The other side of French official arrogance is French improvised and elaborate courtesy. The men from the department store Bon Marche, the deliverymen, called last night, to deliver the wicker kitchen organizer. “We have to be there early, because it’s a small street. Six-thirty.”
“It’s a little too early for us,” I said. “Let’s make it later.” “Ah, no. Its impossible. Six-thirty or nothing.” “All right,” and I hung up the phone, silently cursing French arrogance and the lack of any kind of service ethic.
Then, the next morning, at six forty-six, I was just awakened by the sound of the gentlest possible knocking on the front door—so butterfly quiet that at first I imagined that it must have been Luke Auden stirring in bed. But then there it was again, quiet but insistent. I got up, put on my robe, got to the front door, and stared out the spyglass. There were two workmen in the hallway, leaning over gently, knocking with their knuckles, as lightly as ghosts. I slipped the door open and got not a smile, but a look of acknowledgment, and they brought the kitchen organizer in with balletlike light-footedness. Thank you,” I said, “the baby is sleeping.” They nodded. We know. I signed the invoice, and they were gone, and I went back to sleep.
And then there is the chair. It started by accident one rainy Monday, after we had been to the Musee d’Orsay, and I had failed to get Luke much interested in my old favorites, Monets and Manets. I still find going to the Musee d’Orsay an infuriating, maddening experience. (Apparently, despite my superficial essays at amused blandness, I realize, reading this, that I’m a real pepperpot, a hothead. Billy Martin in France.) That vast, handsome railroad station so horribly done over in Wiener Werkstatte fashion by Gae Aulenti; the stupid, unquestioned dominance of the worst pompier art of the nineteenth century in the main hall as though saying, here are our real treasures. And the greater pain that only the pompier official art could look any good in such a vast and frigid space. I no longer find the taste for nineteenth-century French academic art, which can be amusing if seen small on a slide screen, the least bit likable. It is horrible, depressing beyond words, the revenge of official culture on life and youth, on reality itself. I swear to God I would take a razor to The Romans of the Decadence without a moment’s hesitation.
And then having to take the escalator up all the way to the far upper floors—a garret, in museum terms, in order to see the great pictures, every one of which looked incomparably better in the old Jeu de Paume. It is a calculated, venom-filled insult on the part of French official culture against French civilization, revenge on the part of the academy and administration against everyone who escaped them. French official culture, having the upper hand, simply banishes French civilization to the garret, sends it to its room. What one feels, in that awful place, is violent indignation—and then an ever-increased sense of wonder that Manet and Degas and Monet, faced with the same stupidities of those same academic provocations in their own lifetimes, responded not with rage but with precision and grace and contemplative exactitude.
Paris is marked by a permanent battle between French civilization, which is the accumulated intelligence and wit of French life, and French official culture, which is the expression of the functionary system in all its pomposity and abstraction. Perhaps by French civilization I mean the small shops; by French official culture I mean the big buildings. There is hardly a day when you are not wild with gratitude for something that happens in the small shops: the way that Mme. Glardon, at the pastry shop on the rue Bonaparte, carefully wraps Luke Auden’s chocolate eclair in a little paper pyramid, a ribbon at its apex, knowing perfectly well, all the while, that the paper pyramid and ribbon will endure just long enough for the small boy to rip it open to get to the eclair. And hardly a day when you are not wild with dismay at something that has been begun in the big buildings, some abstraction launched on the world in smug and empty confidence.
In any case, I couldn’t, as it happened, get Luke much stirred by Manet or Monet (not that he was stirred by the Couture either, I’m glad to say), but searching for something that would stir him, I came across the handsome side chapel devoted to Daumier’s portrait busts. They are caricatures of the political men of the mid-nineteenth century. Luke loved them. I held him up, and he stared at their faces behind the Plexiglas boxes and imitated each one. We guessed at the character of each one: who’s mean, who’s nice, who’s conceited. The scary thing is that the faces are exactly the faces of French politicians today: Philippe Seguin, with his raccoon-circled eyes; Le Pen, with his obscene, smiling jowliness; Bruno Megret with his ratlike ordinariness. You could find the men of the left; too: Jospin’s fatuous cheerfulness—they’re all there.
After the success of the Daumiers, I thought of going to the park, as a release, or back to Deyrolle, for the umpteenth time, but it was raining hard, and we needed something new. “Do you want a soda?” I said, and we went over to the Courier de Lyons, the nearest thing our haut neighborhood has to a workingman’s café. After he had a grenadine, and I a grand creme, and we had shared a tarte Normande, I noticed that there was a pinball machine—a flipper, as it is called in French. So I dragged a chair over, so that he could stand up on it and work the left flipper, and took control of the right flipper myself. It was an “NBA all-star” pinball machine, a true old-fashioned, pre-Atari, steel ball pin-ball, but with extra ramps and lights that let you shoot the ball up into hoops, get extra points, make model players jump up and down. (Luke, of course, had never seen a basketball game.) We started playing, and he loved it: the ping of the hard metal balls, the compressed springiness of the release, the fat thwack of the bumpers, above all the bounce of the flipper, hitting the ball back up, keeping it in play, making it go. We played three times, rushed home, and he told his momma about it. “It goes…” he said, and at a loss for words, he just raced his eyes, back and forth, rolled them back and forth crazily—that’s how it goes.