Rue Rude

America: Instructions

What they think of us

Zola's Nana

As Manet imagined Nana, the "plump blonde" demi-mondaine who enthralls le Tout-Paris

I read a lot, but until recently I hadn't actually read many French novels, even the "great" ones, in French. I did get all the way through Remembrance of Things Past in English, the Scott Moncrieff version; but Nancy Mitford, who learned French as a child and lived most of her life in France, believed out that Moncrieff took all the humor out of Proust. And Proust's transformation of the obviously-- to me-- male love interest "Albertine" into a woman and his pretense that the narrator wasn't gay, while gossiping a great deal about others who are, were like fingers scraping on the blackboard.

I tried to read Le Rouge et le Noir in college. It starts with a shy little boy crying and he goes on crying. He turns out to be the hero. I disliked him at first sight. I had also read Madame Bovary as a child (my father was a professor) and that probably warped my ideas, as the main character that interested me was Emma's little daughter, and the first chapter I read was the end of the book. I detested Emma for what she did to her girl! Even reading it as an adult, I kept wanting to just shake Emma for being so selfish. Then I read a few Balzac novels last year. He's a great writer, all right, but it is so hard to find anyone you like in his novels, or at least it has been for me. Reading his biography by Stefan Zweig, I understood that a bit better. Balzac spent his whole life social climbing (adding a de to his name along the way) and writing frantically to pay his bills. He never had a real family life and you can tell. 

So I started Nana by Zola with low expectations. But it's so good! I am reading it in the métro and can't put it down. The differences between French literature and English literature are somewhat staggering for the naive, like me. I see why it was considered shocking for young girls to read "French novels." In the first chapter, the theater owner Bordenave calls his theater "my brothel" and we see a crowd of respectable and not so respectable Parisians at opening night of a musical that sounds fun to watch, about the gods of Olympus. Lucie Stewart, a demi-mondaine, "an ugly little woman in her forties... but so lively and graceful that she had a great charm," says to her friend the journalist, about Nana, "On m'a juré que tu avais couché avec." [They swore to me you slept with her.] In the last scene, the beautiful Nana appears in see-through gauze as Venus, nude "with a tranquil audacity," so that you can see the "golden hairs in her armpits" (!). Even though she can't act and can't sing, the audience succumbs to her charisma and sex appeal.

In the evenings this week, I've been watching the BBC production of Bleak House. It's funny and also significant to notice the difference between the respectability and even puritanism of British and American novels of this period-- Trollope and Thackeray, Dickens and Hardy, not to speak of Austen, Brontë and Gaskell-- and the French novels. I think it says something profound about the two societies as well. But I don't know which is more realistic, in the end. To paraphrase something I read once, fiction is more about sex, less about children. Real life is the reverse.

Café with lunch? Ha ha ha

A woman I met works as a translator and was telling us how difficult it can be to translate cookbooks and travel books from English (or "American") into French.

"First they use completely different measures, of course," she said. "Cups, teaspoons, quarts... then, they have ingredients that are hard to find in France, like baking powder or baking soda [I buy mine at "foreign" stores in Paris] or brown sugar. Or they go into a lengthy explanation of something that any Frenchwoman would know. For example, where we would just say 'cut the vegetables en julienne', they will say, 'first turn the vegetables lengthwise and cut them into tiny lengthwise strips about two inches long.'

"Travel books are even funnier," she went on. "Sometimes you just have to leave things out. One Australian book told the readers that in Italy, you shouldn't order coffee during the meal, but wait until it was time for dessert!"

Everyone burst out laughing. Imagine ordering coffee with a meal!

I learned this the hard way, like all the other Americans, I suppose. Basically, they just won't bring you the coffee till after the meal. It doesn't register in the waiter's mind that you ordered it until then. Didn't you know that ça ne se fait pas?

Long live the American Library of Paris!

One of my favorite places in Paris! And I'm not the only one. It's the biggest English-language library in continental Europe. Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein loved it. There are lots of free evening lectures and events for children. Here is the calendar page. Wish I could go there more often....

Quai d'Orsay, the cartoon

I have just been reading the bande dessinée, or rather graphic novel, Quai d'Orsay* (volume II), and laughing all the way through. It's a fabulous roman à clé depiction of an all-too-real French foreign ministry in the run-up to the Iraq war, with a bull-headed George W. Bush determined to invade with or without United Nations support. It's clear that "Abel Lanzac," the pseudymous co-author, had privileged access to the top levels of the Quai d'Orsay and that is what makes it so fascinating. In an interview with L'Express, he said that he had worked there and is close friends with Bruno LeMaire, the "superpen" of the ministry in those days, "whose presence permeates the book." 

The larger-than-life character of Dominique de Villepin ("Alexandre Taillard de Vorms"**), then French Foreign Minister, dominates the book. It leaves you with a grudging respect for him, in spite of his habit of lecturing to crowds on his Club Med vacations. George W., Colin Powell, Berlusconi, and the Russian foreign minister also make appearances.

 

What strikes an American is, among other things, how important America is in the story. And how anguished the other countries were about the Iraq war. Along with a recent British black comedy, In the Loop, the focus is completely on what the Americans are doing. The other countries think what the U.S. is demanding is stupid, crazy, ignorant; but they are like little kids being dragged by a brutish big brother to somewhere they don't want to go. 

Captions: 

1. Alexandre Taillard de Vorms, French Foreign Minister

2. "I was hoping that the people at Club Med would take fright and put a stop to it. The problem is, they were actually really happy. They started noticing that their customers ate it up, to the point that they would try to guess which Club Med the minister would choose for his next holiday so that they could book there."

