Paris Without Her

by Gregory Curtis

  Bill Curtis actually knew a little French from a course in college. His French textbooks were moldering in our basement, along with his books and notes from Harvard Law School. Sometimes I leafed through them, and I found the legal textbooks every bit as impenetrable as the French textbooks. He read serious novels only if they were about World War II, during which he had served in the army in the Pacific. There were copies of From Here to Eternity, The Young Lions, and The Naked and the Dead on our bookshelves. Otherwise, his taste inclined toward Erle Stanley Gardner. But I was surprised one year, during summer vacation, to see him reading The Girl with the Golden Eyes by someone named Balzac. When I asked about the book, it turned out that he loved saying that name. He pronounced it “Balzac!” as in “Balzac! Who was Balzac!? We had to read Balzac! in college.”

  Maybe he liked a certain kind of French novel more than we ever suspected. For some reason, there was a translation of Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier on one of our bookshelves. Perhaps it had been a pony during one of his French courses. I thumbed through it one afternoon and returned to it in private many times after that. Its racy story, and the frequent lines of colons in that edition, attracted my adolescent imagination. I assumed that the colons indicated that something had been censored. What were these French men and women doing that was so unspeakably shameful that it had to be hidden? In the 1950s, to say that something was French was also to imply that it was a little saucy. In the early days of television, cancan dances appeared at the slightest excuse. The common assumption was that Paris was the place where forbidden things were not only allowed but encouraged, a city where nudity and sex were everywhere all the time. In my mind, that copy of Mademoiselle de Maupin, which I presumed had been redacted, was vivid proof that this libertine image of Paris was true. (Imagine my disappointment years later when, reading portions of Mademoiselle de Maupin in French, I realized that the colons had been put there by Gautier himself.)

  Then, in 1957, when I was thirteen and very impressionable, the final, incontrovertible proof of Parisian licentiousness arrived in Kansas City. And God Created Woman appeared at a movie theater on Grand Avenue. It starred a new young sexpot named Brigitte Bardot. That the movie had been allowed into the United States at all, although in a severely edited version, had been national news that reached even me and my excitable contemporaries, who seldom read the papers except for the sports page. We couldn’t see the film: the theater was not going to admit anyone under eighteen. Besides, we were also too young to drive, and asking our parents to take us to that movie was unthinkable. But our imaginations soared as we whispered among ourselves about what the film might contain.

  Any photograph of Brigitte Bardot electrified us. The other sex symbols of the era—Marilyn Monroe, for example—seemed to be from a different, older generation and lived in a different, older world that didn’t include us and that we didn’t aspire to anyway. Brigitte Bardot, although she was only eight years younger than Monroe, was entirely new and different and, of course, French. One afternoon a year or two later, I saw a review of another of her movies in Time magazine that included a picture of her wrapped in a white towel, standing by a bathtub. Her abundant hair hung over her shoulders and all the way down her back, and her lovely legs were bare beneath the bottom edge of the towel. This was the first time it occurred to me that I might someday want to embrace Paris.

  As I look back now, I think it’s possible that this photograph never existed at all, that it is a chimera that I have summoned up across many years of idle imaginings. I haven’t seen the photograph since that afternoon, and in a search of the Internet I discovered some similar images but not that one. Still, my memory of seeing it is so vivid—I even remember where I was in our house when I was reading the magazine—that I can’t help believing the photograph really must exist.

  * * *

  . . .

  Before our first visit to Paris, Tracy had read in a guidebook about the Château de Chantilly, which is about thirty miles north of Paris, just outside the small town of the same name. Its museum contains one of the greatest collections of Old Master art in France, perhaps the greatest after the Louvre. Its library is equally important, for its immense number of rare books and manuscripts, some of which date as far back as the tenth century.

  We took a train to Chantilly and asked for directions to the château at a tabac. The man pointed down the street and said the château was straight ahead. Could we walk there? Oh yes, of course. So off we went, and walked for what seemed quite a long time before we came to the grandstands of a racetrack. From there we could see the château far in the distance, across a large pasture. It seemed odd that there wasn’t a road or even a path that led to an entrance to the château, but we started walking all the same.

  It turned out to be heavy going. The pasture was a little muddy, and the grass was long so we had to lift our feet high and take exaggerated steps. But we kept on. Our excitement rose with each clumsy step, because the closer we got the more beautiful the château appeared to us. Perhaps it was a little bulky, but it had high windows and a graceful roofline. Again, it seemed odd that there was no suitable entrance, although we could see a small, unmarked door. When we finally reached the door, we didn’t know what to do. Should we just open it and walk in? That didn’t seem right, so Tracy knocked lightly. We waited, but there was no response. I knocked quite a bit louder than she had, but still no one answered. I tried the door, and to our surprise it opened easily. As we walked through, we both started laughing. We were rubes after all. We were in the stables.

  We went back outside, skirted around the stables, and found the real château. It had, after all, a very elaborate entrance, with a tranquil pond, a stone bridge across a moat, multiple arches, and two niches on either side of the gate that held replicas of Michelangelo’s Slaves. The originals, which are now in the Louvre, had once stood there.

