Allumettes, escargots and violettes de Toulouse

Being a single mother could not have been easy for any woman in the Fifties. For my mother, whose intellectual brilliance was matched only by her thorough lack of practicality, it was especially difficult. She was not, among other things, very good at looking after two energetic, impetuous little boys.

My mother’s intellect was not free of pretension and so, if she surrounded us with snatches of French, it may be because she wanted us to have some knowledge of our father’s culture; but I can’t discount her simple desire to flaunt her sophisticated European experience, even as we lived in near poverty. Among other things, she hung an enameled metal box labeled Allumettes above the stove, reasonably thinking it out of the reach of two toddlers. But one day when she was either asleep or possibly even out, my brother and I worked out how to climb the stove and reach those lovely wooden matches which lit so easily.

As it happened, she had just bought several bent iron chairs with red vinyl seats. We quickly discovered that a wooden allumette, easily lit, would leave a gratifying trail in the red vinyl and so spent a happy half hour decorating our mother’s new chairs.

Not all her attempts to teach us French turned out so disastrously. I learned early that snails were escargots; I may even have eaten some in garlic butter. Some time after she remarried and we moved to the Upper East Side, she took me down to the Village to a place called Papier Malcé [sic] and I had my first croissant (then a rarity in New York); nothing suggested for decades that I would end up writing a history of that pastry.

While we were still a small family on Jones Street, a visitor brought us candied violets from France. As a little boy, I thought these absolutely wonderful. When I went to study in Paris and bought colorful candies from vending machines on the Metro platforms, I was disappointed to find that the only thing similar was simply a raspberry candy shaped like a raspberry; I decided I’d enhanced my earlier memory. It wasn’t until business took me, years later, to Toulouse that I discovered yes, there were candies made from violet buds; I hadn’t imagined that part of my French-inflected childhood.

My neighbor, the Pont Neuf

 My first hosts in Paris were friends of my family. They lived in a duplex just off the rue Dauphine. I found this perfectly natural – knowing nothing else of the city – as I did their living just steps away from the Pont Neuf. I would only learn later that the husband worked at a bank and was from an old banking family. Certainly, it would be a long time before I saw another duplex in Paris.

The night I arrived – oblivious to the panic I had caused by casually spending a week in London rather than, as it appeared everyone had expected, going right to Paris –, they were having a dinner party. One woman was a marquise; I was quite disappointed to see she was not wearing an ornate satin robe. When people used some of the coarser (but quite common) French words, one person asked if I knew what one meant. “Is it like in Sartre?” I asked. “He is very literary,” someone said. And I was, at least when it came to French. But French is full of traps for lovers of language. As one guest left, the hostess asked him if he would take down the poubelle. As my hostess must have expected, I found this a pretty word, including as it did “belle”; she was quick to explain it meant “trash”.

My hosts were also very patient. I had never seen a cheese plate before, much less the goat’s cheese which became my main point of interest. The idea that goat’s cheese might be expensive never occurred to me; it was in the fridge, I ate it. A lot of it. After I returned to the States, I would spend years trying to find it again (yes, it was once hard to find). On one march on Washington, I bought Norwegian gjetost, thinking that, because it was goat’s cheese, it would be the same; I was dismayed to find something more like a hard creamy chocolate bar. Years later in Boston, a tall blonde friend of mine announced she was finally ready to stay the night. To celebrate this special event, I went to Boston’s one cheese shop where I at last found real French goat’s cheese. My neighbors, a young French couple, were heartily amused to watch me put on my best dark blue sheets and helped me prepare matching blue candles to light the platter of goat’s cheese – only to have my friend call and desist. (When we finally spent our first night together, it was after a hurried meal at the Chinese place on the corner.) I then shared the goat’s cheese with my French neighbors (still dear friends today). Who of course offered heaping helpings of teasing to go with the cheese.

Just beyond the small cul-de-sac where my hosts lived there was a small café at the corner, right by the Seine. I don’t know then what I learned later, that there had once been a tower there where a wicked French queen would spend the night with illicit lovers, only to have them sewn in a sack the next morning and thrown in the Seine. The café and the tower have forever been confused in my mind.

I was seventeen and full of energy. One morning,  having no doubt spent another night wandering the city I was so eager to explore, I sat in one of the round stone benches on the Pont Neuf and watched the Sun come up. I felt as completely in Paris as I could be.

All this seemed perfectly normal to me. Yes, it was magic, but I was in Paris, and it was supposed to be magic. I’m not sure I’ve ever learned otherwise.