by Pamela Paul
This is probably why I rarely feel the urge to turn to fiction about contemporary American family dysfunction or the saga of someone working for a newspaper in New York or doing the old work-life-family tango. Maybe because I live it, I don’t exactly find it gripping material. Or especially enlightening. The Norton-driven need to fill in the gaps and accumulate knowledge, however fleeting, still percolates within, insatiable. I’d rather know more about what I don’t already know.
In November 2015, I returned to Paris for the first time in eight years. With the advent of e-mail and Skype, staying in touch with the Mathieus electronically would have been easy, but we almost never corresponded. Though it’s difficult to achieve with a full-time job and three children, I far preferred to maintain the relationship through physical presence and place. It was a relationship founded in total immersion and identification, and keeping it that way felt right. I hadn’t been to Paris since I was pregnant with Teddy, a trip marred by horrendous morning sickness. On one especially surly afternoon, I’d stomped around the city in search of something decent to eat; the only thing I could tolerate was bitter dark chocolate ice cream without hazelnut. Why was there nothing to eat in Paris?
My French sister, Juliette, now a biogeneticist at the Institut Pasteur, had come to visit during a conference in New York a few years earlier; since then, she’d had two children. The apartment where I’d stayed as a student was now hers. My French brother, Paul, had become an architect like his father, married his Romanian girlfriend, and had three kids. He’d been fourteen when I lived there; now his hair was gray, and he lived within walking distance of the atelier he shared with Bertrand. The youngest Mathieu, Margot, only ten when I first lived in Paris—the same age as Beatrice—had moved to Brussels with her husband and two children, where she worked as a child psychologist. There were seven brand-new Mathieus and I’d never met any of them.
From the airport I went directly to their house forty minutes north of Paris. By happy circumstance, Margot was visiting from Belgium. There was a street fair in town that weekend, a crowded warren of wares that bore an unsettling resemblance to the street fairs on Third Avenue in Manhattan—the same standardized junk food and Chinese imports, punctuated only occasionally by dollops of French culture—crepes, “follies” of bonbons, artisanal cheese.
In some ways, the place hadn’t changed. The Mathieus’ house was still a ramshackle jumble, walls covered in giant antique mirrors, corners cluttered with the same faded vacation photographs of La Rochelle, immense wooden bookshelves teeming with Éditions Gallimard, an entire ceiling in the parlor dangling with Carole’s fantastical chandeliers—baroque antiques she’d embellished with Belgian glass crystals she’d bought “pas trop cher” from a friend. It was the kind of house where you constantly bumped into a memory. A nineteenth-century pepper grinder. Ancient copies of Le Monde. A grandparent’s handmade doll.
“I’m reading this Icelandic author,” Carole enthused, foisting a French translation in my direction. “You must see if they’re translated into English.” (They were not.) A diplomat from the Ivory Coast, in town for a Euro-African cultural congress, came by for lunch the same day I arrived. They’d all known one another as students. Bertrand had held on to a copy of his friend’s doctoral thesis. The diplomat pleaded for it back, but Bertrand genially refused. “You gave this to me as a gift! It’s a work of genius and it’s precious to me—you cannot have it.” Everyone drank aperitifs in the garden while Margot’s toddlers played in the grass, lightly ignored the way small French children often are.
But the Mathieus’ world had changed in other ways. On Sundays, when most pharmacies are closed, the owners post signs to direct people in case of emergency to the one pharmacy open. Having remembered to buy a few toiletries I’d naturally forgotten to pack, I found myself that Sunday in a pharmacy in an unfamiliar part of town. Here amid the indistinct high-rises of low-income housing, the women wore headscarves; groups of men gathered on corners and street crime was common. I’d been shocked earlier that year when, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the fugitives allegedly took refuge in this medieval walled city surrounded by farmland, forest, and an old sugar factory, of all places. The village’s residents were not surprised.
Carole had cleared out three rooms on the third floor for a family of Syrian refugees, a young couple with a one-year-old. She’d installed a makeshift kitchen and left a pile of hand-me-downs from her seven grandchildren. “As long as they aren’t Muslim,” the woman before her in line told the village committee looking for families willing to accept placements. “We only want to take in Christian refugees.”
“We’ll take anyone, even if they’re Christians,” Carole informed the committee when it was her turn, a story she repeated with mischievous glee.
I spent the rest of the week in the old apartment on rue Rambuteau, leaving reluctantly Thursday night. The following day at work, the shocking headlines tore across my computer screen. Dozens of people had been killed at the Bataclan concert hall not far from the Marais. It was Friday, November 13, and Paris had again exploded in terrorist violence. Facebook quickly confirmed that all the Mathieus were okay. But what had happened to their city? What had happened to the city that I couldn’t help but think of as partly my own?
The book I turned to was Victor Hugo’s 1862 masterpiece, Les Misérables. I hadn’t read a single French novel for two decades, not since taking a French lit course at the Alliance Française in my twenties, before my brain got tired. When the class was over, I fully intended to come back to French novels—but only in French. Why read in translation when I can read them in the original? I reasoned. The result was I didn’t read them at all. But after Juliette told me she’d finished Zola’s entire oeuvre while pregnant, I decided I’d waited long enough. If I waited to read Zola and Hugo and Balzac in French, I’d be waiting another two decades.
