by Adam Gopnik
We followed CNN from motel to hotel, Michelin guide to Michelin guide, as we traveled. When I was in New York, all-news radio had the stock exchange highs every day, waiting for the Dow to break a number (eight thousand? ten thousand? It breaks the next one so quickly that we can't recall), the way we waited for a ballplayer to break a record.
Traveling around France, we've been out to the Loire, down to Grenoble and the Savoy, up to Normandy. I begin to get it. France is a big, rich country. It has a lot of people; they have a lot of good things to eat; they don't see why anyone should push them around. France doesn't believe that it was once the big one, as Holland or England does, by virtue of a special mission and an exceptional national character. France believes that it is naturally the big one, like China or America. The big one by virtue of its size, its abundance, its obvious cultural hegemony (all cultural hegemonies are believed to be natural by the people at the core of them). It was not so terribly long ago that everybody took this status for granted, and speaking French was like speaking English now: not strictly an accomplishment but a necessity for a cosmopolitan life. It was not so long ago that France was almost lazily the big one, as we are now, so to be told, again and again, that not only is it not the big one but not even among the bigger ones riles the French.
***
Luke decided this year to penetrate farther into the Luxembourg Gardens. He is the Amundsen, the Peary, though I hope not the Scott, of the Luxembourg Gardens. His whole life is devoted to penetrating its mysteries, hoping eventually to get to its core. Someday he will enter the surveillants' shed, where the policemen sit and warm their coffee and watch for park infractions, and it will be time to go home. Or else he will spend the rest of his life as a Paris policeman; he will become Pierre! On the carousel he is now up and mounted on a horse, with the leather rope tight around his waist, eyes fixed straight ahead, hands clutching the pole, still too unsure for the stick and rings, but looking at them, hard.
This year he penetrated into the inner temple of the gardens. He went to a puppet show. It was a huge move, much meditated on and discussed in advance.
"Daddy, I think I want to go to the puppet show," he said sometime this spring, and then, having chosen Les Trois Petits Cochons, The Three Little Pigs, as his first show, we debated for a week, before the fateful Saturday matinee arose, what it was going to be like. He would jump into bed at seven in the morning with a new theory. "I think they'll dance like this," he said worriedly one morning, putting his hands on his waist and oscillating his torso back and forth mechanically. Then he stopped and looked even more worried. What if they did dance like that, God help us?
"I think there will be a wolf in it," he said on another morning, "and he will look like this," and then he grimaced, horribly. (I realized that he had become a precise replica of the young Marcel getting worked up about seeing Berma for the first time. It is a French moment, though not exactly the one we had in mind, puppets as pigs rather than Sarah in Racine, still. . .)
Saturday came around at last, and we lined up at the entrance to the puppet theater, just to the left of the playground, where we have gone so many afternoons. The owner—proprietor— producer-chief puppeteer is named Francis-Claude Desarthis, and he walks up and down the gardens with a bell before each show begins, ringing hard—not ringing to be fetching but ringing to fetch. As so often in Paris, it is hard to know if the puppet theater is making a mint—it charges twenty-four francs a ticket, about five dollars, and on weekends always seem full up—or hanging on by its nails.
Desthartis's father started the theater back in the thirties. His framed picture is still in place on the facade of the theater, looking plaintively at a puppet. Many of the shows seem to have been left untouched since then. The performance of Les Trois Petits Cochons, for instance, uses, with slight variations, many of the devices, not to mention the music, of the Disney version of the story from the thirties. There are French touches, though. The catastrophe, or climax, occurs when the wolf pretends to be a minor official come to read the water meter. The pigs have to let him into the one remaining house; the French little pigs have to open the door to administration, even when it has bright white teeth and an immense jaw and sixty white papier-mache teeth. Fortunately the day is saved, first by a series of electric shocks administered by the smart pig to the wolf by way of a rigged water meter and then by a snapping crocodile that arrives wrapped in a package (who sent him isn't clear, at least not to me). Finally, before the hunter arrives, the day is really saved by a black American boxer (Joe Louis?) with gleaming white teeth and thick lips and a terrific, wolf-devastating right uppercut.
