For several moments, I stared into the darkness where she had been. Then I lay back on the pillow and looked up at the ceiling. I felt completely at peace. She had come to Paris with me again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Message from Céleste
During those months in Paris during the spring of 2014, while I was attending the language school at the Sorbonne, I felt that I was living in a world I had imagined. My apartment was real enough, as was the daily walk past Marshal Ney’s statue to the school. So were my classes at school, and so was memorizing verb conjugations in the evening after dinner. But the question “Am I really doing this?” frequently came to me during the many hours I spent alone in the apartment or walking the streets of Paris at random.
Monday through Friday, I had a two-hour grammar class that began at noon. In the morning, I had breakfast, dressed, and studied until about eleven, when I ate lunch. That was often pâté thickly spread on pieces of baguette and apple slices. I left about eleven-thirty to walk to school. I had been placed in a class of mid-level students. Despite my sincere and dedicated effort, I was far from the best student in the class. Building a usable vocabulary took some work, but that work was just brute memorization. Learning grammar required memorization, too, but it also required judgment. Proper French consists of thousands upon thousands of small details. There are grammatical and orthographic rules that lurk silently, ready to bite if you misuse them or, worse, forget them entirely. I was bitten more than most of my classmates.
After the grammar class, I had a one-hour phonics class, beginning at two-thirty. That class was humbling. For complicated reasons, I was put in a section where the other students’ French was noticeably better than mine. The teacher was a tall, slender, theatrical woman who had the most lovely speaking voice. Hearing her recite a sentence was an aesthetic experience, even though at first I had no idea what she was saying. I sat in terror that she would call on me—“Grégoire!”—to recite a phonetic exercise such as saying “sur, sœur, sourd” (on, sister, deaf) with the vowels pronounced correctly. But the torture and the fear were valuable. After six or eight weeks, I could tell that I heard and understood more than before, although still not everything. Near the end of the semester, the teacher began a class by asking me how I pronounced my “r”s. “Avec espoir, madame,” I said (with hope). It caught her off guard. After a moment’s pause, she laughed and the class laughed, too. But my response was true enough.
I am sure that I was the oldest student at the school—I would turn seventy that December—which made me either an object of curiosity for the other students or, just as often, a puzzling phenomenon who could be easily ignored. For my part, I was reserved most of the time, especially around the young women. Most of them were fresh and pretty but also forty-five or fifty years younger than I was. Knowing that none of them would want me for a boyfriend or even for a date, I never said or did anything that was forward or remotely suggestive. After a week or so in class, the other students saw that I wasn’t up to anything but learning French. They relaxed around me, and I was able to make friends.
Yulia, a stately Russian beauty, sat in front of me. Her husband worked at the Parc des Expositions and got free tickets to the shows there. She surprised me one day in February with a ticket to Le Salon de l’Agriculture, which I’ll talk about directly. Claire, from Tyler, Texas, sat behind me, and Anja, from Copenhagen, sat beside Claire. We three became good pals. I took them for kir vin blanc at La Coupole. I showed them the photographs of Hemingway beside the bar and talked to them a little about Paris in the twenties, about which they knew nothing.
Late in May, I took them to Au Moulin à Vent, on the rue des Fossés Saint-Bernard, as a farewell dinner. Claire and I ganged up on Anja to make her try escargot, a signature dish there. The matronly waitress put the plate down in front of Anja. She looked in horror at the snails swimming in butter and garlic, and her face flushed intensely red.
“Elle est débutante?” the waitress asked. We said that, yes, this was her first time, and the waitress stood by to watch. Anja’s protests attracted the attention of people at the tables nearby, who called out to encourage her. Anja was so red by now that you could almost feel the heat coming off her cheeks and forehead.
“Take a bite of bread,” I said. “Then eat the snail, and then take another bite of bread.”
Claire pierced one of the snails with a fork. Anja took a bite of bread, but as she did so, Claire stuck the snail in her mouth. Anja was startled; her eyes grew huge. She swallowed hard, almost involuntarily, and the snail went down. As the restaurant responded with polite applause, Claire and I finished the escargots.
