Roots and Branches

It is fascinating to see how, in moving to another continent, the web of relationships and rituals in my life continues in certain respects, and in others is broken. I could never have predicted how my most treasured relationships would grow deeper, the thread between us stronger, in spite of the distance between us.

Yet in another sense, what I assumed would continue unbroken--certain rituals of daily activity, created over the years and made effortless by repetition--must be recreated here in Paris as if they’d never existed.

The web of relationships continues in Paris. Here I see an acupuncturist, Helen Divov, who was recommended by Dr. Maoshing Ni, my acupuncturist in Los Angeles. Dr. Mao and Helen were trained together some years ago in Los Angeles. After practicing there, Helen fell in love with a Frenchman and moved to Paris.

In our last session, I told her how hard I’m finding it to recreate certain habits here that were second nature a few months ago in the U.S. For instance, stretching in the morning. Lifting weights. Avoiding certain foods that I’ve found are best for me to avoid. Fitting in errands. Getting enough sleep.

It was the same way for her, she said, during her first year in Paris. Her eating habits changed, and her exercise rituals were no longer in place.

Helen sees patients in a small, lovely courtyard apartment in Paris, then spends the weekends at her home in the country. She’s a devoted gardener, and told me a story of how, gardening one day, she noticed that a tree she'd replanted a year earlier had not put out leaves or flowers.

Then, suddenly, during the second year, it was full of green and flowers too. 

She realized that the first year a tree is giving all of its energy into putting down roots. Then it can reach out and up with its branches and leaves. And she saw that it was the same with human beings. In our first year in a new place, most of our energy is invisibly putting down new roots; then we can return to all the ways we’ve found to support our own blossoming.

 

Rub It For Luck

It is good to rub and polish your mind against that of others.—-Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)

Just around the corner from us, and a few blocks west down rue des Écoles (street of the schools), is a tiny public square, named for Paul Panlevé, a mathematician and physicist, and not terribly competent French prime minister, circa World War I.

The square is probably more famous for the life-sized statue of Michel de Montaigne, father of the essay, a rich and distinctive prose form which still enchants writers (and readers) to this day.  The statue of a seated, pensive Montaigne faces the front door of the Sorbonne, across the street, probably the most famous of French colleges, part of the University of Paris since 1257.  It was the Sorbonne and other schools of the early Middle Ages that taught in Latin until the French Revolution, giving our neighborhood its most common appellation, the Latin Quarter.

If you look closely at the Montaigne sculpture, you'll see that his connection to French education continues to this day, if not in the halls of the Sorbonne (we jest, of course he is taught there), at least in urban legend. The statue's bronze foot is worn to a golden patina because students believe it's good luck to rub his foot before an exam.

Are urban legends mere falsehoods, or real lies?

Who can say? But this tradition has crossed the Atlantic, too, at least as far as the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, the second college in the American colonies.  There, students rub the shoe on the marble statue of the bewigged Lord Botetourt, the former English governor, also in the hope of good luck going into a big test or final.

And there's yet another French statue-rubbing tradition, this one in Paris' 20th arrondissement.

A couple of miles northeast of us (a brisk Sunday walk) is Père-Lachaise, Paris' largest cemetery, whose most famous tenant is probably the American singer Jim Morrison.  It also houses (among others) Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Alice B. Toklas, Colette, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret (side by side), Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Edith Piaf, Stéphane Grappelli, Guillaume Apollinaire, Honoré de Balzac, Eugene Delacroix, Gustave Doré, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, etc., etc.

And the writer Victor Noir.

Who?

To make a long story short, Noir (real name Yvan Salmon) was in 1869 a Paris journalist for a Corsican-language newspaper which, by insulting the long-dead Napoleon I, drew for its editor a challenge for a duel from the late emperor's grand-nephew, Prince Pierre Bonaparte, cousin of the then-ruling Emperor Napoleon III. The editor sent Noir and a buddy (both armed) to the prince's house in January, 1870, to work out the duel's terms, but, rather than acting as seconds (a sort of best man, or groomsmen at a duel) they mixed it up verbally with the prince, who, offended at the lack of proper custom, slapped Noir and shot him through the heart.

The prince was acquitted, of course, as he was rich and a Bonaparte, because Noir was armed, and because the prince testified that Noir slapped him first.