That’s how long I’d been meaning to read Les Misérables, a book I first encountered, as many people do, in musical form. When I arrived in Paris as a college student in 1992, my closest college friend, Victoria, and our other roommates and I decided to see the French version, then playing at the Théâtre Mogador. I had never read the book nor seen the show in English. I understood about a third of what was happening onstage, which naturally didn’t stop me from bawling throughout. I immediately purchased the cast album in French and, when I got back to campus, stuck the cassette in my car and left it there for the entire year, driving everyone who had the misfortune to ride in my car insane with rage. “Don’t you have anything other than that stupid French musical tape in your car?” they’d plead. Further marring the passenger experience, tears would inevitably stream down my cheeks as I drove along, quietly singing in French to myself. It took about three bars of an orchestral swell to get me going; I might still be in the driveway.
So fine, I was a bit of a Les Miz fan. I next saw the musical in Czech with my cousin Kirsten in Prague, and after much snobbish resistance—how could it possibly work in English?—I decided to see it on Broadway. “Only if you promise me not to mention a single time how much better it is in French,” Michael warned me before consenting to come along. We watched the movie version together, too, both of us weeping unabashedly at the moment of Jean Valjean’s redemption. When I deemed Beatrice old enough, I watched it with her. Then we watched it again. All three of my children groan when I get choked up just describing one of the songs.
Yet I resisted the novel. It wasn’t just its formidable length. Or that the thought of reading it in French made me want to lie down. It was that I already knew what happened. Could I get through thirteen hundred pages when I could anticipate every impending catastrophe? Jean Valjean’s onerous imprisonment for stealing a loaf of bread. The devastating abandonment of Fantine. The decision to entrust Cosette to the treacherous Thénardiers. Every plot point or at least the musical rendition of those plot points was something I’d idiotically sung to myself dozens of times. Was it possible to enjoy a novel w
hen you knew the whole story in advance?
There was only one way to find out. The book, unlike the musical, begins with the bishop Myriel in a portrait of moral goodness so powerful it had me in tears within pages. In the musical, Bishop Myriel is the man who offers refuge to the paroled Jean Valjean when no one else will shelter him, then covers up his crime when Valjean steals the bishop’s silver. It is the bishop who sets Valjean on the path to redemption when he tells him that he must consecrate his life to God. In the musical, Myriel has a single scene. In the book, he has an entire life. I read on.
Nothing could diminish the novel’s drive. Though I knew nearly everything that would happen, I didn’t know how it would play out. Each fateful decision filled me with trepidation and urgency. “No, Fantine!” I wanted to cry out as I read. “Stay away from that seductive young man!” As Alfred Hitchcock once said of suspense: You can have two men sitting at a table when a bomb suddenly goes off, momentarily frightening the audience. Or, far more effective, you can have two men sitting at the table and show the audience there’s a bomb ticking under the table. The men continue to talk about baseball. The audience, complicit, is aware of what’s going to happen. “Don’t talk about baseball!” you want to shout. “There’s a bomb under the table!”
Knowing everything ahead in Les Misérables only prolonged the anticipation and heightened the emotion. The attenuated suspense was at times almost unbearable, like helplessly watching trains collide in slow motion.
For me, in that moment in time, this book had everything. There was refuge to be found in Myriel’s goodness, solace in Jean Valjean’s earned redemption, comfort in Cosette’s happy ending. I was transported to another world in a way that enriched the quality of my own. At the end of each day (it was too heavy to lug on the train), I could remove myself from the details of quotidian existence—the health care forms, the Valentine’s Day cupcakes, the work meeting—for altogether different challenges: How to ensure a child’s well-being when you cannot provide for her. How to forgive a father you never knew and how to forgive a father you knew well. How to pursue love without hurting other loved ones in the process. There was even a chapter featuring my thoroughly recognizable rue Rambuteau.
In place of childcare arrangements and deadline decisions, I could occupy my mind with larger questions: Can man change the course of his own life and the lives of others? How can religion both repress and uplift? How do revolutions succeed?
There were startling parallels between the post-Revolution tumult of France of nearly two hundred years earlier and the political and religious divides seizing Paris and the world today. In an extended aside about the dangers of monasteries, Hugo decried the effects of religious fanaticism. Hugo was “for religion and against religions,” referring to monastic life as “the scourge of Europe.” He denounced “the violence so often done to the conscience, coerced vocations, feudalism relying on the cloister … the sealed lips, the immured minds, so many ill-fated intellects confined in a dungeon of eternal vows, the taking of the habit, souls buried alive.” Centuries collapsed in his words.
The proper response, Hugo wrote, was to resist the tide of superstition and fight back against fanaticism and militarism. He was writing about Paris then, and he was also writing about Paris now, even elucidating aspects of the political and socioeconomic divides that trouble America today. Everything in this book resonated for me.