One day, after my grammar class, as I was gathering my papers and putting on my coat, I was the last student still in the room. The kindly instructor, whose husband I later learned was a relatively well-known author of comic verse, asked me if my wife was with me in Paris. I said, “Non. Je suis veuf.” (No, I’m a widower.) Her smile immediately disappeared in embarrassment. She apologized and expressed condolences. I assured her that I had not taken offense. But that was one of the very few personal moments that occurred the whole semester.
Many days, I came home after my classes were over, dropped off my books, and set out on random walks around Paris. Sometimes I walked for an hour or two, sometimes for six or seven hours. I was never tired, and never bored, which actually increased my sense of being someone else inside a transparent bubble. Paris was not at all hostile, but Paris didn’t care whether I was there or not. Strangely, Paris almost seemed to disappear unless I went out into the streets looking for what I might find.
One afternoon, I happened upon the entrance to the Jardin des Plantes. Since it was still early in the year, nothing was in bloom. Only two or three other people were there. I wandered around its long expanse, thinking how pretty it must be when spring brought out the flowers. And that turned out to be true. It was pretty when I returned eight weeks later, but it was also so crowded that walking aimlessly in a reverie was impossible, and I felt myself perversely longing for the gray February afternoon when I had been there practically alone. That afternoon, I had also entered the zoo that runs along the northern border of the Jardin. The last time I had been in a zoo was years earlier, in San Antonio, with Tracy, Vivian, and Ben. We had all ridden on an elephant. There were no elephants here, but there was a snow leopard, a snowy owl, a yak, an oryx, and a warthog. There were red pandas, who were adorable-looking but scuffled with each other constantly, and an impressive variety of colorful, exotic birds. But the animals that thrilled me most were the small herd of Przewalski’s horses. These are the closest existing relatives of the breed of horses that lived at the time of the prehistoric cave painters. Almost extinct at one time, they were preserved in captivity and have been successfully reintroduced into their native Mongolia. Though they’re thick and compact, like burros, they have a horse’s dignity. They look like a cave painting come to life.
One afternoon in early March, I used the ticket Yulia had given me to go to Le Salon de l’Agriculture. I don’t think I would have gone except for the free ticket, but now I never miss it when I’m in Paris. It is, in effect, the state fair of France. The salon was spread out across nine immense halls. Forced to choose among them, I did not go into the pavilion dedicated to fruits, vegetables, grains, plants, and flowers, or the pavilion that displayed agricultural machinery and methods. I felt a little sorry to ignore the pavilion dedicated to birds, fowl, and poultry, and immensely sorry when I turned away from the pavilion dedicated entirely to dogs and cats and the one with foods from other countries. I wondered what might be there from the United States—Texas barbecue? Fritos?
Instead, I entered the pavilion dedicated to horses and other livestock. I did not know there were so many different breeds of horses, from huge, thick draft horses like the Percherons, which weighed over a ton and had long, hanging fur around their hooves, to the tiniest,
most delicate miniature horses imaginable, three or four of whom fit easily in a normal-sized stall. There were cattle, too—immense, lumbering bulls whose testicles looked like two eggplants in a net—and tiny goats, the size of cocker spaniels, whose elaborate horns curved around themselves in circles. Some of the hogs were the size of rhinos. Most of them were lying on their side, exhausted from supporting their great mass on tiny legs. Once, a farm boy picked up a suckling piglet by a hind leg; it squealed in anguished terror at being jerked away from its mama.
And, of course, I went to the pavilion for the foods of France. It was so vast that I was lost from the moment I entered until three hours later, when it took me another half-hour to find my way out. I wandered around, sampling cheeses, hams, wines, liquors, juices, syrups, jellies, beers, breads, candies, cakes, and even French bourbon. Best of all was a small glass of Armagnac that had just recently been bottled but had been aging in a cask since 1978. It tasted as if it had been lying dormant all that time, waiting for this moment to burst into flavor in my mouth. A bottle cost sixty euros. I was tempted but didn’t succumb.