3. "The United States of America aspires only to world peace." [In English in the original]

4. "French, too." "Oh good. You reassure me. I recognize French women."

5. "Okay, I see you're getting me now. This is a negotiation with the U.S. over peace versus war.... not an anchovy crisis in the Bay of Biscay.... Sorry, Sylvain."

*Christophe Blain et Abel Lanzac

**To me this sounds like tailleur de worms, but apparently it's borrowed from Luc Tayart de Borms, a Belgian aristocrat.

Madeline's city

I was shocked when I got here to discover that the French had never heard of Madeline. The little red-headed Parisian in a cape, who says "Pooh, pooh!" to tigers at the zoo, is known to almost all American children of the reading classes, but is nobody to children in her native city (who would no doubt call her Madeleine. By the way, the hyper-fashionable name is not currently fashionable in France).

It's still fun to recognize scenes from the books now that I know Paris. The tiger in the zoo is on the quais near the Botanical Gardens. The zoo is still there; sometimes when you are stuck in a traffic jam or on a bus, you can look over and see an ostrich looking back at you.

Of course the twelve little girls in two straight lines are obsolete now, as is Miss Clavel with her veil-- she is not a nun but a governess, by the way; and yes, governesses did used to dress like that. But not that long ago there was an all-girls school in Paris not far from my house where the little girls had to wear hats and walk in lines two-by-two as they went out, just like the girls in the book. "I get so many parents with those hats," the headmistress once said to me. 

One of the loveliest things about Paris is that if you go away and come back, Paris will still look much the same; the central city is preserved as if in amber, and only the storefronts change with the times. So even though Madeline was written in 1939, it gives Americans who read it as children a shock of recognition when they finally see the Eiffel Tower, the Invalides, the Opéra, and the quais of the Seine, where Madeline fell in and was dramatically rescued by that noble mutt, Genevieve.

Sous les pavés, le vide*

Underneath Paris is a network of Roman-era quarries and medieval mines that is much more extensive than most people realize-- 40 % of the city stands over holes. There are 300+ kilometers of stabilized tunnels under Paris. I recently read Graham Robb's book Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris. Among many other interesting and little-known stories, the book discusses the efforts of Charles-Axel Guillaumot, the 18th-century engineer who stabilized the mines and saved large sections of the city from falling through the roofs of the quarries. I also knew that before you buy any property in Paris, you get a report on whether or not there are quarries underneath the building. This is usually lost in the storm of paperwork and few people check it carefully. But the reason it's important is that the owners of a building are responsible for all costs of shoring up the building if the ground starts to give way-- in some places that can cost hundreds of thousands of euros. In parts of the city, notably the picturesque Mouzaïa district northeast of the Buttes-Chaumont, the buildings are made of wood and not allowed to be more than a certain height because of the danger of collapse.

This report by some interns at Rue89 (a great website run by off-duty journalists) woke me up. The map of Paris at the top of one article clearly shows that my apartment building sits right over a huge underground quarry. 

Don't think you will get anything from your insurance company if sinkhole happens. Quarries and mines are not considered "accidents" or natural disasters." But don't worry.  In Paris there are only ten or so incidents a year, and only one complete collapse.

*"Under the cobblestones, the abyss." The photo of a sinkhole in Guatemala is by John McNab, Flickr.

The poetry market

 
A and I went to the Marché de la Poésie. It's a book fair at Saint-Sulpice (in front of Saint-Sulpice, the church in this photo-- it's currently most famous for its role in The Da Vinci Code) and was mostly books in French. I was just after poetry, poetry in a book; but most of the books for sale were exquisitely produced works of art, with prices to match. So we left without buying anything. We did talk to a number of depressed-looking poets and publishers sitting at lonely tables piled high, who all tried to get us to leave our names and address. It was enough to make you vow not to be a poet. Maybe the happier ones were at the very lively wine bar. We did get a few bookmarks and a postcard.

Poetry on the bus

Towards evening
abandon yourself
   to your double destiny:
live in the heart of the landscape
and wave
   to the shooting stars.

--François Cheng (程抱一), "Un jour les pierres," poem in Double chant (1998)

Pocket Book Poetry: From a World War II G.I.

At the weekly Amsterdam book market, I bought this little book, which reminds me of my father's row of World War II pocket books. During the war, presses poured out these tiny, light books of shoddy construction that fit easily into a soldier's or sailor's pack. I think this poetry book must have been treasured because it shows signs of being well read but is still in good shape, with no pages loose.

It comes from a different era, when schoolchildren all memorized poetry and recited it for audiences, when poetry was not considered an arcane and boring specialty of professors.

In the introduction the editor, Ted Malone, writes, 

This pocketful of poetry is composed of poems that are favorites with your friends and neighbors and the strangers you pass on the street...These are the poems people quote over teacups and in offices and on battlefields. Poems like these are part of everyday living. If you don't believe it, just stop somebody on Main Street tomorrow and ask, "What comes after 'If you can keep your head when all about...'?" ....

...In the course of my year as a war correspondent in Europe, I was amazed to find out how many front line fighting men carried little books of verse and that USO libraries could never get enough poetry books....It is hard to find words for the thoughts that go with a man into war, into separation from everything he knows and loves, into discomfort and danger and the shadow of death....

Poetry expresses all the somethings that can't be put into ...ordinary words.... poetry is magic. It is the light that never was on land or sea. 

I like thinking that the soldier who brought this book to the Netherlands 65 years ago found comfort in poetry, the art of saying long things shortly. I hope he survived the war.