Victor Hugo, the great romantic historian of a novelist, French counterpart to Charles Dickens, understood the effects of inevitable change on a place you know and love, even as your memory clings to the familiar contours of its past. Writing about himself in the third person, he explains:
Since he left it, Paris has been transformed. A new city has grown up that is, as it were, unknown to him. Needless to say, he loves Paris. Paris is his spiritual home.… All those places you do not see any more, that you may never see again and that you have kept a picture of in your mind, take on a melancholy charm; they come back to you with the mournfulness of an apparition, make the holy land visible to you, and are, so to speak, the very embodiment of France. And you love them and you conjure them up as they are, as they were, and you persist in this.
You can call up maps of Victor Hugo’s Paris online and compare them to those of the city today; the outlines are all still visible, many of the streets are the same. You can trace Jean Valjean’s path across the city in 1832 and follow the same route today with few detours. His Paris is still recognizable. I promised myself I wouldn’t let another eight years go by without returning to my Mathieus and to my Paris. If reading Les Misérables couldn’t make me feel like the world was a safer place, it could at least ground the current moment in a continuum.
The Internet also led me directly to Jean Valjean, or rather to the American actor playing him in the London production. When my family and I traveled to London the following year, that actor invited Beatrice and me backstage after a performance. He had listened to me discuss Les Misérables on my Times books podcast and reached out via Twitter. The three of us toured the dressing rooms and costume area and walked the stage of the Queen’s Theatre, Beatrice wearing Javert’s immense black police hat. She was ecstatic and overwhelmed seeing a character from a story come alive and walking in his footsteps. I knew exactly how she felt.
CHAPTER 22
A Spy Among Friends
Other Writers
Encounters with various characters and authors now occur with some regularity, but they are no less affecting. When someone magically crosses the divide between page and life it still summons a sense of awe, like the Tooth Fairy suddenly made real.
And it happens when I least expect it. On one of our regular family trips to Los Angeles, where my husband grew up, I brought Ben Macintyre’s true-life espionage tale, A Spy Among Friends, so I could give it to my in-laws when I was done. I’d inherited an obsession with spies from my father—John le Carré and Alan Furst and various historical accounts weave their way in and out of Bob’s pages, continuing to connect the two of us through stories. Now that my father was gone, I felt lucky to share this interest with my in-laws, also Macintyre fans.
On a recent flight to LA, I came across a curious passage. Macintyre was describing the social scene in Beirut where Kim Philby, one of the infamous Cambridge Five ring of spies, was posted for a time. Philby was closest there with two other spy families, the British Elliotts and the American Copelands, neither of whom suspected he was a double agent working for Moscow.
The story was one of absolute betrayal—against country, against social class and family, against friends. For years, Philby had lied to his childhood companions and sworn colleagues, people whose families stretched back generations together, and conspired with the Soviets against them, putting all of their lives at risk. In an aside, Macintyre noted that Philby’s Beirut neighbor, the longtime CIA agent Miles Copeland, also happened to be the father of Stewart Copeland, the former drummer of the Police. At night in Beirut, while the adults drank copiously and spied against one another, their children played together innocently underfoot. Young Stewart had apparently become good friends with Kim Philby’s kids.
Having come of age in the eighties, I had all kinds of adolescent feelings about the Police. I remembered one afternoon in fifth grade when my friend Ericka, who was always more pop-culturally advanced, expertly inserted the Police into her portable cassette player while we suntanned in her backyard; it was the first pop music I’d ever listened to as an activity in and of itself. Later, we studied the band’s full MTV repertoire, discovered Lolita through their lyrics, and religiously attended Sting concerts.
I hadn’t listened to the Police in decades. But over dinner in Los Angeles, when I told my in-laws about A Spy Among Friends, I mentioned the Copeland connection for the benefit of the other Gen Xers at the table.
“You probably don’t know who Stewart Copeland is,” I apologized to my father-in-law, who had decidedly not spent the eighties listening to the Polic
e while suntanning.
“I know exactly who Stewart Copeland is,” he replied. “He lives around the corner.”
Two days later, I was hanging out in Stewart Copeland’s studio while he showed me photographs of his parents’ house in Beirut and told stories about the Philby kids. He had a copy of one of his father’s books, blurbed by Philby himself from exile in Moscow. Everything in the book felt more immediate.
Such experiences are a sharp departure from the cloistered-reading life I’d experienced as a child. Now the subjects and authors regularly make their way into real life. No more need to stalk the Spalding Grays; my Book of Books is peopled with authors I have met on one occasion or another. In this new, still surreal reading life, I have found myself chatting at a dinner party with Christopher Hitchens, the man who once helped me take down Paul Johnson. I have e-mailed with Salman Rushdie, the man who once opened me up to global literature.
Each of these encounters still feels like an occasion. Meeting famous people can be awkward, especially people who are famous in the way that feels meaningful to me, which is to say writers. My inner fangirl is alive and well, making run-ins with the novelists I grew up on especially overwhelming. One weekend a few years ago, I bumped into Judy Blume, north star of the children’s library, in the bathroom at the Miami Book Fair, where I was moderating a panel of authors.
“Why didn’t you get her autograph?” Beatrice practically shouted when I told her about it a few months later, after she’d entered her own Blume phase.
