old part of town. It split the town like a spine so that all life flowed on either side of it, and the life of the whole city was centered there.
Every settlement is divided into two parts by a main street, or even a river or a pathway. In Paris, for instance, the Seine River divides Paris into a left bank and a right bank, just as the main street in any small American town separates it into the right part and the left part of town … culturally, socially, economically, physically, statistically, and in every other way.
In Dijon, which was a small city but one of the oldest and noblest in a very old country when I went there in 1929, the rue de la Liberté divided the town inevitably, although it may not now be the center it once was.
Its narrowness did not adapt itself well to the increasing traffic, since it had existed since the Romans first built a fortified wall around a small camp. In medieval times it was crowded and not as crooked as many, and it was a thoroughfare long before automobiles, tramways, and buses tried to crowd its constant stream of travelers onto the narrow sidewalks. In 1929, though, it was still the main street of the town, and it cut like a sword through the thick conglomeration of small streets spreading out on either side of it.
After the railroads came to France and the PLM was finally completed connecting Paris and Marseille to the south, with Dijon the first main stop, the station was built at the edge of the walled town, and the street that led from it was called the boulevard de Sévigné. This wider street, lined with beautiful trees, was by far the most modern part of town, and it ended at the Grand Place D’Arcy, which continues now to be the center of the town, with the Bureau of Tourism located in its public gardens.
Somewhere on the place d’Arcy was an Arc de Triomphe, and it seems odd that I do not remember anything about it now, but the small Arc is an important part of the decor, especially because it was reported to be the model of the Grand Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It was designed by François Rude, one of the great sculptors; and it forms a part of the solid reputation of architecture and sculpture which has always made Dijon the center of Burgundian culture.
In 1929 the place d’Arcy served as a liaison between the old and the new parts of town, and contained the leading movie theater as well as the Hôtel de la Cloche and several bright café-brasseries. It was the entrance to the true old town and the rue de la Liberté.
The largest movie theater in town was the D’Arcy on the place d’Arcy. It was the kind where they rang the bell fifteen minutes before the movie, to notify people that it was time to come along, and then rang the bell again for the entracte, and it seemed to be heard all over town. The people would wander out to the cafés nearby and then they would come back to see the second half of the show.
Al loved the movies. He hated to stay home, and he believed very sincerely that we went to impove our French; because, first, there were subtitles, and then later while we were there, there came the sound pictures, in about 1931. We saw all the early Pagnol, and the Jean Giono stories that Pagnol made. We saw everything that was going … German films, the UFA films … we knew all the French and all the Italian films, which had subtitles in French. It was fun, but I got really fed up with going every single night to the movies. But Al loved it.
The
re was another theater in the back of the Grande Taverne restaurant, with the Hôtel Terminus above the two, on the top two stories of the same building. This theater was more like a music hall, however, with tables and one act of vaudeville. It was the first place that had a movie with a soundtrack. I had already seen the Al Jolson movie called The Jazz Singer when I came back to this country in 1931 and recommended it to several people who found it very puzzling: The soundtrack was to The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson singing “Mammy,” and the movie was called The King of Jazz, with Paul Whiteman and his full orchestra.
There was another smaller movie house way up on the place Grangier, and it showed rather offbeat movies, like all of Charlie Chaplin’s, which I saw for the first time in years. We saw horror pictures there, and westerns.
On one side of the place d’Arcy, on the rue Victor Hugo facing the municipal gardens and the fountain, was the Hôtel de la Cloche, the Ritz of the town, and opposite it were the newspaper offices and two or three older hotels.
We stayed at the Cloche for a few days before moving to Madame Ollangnier’s on the rue du Petit-Potet, mainly because it was the biggest and best-known place in town. We had known little then to appreciate its famous cellars, and had found the meals fairly dull in the big grim dining room. Later we learned that once a year, in November for the Foire Gastronomique, it recaptured for those days all its old glitter. Then it was full of gourmets from every corner of France, and famous chefs twirled saucepans in its kitchens, and wine buyers drank Chambertins and Cortons and Romanée-Contis by the cave-ful.
But for us it was not the place to be in 1929. My mother and sister Anne later stayed there for a few days when Mother came down from London with a bad knee the first summer we were there. She soon grew bored with it and moved to the Central, which was comparatively new and not really stylish in those days. And later Timmy, my second husband, and I stayed there at the Cloche with his mother, who loved its provincial elegance.
The boulevard de Sévigné and the rue Victor Hugo came to a point in front of the Hôtel de la Cloche where the gardens were, and then the place d’Arcy opened at its other end into the rue de la Liberté. The rue de la Liberté went past the Ducal Palace with its parade grounds in front, and ended naturally at the Church of Saint Michel.
It seemed very narrow always, especially the first long block that split off from the place d’Arcy, and it was in direct contrast to the wide boulevard de Sévigné which led directly from the station to it.
We smelled Dijon mustard, especially at one of the most important corners of the rue de la Liberté, where Grey-Poupon flaunted little pots of it. And I remember that long after I was there, my nephew Sean and his wife Anne and their two little boys were in France one year, and I had told Sean about the Grey-Poupon shop … a kind of show-place, with beautiful old faience jars in the windows and then copies of them that one could buy for mustard pots.
The two boys were fascinated, because they said the floor opened, and their clerk simply disappeared down into the basement right in the middle of the store. Of course, I was not surprised, but the boys were, and they waited, and finally the little man popped up again with a small moutardièr. I broke the bottom of it about three years ago, but I used it until then for mustard, and I still have its top, I believe, and the little wooden spoon with the blue ball on the end of it. It was darling, and they brought it clear from Dijon to me. I liked that.…
We smelled Dijon cassis in the autumn, and stained our mouths with its metallic purple. But all year and everywhere we smelled the Dijon gingerbread, that pain d’épice which came perhaps from Asia with a tired Crusader.
