Paris to the Moon

The Rules of the Sport

Late last year the French government assembled a committee to choose a name for the vast new stadium that’s being built in a Paris suburb. The committee included an actor, an “artiste,” some functionaries, and even a few athletes. It took a long time deliberating over its choice. Names were submitted: Some people liked the idea of naming the stadium after Verlaine or Saint-Exupery, and lots of others liked the idea of calling it Le Stade Platini, after Michel Platini, the great French soccer player. At last, in December, the committee announced that it had come to a decision, and the government decided to broadcast the verdict on television. The scene was a little like the end of the Simpson trial: the worried-looking jurors filing to their seats, the pause as the envelope was handed to the minister of youth and sports, the minister clearing his throat to read the decision to the nation. The stadium that would represent France to the world, he announced, would be called (long, dramatic pause) Le Stade de France. The French Stadium. “Banal and beautiful at the same time,” one journalist wrote. “Obvious and seductive. Timeless and unalterable.”

It wasn’t hard to detect, beneath the sturdy, patriotic surface of the new name, an undercurrent of ironic, derisory minimalism. The French are prepared to be formally enthusiastic about American-style stadiums and American-style sports, but they are not going to get carried away by it all. This realization first came home to me when I joined a pioneer health club on the Left Bank and spent four months unsuccessfully trying to get some exercise there.

“An American gym?” Parisians asked when I said that I was looking for someplace to work out, and at first I didn’t know what to say. What would a French gym be like? Someone suggested that my wife and I join the Health Club at the Ritz; that was about as French as a gym could get. This sounded like a nice, glamorous thing to do, so we went for a trial visit. I ran out of the locker room and dived into the pool. White legs were dangling all around me—crowded to the edges, as though their owners were clinging to the sides of the pool in fear—and only after I rose to the surface did I see that the owners were all hanging from the edge of the pool, eating tea sandwiches off silver platters. Finally, after we’d done a lot of asking around, someone suggested a newly opening “New York-style” gym, which I’ll call the Regiment Rouge. One afternoon Martha and I walked over to see what it was like and found it down at the end of a long, winding street. The gym was wedged into the bottom two floors of an institutional-looking Haussmann-era building. We went in and found ourselves surrounded by the virtuous sounds of Activity—sawing and hammering and other plaster dust-producing noises. The bruit seemed to be rising from a cavernlike area in the basement. At the top of a grand opera-style staircase that led to the basement were three or four fabulously chic young women in red tracksuits—the Regiment Rouge!—that still managed to be fairly form-clinging. The women all had ravishing long hair and lightly applied makeup. When we told them that we wanted to abonner—subscribe—one of them whisked us off to her office and gave us the full spiel on the Regiment Rouge. It was going to bring the rigorous, uncompromising spirit of the New York health club to Paris: its discipline, its toughness, its regimental quality. They were just in the middle of having the work done—one could hear this downstairs—and it would all be finished by the end of the month. The locker rooms, the appareils Nautilus, the stationary bicycles with electronic displays, the steam baths, the massage tables—everything would be not just a l’americaine but tres New Yorkais. Best of all, she went on, they had organized a special “high-intensity” program in which, for the annual sum of about two thousand francs (four hundred dollars), you could make an inexorable New York—style commitment to your physique and visit the gym as often as once a week.

It was obvious that the once-a-week deal was the winner—the closer, in Mamet language—and that though she had a million arguments ready for people who thought that when it came to forme, once a week might be going overboard, she had nothing at all ready for people who thought once a week might not be forme enough. We asked her if we could possibly come more often than that, and she cautiously asked us what we meant by “often.” Well, three, perhaps four times a week, we said. It was not unknown, we added quickly, apologetically, for New Yorkers to visit a gym on an impulse, almost daily. Some New Yorkers, for that matter, arranged to go to their health club every morning before work. She echoed this cautiously too: They rise from their beds and exercise vigorously before breakfast? Yes, we said weakly. That must be a wearing regimen, she commented politely.

She paused, and then she said, wonderingly, “Ah, you mean you wish to abonner for an infinite number of visits?” After much fooling around with numbers and hurried, hushed conferences with other members of the regiment, she arrived at a price for an infinity of forme. The difference between once a week and infinity, by the way, turned out to be surprisingly small, improvised prices being one of the unpredictable pleasures of Paris life. She opened dossiers for both of us; you can’t do anything in France without having a dossier opened on your behalf.

A week later I dug out my old gym bag, cranked up my Walkman, and set off for the Regiment Rouge. When I arrived, the young women in the red tracksuits were still standing there. They looked more ravishing than ever. I picked out our consultant from the group and told her I was ready to get en forme. “Alas, the work continues,” she announced. I peered down. The renovation seemed to have stopped just where it had been when I saw it before. “The vestiaires and the appareils will now be installed next month,” she said. “However, we are having classes all week long, on an emergency basis, and the Regiment Rouge wishes to make you an award for your patience.” Then she gave me a bag of chocolate truffles. (There is a health food store on the rue du Bac that displays in its window its own brand of chocolates and its own marque of champagne. Tout Biologique! a sign alongside them proclaims virtuously.) I ate one.

A week after that we got a phone call from our consultant. She proudly announced that things were ready at last, and there would be a crepe party in honor of the opening. “We will have apricot jam and creme de marrons,” she explained. We went to the crepe party. Everyone—would-be members and the girls in the red tracksuits—walked around eating stuffed crepes and admiring the pristine, shiny, untouched Nautilus machines and exercise bikes and free weights.

A few days later I went back again to try to use the gym, but on my way into the regimen room I was stopped by another of the girls in red tracksuits. Before one could start work on the machines, she explained, it was necessary that one have a rendezvous with a professeur. When I arrived the next day for my rendezvous, the professeur—another girl in a red tracksuit—was waiting for me in the little office. She had my dossier out, and she was reviewing it seriously.

“Aren’t we going to demonstrate the system of the machines?” I asked.

“Ah, that is for the future. This is the oral part of the rendezvous, where we review your body and its desires,” she said. If I blushed, she certainly didn’t. She made a lot of notes and then snapped my dossier shut and said that soon, she hoped, we could begin.

While all this was going on, I tried to tell Parisians about it, and I could see that they couldn’t see what, exactly, I thought was strange. The absence of the whole rhetoric and cult of sports and exercise is the single greatest difference between daily life in France and daily life in America. Its true that French women’s magazines are as deeply preoccupied with body image and appearance as American ones. Rut they are confident that all problems can be solved by lotions. The number of French ointments guaranteed to eliminate fat from the female body seems limitless, and no pharmacy window is complete without a startlingly erotic ad for the Fesse-Uplift—an electrical buttock stimulator, guaranteed to eliminate fat by a steady stream of “small, not unpleasing shocks administered to the area,” the ad says. Votre Beaute, the Self of France, recently had a special issue on losing weight. There were articles on electrical stimulation, on nutrition (raw carrots will help you lose weight; cooked carrots won’t), on antiobesity pills, and on something called passive exercise. There was also, of course, a long article on reducing lotions. Finally, buried in the back, among the lonely-hearts ads, was a single, vaguely illicit-looking page of workout diagrams. If all else fails.

Among men, an enthusiasm for sport simply segregates you in a separate universe: You are a sportsman or you are not. The idea of sports as a lingua franca meant to pick up the slack in male conversations is completely alien here. The awkwardnesses that in America can be bridged by a hearty “See the Knicks last night?” exist here, but nobody bridges them by talking about sports. Sport is a hobby and has clinging to it any hobby’s slightly disreputable air of pathos. Also, sport is an immigrant preoccupation: Whereas in America it acts as a common church, here it is still low church. There is a daily sports paper here, titled L’Equipe, but it is meant for enthusiasts; Le Monde devotes one or two pages to the subject, and Liberation only a few pages more. Paris has one good soccer team (whereas London alone has six), but you could walk the length and breadth of Saint-Germain and not see a single bit of evidence—not a sign in a window, a pennant in a bar, or a sweater on a supporter—that it exists. France has some terrific footballers, but they play mostly in England and Italy. The nearest thing to a Magic-Michael showdown in France is the affrontements of the French-born players David Ginola and Eric Cantona, but those take place across the Channel, in the North of England, where Ginola plays for Newcastle and Cantona for Manchester United. Still, Ginola and Cantona are regularly dunned by L’Equipe to declare their love of country. “But la France I think of all the time! Not only when I play Manchester! She is in my head and in my heart!” Ginola declared recently. It sounded a little forced to me, but apparently L’Equipe was satisfied. Legend has it that among Frenchmen sex and food are supposed to take the place of sports (“Did you perhaps see the petite blonde with the immense balcon, mon vieux?”), but in fact they don’t. What the French do to bridge the uneasy competitive silences that seem to be the price of a Y chromosome is talk about government and particularly about the incompetence of government ministers; which minister has outdone the others in self-important pomposity is viewed as a competitive event. Though the subject is different, the tone is almost exactly the same as that of American sports talk. “Did you see Leotard on the eight o’clock last night?” one Parisian man might ask another. (The news is on at eight here.) Then they both shake their heads woefully, with that half smile, half smirk that New York men reserve for Mets relief pitchers: beyond pathetic.

If talking about the bureaucracy takes the place of talking about sports, getting involved with the bureaucracy takes the place of exercise. Every French man and woman is engaged in a constant entanglement with one ministry or another, and I have come to realize that these entanglements are what take the place of going to a gym where people actually work out. Three or four days a week you’re given something to do that is time-consuming, takes you out of yourself, is mildly painful, forces you into close proximity with strangers, and ends, usually, with a surprising rush of exhilaration: “Hey, I did it.” Every French ministry is, like a Nautilus machine, thoughtfully designed to provide maximum possible resistance to your efforts, only to give way just at the moment of total mental failure. Parisians emerge from the government buildings on the Ile de la Cite feeling just the way New Yorkers do after a good workout: aching and exhausted but on top of the world.

A few days after my oral interview I went back to the Regiment Rouge, and this time I actually got on one of the stationary bicycles and rode it for twenty-four minutes. I was in full New York regalia (sweatpants, headband, Walkman) and did it in good New York form (Stones blasting in my headphones, crying out, “One minute!” when there was a minute left to go). By now there were other people at the gym, though the man on the bicycle next to me was going at a speed barely fast enough to sustain life, while the woman beside him, who was on a treadmill, was walking at the right speed for window-shopping on the boulevard Saint-Germain on an especially sunny day when your heart is filled with love and your pockets are filled with money; it was as though she had set the machine at “Saunter.”

I got down from my bike perspiring right through my T-shirt—the first person on the Left Bank, I thought proudly, to break a sweat at a gym. I walked back to the desk. “A towel, please,” I panted (in French, of course). The girl in the red tracksuit at the desk gave me a long, steady, opaque look. I thought that maybe I had got the word for towel wrong (I hadn’t, though), and after I asked again and got the same look in return, I thought it wise to try to describe its function. My description sounded like a definition from Dr. Johnson’s dictionary: that thing which is used in the process of removing water from the surfaces of your body in the moments after its immersion. “Ah,” she said. “Of course. A towel. We have none yet.” She looked off into the middle distance. “This,” she said at last, “is envisaged.” I looked at her dumbly, pleadingly, the reality dawning on me. Then I walked all the way home, moist as a chocolate mousse.