Noir was buried in another cemetery, but was later (1891, following the fall of the Third Republic and the Franco-Prussian war) disinterred and reburied in Père-Lachaise, honored with yet another life-sized statue (the French like life-sized statues).  The sculpture, by Jules Dalou, depicts Noir as he fell, flat on his back, top hat next to his right hand.  (And no weapon of any kind visible.)

Now, for some reason, perhaps because the statue is SO lifelike, and Noir was said to be something of a roué, the urban legend arose that rubbing Noir's rather prominent (but discreetly covered) private parts would cause the infertile to become fecund.  In addition, placing a flower in the top hat and kissing his lips would add to the mojo.

Voila, Noir's endowment is burnished gold, just like Montaigne's foot.

Perhaps there is a real scientific study to be done someday by someone who has passed his or her finals at the Sorbonne.  Let them choose their local urban legend and have at it.  Falsehood, or real lie?

Whichever, the Noir-rubbing tradition, too, has crossed the Atlantic to New York.

There doesn't seem to be any reason for it, other than its size and prominence (his penis is about face-level on the average American), but the 12-foot-tall bronze Adam by the Colombian artist Fernando Botero in New York's Time Warner Center is also developing a distinct shade of Noir-gold, thanks to the rubs, pats, and who knows, maybe kisses, of New Yorkers and tourists alike.

Then there's Lincoln's Tomb in Springfield, Illinois, where people touch the tip of the bronze nose of the former president's likeness, also allegedly for luck.  But that's too long a walk from our apartment to investigate.

Castor and Pollux

One of my favorite words, one of those words that exist in one language and are difficult to translate into another, is zeitgeist. In German this means “spirit of the time.” I think it applies not just to an era, a decade, but also a year, and even a day. As I write more about daily life in this Paris journal, I notice more and more that there is a spirit of the day, if you simply pay attention. Often you can’t see it until the day is done, and looking backwards, you notice the pattern, the leitmotif, the zeitgeist.

I usually make the 45-minute walk to see my acupuncturist in the seventh arrondissement. Wednesday, I needed to write a bit longer, so for the first time I took the Métro.

Crossing rue des Écoles, a block from our house, a flock of school children were crossing in front of me. A couple of young women in their 20’s were herding the children across the street. Many of them wore little backpacks, and most of them went two-by-two up Cardinal Lemoine. As I passed, I heard their musical chatter, and then at the front of the flock, saw a couple of boys holding hands. They were close friends, speaking perfect French, little brooks of sparkling clarity. I asked the dark-haired young woman how old the children were.

“Quatre et Cinq,” she said.

Adorable, yet, descending the steps to the Métro, I felt melancholy. These four-year-olds and five-year-olds spoke far better French than I would ever speak. 

           *                       *                            *

I'm always hungry after my acupuncture session, so my ritual is to stop at the Italian trattoria on rue de Sèvres, and have a little pasta or fish. Tonight the Coquilles Saint-Jacques looked exquisite. A place must have ravishing food for me to be willing to stand up at a counter while I’m eating. Here, I stand.

The owner/chef was big-bellied, stolid with black hair and a slow manner. His assistant, a young woman with short red hair and a tattoo on her neck, which after much searching between us in French, English and Italian, I figured out was an elf, had a dancing humor in her eyes and mouth—like a dolphin…or an elf! Just seeing her expression made me happy.

As I waited for my Coquilles Saint-Jacques, I stood behind two boys, maybe twelve years old. They reminded me of the four- or five-year-old boys holding hands, the closeness and innocence of young boys who aren’t embarrassed to show their affection towards one another. They were asking the chef about various dishes with such gastronomic confidence, I was sure they could only be French. I could see how close they were, how similar their body language and voices. I felt a great love towards the two of them, the innocence of boys before the self-consciousness of adolescence begins. And there was some quicksilver lightness about them that was quintessentially French.

Ahh, my Coquilles Saint-Jacques was ready. I placed it on the counter and lifted my fork.

“Pardon,” I heard, and glanced over to see the shorter of the two boys looking up at me with such sweetness in his face that I put down my fork.

“Do you mind,” he asked delicately in French, “if we ask you what nationality you are?”

Oh good, a game. “You must guess!” I said.

The two boys jumped in. “French?” said the smaller one. (That instantly wiped out the melancholy of listening to the children earlier.)

“Noooo,” I said.

“German!” said the taller boy.

“No.”

“Italian?”

“No.”