  Inside, we found the long gallery where the famous collection of paintings was displayed. They hung closely side by side, the way museums displayed paintings centuries ago. The paintings were immensely impressive, but we couldn’t study them as we would have liked. They were much more than we could really absorb in a short visit, and now, thanks to our diversion into the stables, we were running out of time and needed to rush to the station so as not to miss the train back to Paris.

  We talked solemnly to each other as we sat on the train. So far, our trip had been a series of wonderful, almost magical experiences, from seeing the Sistine Chapel to our meeting the two French ladies at the side of the road and then taking that first bite of croissant in our hotel room. We had expected Chantilly to be another of these wondrous experiences, and it was, to a degree. But to a greater degree it had been grand, distant, and impenetrable. We had just been made to see that, to understand this place, even genuinely to experience this place, was going to require much more from us than just showing up here and there and casting quick glances. Our expectations, grand as they were, seemed off the mark. They didn’t really harmonize with all that we were seeing. There was more around us here, in France and in Paris especially, than we were really prepared to understand. We didn’t want to turn the pleasure of new places and new experiences into work, or to remove chance and serendipity from our days abroad. But we now realized that some more preparation and considerably less hurry would reveal a different, deeper world to us, a world that, before this trip, we had had no way of knowing was there.

  However, nothing we had seen before was lost. Everything had counted and made us ready for and open to this revelation. All during our visit, we were much in awe of the civilization that we found in the many monuments all around us. We found the churches especially imposing. Inside them, we spoke to each other in whispers even if no one else was nearby. We walked slowly around the periphery, pausing in front of every chapel to admire the mural or the sculpture or the stained-glass windows. A time or two, we had had the luck to ent
er a church when the organist was practicing. We would sit together in the sanctuary, as Paris bustled all around us outside, and listen.

  I had stopped going to church the moment I left home for college. I remember being stunned, during my first weeks away at Rice University when I saw some classmates get up on Sunday morning, put on coats and ties, and go off to church. Why would anyone do that if his parents didn’t make him? Although we seldom went to church together, Tracy was a believer, and was even for several years on the altar guild of the Episcopal church where her funeral service was eventually held. But the religion we saw in the cathedrals of Paris, in their darkness as well as in the light through their stained-glass windows, in their great height and weight as well as in the delicate paintings in their chapels, and in their countless representations of the Virgin, the crucifixion, and multitudes of saints and martyrs—all that seemed more profound and far more religious than anything offered in Episcopal churches in Austin or Amarillo or at the synthetic mega-churches that we saw in Houston and Dallas. Some of those differences weren’t specific to France but were simply the differences between a Catholic church no matter where and a Protestant church no matter where, but not all of them. There was real power in the size of the churches and in their heavy stone walls, real mystery in their darkness and depth and hidden corners. And there was real glory in their tall windows and gesturing statues and heavy golden crucifixes. It was all appealing, although we found that it could also be repelling in equal measures. Why was the Church so rich? Why was it so hierarchical, with Tracy and me and everyone else at the bottom? Were these relics of saints the real thing? Was that really, really Jesus’s crown of thorns in Notre-Dame? You could see why the Revolution opposed both the monarchy and the Church.

  Tracy would be intrigued and probably a little amused to know that, from time to time when I’m in Paris, I go to a mass at eleven on Sunday morning. I’ve read in newspapers both in Paris and at home that these days the churches in France are empty, but in my experience that’s not true. If I arrive for mass at ten-forty-five, there will be only a few people sitting in the rows of chairs in the sanctuary. I usually take a chair near the front. When the service begins, I turn to look behind me, and invariably plenty of people have slipped in and almost all the seats are taken. At one point during the service, the priest asks the congregation to greet their neighbors. In doing so, you shake hands with everyone in reach. I love this moment. When else am I going to reach out and speak to an elderly widow, an African gentleman whose gray trousers have a knife crease, or a young couple standing arm in arm? I like to go to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, near the Deux Magots and the Café de Flore. It’s the oldest church in Paris and rather small, but the congregation is filled with young families. I also like Saint-Eustache, by Les Halles, where they celebrate a very high mass, with as many as seven priests officiating. There is incense and reverberating music from the largest organ in France and a priest uses an aspergillum to sprinkle the congregation with holy water. Saint-Eustache is one of the larger churches in Paris; the transept is so high that it almost seems to fade into a distant sky, which had to be the intended effect.

  After the mass, I make the short walk from Saint-Eustache to Au Pied de Cochon, the restaurant I adore above all others in Paris. I choose their onion soup, which is the best there is anywhere in the world, and a nicely priced carafe of white wine. Au Pied de Cochon is a pretty restaurant that has been open since 1947, and it’s one restaurant where I don’t mind sitting alone, at a table with shining silverware on a crisp, spotless white tablecloth. E. Dehillerin, the store with cooking supplies, is also nearby, and reminds me of the long visit there that Tracy and I made together during our first trip to Paris.