A couple of days later I went for what I thought would be my last visit to the Prefecture de Police to get my carte de sejour, a process that had involved a four-ministry workout stretching over three months. The functionary seemed ready to give it to me—she was actually holding it out across the desk—but then she suddenly took one last look at the dossier the prefecture had on me and noticed something that she had somehow missed before.

“Alors, monsieur,” she said, “you have not yet had a physical examination to make sure that you are in sufficiently good health to remain in France.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I belong to a gym,” I said at last, and I showed her my card from the regiment.

“Well,” she said, “this will be useful for your dossier.” I couldn’t argue with that.

The Chill

It was a very cold winter here, and it felt even colder. “It’s the dampness,” every shivering Parisian explained. But really it was something else. A visitor who has walked bareheaded and oblivious through twenty arctic Canadian winters found that, out for a walk in Paris with the temperature in the high thirties, he was pulling a woolen hat over his ears and huddling in doorways and stopping in cafés to drink hot wine and then quickly heading home.

What has made it seem so cold is the French gift for social dramatization: A cold day is a cold day, and everyone conspires to give it presence. Looking cold is also a way of making it plain that you are feeling miserable, a way to dramatize the “economic horror” that has overtaken Paris. In the chill a series of smaller social pageants have been played out, including a hostage taking, a craze for a strange book on economics, a growing conviction that the way out of the crisis is for everyone to stop working, a campaign against immigrants that led to mass civil disobedience by intellectuals, and visits by two foreigners bringing messages of deliverance.

The hostage taking at the Credit Foncier de France, a semi-public, or state-supported, mortgage lender, was the first and the most improbable of the economic dramas. The Credit Foncier was practically bankrupt, and the government decided to fob off parts of it on anybody who wanted bits of a failing bank. Its employees then decided that the best way to persuade the government to reconsider this plan was to go to the top and kidnap the president, a M. Jerome Meyssonier. Not only did M. Meyssonier stay on as a hostage, but he supposedly made it the only condition of his imprisonment that no photographer be allowed to take a picture of him sleeping on a cot in his office. The employees agreed, and even decided to keep the bank open for business while the boss was being held incommunicado. Then they too decided to sleep in the building, presumably as an act of solidarity with the boss they had just imprisoned.

Hostage taking of this kind has become more or less routine here, kidnapping the boss being to the French economic crisis what firing the employees was to the American one. Over the past few years a number of French bosses, including some at Moet et Chandon, have been held hostage. There’s actually a nice word for telling the patron to go to his room and stay there: He is merely being “sequestered,” which, as euphemisms go, seems a fair trade for the Anglo-Saxon downsizing.

The hostage takings, naturally, are almost entirely symbolic: If M. Meyssonier had really wanted to leave, he could have left. The melodrama of the “sequestration” was nonetheless mistaken by some foreign observers for the real thing. It’s easy to exaggerate the scale of the French crisis; the French do it themselves. The secondary, or symbolic, point of an action is often as clear as the primary, or practical, reality, and sometimes a lot clearer. At Christmastime in 1995 many journalists were enthralled by the masses of ordinary people who were out on the streets every day in the tens of thousands, symbolically showing their solidarity with striking Metro drivers. It was easy to miss the real point, which is that what everybody was doing on the streets was walking to work.

One economic problem is especially acute here: Unemployment-or chomage, as it’s called—has hovered around 12 percent for the last two years. Most of the other problems, the ones that create the sense of crisis, are anticipatory. They grow out of the fear that the right-wing government’s tentative attempts at reform will eventually corral France into an “Anglo-Saxon” economy, where an unleashed free market will make everybody do awful jobs for no money, forever. No one is reassured by the stridently triumphal tones of American free-marketers. After a recent trip to New York one French journalist remarked that leafing through a copy of Forbes or Fortune is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship.

These days one popular solution to the economic crisis is for everyone to stop working. The movement to lower the universal retirement age to fifty-five is the closest thing to a mass economic uprising that the country has seen; without the support of even the labor unions, to say nothing of the bemused parties of left or right, it is sweeping the country. It started last November, when striking truck drivers blockaded highways and ports to secure their right to retire at fifty-five. The government, faced with a choice between calling out the army and giving in, gave in. There was a general feeling that social justice had been done:

Truck drivers work long hours, away from their families, and letting them stop for good at fifty-five seemed fair.

Several weeks later people started to realize that after all, the truck drivers’ lot wasn’t that much harder than everybody else’s, and the idea of universal retirement at fifty-five really took flight. In January one of the public transportation unions decided to demand universal retirement at fifty-five, and despite the opposition of the respectable left, by mid-February a poll revealed that almost 70 percent of the population was in favor of stopping work at fifty-five.

The folie for fifty-five can be seen as a nice populist rebound on an idea first put forward by employers. For years businesses had been able to draw on a public fund (the Fonds National pour l’Emploi) in order to encourage workers to take early retirement. At the same time, the idea of reducing the length of the workweek has been debated; many people, for instance, had proposed moving to a four-day week, so that a few young workers might be shoehorned in on Fridays. In the minds of many working people, though, the debate about a shorter workweek got mixed up with the truck drivers’ retirement coup, and the two together produced a sweeping, simple, plausible-sounding solution to the crise: Since the unemployed would benefit if everyone worked a little bit less, wouldn’t they benefit even more if everyone stopped working a lot sooner?

The national craze for early retirement may be an employees’ twist on an employers’ gimmick, but its roots are cultural. Retirement isn’t scary here. In America one unmentioned aspect of the Social Security debate is the feeling people have that to stop working is, in a sense, to stop living. It is the vestibule of death. In France there is no equivalent anxiety—and there are no great Florida-style gulags for the elderly. One of the striking things about Paris is that it is filled with old people who actually look old: bent, fitted out with canes, but dining and lunching and taking the air and walking their small, indifferent dogs along with everybody else. The humiliations visited on old people in America—dressed up like six-year-olds, in shorts and T-shirts and sneakers, imploding with rage—aren’t common here. The romance of retirement is strong. The right-wing daily Figaro, for instance, though editorially opposed to the move for very early retirement, ran a series of pieces about the “young retired”—people still in their forties or fifties who have managed to stop working. The series described people who at last have time to “reflect”; it was written in exactly the same admiring spirit that an American daily might use for a series about old people who are as busy as all get-out.

For Parisians the pleasure of quitting isn’t far to seek. Many of them come from the country—or, at least, feel attached to a particular village—so the idea of returning has a certain appeal. They are not being sent to Florida; they are just going home. People who remain here in town find that life becomes interesting when they stop working. Everyone who attends French public lectures knows that the most visible, and most audible, element in the crowd is the phalanx of the retired. Sometimes they present a bit of a problem, since they tend to be contentious, and when the subject comes within their purview—if it’s the Third Republic, say, or the Second World War—they feel free to speak up and correct the lecturer.

Not long ago somebody referred to the debate on Social Security in America as being distorted by “black helicopter” thinking. In France there is something that might be called “white helicopter” thinking. The American populist belief is that there is a secret multinational agency ready to swoop down from the skies and make everybody work for the government; the French populist belief is that there is a secret government agency that may yet swoop down from the skies and give everybody a larger pension.

L’Horreur Economique, the extreme manifesto of white helicopter thought, is the most successful book of the last several publishing seasons. A treatise by the novelist and essayist Viviane Forrester, it has sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in six months, and in November it won the Prix Medicis, which is a little like a French Pulitzer Prize. Forrester is a minor bellettrist whose earlier work included popular studies of Virginia Woolf and van Gogh. Not surprisingly, in L’Horreur Economique she has produced a work of political economy with all the economics, and most of the politics, left out. Unburdened by pie charts, statistics, or much else in the way of argument or evidence, the book is written in a tone of steady, murmuring apocalyptic dissent, with an occasional perky nod to a familiar neoliberal argument. The total effect is of a collaboration between Robert Reich and Rimbaud. Barely into the first chapter the author flatly announces that the logic of globalization will lead to an Auschwitz of the unemployed. “From exploitation to exclusion, from exclusion to elimination,” she writes. “Is it such an unlikely scenario?”

The reader eventually comes to the realization that Forrester is not arguing against the free market, or even against globalization, but against the original sin of commerce—against buying and selling and hiring and firing and getting and spending. Her book is a pure expression of the old French romance of a radical alternative, with the ancient Catholic prejudices against usury, simony, and the rest translated into a curious kind of dinner party nihilism. Of course, the trouble with reviving the romance of the radical alternative is that the only radical alternative remaining is the extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen, who isn’t romantic at all.

Laurent Joffrin, the editor of the left-wing daily Liberation, likes to say that Forrester’s book is a “symptom.” “The fears are irrational, psychological, but they are real,” he says. He himself is a kind of neo-Keynesian, and like many other sensible people here, he thinks that for all the hysteria, the economic crise is not really very deep and could be soothed by a little deficit spending. But the Keynesian medicine is forbidden by the rules of the Maastricht Treaty, which is to lead to European economic union and which, for the sake of German confidence, prohibits new deficit spending.

In any case, there’s something emotionally unsatisfying about the Keynesian message. It is like going to the doctor in the certainty that you’re dying of tuberculosis, only to be told that your trouble is that your shoes are too tight. In America, and even more so in England, the triumphant free market has a rhetoric, and even a kind of poetry, of its own, visible in the Economist and the Spectator and the Telegraph: witty, trumpet-sharp, exuberant, hardhearted. In France there is a knack of small shopkeeping and a high rhetoric of the state, but there will never be a high rhetoric of shopkeeping.

By the end of February a new social movement was sweeping the papers and the streets. This one came from the left, in reaction to a new bill that attempted to appease Le Pen supporters by jumping up and down on illegal immigrants. The most obnoxious aspect of the Debre bill—named after the interior minister—was a requirement that people who had foreign guests in their homes inform the police when the foreigners left. This provision was so reminiscent of the Vichy laws, which made denouncing Jews a social obligation, that the entire French intellectual class launched a series of petitions against it. Famous artists and directors announced (theatrically, and as a dare-you-to-do-something-about-it principle, rather than as actual fact) that they were lodging illegal immigrants. The petitions flooded the newspapers and were signed by groups: directors, actors, philosophers, and even dentists. A massive demonstration was held, drawing as few as thirty thousand people (the government counting the marchers) or as many as a hundred thousand (the marchers counting themselves).

The provision was immediately withdrawn, but everyone agreed it was depressing that the government had been swayed by Le Pen’s absurd notion that France’s economic problems have to do with the presence of immigrants, legal or illegal. Many people, including numerous petition signers, also thought there was a depressing element of coercive self-congratulation about the marchers. The protest reached its climax when protesters, got up as deportees, arrived at the Gare de 1’Est to reenact the deportations of the forties. This struck even many sympathetic watchers as being in mauvais gout.

On a recent Saturday, at the first children’s concert of the season at the beautiful new Cite de la Musique, the union of part-time artists, which had been threatening to strike over their pension predicament, decided instead to educate the audience. Before a Rameau pastorale began, a representative of the union harangued the five-year-olds for fifteen minutes on the role of itinerant workers in the arts, and about the modalities of their contributions to the national pension fund, and how the government was imperiling their retirement. The five-year-olds listened respectfully and then gave him a big hand.