There are dances—various animal puppets leaping up and down in time—at regular intervals, even when some necessary question of the play has yet to be resolved. The line to the seventeenth-century theater—for Moliere too is full of arbitrary dances—is real. The puppet shows are real puppet shows. They use puppets, the kind you hold with your hand from beneath. They're big puppets, with overlarge, papier-mache heads and long arms, but no legs.
The no-legness of the puppets puzzles and discourages Luke. Far from seeming to him an invisible artistic convention, I think that he believes it to be a notable, disturbing piece of amputation. He thinks not Well, their legs are represented by sheets of fabric but, rather, Their legs have been cut off, and they have been forced to perform in a theater! In every show the hero is always Guignol, a kind of Puck or Trickster puppet, with a long Chinese braid. It is alarming to see his face, since it is obviously modeled on that of M. Desarthis himself—or, even scarier, on that of his father, who, from his portrait on the side of the building, seems to have had more or less the same features. They have passed themselves, it seems, into Guignol, who is, interestingly, amoral. Guignol takes the splinters out of the paws of wounded tigers ("Le pauvre," he soothes) but is in business for himself, and mocks and bedevils the well-meaning admirals and librarians and magistrates he always seem to encounter. (Many of these, interestingly enough, have British accents.)
So far we have seen Les Tresors du Sultan (first a mixup on a ship and then a second act on a desert island, including, oddly, a tiger with a thorn in its paw and that noisy, impressively snapping crocodile. Also highly Semitic caricatures of the pirates and the sultan), Minochet (a cat in a Paris garret), Le Cirque en Folie (the Mad Circus, many animals, including, again oddly enough, a tiger and a crocodile), Le Rossignol et I'Empereur de Chine (adapted, the sign says honorably, from the comte of Hans Christian Andersen, although, interestingly, a tiger and a crocodile have been added), and, of course, those pigs.
As in any vast dramatic corpus, the puppet plays are of varying styles, ranging from the classic heigh-ho heartiness of Pigs and Tresors (as they are known to scholars) to the darker, more static style of Minochet and Le Vieux Chateau—the problem puppet shows, as they are known. (Le Vieux Chateau begins with a long, endless sequence in a scholar's library, and Minochet with an act, half Celine and half Beckett, about the poor cat, Minochet, trying to have her little supper while a mad butcher searches for her to turn her into cat sausage.) All of course are in French, using recorded voices that must have also been registered sometime in the late thirties—you can practically see the Pathe rooster on the side of the box that the records are kept in—and since the language is idiomatic and jokey, it is often hard for me to follow. Luke, whose French, despite his going to a French school, is in and out—as Hemingway's friends said about him, you never know if he knows a lot or a little—kneels up on the seat beside me and demands translations. ("What's he saying?" "That they're going to kidnap the princess . . . no, now he's saying something else". . . etc.)
That first performance, though, the epochal Pigs, was so overwhelming that he couldn't sleep, and so we tried a usually reliable soporific: walking him down to the Seine in his poussette to watch the boats from the ponts des Arts. Usually, almost always, he falls asleep on the walk back. This night, though—a wonderful May night, chestnuts in blossom, a m
onth later than the song advertises—he couldn't sleep, and his troubled, obsessive mind kept returning to the puppet show, to the struggle 'twixt damnation and impassioned papier-mache.
We wandered through the Sixth, taking what I still think is the most beautiful walk in the world: up the rue de Seine and then right through the little, unprepossessing-looking arch—a hole punched in a wall—that gives no promise at all that it opens right onto the esplanade of the greatest of grand siecle buildings, the Institut de France, Mazarin's great curved library topped by its perfect dome. Passing through the tiny, poussette-wide arch onto the curved esplanade is like walking backstage through a flat and onto a great set.
There are no guards, no guardrails—nothing between you and the great building. It's all just there, and you can push a child's poussette back and forth in front of the institute entrance and even lean on the door to rest, though it is the center of French civilization. It is one of those odd Parisian absences that are as strange as the pervasive presences elsewhere. (There are enough policemen in the Luxembourg Gardens for each to be assigned one child each, but not a single guard anywhere here.)
