Rue Rude

"We may have to go into Iran."

"I think we may have to go into Iran," said R, rather casually.

Appalachia? or U.S.?

Suspicion. That's the thing that's changed the most since I last lived in the States. The dominant emotion toward strangers seems to have become: suspicion.

Or is it just being back in Appalachia?

My brother was in his nice rented vacation house a couple of days ago and went for a walk around the pretty garden. As he strolled by the locked shed in the back, the next-door neighbor fired off his gun. Later my sister tried to walk down from the house to the little river a few feet below (you can see it in the photo), where people from the village across the river were playing, and another neighbor came out and yelled, "That's private property!"

At the airport the other day, I was not given a seat assignment until I got to the gate (this is a new and unpleasant addition to the nonstop hassle of airplane travel these days). After the agent showed up, I got up and asked the woman sitting next to me to watch my suitcases as I stood right in front of her just a few feet away to get an assigned seat. She refused with a frown. I might be a terrorist, I guess.

I do remember our old concierge, though, and the Guy de Maupassant story in which a man's life is ruined because his neighbors see him stoop to pick up a piece of string in the road. Whether it is called méfiance or mistrust, and whatever the reason, it's a nasty emotion that I don't like to see becoming more common.

The servants' quarters

Today I went to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, which is called the largest private house in America. It was built about 1889, in the era before income tax, by George Vanderbilt, grandson of the "Commodore" who made the family fortune. According to the brochure, George was an amateur of art, history and architecture, and the gardens around the estate were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who landscaped Central Park in New York-- there is a portrait of him by John Singer Sargent in the house. I couldn't help wondering if the portraits by Sargent at the Biltmore house had not contributed to his famous weariness of society portrait-painting.

"The house looks like a chateau on the outside, but did you notice how little art there was?" said L as we walked out, exhausted (no air conditioning, and massive crowds of tourists-- no French ones, however). "And all those reproduction Chippendales?"

What I had noticed was the servants' quarters, which were relatively large, high-ceilinged, well-lit, airy and comfortable, and included a fountain, recreation room, showers, modern toilets, and a large servants' dining room. Maybe it was especially hard to get servants to the North Carolina hills, but I couldn't help but contrast these pleasant rooms with the miserable cramped chambres de service built into my apartment building around 1900 and largely unchanged: a warren of tiny rooms of five to ten square meters, each with a door opening to a sinister narrow corridor of doors and an untreated wooden floor, up seven staircases from the back entrance of the building. Even now there is no elevator, although space for one was designed into the building. Instead, the elevator opening has been turned into extra closet space for the proprietaires.

Good for George Vanderbilt, I thought.

Bat Cave

Please excuse the silence. I am staying near a town called Bat Cave, North Carolina, where internet access means imposing on very polite, friendly Southerners who don't know me. I will be back in a few days.

The rest of the world feels a million miles away. And these people vote for the most powerful man in the world.

The real rue Rude

"I was born in Paris," said a fellow guest at dinner. "You won't believe it, but it was on the rue Rude!"

"I didn't know that was a real place!" said L.

Visiting the "eldest daughter of the Church"

Sorry for the long silence. I have been traveling nonstop.

"You live in France? I have been to France several times," said my taxi driver.

"Really? How do you like Paris?" I said.

"Oh, I haven't seen Paris. I go to the shrine of Our Lady at La Salette," he said. "I haven't been out of work once since I started going."

Bastille Day celebration, NYC

As I was walking up Madison Avenue in the furnacelike heat today, trying to stick to the shade, I came to a street fair at 60th Street. Several Eiffel Tower drawings by children had been pinned up at a table near the entrance to one side, and festoons of bleu-blanc-rouge balloons were hanging across the street on either side of the avenue. It was the Bastille Day celebration of the Alliance Française, and it was a true fête populaire, judging by the crowds thronging through.