In the midst of the economic gloom Bill Gates came to France. Not since Wilbur Wright, back in 1908, has an American arrived in France quite so imbued with the mystique of American inventiveness, industry, and technological hocus-pocus. Bill Gates came here with a masterpiece, the Leonardo Codex, and it has gone on display in the Musee du Luxembourg, but his visit seems unlikely to produce a masterpiece, as Wilbur Wright’s did. Wright became the subject of one of the great portraits by the boy genius Jacques-Henri Lartigue, the Mozart of photography, which summed up the early-twentieth-century French view of American technological wizardry; grave, dignified, pure. Bill Gates doesn’t have the bone structure, and anyway, the French cult of Gates is strangely indeterminate. He is described, variously, as the father of the Internet and the creator of popular computing—as anything except what he is, which is the head of a gigantic corporation. He is a symbol divorced from his invention, an aviator without an airplane.

Nonetheless he is presumed to know something. “What France needs is its own Bill Gates,” the governor of the Bank of France announced. Gates’s message to the French, which is essentially that buying Windows will lead to mass happiness, was symbolically linked with that of another celebrated recent visitor, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Habermas is the last of Europe’s “master thinkers,” and he gave a series of lectures at the College de France. His books and lectures have been the subject of reports in Le Monde and L’Express and on the television news. It seems that Habermas has replaced his old theory of the state, which was that there is no natural basis for it outside of a bunch of human conventions, with a new theory, which is that the natural basis for the state is the human habit of arguing about whether or not it has one. The argument is somewhat opaque, but it has produced a nice catchphrase, “social communication.” That, rather than the social contract, is to be the basis of the new society, and a hope now faintly glimmers that between Habermas and Gates—between the German philosopher who tells you that you need only connect and the American businessman who will sell you the software to let you do it—a new, comprehensive social theory is around the corner.

Some people just get fed up waiting. After five days in mostly happy captivity at Credit Foncier, Jerome Meyssonier decided that he’d had enough. “Ca sufit,” the president announced to his employees, and that afternoon he went home. Curiously, he had become, in the interim, a kind of hero to the very people who were keeping him locked up. “Meyssonier is with us!” the employees of the Credit Foncier cried as their boss emerged into the light. (Later in the week they added to that slogan an even better one: “The semipublic will never surrender!”) On television Meyssonier was seen smiling weakly. He looked worn out and about ready to quit, but then perhaps this should not be a surprise. M. Meyssonier is fifty-five.

A Tale of Two Cafés

I have been brooding a lot lately on what I have come to think of as the Two-café Problem. The form is borrowed from the old Three-Body Problem, which perplexed mathematicians late into the nineteenth century, and which, as I vaguely understand it, involved calculating the weird swerves and dodges that three planets worked on each other when the force of gravity was working on them all. My problem looks simpler, because all it involves is the interaction of a couple of places in Paris where you can eat omelets and drink coffee. It’s still pretty tricky, though, because what fills in for gravity is the force of fashion—arbitrary, or arbitrary-seeming, taste—which in Paris is powerful enough to turn planets from their orbits and make every apple fall upward.

I began to brood not long ago, on a beautiful Saturday in October, when I arranged to meet my friend Nicole Wisniak at the café de Flore, on the boulevard Saint-Germain, for lunch. Nicole is the editor, publisher, advertising account manager, and art director of the magazine Egoiste and is a woman of such original chic that in her presence I feel even more ingenuous and American than I usually do, as though pinned to the back of my jacket were a particularly embarrassing American license plate: “Pennsylvania: The Keystone State” or “Explore Minnesota: 10,000 Lakes.”

When we got to the Flore and looked around, upstairs and down, we couldn’t find an empty table—that kind of Saturday—so we went outside and thought about where to go. I looked, a little longingly, at Les Deux Magots, just down the street, on the place Saint-Germain-des-Pres. The two cafés are separated only by the tiny, narrow rue Saint-Benoit. I turned to Nicole. “Why don’t we just go in there?” I said.

A smile, one of slight squeamishness mixed with incapacity, passed across Nicole’s face. “I don’t know,” she said, at a loss for the usual epigrammatic summary of the situation. “We used to go there, I think… twenty years ago….” Her voice trailed off, and again she got a funny smile on her face. She couldn’t say why, but she knew that it was impossible.

A taboo as real as any that Malinowski studied among the Trobriand Islanders kept us out, though why it existed and how it kept its spell I had no idea. Still, one of the things you learn if you live as a curious observer (or as an observed curiosity) on the fringes of the fashionable world in Paris is that the Flore remains the most fashionable place in Paris, while the Deux Magots was long ago abandoned by people who think of themselves as belonging to the world, to ce pays-ci—this country here, as the inhabitants of Versailles called their little fashionable island. Somehow, at some point, in a past that was right around the corner but—to Nicole, at least—was irretrievable, something had happened to make the Café de Flore the most fashionable place in Paris and the Deux Magots the least.

In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation. So, for instance, if your clothes dryer breaks down and you want to get the people from BHV—the strange Sears, Roebuck of Paris—to come fix it, you will be told, first, that only one man knows how it works and he cannot be found (explanation in terms of the gifts of the romanticized individual); next, that it cannot be fixed for a week because of a store policy (explanation in terms of ideological necessity); and, finally, that you are perfectly right to find all this exasperating, but nothing can be done, because it is in the nature of things for a dryer to break down, dryers are like that (futility of explanation itself). “They are sensitive machines; they are ill suited to the task; no one has ever made one successfully,” the store bureaucrat in charge of service says, sighing. “C’est normal.” And what works small works big too. The same sequence that explains the broken dryer also governs the explanations of the French Revolution that have been offered by the major French historians. “Voltaire did all this!” was de La Villette’s explanation (only one workman); an inevitable fight between the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats, the Marxists said (store policy); until, finally, Foucault announced that there is nothing really worth explaining in the coming of the Reign of Terror, since everything in Western culture, seen properly, is a reign of terror (all dryers are like that).

“It’s a good question,” a friend who has been a figure in the French media since the forties, and who eats lunch at the Flore every day, told me when I quizzed him about why, and when, exactly, and how the Flore had outstripped the Deux Magots. We were sitting, as it happened, at the Flore, eating good, wildly overpriced omelets. The downstairs room was as pleasantly red and melancholy as it always is, with its square, rather than round, tables, which give the impression that all the tables are corner tables.

In the week or so since my first inquiry I had been doing some reading. The Deux Magots and the Flore had, I knew, existed beside each other for more than a century. The Flore had long had a white marquee with green lettering, the Deux Magots a green marquee with gilt lettering. The interior of the Flore had always been decorated in red leather—what the French call moleskin—and the Deux Magots in brown. But I had only just learned that like so many timeless things in Paris, they got timeless right after the horror of the Franco-Prussian War. Although there had always been a church at Saint-Germain, the topography of the place Saint-Germain—the square itself—dates back only to the 1870s.

The Deux Magots is the modest inheritor of a silk lingerie store of that name that stood on the spot for decades, until the 1860s, when the growth of the big department stores across the river drove it out of business. The owners eventually rented out the space to a café liquoriste, which kept the name and started serving coffee. No one knows exactly when the two famous statues of Chinese mandarins—the Deux Magots—were installed; Anatole France, in his memoirs, written at the turn of the century, speaks of a big picture of three magots that used to hang in the lingerie store. The Flore, on the other hand, has no prehistory; founded in 1870, it was always a café and was called the Flore because of a statue of the goddess Flora that used to stand outside. Then, in 1880, Leonard Lipp, an Alsatian who had fled the German occupation of his province, opened a brasserie across the street, and the basic topography of the new square was in place.

For many years the Deux Magots was the more famous and fashionable of the two cafés. It was there that Oscar Wilde went to drink after he left England; he died about five blocks away. And it was there that Joyce went to drink Swiss white wine, with everybody except Hemingway, with whom he drank dry sherry, because Hemingway wasn’t everybody. (That’s how Hemingway tells it, anyway.) The presence of so much history ought to be unmanning or even just embarrassing. In Paris it isn’t, not because the past is so hallowed but because it doesn’t seem to be there.

The unsentimental efficiency of French commonplace civilization, of which the French café is the highest embodiment, is so brisk that it disarms nostalgia. History keeps wiping the table off and asking you, a little impatiently, what you’ll have now.

Not until the 1940s—I had learned a lot of this in the course of reading Olivier Todd’s excellent new biography of Camus, one of the big books here this year—did the triangle of the two cafés and the Brasserie Lipp at Saint-Germain-des-Pres become legendary. This was when the group of resistants came into being, and a culture to go with them—when Camus and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as the cliche has it, brooded in one corner of the Deux Magots while Juliette Greco sang sad songs in another. The odd thing is that the cliche is almost entirely true. It was at the Deux Magots, for instance, that Sartre saw his famous philosophical garcon, of whom he wrote, “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly, his eyes express an interest too solicitous for the order of the customer.” (I still get waiters like that.)

Yet fifty years after the classic period, one café is more fashionable than ever and the other is not fashionable at all. You might not see this at once. At the Flore the fashionable people are spread out among the tables rather than concentrated in one spot or area; they occupy the place clandestinely, following the law of Inverse Natural Appeal. The terrasse of the Flore, even on a sunny and perfect day (especially on a sunny and perfect day), is off limits; the inner room, with its red moleskin banquettes, is acceptable; but by far the most OK place to sit is upstairs (I was sitting there now, with my friend), and the banquettes are made of an ugly tan leatherette. (The law of Inverse Natural Appeal is at work: The outlawed terrasse is, as it happens, an extraordinarily pleasant place to sit; the inner room is a very pleasant place to sit; and the upstairs room is reminiscent of the cocktail lounge of a Howard Johnson’s.)

The sounds of the higher French conversation, with its lovely murmur of certainties and, rising from the banquettes, the favorite words of fashionable French people, resonated all around. Perversite, which means “perversity” but is used as a word of praise, suggests something—a book, a dish, a politician—that is aristocratic. C’est normal, which means something like “No problem” and can also refer to any political or literary situation, is different from the American phrase in that its emphasis is not on a difficulty surmounted or evaded but on the return to a familiar, homeostatic atmosphere of comfort: Something that happens may seem unusual (say, the revelation that a former defense minister might have been an East Bloc agent) but, properly understood, is not shocking at all; it’s normal, even if a little deplorable. And from table after table, like the sound of a tolling bell, rises the connective donc, which just means “so” or “therefore,” but, when used in literary and worldly conversation, and rung with sufficient force, means “It must therefore follow as the night the day” and always sounds to me as conclusive as Gideon’s trumpet.

“But it all has to do with the character of two men, Boubal and Cazes,” my friend said. Paul Boubal was the owner of the Flore from 1939 to 1983—he died five years later—and Roger Cazes was the owner not of the Deux Magots but of the Brasserie Lipp, across the street. “That is to say, both Gazes and Boubal were from the Auvergne—they were countrymen—and though each thought the other was running a sneaky business, each respected the other and frequented the other’s place. This produced, in the fifties, a natural compact, a kind of family feeling between the two places. I mean family feeling in the real sense—of dependence and suspicion and resentment. The owner of the Deux Magots was a much more timid fellow. He was left out of the compact.” So the real force working was that of the Lipp; it was the third planet, perturbing the orbits of the two others.

There it was, the explanation in terms of the romantic individual in almost perfect form, along with the bonus of a touch of terroir, the French affection for a bit of native land. Then someone suggested that I speak to the essayist and editor Jean-Paul Enthoven, who is the author of the season’s most winning collection of literary essays, Les Enfants de Satume. Enthoven, I was told, would be sure to have an explanation; he could explain anything Parisian.