The zoo and the salon were glorious exceptions to the calmer, random pleasures of most of my walks. As I walked along across block after block, it was small, ephemeral moments that counted most of all—a border collie waiting expectantly outside a pâtisserie, the window of a shop filled with nothing but antique barometers, a round woman in a shawl begging on a street corner while talking on her cell phone, a mother calling down the street to her dawdling child, the elderly woman in a wool coat asking me with extreme politeness where she might find the rue Broca (and I knew!), the plaque above the door to an apartment saying that Verlaine had lived there, a covered arcade of exclusive shops, the narrow cobbled street where I came across a fenced pen containing goats and chickens. I rarely found a street with nothing of interest, and when I did, that became interesting. What is it, I wondered, that makes it lack interest?
Why was I doing this? I didn’t know exactly. The easy, obvious answer would be that I was searching for something or someone, that Tracy’s death had severed my moorings and now I was condemned to wandering until I found a safe harbor. But that didn’t seem right to me at the time, and still doesn’t seem right as I consider it now. It’s true that I was compelled to go out and observe Paris, but that is not the same thing as searching Paris for something particular. I did not feel that I was searching at all. When I came home, I rarely had anything more with me than what I had had when I left, except for books, which I could not resist buying. Certainly, I would have been disappointed if I had searched for hours and not found what I was looking for, but I felt no disappointment. In fact, I didn’t mind at all. Yes, I was alone in Paris, but during my walks I was alone with Paris, which was where I wanted to be and had chosen to be. Paris asked for nothing from me, and all I asked of Paris was just to be Paris. That, I believed, was our understanding.
In addition to my solitary walks, I was drawn toward the grand museums in Paris and the paintings on their walls. I found that I could lose myself while walking in museums much as I lost myself walking along the sidewalks in Paris. Tracy had known more about art than I did. She knew the basic history—her thick and tattered copy of Janson’s History of Art from her student days was on our bookshelves at home—and she also had an acute, instinctive understanding of composition and color. As we walked through a museum, she did the talking. I hardly knew enough to ask questions. She liked Cézanne in particular, understanding the complicated geometry in his landscapes and loving the play of light in his often muted palette of browns and greens. One of the reasons she had wanted to visit Aix was to see his studio there. It was much larger and taller than she had imagined, and naturally lit by a wall of glass windows. On a mantel were three skulls that he used in a late painting; a large collection of pottery sat on a high shelf; a rickety wooden stepladder went twenty feet or more up to the ceiling. Evidently, Cézanne trusted it, but I wasn’t sure I would have. A large crucifix hung on the wall above the shelf of pottery, evidence of his deeply felt Catholicism. The studio itself seemed to be a shrine devoted to serious work and deep contemplation. “With an apple,” Cézanne once remarked, “I will astonish Paris.”
Now in Paris myself, but without Tracy to guide me, I decided that perhaps I could strengthen the bond between the city and myself by joining both the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay. My membership cards gave me free admission and allowed me to skip the frequently long lines waiting to enter. Before joining, I had visited the museums only occasionally and stayed as long as I could. But now I made more frequent, shorter visits. I found that spending about two hours was ideal. When I stayed longer than that, the art melded into a blur and my response to any single work was dulled. Sometimes I knew which work I would go see first, but often I would leave that to chance. Either way, I seldom had a goal during a visit to a museum, just as I seldom had a goal during my long walks. In my wanderings about a museum, something would occur, most often a strong reaction to a new discovery, that let me know that this visit was over. Although I hadn’t known in advance what it would be, I had now seen what I had come to see and found what I had come to find. I always left with a great feeling of plenitude and fulfillment.
