Outside the Galeries Lafayette are stationed official city guards in uniform and a store surveillant, telling everyone how to get up to the windows and which way to walk once you’re there, directing traffic, with no appeal. Everyone meekly obeys. The authoritarian impulses shapes everything, even the traffic by the windows.
The weird thing is that by taking tracing on as an ambition, I’ve become more in tune with the fundamental French temperament. The will toward contemplative observation is the keynote of French sensibility and tied, in ways both beautiful and horrible, to French indifference. My favorite French writers when I arrived were, dutifully, Proust and Camus and Stendhal, who generalize, brilliantly; now my favorites are Colette, Antoine Blondin, and Maupassant, who above all look, who are part of the great French Machine to Draw the World.
The greatness of Colette and Maupassant, who is the real father of modern writing, have leaked out back home (though I think Maupassant is still known as the father of the trick ending), but I think Blondin is just about completely unknown in America. He was a French newspaperman and essayist, thriving in the 1950s and 1960s, who wrote novels and reportage and essays for the French papers. He is most famous for writing a kind of all-purpose column in the French sports daily L’Equipe.
Blondin is a wonderful, easy writer, and what I admire most about him is the fluency, the particularizations of his language. Everything seeks a joke, but nothing misses a point. He captures tiny moments of reality: a rainy day in the stadium where someone is listening to the radio of the rugby game below, and the crackling broadcast is more real than the game it is describing, which takes you back outside the stadium, is more real than the game it describes. His most emphatic aphorism was simple:
“The only duty of the writer is not to have one.”
Against the official French culture of the academy, the French empirical tradition has to keep itself alive in the oddest corners, like Blondin in L’Equipe. Manet’s lemons and asparagus are its best emblems. It produces an atmosphere of calm. The calm of Manet’s flowers, the calm of Colettes dialogue, the precious, life-enhancing calm of the Palais Royal at three in the afternoon, the last coffee on the table, the light slanting in, French calm. Has anyone ever thought how incongruous and touching the use of that word is in the Baudelaire poem, the Matisse title? “Luxe, Caime and Volupte”? Luxury, Calm and Voluptuousness. Calm and Voluptuousness? Not hot and voluptuous or funky and voluptuous? We have grown accustomed to it by familiarity, but really, Calm—it is as if one put some other flat, bourgeois word in there: Luxury: nice and voluptuous? Luxury: comfy and voluptuous. And yet it works. It is the essence of the French vision. Everybody calm down. (Luke Auden about the excitable little boy in his class: “He was nervous, but Sonia calmed him up.”) Matisse, Manet, calm us up.
In France private life still turns on the closed seventeenth-century model of ce pays ici, this little country here. The crucial unit of social life in France is the Cohort, rather than the social Class, as in England, or the Clan, as in Italy (or the Company, as back home in America). These Parisian cohorts—loosely defined working alliances of people in politics and art and literature, who draw together in youth for one purpose or another and then remain linked, if only in mutual hatred, for life—get drawn from a lot of different social classes and clans and therefore need neutral places to inhabit. This has produced the unique Parisian commonplace civilization of parks and cafés and salons, which give the illusion of democratic entry.
It is only an illusion, though. What looks like a café is really a kind of club, and you can no more really enter it than you can enter White’s or Boodle’s in St. James’s just by walking in there. The cohorts of Paris—the impressionist group is a perfect example of the kind—look open but remain essentially closed to anyone not in at their formation. Pressed beyond a polite point, they clam up as firmly as an Italian family.
John Singer Sargent’s relations with the impressionists are a perfect example of how this works. Throughout the 1870s he stood right on the friendly edges of the impressionist cohort, knocking politely on the door again and again. They looked him over, but they never let him in. All that’s left to the outsider is the beautiful surface. The two favorite sites of Sargent—the Luxembourg Gardens and the Winter Circus—strike a guilty chord;
parks and circuses are open and seem to offer the illusion of assimilation. You end up by walking around and around the Luxembourg Gardens. French life just goes on, with its enormous insular indifference. Americans and Frenchmen always agree that they share something, something deeper than anything they share with any other people—the love of happiness, perhaps, or of social pleasures. Really it is this insularity that they share, as they discover sadly in the end. Americans welcome everyone with open arms and forced smiles, and in the end the immigrant-expatriates discover that that’s the problem; the next man off the next boat is just as welcome too. Paris is open to anyone, but what is open isn’t entirely Paris. It is another, simulacra Paris, which wraps around the real one and is there to be looked at, to be seen. About all you can do is paint it, and Sargent did that about as well as it could be done for about as long as it could be done. It was a great subject, but never Home, and Americans want home.
More comfort: Food here is comfort, not theater. Last night we had our good friends B. and R. over, and we had champagne (Drappier ’90) and then lemon tart from Laduree, where Luke and I stood in line for half an hour. It’s a beautiful Proustian store on the rue Royale with a pale green wooden front, old wooden tables, and absolutely no line discipline. We get bilches from Laduree too. Tonight, Christmas night: a brined turkey Brussels sprouts with creme fraiche, chestnut stuffing, and those buches de Noel. As always in Paris, each thing has a thing associated with it, a story: The turkey was ordered, argued over (take two small ones, I don’t want two small ones, etc.).
I was, if anything, a slightly too complacent universalist when I arrived in Paris and have become a far too melancholic particularist as we get ready to leave, someone who believes in the spirit of places, although he always expects to be outside them, and can pay them only the compliment of eternal comparison.
Luke, once this winter, brought home the school goldfish, Swimmy, for the weekend. He got up on a chair to stare at his bowl and said hello. No answer. Then he recalled what kind of goldfish it was. “Ca va, Swimmy?” he said at last, “ca va?” speaking the goldfish’s language to the goldfish.
It is better to speak to the goldfish in their own language, and better still just to jump into the bowl and become a goldfish yourself, or try to. Without that immersion you feel a constant temptation to compare them with the nongoldfish you know back home, to say what they are like, to engage in the constant stilted game of comparison. In the end it is better just to say what goldfish do than to say what they are like, goldfish, like Parisians, in the end not being “like” anything, but just busy being, like everything else. Yet the attempt to say what the goldfish are like—they’re swimming, they’re gold, oh, how they shine—is in its way the sincerest tribute to their glitter.