“Here is my hypothesis,” he announced when I reached him on the phone at his office, at the publishing house of Grasset. “You must go back to the twenties and thirties, when the Flore became identified with the extreme right and the Deux Magots, by default, with the left. Charles Maurras, the founder of Action Francaise, used the Flore as his home base.” Maurras was simultaneously one of the most important stylists in French literature—a member of the French Academy, and a crucial influence on T. S. Eliot, among other modernists—and a right-wing anti-Semite. “Before it was anyone else’s place, it was Maurras’s. His most famous polemic was even named after the café: ‘Au Signe de Flore.’ Maurras was a malevolent force, in that everything he touched was simultaneously disgraced and hallowed.”

Enthoven went on to say, “This meant that by the time of the occupation, when Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir came to Saint-Germain and began their resistance, they had to avoid the Flore like a plague, since it had been contaminated by Maurras. But then the tourists began to crowd into the Deux Magots in order to look at Sartre and de Beauvoir. The place became overcrowded, and eventually the intellectuals noticed the emptiness of the Flore next door. By then Maurras was gone, the occupation had passed, and confronted with a choice between the pollution of Maurras and the pollution of tourism, the intellectuals chose to remake the emptiness rather than abide with the many. So they went across the street and have never returned.” He stopped for a second, as if readying himself for an aphorism, and then said, “The Deux Magots was sacralized by Sartre, desacralized by the tourists, and then left vacant by history.” Eighteen-seventy, 1940, I thought. Like so many lovely things in Paris, the two cafés were given shape by the first German invasion and then in one way or another were deformed by the second.

It was left to another, more dour friend to supply the futility-of-explanation explanation, over coffee at a lesser, more despairing café—neither fashionable nor unfashionable, just a place where you go to talk. “There is nothing to explain here,” he said. “The explanation is a simple, Saussurean one.” He was referring, I realized after a moment, to the father of modern linguistics, who was the first to point out that signs get their meanings not by being like the things they stand for but by being different from other signs: A sign for black means black because it isn’t like the sign for white.

“The fashionable exists only in relation to something that is not that way,” he went on. “The relationship between the modishness of the Flore and the unmodishness of the Deux Magots isn’t just possibly arbitrary. It’s necessarily arbitrary. If you place any two things side by side, one will become fashionable and the other will not. It’s a necessity determined by the entire idea of fashion. A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it’s in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely. That’s the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful—they are goddesses—and yet a man must choose. And what was the chooser’s name? Paris. C’est normal.”

Distant Errors, Christmas Journal 2

My fax machine, which was made by the French state, always blames someone else when things go wrong. It is a Galeo 5000 model, and it is made by France Telecom and is therefore an official, or French government, product; even its name carries with it the nice implication that 4,999 other models were attempted before perfection was at last achieved by the French fax machine ministry.

You even have to go to a government telephone outlet to buy a new ribbon for it. It’s a plain paper fax (you have the same expression in French, papier ordinaire, ordinary paper) with all the usual features. It’s really very nicely designed—much better designed than its American equivalents, with that streamlined, intelligent Philippe Starck look that the French seem magically able to give to everything they make. It’s reasonably efficient too—perhaps a little overtricky in loading in the sheets and unduly inclined to bourrage de papier, paper jams—but still…

It has a little glowing window on its face where it affiches, or posts, the events and troubles of its day, its operating life. The window flashes, for instance, a shocked, offended Pas d’iden-tite!—no identity!—when the fax machine at the other end doesn’t “identify itself,” which for some reason or another most American machines don’t seem to.

But the favorite, all-purpose affiche of my fax machine is erreur distante—distant error—which it affiches all the time, no matter where the error actually originates, far away or right in its own backyard. Whether the error comes from a fax machine in Lille or Los Angeles, it says that it is a distant error. When the machine itself has run out of paper, it is still a distant error. When I have forgotten to clean the ribbon heads, an error has nonetheless taken place, at a distance. Jams and overflows, missed connections, and faulty plugs: all are erreurs distantes. When it really is a distant error, it is still just another distant error. This is the French fax machine’s way of getting through life. The error is distant; the problem lies someplace else; there is always somebody else to blame for your malfunctions.

French intellectuals and public people, I have on certain occasions come to the mordant, exasperated, and gloomy conclusion, share the same belief, affiche the same accusatory message, banding together and flashing erreur distante, whenever they run out of paper or ink or arguments. This morning, for instance, I saw the economist Emmanuel Todd being interviewed about his book on the economic “stagnation” of industrialized economies. He blandly announced that the U.S. economy was just as stagnant as France’s, in fact was worse because its “cultural level” (by which he meant the level of education) was so much more depraved. Also, the United States manufactured less than it once had. Economic stagnation was the problem of all the industrialized economies, France was simply sharing in it, and the United States was really to blame. His debating opponent, an intelligent economist named Cohen—very poorly dressed in a brightly colored blazer and bad tortoiseshell glasses—tried to explain that this wasn’t so, that the fall in manufacturing was in fact a sign of the renovation of the American economy, and that whatever its flaws in equality, the growth in America was real, that the one thing you couldn’t call the American economy was stagnant. Todd, who looked terrific, hardly bothered to argue with him; he just made the same assertions again: The American economy is stagnant. He just affiched, like my fax machine erreur distante, and the host, terrified, nodded.

A while ago I was on a panel broadcast for France-Culture, the radio station, at the Sciences Po, the great political science school, along with Philippe Sollers and other French worthies, and we talked about the influence of American culture on France. Everyone took it for granted that the American dominance in culture was a distant error or, rather, a distant conspiracy organized by the CIA and the Disney corporation. (I was there, the sole American on the panel, to be condescended to as the representative of both Michael Eisner and William Colby, with mouse ears on my head and a listening device presumably implanted inside them.) The cliches get trotted out—that Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists got put over by the CIA, etc.—with a complacent certitude, and it was taken for granted that the relative decline of the prestige of French writing and painting has nothing to do with the actual decline of the quality of French writing and painting. (And yet when we got down to particulars, much of these prejudices vanished: Sellers and I actually had a reasonable debate about Roth and Updike. No American Sellers would have been able to name two French novelists, much less debate their value.)

What was maddening was not the anti-Americanism, which is understandable and even, in its Asterix-style resistance to American domination, admirable. What is maddening is the bland certainty, the lack of vigilant curiosity, the incapacity for critical self-reflection, the readiness to affiche erreur distante and wait for somebody else to change the paper.

A wise man, an old emigre artist, when I told him, gaily, that we were going to move to Paris, said soberly, even darkly: “Ah. So you have at last decided not to forgo the essential Jewish experience of emigration and expatriation.” I thought it was a joke, a highly complicated, ironic joke, but still a joke, since what could be less traumatic, in the old-fashioned emigre’s sense, less Cioran and Benjamin and Celan, than moving to Paris with a baby? But of course, what he said was true, or contained a truth. The reality is that after a year here everything about moving to Paris has been wonderful, and everything about emigrating to France difficult. An immigrant is an immigrant, poor fellow: Pity him! The errors arrive, and they tell me I brought them with me.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped. Martha, the other day, spent the morning watching Luke open and shut the little gates that lead into the interior gardens at the Palais Royal. He would open the gate, she explained, walk through, watch it shut, and then walk back through again, with the rows of violet flowers in the background. She felt, she said, as if she had died and gone to heaven—but with the strange feeling that dying and going to heaven mean parting, leaving, and missing the people you left behind on earth. No wonder ghosts at seances are so blandly encouraging; they miss you, but they are busy watching someone else.

There is the feeling of being apart and the feeling of being a universe apart—the immigrant’s strange knowledge that the language and lore that carry on in your own living space are so unlike the ones right outside. (This is particularly true of our odd Canadian-American-Jewish-Sri Lankan-Franco-American menage, with the two-year-old at its center.) There is also the odd knowledge, at once comforting and scary, that whatever is going on outside, you are without a predisposed opinion on it, that you have had a kind of operation, removing your instant reflexive sides-taking instinct. When French politicians debate, I think, well, everybody has a point. After a year the feeling that everything was amusing, though, bombs and strikes an act in the Winter Circus, does begin to fade, to seem less amusing in itself. When Le Canard Enchatne, the satiric paper, comes out on Wednesday mornings, I buy it and generally enjoy, am even beginning to understand, most of the jokes and digs; what was largely incomprehensible to me at first is now self-evident: who is being mocked for what and why.

But I don’t actually care about who is being mocked. I am simply pleased to register that what I am reading is mockery. And the slightly amused, removed feeling always breaks down as you realize that you really don’t want to be so lofty and Olympian—or rather, that being lofty and Olympian carries within it, by tradition and precedent, the habit of wishing you could be down there in the plain, taking sides. Even the gods, actually looking down from Olympus in amusement, kept hurtling down to get laid or slug somebody.

After a first winter in Paris, when the lure of the chimney and cigar smell holds you in thrall, you become accustomed to them, and then all you notice is the dark. From November to April, hardly a single day when you see the sun. The light itself is beautiful, violet and gray, but it always looks as if it were planning to snow, and then it never does.

We had the seasonal pleasure of buying a (by Canadian standards, insanely overpriced) Christmas tree. We bought it from a Greek tree-and-plant dealer on the Ile de la Cite. It’s a nice tree, a big fir, green and lush, but, at our insistence, without that crazy wooden cross that the French insist on nailing to the bottoms of their Christmas trees, so that you can’t give them water. Ours is open, with a fresh cut, and sits in its watery pedestal, a red-and-open tripod, which we brought all the way over from Farm and Garden nursery down on Franklin Street in TriBeCa.

The logic (or fantasy) of the wooden cross on the bottoms of the trunks of the French Christmas trees, as the bemused dealer explained it to me, is that it “seals” off the tree’s trunk and keeps the sap inside, keeps it from drying out. The opposed American logic, our logic, of course (or is it our fantasy too?), is that an open cut will keep a dead and derooted tree “fresh” for as long as you need it, for as long as you give it water and the season lasts.

Or is the cut cross, after all, really a kind of covert, symbolic, half-hidden reminder on the part of a once entirely Catholic country of the cross-that-is-to-come, of the knowledge that even Christmas trees can’t be resurrected without a miracle? Americans persuade themselves that a dead tree is still fresh if you keep pouring water on it; here there is a small guilty stirring of Catholic conscience that says, “It’s dead, you know, the way everything will be. You can seal it up, but you can’t keep it going. Only a miracle will bring it back to life.”

Naturally none of the Christmas tree garlands I bought last year works this year. Though Martha packed them away neatly when we took the tree down, they have managed to work themselves into hideous tangles, the way Christmas lights always do. If the continued existence of the Christmas tree light garlands, even though they’re obviously impractical compared with strings, is proof of the strength of cultural difference, their ability to get themselves tangled is just as strong proof of cultural universality. The strands did it in New York, the garlands do it here, and there is no explaining how they do. The permanent cultural differences are language, the rituals of eating, and the habits of education; the permanent cultural universals are love of children and the capacity of Christmas lights left in a box in a closet to get themselves hopelessly tangled in knots.

The American Christmas came to Paris while I was away in New York; Halloween came this year for the first time, right while we were watching, right under our noses. Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin couldn’t have been more shocked, more pleased than we were to see Halloween rising before us like a specter, an inflate raft. The shops were suddenly filled with pumpkins and rubber masks and witches and ghost costumes and bags of candy. Apparently the American Halloween has been sneaking up bit by bit for a little while, but everyone agrees that this year the whole thing has really happened, and for the most obvious of reasons: It is a way for small shopkeepers to sell stuff before Christmas comes. Le Monde, sensing this brisk commercial motive, published a piece about the coming of Halloween, predictably indignant.