The red-haired girl was laughing quietly behind the counter, a Celtic elf.   

“Polish!”

“Noo.”

“Spanish!” said the taller one, who stood slightly behind the shorter. Both had John Lennon glasses on, and were slender and sensitive and smart.

I shook my head. “You two seem like twins,” I said. “But not identical.”

“We’re brothers,” said the shorter one.

“And you’re how old?”

I am thirteen.”

“And I am eleven,” said the taller.

“And what is your age difference?”

“18 months!” said the older and shorter.

“Just like my sister and me. We are very close, just like you two.”

They both nodded, Yes, we are.

“Portuguese!” said the younger one.

“Nooo.”

“Wait, let’s slow down,” said the older. “Let’s look at the physiognomy of her face.”

He pondered. “You’re not Chinese.”

“You can see that I’m not,” I said.

“English?”

“Now you’re getting warmer. Some of my ancestors were English long ago.”

The older one looked hesitant. “You won’t get angry if I ask you something?”

“No,” I said.

“I don’t think you’re American because you aren’t obese.”

I laughed. “Well, you’re right and you’re wrong. I am American. And you’re right, there are more obese Americans than French.”

“Because of the fast food?” asked the older.

“Maybe, partly. Do you live in Paris?”

“Yes, we are Parisian.”

“You walk a lot here, so almost no one is fat.”

“Don’t people walk in the United States?”

“Yes, but not as much. We drive a lot. And not everyone is fat. And Americans have many wonderful qualities.”

“Like what?” He asked the question with great delicacy, signaling me that he wasn’t asking this as a challenge, but was just curious.

“Oh, energy, exuberance, spontanei—” I couldn’t get the word out in French.

The younger brother tried one translation, and the older brother corrected him. “No, she means spontaneity.”

The older brother was doing all the interviewing now. I thought of my sister, Jane, and how close we were at these boys’ age, and still are. Also how when we were children, I talked too much, so that she talked too little. Though she’s certainly made up for it since.

“Well,” said the older brother, “you see, we were only thinking of Europe.”

The younger one nodded.

They both noticed that my Coquilles Saint-Jacques was getting cold, and said goodbye. Then turned around at the door and asked, “Do you live in this neighborhood?”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“How often do you come back?”

“Every other Wednesday, about this time. And I always come here for dinner.”

“Well, we’ll see you back here then,” he said, and they turned to go. “Arrivederci,” they called to the Italians behind the counter and slipped out into the street.

“They were adorable!” said elf girl.

“Weren’t they?” I said.

The dish was amazingly good. I’d bring some home for Richard. Plus some of that risotto with lemon.

I ate and thought about these two twin-like brothers, and earlier, the two four or five-year-olds holding hands. The two older boys had such a quicksilver intelligence and sensitivity. What empathy in a boy that age. He knew that a disparaging comment about Americans could very well hurt my feelings, even if it didn’t apply to me. They were sensitive enough to realize that people identify with their nationality and where they live. I thought of adults we know from other parts of the country who didn’t hesitate to make rude remarks about Los Angeles when we lived there.

They made me think of the Celtic roots of French culture, a heritage that traveled up from Crete and Greece through Spain and France and as far north as England. The courtesy, the light intelligence and spiritual sensitivity, it runs through La Chanson de Roland, the troubador tales, Chaucer, Blake, and up to the present time; it is evident in democratic ideals and the courteous treatment of women.

Later, at home, Richard wolfed the Coquilles Saint- Jacques and agreed that they were superb. I looked up the astrological aspects that day, looking for the pattern, the zeitgeist, and saw that the moon was in Gemini. The Dioscuri, the Twins of the zodiac, are ruled by Hermes, who in ancient Egypt was the god Thoth. An ibis-headed god, he was the scribe, the magician, the poet, the one who named things.

In Greek myth, the twins were brothers, boxers and horsemen, who so loved each other that when Castor died, Pollux asked Zeus to let him share his own immortality with his twin, and they were transformed into the constellation of Gemini.

Mercury/Hermes was the favorite god of the Celts, a tribe who were fond of magic and poetry. And these twin-like brothers seemed to me to appear suddenly (as Hermes always does) to offer some magic words: do not despair. You haven’t lost your voice here in France--that was a fine conversation. And making French friends may not be so difficult after all.