The first painting that affected me deeply and seemed to speak personally to me was not one of the many famous masterpieces in those museums, but Le Veuf by Jean-Louis Forain, from 1885, which is in the Musée d’Orsay. Forain had lived in bohemian poverty in Paris as a young man, and had even shared a room for several months with Arthur Rimbaud. Later, he had a long friendship with Degas. He made his living from his painting but also from his very popular political cartoons and drawings of scenes of contemporary life, which were published in a variety of newspapers. In Le Veuf, a tall, slender bourgeois gentleman in a black top hat and a black suit—we presume that he has just returned from his wife’s funeral—is seated in a stuffed chair with narrow orange stripes in what must have been her boudoir. His left elbow is on his knee, and his chin is in his left hand, as he stares pensively at the shelves of a cabinet that hold white, lacy women’s undergarments. One such garment dangles from his right hand to the floor. These were his wife’s most intimate possessions, but what should he do with them? To throw them away would be an affront to her memory. But to give them away, so that another woman could wear them, would be an affront as well. All this lace is filled with associations for him, but without her, those associations would lead only to emptiness. Although the painting is full of objects—boxes and cabinets and lace and stuffed chairs—emptiness is the main impression it gives. Forain married Jeanne Bosc, also a painter, in 1891, when he was thirty-nine. They had a long, happy marriage that ended only with his death, in 1931. Le Veuf, then, painted six years before his marriage, does not come from Forain’s personal experience. But he was able to imagine the personal experience of another man, a man like me, for example, with accuracy and compassion. I linger in front of the painting whenever I visit the Musée d’Orsay.
By now, I had read enough and seen enough so that I wasn’t completely naïve about art. I had written a book about the Venus de Milo, and one about the paintings in prehistoric caves. But my knowledge was specific and limited, and I knew that Tracy had seen art differently and better than I did. Whereas she saw paintings as forms and colors, my response to paintings was to see them as narratives. That reaction is reasonable for paintings like Le Veuf and for a huge variety of religious scenes, domestic scenes, battle scenes, and so on. But that is not a reaction that makes much sense when looking at an abstract painting or one of Cézanne’s landscapes, or even a portrait like the Mona Lisa. I wanted to learn how to look at a painting without imagining a narrative. And early that spring in Paris, I had a piece of luck. I found a series of lectures on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French paintings listed in one of the museum bulletins. The lectures were once a week, in the late afternoon, so there was no conflict with any of m
y classes. Although the lectures were in French, I found I could follow them without too much difficulty. I was soon enraptured by what I was seeing and learning.
The lecturer was a slender woman in her early fifties who had a mass of wavy reddish-brown hair that looked cared for but also untamed. I liked it. She had the appearance of having dressed and done her hair while she was slightly distracted. Every Tuesday afternoon, she sat at a table on a stage in the front of the lecture hall and plugged a flash drive into a computer connected to two large screens, one on either side of the stage. She began speaking exactly at four-thirty without any introduction or call to order, and the room immediately became quiet. She continued without pause until six. She had a clear, soft, musical voice, and radiated a calm authority and a complete certainty about her remarks. About two hundred people attended these lectures, most of them in their twenties and probably students. There had been an easy registration procedure, little more than a formality, but the students could get college credit for attending. When she finished a lecture, everyone politely applauded. In these pages, she will be called Céleste Bernard.
I always sat in the same seat, in the second row, on the right side of the hall. Her course began with David, Ingres, and Neoclassicism and then proceeded to Romanticism, and then the Barbizon school, which I knew a little bit about from staying in Barbizon with Tracy while stag hunting, and continued chronologically with Impressionism, Postimpressionism, Gauguin and the Pont-Aven school, the Nabis, Fauvism, Cubism, and finally the Surrealists. She was particularly good on van Gogh. She had a magnified photograph of some details in one of his canvasses, which she used to explain what she called his “touch”—that is, the exact way he made his brushstrokes. And she added that his ecstatic paintings of nature are very much in a Dutch tradition. In the Netherlands, there were many fewer Biblical images in painting because in the Calvinist religion the representation of God was accomplished by a celebration of His creation, of nature and the world that surrounds us. And she cast van Gogh—rapid, spontaneous, emotional, reactive, concerned with color—as the opposite of Cézanne—slow, intellectual, pensive, concerned with shapes. She also compared van Gogh with Seurat. In some ways, especially in their colors, it’s easy to see the links between them. On the other hand, if there was ever a painter completely opposed to spontaneity, it was Seurat. And she showed us the importance of lines in Seurat, which is not the first thing one would say about van Gogh.
Paris Without Her Page 15