The essentially creepy, necrophile nature of the holiday, invisible to Americans, was harder to hide from the French. Our friends Marie and Edouard, whose two children, Thomas and Alexandra, live across the courtyard, were dubious: The children dress up as the dead and the horrific and then demand sweets at the price of vandalism? The pleasure is located where exactly? Our friend Cassie says that her French mother-in-law, seeing the grandchildren dressed up as skeletons, let out a genuine shriek of distaste.

Of course, it is incumbent on Americans to reassure, gently, that it is not really a holiday of the dead at all, that like all American holidays, it is a ritual of materialism, or, to put it another way, of greed, a rite designed to teach our children that everything, even death, ends with candy. It is just fun. Fun is the magic American word (Our motto “Let’s have fun!” is met by the French motto “Let’s be amused.”) Though Halloween arrived and caused parties and sales, the tradition of trick-or-treating has not really caught on here, and so Martha and several other mothers decided to have a Halloween party in her friend Cassie’s apartment, where the mothers hid behind doors, so that the children could knock and get their candy. It was trick-or-treating made into an indoor sport. The French children in the party, she tells me, just didn’t get it. What was the point, the French children, disconsolate as ghosts and skeletons and witches, seemed to wonder, waiting behind their doors, to be all dressed up, with nowhere to go?

Luke has mounted up onto the horses on the carousel this year, although he needs to be tied on, like a parcel. To my delight, though not really to my surprise, I discovered this year that the carousel has been turning in the same manner, offering the same game, and drawing the same bemused, fascinated attention of foreigners for at least seventy-five years. I found a passage in the travel writing of Joseph Roth, the German novelist, who visited the Luxembourg Gardens in 1925 and wrote about the “maneges de chevaux de bois pour enfants.” He describes the rings and sticks, exactly as they are today: “The owner of the merry-go-round holds in his hand, at the end of a stick, little rings lightly hung and easy to detach. All the children on the horses and in the tiny cars are armed with wands. So that when they pass before the rings, they try to unhook them, which is to say slip them onto their wand. Whoever gets the most gets a prize. They learn quick action, the value of the instant, accelerated reflexes, and the trick of adjusting ones eye.” “The value of the instant…” Doubtless Cartier-Bresson and the rest of the decisive moment” photographers rode on such horses, caught their rings, learned there’s only one right moment in which to do it.

Roth admired the game endlessly, because it seemed so un-German, such a free and charming way to educate, without the military brutality of Teutonic schools. The funny thing is that there are now no more prizes—the same game, same carousel, but no more prizes. Nothing left to teach. You get the ring for the pleasure of having taken it. I wonder which child when won the last prize.

The differences are tiny and real. Cultures don’t really encode things. They include things, and leave things out. There is, for instance, the exasperation of lunch. Lunch, as it exists in New York, doesn’t exist here. Either lunch is a three-course meal—i.e., dinner, complete with two bottles of wine—or else it is to be had only at a brasserie, where the same menu—croque monsieur, omelet, salad Nicoise—is presented almost without any variation at all, as though the menu had been decreed by the state. A tuna sandwich, a bran muffin, a bowl of black bean soup—black bean soup! Yankee bean! Chicken vegetable! It is soup, beautiful soup, that I miss more than anything, not French soup, all pureed and homogenized, but American soup, with bits and things, beans and corn and even letters, in it. This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch. So on Sundays I have developed the habit of making soup for the week, from the good things we buy in the marche biologique on the boulevard Raspail. Soup and custard on Sunday nights, our salute to the land of the free.

My favorite bit of evidence of the French habit of pervasive, permanent abstraction lies in the difficulties of telling people about fact checking. (I use the English word usually; there doesn’t seem to be a simple French equivalent.) “Thank you so much for your help,” I will say after interviewing a man of letters or politician. “I’m going to write this up, and you’ll probably be hearing from what we call une fact checker in a couple of weeks.” (I make it feminine since the fact checker usually is.)

“What do you mean, une fact checker?”

“Oh, it’s someone to make sure that I’ve got all the facts right, reported them correctly”

Annoyed: “No, no, I’ve told you everything I know.”

I, soothing: “Oh, I know you have.”

Suspicious: “You mean your editor double-checks?”

“No, no, it’s just a way of making sure that we haven’t made a mistake in facts.”

More wary and curious: “This is a way of maintaining an ideological line?”

“No, no—well, in a sense I suppose…” (For positivism, of which New Yorker fact checking is the last redoubt, is an ideological line; I’ve lived long enough in France to see that move coming….)

“But really,” I go on, “it’s just to make sure that your dates and what we have you quoted as saying are accurate. Just to be sure.”

Dubious look; there is More Here Than Meets the Eye. On occasion I even get a helpful, warning call from the subject after the fact checker has called. “You know, someone, another reporter called me from the magazine. They were checking up on you.” (“No, no, really checking on you,” I want to say, offended, but don’t—and then think he’s right: They are checking up on me too; never thought of it that way, though.) There is a certainty in France that what assumes the guise of transparent positivism, fact checking,” is in fact a complicated plot of one kind or another, a way of enforcing ideological coherence. That there might really be facts worth checking is an obvious and annoying absurdity; it would be naive to think otherwise.

I was baffled and exasperated by this until it occurred to me that you would get exactly the same incomprehension and suspicion if you told American intellectuals and politicians, postinter-view, that a theory checker would be calling them. “It’s been a pleasure speaking to you,” you’d say to Al Gore or Mayor Giuliani. “And I’m going to write this up; probably in a couple of weeks a theory checker will be in touch with you.”

Alarmed, suspicious: “A what?”

“You know, a theory checker. Just someone to make sure that all your premises agree with your conclusions, that there aren’t any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream—that kind of thing.”

“What do you mean?” the American would say, alarmed. “Of course they do, I don’t need to talk to a theory checker.”

“Oh, no, you don’t need to. It’s for your protection, really. They just want to make sure that the theory hangs together….”

The American subject would be exactly as startled and annoyed at the idea of being investigated by a theory checker as the French are by being harassed by a fact checker, since this process would claim some special status, some “privileged” place for theory. A theory checker? What an absurd waste of time, since it’s apparent (to us Americans) that people don’t speak in theories, that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of theoretical constancy is an absurd denial of what conversation is.

Well, replace fact (and factual) for theory in that last sentence, and you have the common French view of fact checking. People don’t speak in straight facts; the facts they employ to enforce their truths change, flexibly and with varying emphasis, as the conversation changes, and the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of pure factual consistency is an absurd denial of what conversation is. Not, of course, that the French intellectual doesn’t use and respect facts, up to a useful point, any more than even the last remaining American positivist doesn’t use and respect theory, up to a point. It’s simply the fetishizing of one term in the game of conversation that strikes the French funny. Conversation is an organic, improvised web of fact and theory, and to pick out one bit of it for microscopic overexamination is typically American overearnest comedy.

“Does this bus go across the river?” the man from Chicago demands of the Parisian bus driver, who looks blank. “I said, this bus goes across the river, or doesn’t it?” I myself have been in this position, of course, more times than once, in Venice and in Tuscany, but (I choose to believe, at least) I try to make up for it with the necessary abasing looks of ignorance and sorrow and multitudes of thank-yous and head ducks, as the Japanese do here. The American in Paris just demands, querulously—“Now, you remember that pastry I showed you in the window. Now, I want that one”—in English, and expects the world to answer.

Sometimes the French response is muttered and comic. “Hey, does this bus go across the river?” the woman from California says, mounting onto the steps of the 63. “I wouldn’t come to your country and not speak in your language,” the driver says, in French. A sensitive listener would detect some frost in the manner, but the American woman doesn’t: “No—I asked you, does this bus go across the river?” Or, worse, Americans ordering in English at French menus, specifying precisely, exigently, what they want in a language the waiters don’t speak.

For it turns out that there is a Regulon in the Semiosphere stronger even than the plug, more agile than the fish. It’s language. Language really does prevent signs or cultures from going universal. For all the endless articles in the papers and magazines about the force of globalization and international standardization, language divides and confuses people as effectively now as it ever has. It stops the fatal “exponentiality” of culture in the real world as surely as starvation stops it in the jungle. It divides absolutely, and what is really international, truly global, is, in this way, very small.

The real “crisis” in France in fact is not economic (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) or even cultural (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) but linguistic. French has diminished as an international language, and this will not end. When people talk about globalization, what they’re really saying is that an English-speaking imperium now stretches from Adelaide to Vancouver, and that anyone who is at home in one bit of it is likely to feel at home in the other bits. You can join this global community by speaking English yourself, but that’s about all. The space between the average Frenchman (or Italian or German) and the average American is just as great as it’s ever been, because language remains in place, and it remains hard. Even after two years of speaking French all the time, I feel it. We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Yet there is a kind of authority associated with the American presence right now that is both awe-inspiring and absurd. At the Bastille Day fireworks, for instance, over on the champ-de-Mars, there is always a nice big picnic feeling, but no one pays minimal respect to the notion that people ought not to stand up in front of other people when other people are trying to watch fireworks. As happens so often in France, it is a designated bacchanal, like the playground in the Luxembourg Gardens. At the Bastille Day on the champ-de-Mars this July, in the midst of the anarchy—over on the fringes, of course, there were flies, gendarmes, busy arresting the vendors of those glow-in-the-dark necklaces; now, there was a real crime—a single American woman rose to bring order to the multitudes. She was the kind of big-boned East Coast woman you see running a progressive day camp, or working as the phys ed instructor at Dalton or Brearley, high-flown but (as she would be the first to tell you) down-to-earth. She just started ordering people around: Sit down, you down there (all this in English, of course), now make room so the little kids can see etc. And people, at least the few hundred in earshot, actually did it. They obeyed, for a little while anyway.

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

It is, still, amazing to see how vast a screen the differences of language can be—not an opaque but a kind of translucent one. You sort of see through it, but not quite. There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston), is engaged to an American, whom we never see but who’s called Hal—like Falstaff’s prince, like a good high Englishman. That English H, though, was completely inaudible to the French translator who did the subtitles, and so throughout the film the absent lover is referred to in the subtitles as Al—Al like a stagehand, Al like my grandfather. If you have the habit of print addiction, so that you are listening and reading at the same time, this guy Al keeps forcing his way into the movie. “But what shall I say to Hal—that I have never loved him?” Patricia says to Fred. Down below it says, “Et Al—qu’est-ce que je vais lui dire?”

My other favorite subtitle was in some contemporary comedy that we went to see—we see about a movie every six months, where once I saw three a day—in which there was a reference to American talk shows. “And what do you want me to do: go on Oprah, Geraldo, or Sally Jessy?” the character asked. The translator did fine with Oprah and Geraldo but could make nothing of the last, so Sally with her glasses became a non—non sequitur question. “Oprah, Geraldo—et sale est Jesse?” the subtitle read—Oprah, Geraldo—and Jesse is dirty?” This network of distant errors obviously occludes itself in front of us all the time, every day, and mostly we don’t know it.