Paris: Vision

The following poem is included in a book of photos my sister, Suki, created after a trip to Paris in May 2008. My mother gave her children the gift of a lifetime, a trip to Paris for my four siblings, Jane, Jon, Ann and Suki. I was already here. She arrived needing an eye operation which was scheduled for after she returned home to Arizona. But she is a stoic Norwegian-American Viking, and explored Paris with the five of us, ignoring the pain. By the end of the ten days, she was walking down steep steps, in spite of also needing a hip replacement, which she's since had.

Richard traveled, while my mother stayed in our apartment with me. It was wonderful to be able to market and cook for her, after the thousands of meals she made for the five of us throughout our childhood.

Betty Heimark Kitchell and Kaaren

While my father was alive, he and my mother traveled around the world. After my father died in 2006, my mother was in a stunned state for two years, and said she would never travel again. This was the first trip she made after his death. We all felt his presence with us in Paris.

PARIS: VISION

                  For my mother, Betty Heimark Kitchell

Two eyes

gaze out from the Seine:

the eye of judgment,

the eye of dream.

We cross into the left eye:

Here is where Camille Claudel

wrestled lost love

into faithful stone,

where Baudelaire wove

his poems out of smoke,

where Breton planted

Les Champs Magnétiques.

(Here is the place

on her left eye

that teared up,

preventing her from seeing.)

Here is the Pont St.-Louis where police

tortured a gypsy for a crime--

her mother cursed the bridge

and it crumbled seven times.

We cross into the right eye

where tulips bend their heads

over smaller blooms

in the park named for a pope,

past pink cherry blossoms,

through the Portal of Last Judgment,

and enter Notre-Dame.

(Here is where he and I

lit a votive

beneath the painting of mother and child

and prayed to pagan Demeter

for the health of her eye.)

Here is the Hôtel Dieu,

the first hospital in Paris,

where a drag queen stands in the quadrangle

dressed like Snow White.

Here is the Conciergerie

where Marie Antoinette was locked

before losing her head. (Her judges,

Danton and Robespierre, lost theirs too.)

Here is Sainte-Chapelle, the king's chapel

where 15 windows blaze with blue,

green, gold, red, mauve light,

and stars spangle the ceiling.

Here is where we remember our father's

Four Seasons (blossoms opening, bees

buzzing, horses galloping, snow falling).

Tears spangle our cheeks.

And here is the Square du Vert-Galant,

the old charmer, Henri IV,

most beloved king of France

astride his bronze horse.

Willows hang heavy as lashes

in the corner of the eye

where the bateaux mouches1

depart,

Where she descends

hundreds of steps

and we embark, exultant,

under the bridges of ghostly faces

carved in stone,

our boat sliding

toward the tower of lace

flooded with light.

We have passed

through death, passed

through suffering,

whole.

[1] Open excursion boats that provide visitors to Paris with a view of the city from along the river Seine.

Queen Margot

Henri IV and Margot de Valois, adapted from Wikipedia

I spent the weekend editing the memoir/novel of a friend named Margo, then met her Tuesday night for dinner to discuss the book. It’s called Vagrant, and it will be published soon. It’s the lusty version of Eat, Pray, Love. Do not buy it—I repeat—do not buy it, if you are a puritan. But if you are drawn to Paris, Hawaii, the quest for love and the quest for God, loneliness, beauty, poetry, sex, this is the book for you.

The sun and moon are in Taurus and that made me think of the goddess Aphrodite and lusty women. I’ve heard comments about how decadent the royal wedding of William and Kate was last week, but perhaps these commentators don’t know about the Renaissance Queen Margot, a truly lusty woman. (Again, you puritans can stop reading right now.)

Marguerite de Valois was born May 14, 1553. At the age of 19, she had an affair with Henri de Lorraine, Duc de Guise and wanted to marry him. But her mother, Catherine of Medici, had other plans for Margot.

This was an era of violent wars between Catholics and Protestants, and Catherine thought her daughter’s marriage ought to serve some practical political purpose, such as uniting the two warring religious factions.

On August 18, 1572, Margot was married off to Henri de Navarre, a Protestant Huguenot in Notre Dame Cathedral. Because Henri was not Catholic, he was kept out of the cathedral for most of the ceremony. (And so was his mother, Jeanne, who had just died, probably from putting on a pair of poisoned gloves that Catherine of Medici had given her as a wedding gift.)