Luke all the while was keeping up a running, troubled commentary on Les Trois Petits Cochons. "Why there were two wolves?" he would spring up, sleepy, from his poussette, to demand. (Actually there was just one, but he would appear, with sinister effect, on either side of the proscenium.) "Why he wants to eat the pigs?" "Why that man knock him?" "Why that crocodile bite?" Why why, why . . . the question the pigs ask the wolf, that the wolf asks the hunter, that the hunter asks God—and the answer, as it comes at midnight, after all the other, patient parental answers ("Well, you see, wolves generally like to eat pigs, though that's just in the story." "Well, hunters, a long time ago, would go hunting for wolves with guns when they were a danger to people"), the final, exhausted midnight-in-the-lamplight answer, wheeling the poussette down the quai Voltaire, is the only answer there is, the Bible's answer to Job: because that's the way the puppet master chose to do it, because that's the way the guy who works the puppets likes to see it done.
Wednesday afternoons, Luke and I take our local bus, the 63, which runs down the boulevard Saint-Germain toward his school and the Seventh Arrondissement, back up toward the Jardin des Plantes and the Fifth, to visit the dinosaur museum. Luke has been following a course in Picasso and dinosaurs in his maternelle. I had already taken him round the Picasso museum, which Luke liked, and the dinosaurs were an even bigger hit. He talks knowingly, familiarly, of the brachiosaurus and pterodactyl. I have told him that dinosaurs were defeated by an alliance of daddies, that only daddies can defeat dinosaurs. Look around, I ask, are there dinosaurs? (No.) Are there daddies? (Yes.) Well, then . . . He sees the flaw in this argument more quickly than I expected. Daddies came long after dinosaurs; daddies claimed the terrain of power only after dinosaurs had already abandoned it. That's the way the dinosaurs tell it, I say. Long discussions. Long pause. Finally: "Here's one dinosaur you can never defeat [dramatic pause] ... T rex!" He needs an undefeatable dinosaur, a dinosaur beyond the reach of a dad.
The entrance to the paleontology museum at the Jardin des Plantes is graced by a statue of Lamarck, with the engraving "The Father of Evolution," in giant letters, on its pedestal. Darwin, on the other hand, is nowhere in sight.
There is nothing more exasperating than French monuments to unheroic local heroes. In the Luxembourg Gardens, where I run many mornings, there are statues of the great writers of France, genuinely towering and Olympian figures—real all-stars, the greats. Baudelaire scowls at the southern end of the gardens;
Delacroix is greeted by angels at the other end. I salute them both every morning, while jogging by Verlaine and Sainte-Beuve. In the midst of them all there is a statue to a man whose name I, at least, have never heard, a guy named Branly, whose pedestal proclaims him to be the father of the wireless communication, radiotelegraph, and television. I am skeptical of this claim. It is a few feet away from the small, just larger than life-size Statue of Liberty, made by Bartholdi for fund-raising back when. This Liberty looks, well, sexy, free.
At last we get to the big Hall of Evolution, and Darwin sneaks in there—sideways. He gets a plaque. The Hall is filled with stuffed animals, giraffes and elephants, from another time, all apparently done by the artisans of Deyrolle but now placed in modernized half-light, the same kind of light you see in the fish restaurants of the Seventh Arrondissement. Recessed lighting says modern in France the way that a pastel arch says postmodern in New York.