  After I’ve ordered, while I’m waiting for my onion soup, with the carafe of wine in front of me, I can reflect, and do reflect, on why I especially miss Tracy during the masses I attend. I miss her then because that is precisely when my most intimate feelings tell me that she is with me, even though Tracy and I never attended a mass together. We did wander through Saint-Germain-des-Prés on our first visit to Paris, since it was close to the Hôtel d’Angleterre, but we never went to Saint-Eustache. Besides, even if we had gone to a mass together, it was the Episcopal Church she believed in, not the Roman Catholic one. I didn’t then and don’t now believe in either church. But there is something holy that I find in the great mass of Saint-Eustache and the other grand Parisian cathedrals, and that something is emptiness. I don’t mean nothing. I mean an emptiness, an emptiness that is there and palpable, an emptiness that is nevertheless something and that contains invisible multitudes, an emptiness that is sanctified by the mass. I believe that Tracy must be somewhere in that emptiness. The bigger the church, the bigger the emptiness it contains, and the more likely it is that she is there.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Her Bilingual Husband

  When we left Paris after our first visit in 1982—Tracy returned to Austin; I went on to Germany—we did not know that it would be twelve years before we saw Paris again. The offer from Germany of a plane ticket and a tour, something completely unexpected that was too good to pass up, had given us permission to go to Europe the first time, and spend money and leave the children behind in the care of their grandparents Quentin and Shirley. Without any such permission, taking an expensive trip to Europe just because we wanted to seemed like a selfish extravagance. Instead, for several summers in a row, we drove to Colorado with the children. We had a luggage rack on the roof of our car filled with fishing rods, swimming suits, golf clubs, and hiking boots. We did continue trying to learn French, in a classroom, with instructional tapes, or with a tutor. We read Balzac. He’s usually quite specific about where his characters live and what routes they take when moving around Paris. It was fun to find these streets in the blue Michelin Paris map we had bought, especially if they turned out to be near places we had happened on ourselves. But that was as close to Paris as we got until 1994, when by chance we got permission to go again.

  One evening early in the year, someone at the stables where I rode horses gave me a brochure from a company that booked rides on horseback in many European countries as well as in South America, Africa, and even Mongolia. This outfitter had a wide selection of rides in France.

  My connection with horses began when our youngest daughter, Vivian, had the typical girlish infatuation with horses. Tracy and I began driving her to stables once a week after school and on Saturday mornings. Horses, stables, tack rooms, riding boots, and riders all existed in a world that was alien to me. At first I found it frivolous and off-putting. But, soon enough, I began to recognize the skill involved in horsemanship and could see the difference between a real rider and someone who could merely stay on a horse. Sometime around 1990, I started taking lessons myself, and kept on with them for the next twelve years. After a few years, I passed from being a merely adequate rider to being perhaps slightly more than adequate, but I had started too late in life to become really good. Eventually, though, I was able to hold my own in a class twice a week among the better riders at the stables, most of whom were women.

  The most appealing ride in the brochure, both to Tracy and to me, was going to be that June. It traversed the Loire Valley, visiting châteaux along the way. But the ride was expensive, and became more expensive still when airfare and an irresistible few days in Paris were added in. We had two children in college and two teenagers still at home. Normally, this trip would be such an extravagance that we would feel guilty all the while we were in France. But I persuaded Travel Holiday to let me write a story for them about the ride. The magazine would take care of the expenses and pay me a fee besides. Only one complication remained—Tracy didn’t ride. I can still clearly see her face, white with fear, as she bounced on the back of a trotting horse the one time she did climb into a saddle. At first, we thought that Tracy would drive a rented car and rejoin the other riders and me in the evenings when we stopped at a hot
el. But, luckily, the outfitter of the ride—Paul Bontemps, an appropriate name—had made efforts to accommodate an elderly German woman who had always loved horses but couldn’t ride anymore. She would follow the riders in a gig that Paul’s son Benjamin, who was seventeen, would drive. That provided the happy solution: Tracy could ride with them.

  We arrived in Paris on a Friday morning in late June. In the intervening twelve years, the prices at the Hôtel d’Angleterre must have risen, or we were simply more conscious of our budget, or, most likely, both. We stayed just a block or so east on the rue Jacob, at the Hôtel des Marronniers (chestnut trees). The doors from the street to the hotel opened onto a deep, narrow courtyard lined with abundant ferns planted in long boxes. Inside, a curving staircase by the reception desk climbed up to our room. It had floral wallpaper and was pleasant enough; what’s more, here we were back in Paris. But we were both too tired from our overnight flight to do much to celebrate our return. While Tracy took a long bath in the surprisingly spacious marble bathroom, I lay on the bed, looking through the window at a warren of Parisian rooftops beneath a blue sky. There were shuttered mansard windows with peeling paint, small round chimneys, and ancient, spindly television antennas. Somewhere—I looked but it was impossible to see where—a large choir was rehearsing. “My sweet Lord,” they sang. “Hallelujah. My sweet Lord…” The choir was filled with rich, swelling voices. Their singing floated invisibly over the rooftops. Tracy came out of the bathroom wearing a silk robe. She sat next to me on the bed and brushed out her hair as we listened to the choir for several minutes without speaking, lost in our thoughts. But when Tracy did speak, it became clear that our thoughts were much the same. In a low voice, almost a whisper, she said, “This is Paris after all, isn’t it.”