Henri and Margot were both passionate people, just not about each other. Soon after their wedding, they took other lovers. But Margot protected Henri from being murdered six days later when Catherine of Medici called on her Catholic supporters to massacre the Huguenots gathered in Paris from all over France for the wedding. This is now known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Mothers-in-law can be difficult.

The two royals continued to protect and support each other, while enjoying busy love lives. But after some years, they grew apart, and Henri wanted to marry Marie de Medici. Queen Margot refused to divorce him, until the king gave her some money and allowed her to keep the title of Queen.

Reconciled to her former husband and his second wife, Marie de Medici, Queen Margaret became a patron of the arts and benefactress of the poor. She often helped plan events at court and nurtured the children of Henry IV and Marie. Rather like Bruce Willis and Demi Moore after their divorce.

Margot was known for her dazzling sense of style and fashion, and was a gifted poet and writer. Her memoir was published after her death in 1615. It was considered absolutely scandalous, and that is no easy thing to do, to scandalize the French.

Since I love outrageous people and lusty women (though you could say that Margot took it too far), some years ago, I wrote this persona poem, in her voice:

L'Hôtel de Sens, in the Marais

QUEEN MARGOT

The French call me Chère Margot.

The doors of L'Hôtel de Sens

had grown too narrow

by the time they released me from prison.

Doorway, L'Hôtel de Sens

At 52, I’d grown stout

and bald, though it hardly mattered,

the declining power of skin balanced

by shapelier soul.

I had blond wigs fashioned

from the locks of my valets’ hair,

had the doors of the palace widened.

Though 18 years, it wasn’t so bad at Usson.

The jailer in my bed each night;

by day my memoir

about my lovers,

and prayers to Saint Jacob for release.         

I’d never had illusions about                        

fairness between women and men.

I “knew love” at age 11,

courtesy of my brother,

the very one who incited the king

to imprison me for “insatiable desire,”

my husband, Henri IV—that’s right,

the one with 52 mistresses.

Life was full again. I built

a little chateau,

Henri remarried, left me alone

with my 20-year-old Count—

but then the 18-year-old carpenter’s son        

arrived from Usson.

I returned from church one day,

my head full of songs for Saint Jacob,

when the Count shot my carpenter                 

before my very eyes.               

Strangle him with my garters! I cried.

They removed his head. He’s the only dead lover          

whose bit of heart is missing from the girdle

strung with lockets round my waist.

I moved to the chateau, finished

the garden convent I’d promised Jacob,

hired 14 Augustine fathers to sing

his praises round the clock.                                        

I wrote all the lyrics and music myself. Jacob

was the only one who stayed with me to the end. 

* 

Richard and I began spending time in Paris every spring after our honeymoon here in 1997. We usually stayed in the apartment of friends, an apartment we now own. From here, we often walked across the Pont des Tournelles to the Marais. And just as you emerge from the Île St. Louis onto the Right Bank, there was a little chateau that intrigued me. I didn’t know why, but I slowed down and lingered in front of it each time we passed it.

A few years later, I finally stopped to read the plaque in front of it. L'Hôtel de Sens, it said. This was the chateau that Henri had provided for Margot when she was released from prison in Usson. Isn’t that strange? A place has a fascination for you and you later discover its connection to someone you’ve written about.

Even later, I was doing research on family names. My father’s middle name was Farrand. I traced it back to the Auvergne region in southern France, Ferrand, which later became the town of Clermont-Ferrand. In the volcanic mountains close by was the chateau Usson, where Margot spent 18 years writing her memoir. Is it possible that places and historical figures have resonance for us because the thread has come down in our DNA from our own ancestors? I think I read that a Ferrand lived in this castle, but I’m not sure. I’ve been looking for this genealogical information today and cannot find it. It may not be much of a link at all.

But the connection keeps coming up. I’ve just read that my new literary paramour, essayist Michel de Montaigne, was friends with Henri IV and Queen Margot. What an intricate web connects us all to one another, all of us, through all time, through books, imagination, DNA, kindred spirits.

(You can learn more about Queen Margot by reading Alexandre Dumas, pere’s 1845 novel, La Reine Margot, or see the 1994 French film La Reine Margot. And Shakespeare’s comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594-5) dramatizes an attempt at reconciliation in 1578 between Margaret and Henri. And Margot is played by Constance Talmadge in D. W. Griffiths’ 1916 film, Intolerance.

 But you'll have to wait until 2012 to read Margo Berdeshevsky's Vagrant.)