The boy, however, wants to see his dinosaurs, so we go down in the gardens to the old Hall of Paleontology, off by itself down by the entrance to the gardens. It is two floors of pure bones— all bones, wall-to-wall bones, more bones than I have ever seen. At the entrance, a few feet from the Lamarck memorial, there is a statue by Fremiet of the Eternal Struggle. It shows a great ape—a species unknown to nature, with the ears of an elephant, the face of a magazine executive, and the grin of a Santa Monica maitre d'—who, clutching his (her?) infant, has just wrapped his hands around the throat of a beautiful human youth. The youth, before being killed by the ape, managed to plant his ax in the ape's side, where it has left a hideous and gaping wound, perfectly cut out in stone. It is lurid, preposterous, and loud, the most improbable memorial, and this by the guy who made the golden and boring St. Joan on the rue de Rivoli. It defeats my dusty and out-of-date attempts at iconographic analysis, despite Luke's constant questions: Why the ape, why the man ...? Does it represent the triumph of Lamarckian evolution? Then the man with the culture (i.e., the ax) should be triumphing over the ape. It can't represent the domination of the ape-in-man over the beauty-in-man. Is it the Triumph of the Monkey in Us? Or is it simply (simply!) a lurid show piece? Eugenio would have pointed out that the "trope" or conceit of the ape-on-the-loose is a rich nineteenth-century Parisian one, ranging from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" to this. Man and Ape in Evolutionary Metaphor . . . these days you could probably put it out front of the Concorde and redub it "France and America."
The dinosaurs are upstairs. They are enormous and articulated to look big. Of course, this is easy: They are big. But they are made to look even bigger, perhaps by contrast with the delicate beaux arts architecture. They loom. There is a single mold of a T rex head, which turns out to be a copy taken from the New York T. rex. Just as the famous mechanical nightingales of Byzantium that Yeats admired so were, as you discover when you read Byzantine history, the same damn bird, brought out century after century to impress out-of-town visitors, until the paint was peeling off the thing, so the T. rex that has scared several generations of schoolchildren in the two cities is the same damn lizard, dead so many million years.
In the new New York hall, where we took Luke last Christmas, the dinosaurs look wise and cunning, balanced forward on their middle feet, delicate little hands trembling like base stealers. They have fabricated fiberglass skins too, in gleaming, subtle, elegantly understated two-tone, Armani colors. Here, in Paris, in the old museum, they are still upright and looming and stolid. There is even a brontosaurus, still called that, though I think I read that there never were brontosauruses, that they were a false association of two different animals.
The force—I suppose I have to say the image—of the dinosaur, as it was understood by the nineteenth century, comes through here, terrifyingly. It is like reading Conan Doyle's "Lost World." The giant Irish elk (a mammal and, anyway, not that amazing—just a big moose) shares pride of place here with the big lizards, as he does in Doyle's story. The reason, I suspect, is that it wasn't so much the distant, scary past that drew the nineteenth century, but the simple specter of giganticism, bigness itself. They wanted their dinosaurs to loom over them, as their tycoons did. In the "Lost World" of Conan Doyle, in fact, the dinosaurs are constantly being called Gothic. They were interested in big, whereas we are interested in mean. (Was this because bigness was their problem—mass armies, mass society, massive-ness—whereas meanness is
ours—small wars, horrible murders?) The difference between the old Parisian and the new New York dinosaurs is the difference between an industrial dinosaur, big and dumb and looming, and the postindustrial dinosaur, swift and smart and a scavenger. We make our monsters according to the armature of our fears. They wanted what loomed over them to be huge, stolid, immovable, and a little slow, like J. P. Morgan or Mr. Frick. We want them now to be smart, fast, mean, ugly, and wearing expensive suits, like Barry Diller or Rupert Murdoch.
A little while later I visited the new Bibliotheque Nationale, the big—the unbelievably vertigo-inspiringly enormous—library, out at the other end of the quai in the Thirteenth. It seems to have been designed by a committee made up of Michel Foucault, Jacques Tati, and the production designer of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The whole thing is set up, way up, on a wooden platform the size of six or seven football fields, high up off the street. There is an unbelievably steep stairs, leading up to this plateau, which is like nothing so much as one of those stepped pyramids where the Aztecs plucked the hearts out of their sacrificial victims. Then there are four glass skyscrapers, each one set at one of the corners of the platform, and all very handsome, in a kind of early-sixties, post-Lever House, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill way. The vast space has been planked with teak boards, to make it "warmer," but this just makes it more slippery. They have had to put down cheap-looking runners on a sticky backing, to keep people from breaking legs. (Apparently there were quite a few victims early on.)