Its flat strange odor, honey, cow dung, clove, something unnameable but unmistakable, blew over all the town. Into the theater sometimes would swim a little cloud of it, or quickly through a café gray with smoke. In churches it went for one triumphant minute far above the incenses.
At art school, where tiny Ovide Yencesse tried to convince the hungriest students that medal-making was a great career, and fed them secretly whether they agreed or not, altar smoke crept through from the cathedral on one side, and from the other the smell of pain d’épice baking in a little factory. It was a smell as thick as a flannel curtain.
We knew most of the shops, and although I can’t remember eating much gingerbread when we first went there, later when my younger sister Norah lived nearby, I bought it often. It was called pavé de santé, and it was the plainest and the most delicious, and the cheapest cut. It was made in huge loaves about six feet square, six inches thick, and it was sold in square blocks of about a kilo each, or a half-kilo maybe, and wrapped up in paper marked Mulot et Petit Jean or any of the other good gingerbread places. The smells were heavenly.
Mulot et Petit Jean was the biggest and oldest supplier of gingerbread, and its main store always looked something like a pharmacy. The women who worked there all looked the same, with tight high-breasted bodies and handsome hands and feet, and they went lightly over the tiled floors, behind the high polished counters piled with pretty boxes and the towering cash desk with a little carved fence around its top. They were deft and remote, and yet protective. Now and then for Christmas or birthdays, I sent loaves of the plain kind of gingerbread and boxes of the sticky kind to America, and they advised against shipping a round cake covered with candied cherries, and advised for a smaller square one stuffed with apricot jam, and I smiled at them without their knowing why, nor caring.
The Grey-Poupon shop was on the corner of one of the streets that led off the rue de la Liberté down to the place Bossuet, where Mulot et Petit Jean was, and across from it was a wonderful store where workmen got their clothes. Al bought a suit there, I remember. It was a navy blue corduroy, a thick-waled corduroy. One time there was a masked students’ ball given by the Mayor in the Ducal Palace, and we both bought harlequin costumes alike there. I skinned my hair back, and was perhaps a little masculine. Al was rather effeminate, I think. Anyway, we both wore makeup, and he, to me, was obviously a man and I was obviously a girl, and it was fun.
The shop also had smocks for various kinds of working people (they all had their own smocks, navy blue, or dark gray), and there were lots of butchers’ aprons. Every kind of workman had his own quality and cut and color of suit. I still have a smock that I bought there. It is gray and ugly, but I still have it hanging in my closet. I haven’t worn it for years, but I keep it, for some reason. It would be a nice thing for a sculptor or cabinet worker … something to wipe gluey old hands on.…
There were people who belted out street songs in 1929–1930. There were usually two people: One would be a wounded veteran from the war—World War I, which was still very keen in their minds, of course—and then there would be a woman. The man would sit on a little stool usually, and the woman would go around and collect pennies and sell sheet music now and then. They would sing a song, and sometimes they’d sing two or three, but they would sell the sheet music to people for a penny. I always stopped and listened, but it seems odd that I don’t remember ever paying for and getting a piece of sheet music.
The Ducal Palace was at the far end of the rue de la Liberté facing the place d’Armes, and it was a series of majestic buildings, which housed the mayor’s offices as well as the museums. In its courtyard was the Ducal Kitchen, which was nothing but a great chimney rising from a space which formed the oven itself.
There were several other things in the courtyard, including the brooding statue of Claus Sluter, the first great sculptor of Burgundy, who did the Puits de Moïse, which is outside the town. The great tower of Phillipe Le Bon was toward the back of the high buildings and rose high above even the churches. The rue de la Liberté separated the Ducal Palace from the place d’Armes, which was its natural parade ground and always seemed the center of town.
Down the rue de la Liberté from the ducal Palace, there was the Opera House, the place de l’Opéra, and the small Café de l’Opéra. There was also a famous printshop, where they printed James
Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and other writers forbidden in America and England. There were strange typos in them, because all the proofreaders were, of course, Frenchmen speaking English. They finally did print Al’s thesis and later Larry Powell’s, because printing theses was their livelihood. Then there was the grain market, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays there would be lots of pigeons walking around, picking up seeds that the merchants had dropped from their pockets.
Behind the Ducal Palace ran the oldest marketing street in town. It was very narrow and crowded and dirty, and it was the most picturesque part of town, with gabled buildings showing the famous tiled roofs of Burgundy … green and yellow and black and red. And there was the beautiful small place François Rude and finally the place where people gathered to see the famous gargoyles and the great clock Jacquemart with its mechanized figures on the façade of the église Notre-Dame.
The other half of the ancient city was where the place d’Armes spread out in front of the Ducal Palace. Out from the half-circle of the place ran a dozen small streets which led into the older quarter of the city, part commercial and part beautiful town houses, which seemed to end for us anyway on the corner of the Chabot-Charny and the rue du Petit-Potet.
The buildings on the place d’Armes were all two stories tall and fairly uniform, and they included several small cafés and tea shops and two restaurants, the Prés aux Clercs and Racouchot’s Three Pheasants. On the corner of one of the streets that went down from the place was Venot’s, the main bookstore of the town. It was the only one known to me then, and it supplied all the university books.
Monsieur Venot was a town character and was supposed to be the stingiest and most disagreeable man in Dijon, if not in the whole of France. But I did not know this, and I assumed that it was all right to treat him as if he were a polite and even generous person. I never bought much from him but textbooks, because I had no extra money, but I often spent hours in his cluttered shop, looking at books and asking him things, and sniffing the fine papers there, and even sitting copying things from books he would suggest I use at his worktable, with his compliments and his ink and often his paper. In other words, he was polite and generous to me, and I liked him.
