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| Planting cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower with Kurt. |
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| The big garden this morning. |
Over a lifetime of armchair traveling, I have been to France many, many times. I have known her in almost every age of her history. I was there with Caesar when he conquered the Gauls. I watched as Robert de Luzarches, and Bishop Evrard de Fouilloy laid the foundation stones of the great cathedral at Amiens. I saw Joan of Arc burn at the stake. I’ve known France in the decadent glory of the Sun King, in the horror of the Reign of Terror, in the splendor of Napoleon and Josephine, and in the ruins of war after war.
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| Notre-Dame de Amiens. |
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| The coronation of Napoleon by David. |
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| D-Day. |
Of course all my knowledge comes through books, movies, and my imagination. They paint a vast and detailed image in my mind. My greatest impressions of France center on war, art, and music. The Hundred Years War, the Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II – I’ve seen her rise and fall, be the invaded and the invader. I loved Barbara Tuchman’s book, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, a fascinating account of the Hundred Years’ War, the Black Death, the Papal Schism, and other French historical disasters. And I adore Shakespeare’s Henry V which is set during the Hundred Years’ War and the Battle of Agincourt where the English unexpectedly triumphed over the French. Sometimes I go back and read Henry’s speech just before the battle on St. Crispins’ Day just for the beauty of his words –
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
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| The Battle of Agincourt. |
I’ve read several history books on the French Revolution, but the book I love most isn’t a non-fiction historical account, but rather, the description Charles Dickens gives in his novel A Tale of Two Cities. It begins with the famous lines:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
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| An illustration from A Tale of Two Cities. |
I’ve read two novels by Victor Hugo that showed me aspects of France in wonderful detail. Notre-Dame de Paris (published as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in English) is set in Paris in 1482. The plot, with its characters – pitiful deformed Quasimodo, evil Claude Frollo, vain and untrustworthy Captain Phoebus, and the beautiful Esmeralda – is compelling, but the vivid and lengthy descriptions of Medieval Paris are wonderful. The second novel, Les Misérables, is one of the greatest novels I have ever read. Spanning the years 1815 to 1832, it is divided into five volumes with subplots and digressions that tell an interwoven tale of its many characters and of Paris. Hugo summed up its structure as “a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life; from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. The starting point: matter, destination: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.” It took me almost a year to read it and when I finished I felt as though I’d lived in France and actually knew the places and people he describes. And now I want to read it again.
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| An illustration from Notre-Dame de Paris. |
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| An illustration from Les Misérables. |
I also tend to picture France as I have seen it portrayed in art and film. I’ve poured over many art books and of the masterworks I love most, many were done by the French Impressionists – Caillebotte, Degas, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, and Toulouse-Lautec. Through them I’ve seen France in glorious color – Monet’s gardens at Giverny, the rainy streets of Paris, the French countryside with fields of poppies, Montmartre, the beaches at Normandy, and the sun drenched hills of Provence. I know France doesn’t look like that anymore, but soon I’ll get to see some of those paintings in person that I’ve only known on paper and I’m thrilled.
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| Monet's garden at Giverny. |
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| The Poppy Field by Monet. |
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| Quai du Louvre by Monet. |
My favorite French music comes from the Impressionists too – Debussy and Ravel, and other composers Satie, Poulenc, Saint-Saëns. While we are in Paris, I’d like to see the Théâtre du Châtelet where the audience hissed and booed and then applauded Vaslav Nijinsky on 29 May 1912 when he scandalized Paris as he danced to Debussy’s ballet, L'Après-midi d'un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun), or the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées where a year later on 29 May 1913, the premier of Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) caused a riot.
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| Nijinsky as the Faun. |
And then there are all the films I love that are set in France, films like An American in Paris (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), Lili (1953), The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), The Red Balloon (1956), Gigi (1958), Charade (1963), The Pink Panther (1964) and others. I want to stand where Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron danced on the quay of the Seine in An American in Paris and walk through the Colonnade at the Palais-Royal where Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn had their rendezvous with danger in Charade. And of course there is the time the Ricardos and the Mertzes went to Paris in Season 5, Episodes 18, 19, and 20 (1956) of I Love Lucy.
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| In the Colonnade in Charade. |
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| The Ricardos and the Mertzes in Paris. |
In 1889 Mark Twain moved his family to Europe and out of that experience, he wrote some very funny accounts of what he encountered there. The things he wrote about France and the French might be a bit exaggerated, that was his style of humor, but there is, no doubt, a kernel of truth in them. No matter what, what he said was funny.
“France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.”
On the language he said:
“It has always been a marvel to me – that French language; it has always been a puzzle to me. How beautiful that language is! How expressive it seems to be! How full of grace it is! And when it comes from lips like those of Sarah Bernhardt, how eloquent and how limpid it is! And, oh, I am always deceived – I always think I am going to understand it.”
“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”
“It is the language for lying compliment, for illicit love and for the conveying of exquisitely nice shades of meaning in bright graceful and trivial conversations – the conveying, especially of double-meanings, a decent and indecent one so blended as – nudity thinly veiled, but gauzily and lovely.”
About Paris:
“Anywhere is better than Paris. Paris the cold, Paris the drizzly, Paris the rainy, Paris the damnable. More than a hundred years ago somebody asked Quin, “Did you ever see such a winter in all your life before?” “Yes,” said he, “Last summer.” I judge he spent his summer in Paris.”
I am not the wit that Twain was, and I hope to find France a bit more agreeable than he found it. I do not expect it to be as I have envisioned and imagined it, but I approach it with an open mind and heart and I am willing to be impressed no matter the impression.
We leave tomorrow and won’t be home again until the 8th of June. I’m nervous and excited. While we are gone, Kurt and Julie are taking care of the chickens, the chicks, all the plants, and the gardens and I appreciate that more than I can say. I travel a little easier knowing they are here. The next Potter County Journal won’t appear until we are back from our adventure. I’ll tell you all about it then.