There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a counter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Telecom who won’t give you the fax ribbons that are there on the counter in front of her because she can’t find them on the computer inventory; the chair restorer who looks at your beautiful Thonet rocker and then announces, sniffily, that it isn’t worth his time; the woman who sells you a poster and then announces that she has no idea where you might go to frame it; the bus driver who won’t let an exhausted pregnant woman off the front door of the bus (you’re supposed to exit from the rear) from sheer bloody-mindedness. It affects Martha much less than me, leading me to suspect that it is essentially a masculine problem. My trouble is that I think like a Frenchman: I transform every encounter into a competition in status and get enraged when I lose it. As Cioran said, it’s hard for me to live in a country where everyone is as irascible as I am.

At the same time, I find myself often reduced to an immigrant helplessness. We went to BHV, for instance, earlier this year to frame our Paris to the Moon engraving. I have had it up in my study, an icon to write under. There’s a nice do-it-yourself framing shop up there, and lacking a framer to go to, we thought we just ought to, well, do it ourselves. Back in New York we knew a framer who did our frames, and I prided myself, within limits, on having learned a thing or two about what made the right edge for the right picture. We began to sort around with simple white mats and black wooden frames. As we were doing it, a lady came up to us: a Frenchwoman in her seventies, with pearls and a strong jaw and silver hair. She had a couple of handsome flower prints that she was framing for herself. “No, no, children,” she said. “You are doing that quite incorrectly. This, you see,” she said, “is a nineteenth-century print. It needs a nineteenth-century mat, a nineteenth-century frame.” She took the white-and-black frame away from us—put them right back—and chose a cream mat and a fake, “antiqued” gold frame. “There,” she said. “That is the French nineteenth century,” she said, and took the frame and the print and the mat all up to the counter for us. We looked at each other sheepishly and went ahead and bought them. I used to know something about art, or thought I did, I muttered to myself, all the way home. The print actually looks pretty nice in its gold frame. When I remember the moment now, I remember my utter helplessness and how she smelled of a wonderful tea-rose perfume.

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.

Since then we go once a week to play pinball, always prefaced by a trip first to the Musee d’Orsay to look at the funny faces (while Daddy seethes at the nineteenth-century academicians and the small boy counts the minutes to the Courier de Lyons.) The funny thing is that the café changes the pinball machine every month or so, and it is always, always, an American machine with an American theme. Each machine has an automated bonus, something weird that happens if you get enough points, and there is something rapt and lovely, in this day of virtual everything, about the clockwork nightingale mechanicalness of the pinball machines, about the persistence of their metallic gears and simple slot-and-track devices. So far we have been through major-league baseball, Star Wars (Hans Solo gets blasted into that carbon sheet), Jurassic Park (an egg glows and opens, and a baby dinosaur appears), Gopher Golf (a kind of parody golf, with little chipmunks that jump up, bucktoothed), and, our favorite, Monster Bash (Dracula comes out of his coffin, on a little metal track; Frankenstein, to the accompaniment of suitably stormy music—the lights on the machine actually first go off, a lovely touch—sits up). All the instructions on the machines are in English, of course, as are all the details. (“I love these machines, compared to video games,” another aficionado at the café said to me once, sincerely, as we scored big and watched Dracula creaking out on his mechanical track. “They are, well, so real.”)

We go once a week, always get the same grenadine-coffee-pie combo, leave a ten-franc tip; I am sure that it is illegal for a three-year-old to play pinball, and I am paying protection. After a month or so, though, I noticed something odd. When we began to play, I would always discreetly drag a café chair over from the table and put it alongside the machine for him to stand on. But after we had done this five or six times, over five or six weeks, I noticed that someone had quietly tucked that small café chair under the left flipper, for Luke to stand on. The chair, the little bistro chair, was pushed under the pinball machine, on the left, or Lukeish, side. There was no talk, no explanation; no one mentioned it, or pointed it out. No, it was a quiet, almost a grudging courtesy, offered to a short client who came regularly to take his pleasure there. Nothing has changed in our relation to that café: No one shakes our hands or offers us a false genial smile; we pay for our coffee and grenadine as we always have; we leave the tip we have always left. But that chair is always there.

Papon’s Paper Trail

Bordeaux is the town where France goes to give up. It was where the French government retreated from Paris under fire from the Prussians in 1870, and again from the kaisers armies in 1914, and where, in June 1940, the French government fled in the face of the German advance and soon afterward met not just the fact of defeat but the utter depth of France’s demoralization. A. J. Liebling wrote of those days that “there was a climate of death in Bordeaux, heavy and unhealthy like the smell of tuberoses.” He recalled the wealthy men in the famous restaurants like the Chapon Fin, “heavy-jowled, waxy-faced, wearing an odd expression of relief from fear.” Though the bad peace was ruled from the spa town of Vichy, Bordeaux is the place that gave the surrender its strange, bitter, bourgeois character: a nation retreating from cosmopolitan Paris back to la France profonde.

Bordeaux has always been a trench coat—and—train station, 1940s kind of town, and despite the mediocre, concrete modern architecture it shares with nearly all French provincial capitals, it remains one. The Chapon Fin is still in business, but it is not deathlike—merely nervous and overwrought, in the way of French provincial restaurants since the capitalists trimmed down and the only market left was German tourists.

In the spring of 1998, Bordeaux was invaded again, this time by battalions of lawyers, broadcasters, historians, and journalists, who had come to attend or participate in the trial of Maurice Papon—the former secretary-general of the Gironde, of which Bordeaux is the capital—for complicity in crimes against humanity fifty-five years ago, during the occupation. The Papon trial was the central, binding event of the past year in France, a kind of O.J. trial, without television or a glove. It was the longest, the most discouraging, the most moving, at times the most ridiculous, and certainly the most fraught trial in postwar French history.

On the last day of the trial, Wednesday, April 1, the invasion of the media became an occupation; what seemed like every European journalist resident in France, and a lot of Americans too, descended on the little square outside the Palais de Justice. The convenience of having La Concorde, a stage-set grand café right across from the Palais (doors open to the spring weather, bottles of good wine lined up on the wall), gave the end of the trial a strangely hilarious, high-hearted, yet self-subduing party spirit—a combination of Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party and the Nuremberg trials.

Despite the mob, the national allegiance of every journalist was instantly recognizable. French journalists wear handsomely tailored jackets and share with English rock guitarists the secret of eternal hair: It piles up. Americans, rumpled and exhausted before the day begins, seem to be still longing for Vietnam. Even walking up and down the steps of the palais, they looked as though they were ducking into the backwash of a helicopter rotor, weighed down by invisible dog tags. What really depressed them was the knowledge that their stories about the proces Papon would sneak into the paper only “between blow jobs,” as one said bitterly. The British alone were exhilarated, bouncing around in bad suits. They all speak French, they all knew they would be on the front page, and secretly they knew too that their readers would not be completely unhappy with a story whose basic point was that all foreigners were like that.

The great Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld waited outside the courthouse too. He is in his sixties, spreading at the middle, and was dressed in a black jacket and cloth cap. “If Papon is found guilty, then the appareil of the state will be held responsible,” he was saying to another journalist. “The French people will be saying that there is a limit, you must act on your conscience, even if you are a man motivated not by hatred but by procedures.” Behind him, members of his group, the Association of Sons and Daughters of the Deported Jews of France, were reading out the names of Jewish children whom Papon was charged with having sent to their deaths.

A few moments later three British journalists rushed into La Concorde, having just heard the accused man’s last speech. Like all of Papon’s interventions during the trial, this one was sonorous, unremorseful, and full of literary and artistic reference. As soon as he finished, the three judges and nine jurors had gone to deliberate 764 questions of guilt or innocence, with a tray of sandwiches to see them through the night. The three Brits now sat down and ordered wine and roast chicken, and one began reading his translation of the speech as the others ate: “He said that it was a double scandal, something about Camus in here. Oh, yes, his wife’s favorite writer was Camus.” The reporter looked down at his notes and deciphered. “They killed his wife… I think.” Papon’s wife of sixty-six years had died, at the age of eighty-eight, the week before the trial was to end. “‘In their desperate… desperate search,’ I think you’d put it, ‘for a crime, they have killed her with… petite esprits.’ What would you say? Small guns? Small steps? Little blows? Little blows. De Gaulle gave her a Legion d’Honneur.”

“‘With his own hands,’” one of the other journalists added, consulting his notes.

“Oh, yes. God, yes. ‘With his own hands.’ Then there was… Oh, yes. Here’s when he turned to the prosecutor: ‘Sir, you will go down in history—but through the servants’ entrance!’” The reporter looked up, his eyes amused. “Well, that’s not bad. Now something here about the absence of Germans. Oh, yes: ‘Throughout the stages of this strange and surreal trial, there has been a notable absence of Germans.’ A Notable Absence of Germans—sounds like a Michael Frayn play. Then something odd about Abraham sacrificing Isaac in Rembrandt, a ray of light? Staying his hand. Anyone get that?”

Everything came to a halt as a crowd of journalists who had gathered around the table tried to call to mind the light of an early Rembrandt, struggling to keep up with the tight web of cultural allusion spun by a French war criminal.

“Well, anyway,” the British reporter resumed, “he called it the most beautiful light in painting. I still don’t get it. He’s comparing himself to the Jewish child about to be killed? Well, it’s a point of view. Anyway, he stayed the hand. So that’s it. Camus, his wife, no Germans, servants’ entrance, bit about the light, Rembrandt, and then the sandwiches were sent in,” he concluded decisively.

“Anyone see what kind of sandwiches?” an American reporter asked anxiously The Brits laughed. But a little later the man from the L.A. Times said that he had seen the sandwiches go in, and he was confident that they were ham.

When the French government in Bordeaux surrendered, in 1940, it was replaced by the right-wing Vichy government under the direction of Marechal Petain, the great French hero of the First World War. The Vichy regime passed anti-Jewish laws that summer, before the Germans even demanded them. Two years later, at the Nazis’ demand, Vichy began deporting Jews, including children, from all over the country. Although “only” 25 percent of the Jews in France were sent to death camps, this is, as the historian Robert Paxton has pointed out, a derisive figure: Jews in France were the most assimilated in Europe. If there had not been riches and dossiers in place at the prefecture, the Germans would have had a hard time finding Jews to kill.

No one disputes that from 1942 to 1944 Maurice Papon, the secretary-general of the department of the Gironde, signed documents recording the arrest, assembly, and deportation of more than 1,500 Jews, including 220 children. The rafles took place between July 1942 and May 1944. The documents show that the deportees, some French, some refugees from the East, were to be sent to the transit camp of Drancy, outside Paris. Then they were to go to a destination inconnue. The unknown destination was Auschwitz.

Papon’s history after the war is also public knowledge. By the end of 1943 Papon had begun to cooperate quietly with the resistance, and even sheltered an important Jewish resistant. Then, at the liberation, he delivered the prefecture to the resistance and, despite the complaints of a few locals, began a spectacular rise in the postwar French bureaucracy as an haut fonctionnaire. In the late fifties he became the head of the prefecture of police in Paris and, in the seventies, budget minister in the government of Giscard d’Estaing. (The division between hauts fonctionnaires and politicians in France is fluid; there were five hauts fonctionnaires in the cabinet that signed the armistice with the Germans. Today, 41 percent of the members of the National Assembly are civil servants on leave.)

Then, in 1981, Michel Slitinsky, a Bordeaux Jew who had escaped the deportations, met a historian named Michel Berges, who had been doing work on the role of the local wine negotiants during the war. Berges had stumbled on some interesting documents recording what the prefecture under Papon had been doing at the same time. Slitinsky eventually helped deliver the documents to the satiric newspaper Le Canard Enchaine. Later, two more Bordelais, Maurice-David Matisson and Rene Jacob, made formal accusations against Papon. (A Frenchman can bring a charge against another Frenchman to the attention of a magistrate, who may then investigate it.) President Mitterrand did everything he could to delay the trial. French justice is under the control, or anyway the influence, of the president; Mitterrand must have felt that opening old Vichy cases was not in anyone’s interest, especially his. It was only in 1995 that a formal indictment was handed down. Last October, Papon was brought from his house outside Paris to Bordeaux to stand trial.

The trial began in October and was expected to end in December, but it went on until the poisson d’avril—April Fools’ Day. The cast of characters in the courtroom, as the trial was reported in manic detail in the Paris papers, seemed noisy and fantastic. French courtroom decorum allows far more time than would be acceptable in an American or British court for free questioning, speechifying, digressive material, and moral instruction directed by whoever is in the mood to give it toward whoever he thinks deserves to get it. This lent the event an interestingly literary air. There was the lawyer for the accused, Jean-Marc Varaut, the author of grandiloquent books on famous trials: one on Oscar Wilde, one on Jesus. There was a stream of historians: Berges, now bizarrely on the side of the defense; the universally admired American Robert Paxton, the greatest of Vichy historians; and Henri Amouroux, “of the Institute,” the most well-known historian to appear for the defense.

There was Serge Klarsfeld, whose son Arno was one of the leading civil prosecutors in the trial. (In a French courtroom, four or five separate prosecution teams—some civil, some from the government—can all argue the same case, each in its own way.) Arno drove the other prosecutors crazy. At the last minute he pleaded for a lesser penalty for Papon than perpetuite, the life sentence, demanded by the parquet, the prosecuting government authorities. And during the trial he led a move to have the presiding judge barred, on the ground that a relative of his had been among the deportees. (This may have been a preemptive strike, to keep the defense from raising the same point.) Then, after the motion failed, he took it on himself to disassociate Papon from other, worse war criminals, like Paul Touvier and Klaus Barbie, whom his parents had also helped bring to justice, announcing that, unlike them, Papon had merely signed papers. Since the whole point of the trial was to establish that signing papers was itself a crime, the other prosecutors understandably developed an even more intense dislike of Arno. Arno became the event of the trial. Out of the black robe and white kerchief that French lawyers still wear, making them look like perpetual Daumier drawings, he could often be seen in jeans, with his shirt hanging out. He is handsome, but in a modelish way, with too much hair and too open a collar. For a while before the start of the trial, he lived with the model Carla Bruni and had been photographed in Paris Match with her on a romantic vacation in Venice. Most days he arrived at the Palais on Rollerblades. Even in America this would have been controversial. In France it was regarded as just short of mooning the judges.

Above all, there was Papon himself, pompous and aging and erect and unrepentant. For the first time in a French war crimes trial, there was a figure of sufficient Mephistophelian stature to excite a moralist. Papon may have been evil, but he was certainly not banal. According to the rules of French trials, he was allowed not just to speak but to pontificate, and from the courtroom came daily dispatches recording, in the sonorous, Gaullist tones of the high estate, his views on the trial and the witnesses brought against him. “This testimony is moving in both its nature and the dignity with which it was given,” he said of one witness. Or again, “I cannot help but express my emotion in the face of this sober, painful account. It brings back heart-wrenching memories.”

The trial failed to clarify its subject, for reasons that were partly complicated and French, partly universal and human. The universal and human reason was that Papon was an old man being tried as an accomplice to murder. Complicity is hard to prove in any courtroom, and old men make bad culprits. Papon was sick—too sick, the doctors said, to be held in prison during the trial—and his wife was even sicker; after he went home for her funeral, there were those who thought that he might not come back. Whenever it seemed that the accusers had assured the necessity of his conviction, Papon stumbled, or fell sick, or a confused memory intervened, and one was reminded that here was a very old and decrepit functionary. Whenever one wanted to leave the verdict to the historians, one was reminded by some piece of heartbreaking evidence—a few words about a wife, a mother—that here in person was the instrument by which the French state casually delivered children to their murderers. We will have justice, said the ghosts. I will soon be one of you, said the guilty man. The trial went on for six months—too short a time to try Vichy, someone said, and too long a time to try Papon.

There is an idea, beloved of American editorialists, that the Vichy regime itself was on trial in Bordeaux and that France was finally “confronting its repressed past.” This is a myth. The French have been obsessed with the details of Vichy for at least twenty-five years. Almost every bookstore keeps a shelf of books devoted to these four years of France’s thousand-year history. Frenchmen of the left and of the right long ago accepted that Vichy was made possible by the German army but followed homegrown right-wing ideology, and was broadly popular.

What was on trial in Bordeaux was not Vichy but something more: I’etat, the state itself, through the acts of one of its most successful representatives. The French war crimes trials of recent years, from Barbie the Gestapo man to Touvier the militiaman to Papon the fonctionnaire, have been moving closer to the heart of the French identity. The idea of l’etat, the state, and its representatives, the hauts fonctionnaires, has a significance in France that is incomprehensible to Americans, for whom it means, at best, the post office. L’Etat suggests far more than the mere sum of the civil service. It has the authority that the Constitution has in America, that the monarchy until recently had in Britain. (Serge July, of the newspaper Liberation, has even referred to “the religion of the fonction publique.”) The state is the one guarantor of permanence in a country where neither the left nor the right can quite accept the legitimacy of the other side.

In France the state intervenes between the nation, the repository of racial memory, beloved of the right, and the republic, repository of universal rights, beloved of the left. Its presence lets them coexist: The state keeps the nation from becoming too national, and the republic from becoming too republican. In France the state suggests the official, disinterested tradition of service; it means the functioning and unity of the country; it means what works. When one of the lawyers at the trial, trying to give an interview in English, was prompted with the term civil servant as a translation for what Papon had been, he repeated it and then visibly gagged, as though he’d swallowed a bad oyster;

the idea of associating the word servant with the social role he was describing was just too weird.

The cult of the state makes France run. Yet every cult comes at a price. The price of constitution worship, as in America, is to make every personal question a legal question—so that every pat on every bottom, every swig on a bottle, and every pull on every cigarette seem likely to have, eventually, a law and a prosecutor of their own. The price of state worship, as in France, is that real things and events get displaced into a parallel paper universe;

the state is possible only because everything has been neatly removed from life and put in a filing cabinet.

The abstraction extends into every corner of French life. The girl at the France Telecom store who is asked for a new fax ribbon finds it, places it on the counter beside her—and then spends fifteen minutes searching through her computer files, her inventory, for some evidence that such ribbons do in fact exist. The ribbon on the counter is an empirical accident; what counts is what is in the system. The reality is the list; the reality is the document. This French habit of abstraction, unlike, say, the German habit of blind obedience, is difficult to criticize, because it is linked to so many admirable things. It is linked to the French sift for generalization, for intelligent living, for the grand manner, the classical style. It not only makes the trains run on time but makes them run on time to places one would like to visit. But it was this national habit of abstraction, with its blindness to particulars, that was, in a way on trial.

The irony was that a French courtroom attended by the French political classes was the last place to defeat, or even to test, the compulsive habit of abstraction. The language of French lawyering, like the language of the institute and the academy, is an etatiste language. Inside and outside a French court-room, abstractions pile on abstractions, and by the end you are so distracted that you are unable to face plain facts: children in a cattle car being delivered to a death camp. It was not just that you could not see the trees for the forest. It was that you could not see the forest because it was covered by a map.

So the documents involving deportations that bear Papon’s signature might have been official orders authorizing actions, but—crucial difference—they might have been official memorandums, recording for the benefit of the regional prefect, Maurice Sabatier, who was Papon’s boss, actions already taken, a type of document that belongs in a different filing cabinet. Berges, the historian who found the documents, was persuaded to testify that this was in fact the case. Papon was, in his own words, a mere telephoniste—a receptionist, taking messages and creating memorandums. Then what to make of Sabatier’s delegating to him, among other things, responsibility for Jewish affairs? Ah, but—understandable, though lamentable, confusion—this Department of Jewish Affairs was a recording bureau, not to be confused with the governmental Department of Jewish Affairs, which organized the deportations and the convoys. Papon was responsible for Jewish affairs only in a secondary sense. Anyway, he did whatever he could to protect Jews; look at the memos in which he struggles to see to it that Jewish children are sent to their parents! But those children were being sent to parents who were already dead and were therefore being sent to their own deaths. Where on paper can that be shown to have been understood? Within the paper universe of the prefecture, the unorthodox act of attaching children’s files to their parents’ was an act of respect for families, whatever the sad distortion in the world outside. And Papon actually insisted that the cattle cars, wagons a bestiaux, be replaced with passenger cars. But if he was capable of ordering the change of cars then… No, here again you are confusing the technical decisions of the prefecture with the policy directives of Paris—or, in this case, of Paris and Vichy. In any case, Maitre Varaut, Papon’s lawyer, demanded, seizing on the prosecutors’ uncertainty about how hard to press their case, how could one talk about degrees of guilt in a crime against humanity? Either one was implicit in mass murder or one was not. Any other claim was illogical. One could not be 60 percent guilty, or 30 percent guilty The paper chain proved guilt or it did not.

Only the victims seemed quite real. Marcel Stourdze, a deportee who traveled back and forth from Paris to Bordeaux every day, in order not to miss a day, testified, “When I went back to Auschwitz after the liberation, I saw that in an enormous vat they had saved all the hair. I thought that I saw the hair of my wife. Today all that hair has become white. But at the time it still bore the color of those we had loved.”

One of the shocks the trial offered involved the events not of 1942 but of 1961. At that time, when Papon was the head of the Paris police, the city and federal police had taken part in a massacre in which approximately two hundred Algerian demonstrators died. It was toward the end of the Algerian War, and Algerians in Paris, sympathetic to Algerian nationalism, broke a curfew and marched to the center of the city. There had been Paris policemen killed in the preceding month, and as the march pressed on, a kind of murderous free-for-all began. Many of the demonstrators, bound hand and foot, were drowned in the Seine. (The details of this atrocity, which took place in the center of Paris, remain murky and obscure.) A partial glimpse of the records of the crime appeared only last fall, in the newspaper Liberation.

This was regarded as good news for the defense—it showed that Papon had nothing particular against Jews—but it was also seen as an attempt by the left to equate the mistakes of the Gaullist regime during the Algerian civil war with the crimes of Vichy. What came to fill the gap of real issues was, inevitably, contemporary politics. The first people to feel the sting of the Papon trial were the Gaullists, and Philippe Sequin, the leader of the remaining Gaullist party, was the first political leader to denounce the trial. De Gaulle himself, Seguin felt, had come under attack. Papon, after all, had been allowed to continue in the fonction publique and had been regularly promoted by Gaullist politicians,

The right discovered a response in an 850-page book called Le Livre Noir du Communisme, the Black Book of Communism, which appeared last November, shortly after the Papon trial had begun. It is an encyclopedia of Communist atrocities around the world, from 1917 to the present, all scrupulously recorded and presented, with a tally of a hundred million deaths. The Black Book became the subject of a polemic, focused indirectly, as everyone understood, on the proces Papon. Were the crimes of the Communists really comparable to the crimes of the Nazis? And if they were, didn’t that make the entire apparatus of international communism, including, of course, the French Communist party and its intellectuals—slavishly Stalinist for so long—“complicit” in another way too? Were the fiches in the prefecture the only ones that mattered or could acts in that other paper universe, of poems and manifestos, be complicit in murder too?

After the jury retired, the journalists waited for the verdict at La Concorde. The wine was good, a generic Merlot, and every table was taken. Nine o’clock became ten, the clouds of smoke thickened, and the gaiety rose as, one by one, filing deadlines for the next day’s paper passed. Twelve o’clock and the French journalists are off the hook; three o’clock and the Brits are off! Only the Americans are going to have to file late tonight, no matter what. But then, around three-thirty, the big news comes in. The Paula Jones case has been dismissed; whatever anyone files is now set for page 2. Mildly annoying to the newspapermen, this news is disaster for the independent television crews. “I can hear them now,” one cameraman says moodily, deep in his cups. “‘Ship it, ship it.’” (“Ship it” meaning “Don’t even try to put it on the satellite” is the TV equivalent of “We’ll call you.”)

The owners of La Concorde had learned, over the months of the trial, that American journalists cannot be outdone in their pitiless pursuit of truth and blank restaurant receipts. To cries of “Fiche, fiche, fiche,” the waiters slap one down with every order. A gloomy Dutch newspaperman at one table is telling stories about how often he has broken big stories, but in Dutch. “No one knows. No one cares,” he says. “Cheesus could come back tomorrow, but if he comes to me, they’ll know it only in Amsterdam.”

The British journalists, deadlines gone, drink whiskey and begin to reminisce about other, kinder war crimes trials, where you didn’t have to stay up all night for the verdict. “Take the Barbie trial,” one says. “Everyone knew what the verdict would be, but the jury waited until just after midnight to announce it; that way they got an extra day’s pay, six hundred francs. We all went out and got drunk with the jury and the lawyers, and then we filed and were all on the boat train home and back in London in time for dinner. Now, that was a trial for crimes against humanity that wasn’t a crime against humanity.”

The Klarsfelds wander in and out, waiting for the verdict like everyone else. They have been cast as wreckers, loose cannons, pursuing some odd, private agenda. Seeing them together, certainly, one finds the connection between stolid, impassive father and mercurial son hard to grasp. Daniel Schneidermann, a television journalist who has written a book about the trial, argues that the horror of their family history—Serge’s father was a deportee who died in Auschwitz—has left an “emptiness” inside Arno, the emptiness of a world that, since the Holocaust, has been abandoned by God. It is probably true that Arno’s aggressive gestures—the Rollerblades, the jeans, the rude interjections in court—are meant to show a certain distaste for the whole pompous system, for the parallel paper universe in all its dignity. But it is also possible that metaphysics aside, the Klarsfelds just have a shrewder take on the possibilities of the trial than their more sophisticated confreres. They understand that only an “intermediary” penalty, only some finding of guilt for Papon clearly distinguished from the great guilt of the real killers, will seem plausible to a Bordeaux jury. They are struggling to articulate, in the rhetoric of the courtroom, that there are gradations of guilt, styles of complicity, even in the Holocaust. To treat Papon as though he were equivalent to SS killers, like Barbie, is, in a sense, to draw a line again around the killings, with pure evil on one side and innocence, by implication, safely on the other.

Among the people and the talk and the stories, one bald, hard-looking man in his seventies, drinking his cognac and coffee, never leaves his table. “Who is he?” a newcomer asks.

Nobody knows,” one of the women from the wire services answers. “He’s been here every day since the trial began. He hassled some of the women, but then he gave it up.” She lowers her voice. “A lot of us think he may be the man from the FN.” The FN, the neo-Fascist National Front, is the phantom of Vichy that everyone wishes would go to sleep.

At four-thirty in the morning it was announced that the verdict would arrive at eight. A lot of the American reporters went back to their hotel rooms, opened their windows to let in the French spring air, and turned on CNN to watch the news about the Paula Jones dismissal. It was hard, one reporter commented afterward, not to think about the extravagant good fortune of a country that had trials like that to worry about. Another, watching James Carville and Susan Carpenter-McMillan on Lorry King, said that he found it hard, particularly after months of trying to decode French verbal combat, to remember which was which: Did the two Americans on TV actually hate each other, despite the smileyness and forced good humor? Or was the hatred the pretense, and the reality the professional prizefighter’s camaraderie? He had, he said, been away from America too long to remember.

By eight everyone was back at La Concorde. Serge Klarsfeld was waiting too. Someone asked one of the Brits, who had been there all night, if anyone had any instincts about what was to happen.

“None,” he said.

“No one was persuaded?”

“No one was sober,” he replied.

Shortly after nine a middle-aged woman rushed into the café. She was stout and squarely built and was bent over as she ran. She had both palms held out straight in front of her, fingers spread. It was a strange, lamenting posture, like that of a Greek mourning figure.

She ran over to Klarsfeld. He nodded and wept briefly, and they held each other. Ten! The spread fingers meant that Papon had been given ten years. “And everyone against us,” Klarsfeld muttered. It was a victory for him and for Arno; the jury had found Papon guilty of complicity in crimes against humanity but not of mass murder.

Outside, the children of the deportees came to meet Klarsfeld, clasping one another and kissing cheeks. They were stout and old and plain; evil may sometimes be banal, but virtue, to its credit, always is.

In front of the courthouse the argument had already begun. “It isn’t enough of a penalty!” someone cried. “You go serve ten years,” Klarsfeld said, pushing him gently The stout lady kept saying, “It was double or nothing, the parquet”—the government prosecutors—“wanted double or nothing.” She said “double or nothing” in English. Klarsfeld said, “He was not Touvier, and he was not Barbie. The ultimate responsables were the Nazis. After you have looked a real Nazi in the eye, you know the difference with Papon.” For the most part, the civil parties and the reporters who had been with them for six months were disappointed. “Ten years! Ten years is what you give a housebreaker,” one exhausted French journalist said.

Somehow, back in Paris, the verdict seemed more tolerable. Paradoxically the trial had concentrated so exclusively on Papon’s role in Bordeaux in the forties that it had redrawn his picture, making him once again a mere prefect. In reality, he had not been one more face among the fonctionnaires but one of the highest, one of the great men of state, a cabinet minister. But this was a Paris reality, not a Bordeaux one, and it was only back in Paris, where the ministerial Papon could be recalled, that the scale of the achievement in Bordeaux registered. A great man of state, protected by the state, had been pursued for crimes by pitifully ordinary people—and despite that, he had at last been held responsible. It wasn’t the victory over abstraction that Camus had died dreaming of. But this time nobody gave up.

In a way, the jury in the Palais de Justice had even, over sandwiches, used their imaginations to make some necessary retrospective law, and they had done it well. By saying that Papon didn’t know where the trains were going, and also saying that he was guilty of crimes against humanity, they were making the right and courageous point. To deliver a child to the secret police is as large a crime against humanity as you ever need to find, no matter where you think he is going or what kind of car he is going to travel in. The men with stamps and filing cabinets now couldn’t plead procedure any more than soldiers could plead orders; the appareil of the state would have to understand that their fiches represented people, whether they were Jews or Algerian demonstrators or refugees yet to come. The parallel paper universe now had a window.

I had explained to Luke, over the course of the trial, what was going on and why I was away: A bad man had long ago done wicked things to little children, and now he would be put in jail for it. When I came home, he asked if they had put the bad man in jail, and I said, well, yes, they had. “And when the bad man got put in jail, did all the children come out?” he asked.

Of course, they hadn’t even really put the bad man in jail. Papon remained free for almost another two years in various appeals—unusually so for a convicted man in France—and then, on the eve of his incarceration, fled to Switzerland. It seemed clear from the circumstances of his flight that he had some kind of internal help from the French functionary state. But he was found, quickly, within days, and brought back to France and locked up at last. In his flight he had taken the alias of La Rochefoucauld, the great French skeptic, a man of culture to the end.

Trouble at the Tower

Paris in July is pretty much left to the tourists and the people who look after them, while everyone else goes south, or west, or, in any case, away. An incident at the Eiffel Tower—which left a tourist sore, the tower closed tight for a couple of days, and an elevator operator out of a job for a while—told you everything you needed to know about what happens when you leave the tourist and his handlers alone to sort things out. What happened, if you missed it, was that a lady tourist got on the “up” elevator of the tower with a ticket for the second platform and then decided to get off at the first platform (because she felt dizzy or because she didn’t, or just because she was exercising her fundamental right to get on and off an elevator whenever she felt like it). She was kept from getting off the elevator by a French elevator operator (who either gently dissuaded her or handled her a bit roughly, or else launched into a Joe Pesci-in-a-Scorsese-film attack). The woman (an American? No, a Brit! Finally the French papers settled on calling her an Anglo-Saxon) was, it turned out, a successful writer with a profound sense of indignation and a lawyer. She complained, and the company that runs the tower—it’s a private business—had the elevator guy fired. But then the rest of the tower employees went out on strike in solidarity, closing down the tower and leaving a lot of indignant American and British tourists on the ground, furious at being denied their chance to be manhandled by the elevator operators.

The incident produced a certain panicky, just discernible exchange of meaningful glances for the rest of the week between the tourists and the touristed. (“So that’s what they want—our lives!” “So that’s what they want—our jobs!”) Naturally, sympathy in France gathered quickly around the wronged operator and his striking friends, while sympathy on the Anglo-American side gathered around the roughed-up lady. This distribution of sympathy wasn’t merely tribal, though. The Eiffel Tower Incident of the Summer of ’97 illustrates a temperamental and even intellectual difference between the two cultures. Most Americans draw their identities from the things they buy, while the French draw theirs from the jobs they do. What we think of as “French rudeness,” and what they think of as “American arrogance,” arise from this difference. But she was just trying to have a good time, we think. But he was only doing his job, they think. For us, an elevator operator is only a tourist’s way of getting to the top of the Eiffel Tower. For the French, a tourist is only an elevator operators opportunity to practice his metier in a suitably impressive setting.

The metaphysics of consumerism are much studied, of course, since it seems to be the century’s winning ism. (Americans have shown that whole art forms can be made through creative browsing.) Producerism, its surprisingly hardy French counterpart, is much less well diagnosed. The Eiffel Tower itself is a prime example of pure producerism, of metier mania: a thing built by an engineer as a self-sufficient work, whose only function is to stand there and be admired for having been engineered. The French ideal of a world in which everyone has a metier but no customers to trouble him is more practical than it might seem. It has been achieved, for instance, by the diplomats inside the quai d’Orsay, who create foreign policy of enormous subtlety and refinement which has absolutely no effect on anyone outside the building. It has also been achieved by IRCAM, the modern music institute, which sponsors contemporary composers who write music that so far no one has ever heard. (When the waiter at the café finally deigns to shake your hand, it does not mean that you are now a valued client. It means that you are now an honorary waiter.)

The elevator operator dreams of going to the top of the tower alone in his elevator, while the Anglo-Saxon tourist, in her heart of hearts (and he knows this; it’s what terrifies him most), dreams of an automatic elevator. When the two ideals—of absolute professionalism unfettered by customers and of absolute tourism unaffected by locals—collide, trouble happens, pain is caused. Americans long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World. The French dream of a place where everyone can practice his metier in self-enclosed perfection, with the people to be served only on sufferance, as extras, to be knocked down the moment they act up. This place, come to think of it, is called Paris in July