"It's the wrong day!" said L indignantly. The holiday had been moved to a Sunday so that the street could be closed and more people could come. It reminded me of how Americans in Paris usually celebrate Thanksgiving on Saturday, instead of Thursday.

The Bastille Day fair explained a puzzling manifestation earlier in the day. I saw a man (I think) dressed in a white Marie-Antoinette wig, a shiny red poufy skirt, and a huge red parasol walking near the Plaza Hotel. From the rear s/he resembled these Minnesota Bastille Day celebrators I found on the internet, en plus masculin.

Marie-Antoinette is a popular subject these days, perhaps because of the new Sofia Coppola movie. I saw this toy in a store:

Mon berbère, ce héros

Maybe it's my Irish street-kid side, but I love Zidane just as much after he was thrown out of the game. I feel that saying something vile and insulting, deliberately trying to get him to lose his temper, that it made Zizou blow up in front of the whole world is far worse than headbutting.

He may not be a hero in every sense, but who is? I've never heard anything dreadful about Zidane. He has the right values, on the whole. You get the feeling of watching a straightforward Greek hero, perhaps not totally suited to the modern business-suited world. After all, didn't Achilles have a temper, along with his noble side? Zidane grew up in a project in Marseilles, his parents hardworking Berbers from Algeria whom he loved (he has bought a house for his father in la cité phocéenne, as Marseilles is often called in France), and he is married with four little boys. When he has spoken out in the past, it has always been for good causes, like telling everyone to vote. I still respect him. It's Mazeratti I don't respect.

Today a new website goes online where you can leave a note for Zinedine Zidane. It's called Merci Zidane  It's not thanking him for his outburst, of course, but just for his magic feet and the inspiration he has been to a generation of kids.

It's profoundly unoriginal to write about Zidane, of course. Google just listed 111,000,000 sites about him.

Happy Quatorze juillet!

*

Well, George W. Bush is far away in Russia at the G8 meeting, not in Paris, of course. It's just as well for him, since he has just defended Israel's bombing of Lebanon, and there are lots of Lebanese in Paris.

Another year that I miss the big défilé (parade) on the Champs-Elysées. Year after year I miss both the Fourth of July in the U.S. and the 14th of July in Paris.

Although all French people love France, not everyone celebrates the cause of the holiday, the taking of the Bastille prison by common people.

I know an American woman here who bought a pretty bleu-blanc-rouge Hermès scarf commemorating the 200th anniversary of the French revolution. She thought her French in-laws would be pleased at her love for their country, but instead they were horrifiés. During the revolution, their family had lost everything. "It is not something we celebrate," they informed her sniffily.

Boston, the Hub of the Universe

I arrived in Boston two days after part of the ceiling of the new tunnel leading from the airport into the city collapsed, killing a woman in her car. The long, long construction of this tunnel was called the Big Dig. It cost $15 million billion dollars [thanks you guys! I didn't believe it when I heard the figure], and the ugly construction site snarled central Boston traffic for about ten years.

As I drove out of the rental car site, the guy at the gate checked my French driver's license. He had an unusual name; maybe it was African, but he was American. "You live over there?" he said.

"Yes, in Paris," I said.

"So, which do you like better, France or the United States?" he said. Only Americans ask this question. And there is only on correct answer, of course. But this guy really seemed to want to know.

"There are wonderful things about both of them," I said. "But of course this is my own country."

He waved me off. I stopped by the side of the road to program my destination into the GPS. It led me straight to the Big Dig, where a huge traffic jam was building up. I was amazed that the tunnel was still open after the accident, and as if to confirm me in my worry, I turned the radio on to hear an announcer's tirade against the incompetence and corruption of the Big Dig politicians, builders and workers. I did a U-turn along with dozens of other cars, and headed out through Chelsea. I used to live in Boston and have fond and not-so-fond memories of it. It is a city with a big personality.

You can tell you're in Massachusetts New England [note later: actually Rhode Island!]. One of the first things that hit me on my way out of town was this large billboard: