Paris to the Moon

Couture Shock

I suppose you could say that my introduction to the rites and spells of Parisian haute couture occurred early on a Sunday morning, at the Valentino show, when the ladies in the front row suddenly, and pretty much in unison, folded their programs over and began to fan themselves ferociously with the gold and brown paper. The Valentino show was being held at nine-thirty in the morning for reasons of protocol so complicated that they resembled one of those nineteenth-century diplomatic negotiations, like the Schleswig-Holstein question, comprehensible to only three people in Europe. The cream of the fashion press had turned up anyway, although Anna Wintour and Suzy Menkes and the rest had the pained, aren’t-you-a-clever-boy-to-wake-me-up-this-early smiles otherwise seen only on parents of two-year-olds. The music had begun, Stella Tennant had come out (head angled, shoulders thrown back, hips a little forward, rolling the works) in ivory wool and silk chevron trousers with two patch pockets, an ivory blouse with matching lace, and a beige cashmere shawl bordered in lace, looking game despite the hour and all that lace. Then the ladies in the front row, the rich clients, began to fan. They fanned hard, expertly—my God, it’s hot in here—just the way veteran de-fle watchers always do. And this was odd, because it was freezing cold inside the Salon Opera at the Grand Hotel: the coldest July in Paris anyone could recall;

cassoulet and topcoat weather. But the ladies fanned as they always do, in the gasping heat of July at the collections.

I turned to a friend sitting next to me, a French television journalist, and directed at her my version of the French shrug-and-frown that means, Why on earth? She, in turn, made the French 0 with her mouth that means. Please, my friend, discard this elaborate pretense of naivete. Then she shrugged too. “They are at the collections. It is July. They fan,” she said. She thought for a moment. “It is a reflex. We watch, therefore we fan. No. I fan, therefore I am.” Then she looked around the salon and made the encompassing shrug-and-pout-and-flex-your-hands-from-the-wrist French gesture that in the context meant that the apparent absurdity of the act of fanning yourself in the cold is no more absurd than the whole enterprise of traveling to Paris to look at clothes that you will never wear, displayed on models to whom you bear no resemblance, in order to help a designer get people who will never attend shows like this someday to buy a perfume or a scarf that will give them the consoling illusion that they have a vague association with the kind of people who do attend shows like this—even though the people who attend shows like this are the kind who fan themselves against July heat that happens not to exist. It is these formulations—packed tight with contradictions that spiral around, turn in on themselves, bite their own tails, and eventually come out dressed in taffeta and lace tulle—that give haute couture its charm, or, anyway, help it cast its spell.

Participating in the haute couture is more like entering a yacht in the America’s Cup than it is like opening a Seventh Avenue showroom: The collections are overseen by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, which demands, among other things, that its members maintain a working atelier in Paris, and put on a show each season of no fewer than fifty costumes each. Belonging is an expensive, exacting business, and every year one more house just drops out. This season there were sixteen shows—about a thousand outfits, from Stella’s silky pants to the wedding dress at Saint Laurent. First an event and then a theme dominated the five days of the shows. The event was the separation of Gianfranco Ferre as head designer from the House of Dior, which was significant because it threw a major house into a “crisis,” and the theme was the crisis of haute couture. Of course, haute couture is always in crisis, like Cyprus or the New York theater. But by now the crisis has become almost existential; not even a hit will help. Even very, very rich women don’t buy bespoke clothes in Paris anymore, and the widely understood, though never openly articulated, justification for losing money in couture for the past twenty years or so—the loss leader justification—no longer works. By now, most fashionable people feel, the average woman who buys, say, a box of Pierre Cardin handkerchiefs is probably buying them less because of the glamorous association of Pierre Cardin haute couture than because of the glamorous association of Pierre Cardin socks and Pierre Cardin sunglasses. (As a consequence, Pierre Cardin, who seems to have figured this out, doesn’t even show his haute couture line in the defiles.)

Fashionable people have two contradictory theories to explain the persistence of couture despite its troubles—theories usually mentioned in succession and often in the same sentence. The first—a kind of Tang and Teflon explanation, which is promoted by the chambre—is that haute couture is the R&D wing of the fashion business, an investment in its future, since the “techniques” and “styles” that the designers wheel out today will somehow affect the kind of clothes that people wear tomorrow. (Veteran explainers offering this view can make it sound as though the defiles were taking place in a particle accelerator.) The other, contradictory explanation is that haute couture is the living memory of French fashion, where vanishing standards of workmanship, craftsmanship, and imagination are kept alive as a necessary act of filial piety. When you point out that both these explanations can’t be true at the same time, you generally get in response a kind of Paris Zen. “Ah, you are right. Both things cannot be true at once. That is the point of haute couture,” one fashion prince explained to me. Then he walked off seraphically.

The haute couture remains a rite. There are the photographers, who push to get inside, and who form, on their bleachers, a little island of happy heterosexual lust amid two seas of becalmed aestheticism. They’re the only free men at the collections; they whoop, whistle, and call out to the models anything they feel like calling out to the models. (“They could come out dressed in paper bags for all I care,” one photographer said that morning as he looked over the Valentino program. “Well, plastic bags anyway”) Then there are the models themselves, who can undress and dress again so quickly that when the show is over, they climb out of the last evening dress and are on the street, wearing jeans and T-shirts and Prada knapsacks, getting a taxi before the applause has stopped. And there are the fashionable people, lining up in order not to be allowed in. (The shows never start on time, or near it, but everybody comes to the security desk and waves the invitation anyway.)

It’s the clothes, of course, that differ from show to show. At Valentino the collection soon settles into a look—clothes in colors that the regular guy might describe as “sort of brown,” although a fashionable person might call them chestnut, chocolate, beige, coffee, and bronze. The sequence of styles is fixed. Day wear comes first, then what are still called, touchingly, cocktail dresses, and then evening wear. Usually a wedding dress comes last, but Valentino replaced it with a long red chiffon sheath. As the models come out, almost everyone in the room begins one task of translation or another. The press has the simple job of translating the descriptions of the clothes, which are written in fashionese, into ordinary language. Valentino’s program was relatively taciturn compared to most. Lacroix, for example, later in the week showed a “‘cold dawn’ shot razimir spiral sheath dress with ‘apricot’ and ‘melon’ kick pleat”). Still, even Valentino’s “Mordore silk laminated ottoman pinstriped pantsuit, gold lace polo T-shirt, black cashmere shawl bordered in gold lace” became, in the margin of one journalist’s program, “beige slacks.” The garment industry people are looking for something—a range of colors, a shape, a new line—that they can translate from cashmere and laminated ottoman into cottons and synthetics and sell. They sketch shapes, which to the unpracticed eye all look more or less the same. A tight bodice with a big skirt represents evening wear; a short, tight jacket with big pleated flowing pants stands in for day wear. The few unattached, noncommercial, nonbuying spectators in the room are waiting for what they call a couture moment—a moment, the newcomer is assured, that is roughly equivalent to the moment in opera when the clouds of shlock lift and something crazily artificial becomes transporting.

Only the top fashion editors—at whom all the expense is in a way directed—cannot sketch or make notes, for fear of seeming rude. They leave that to their underlings and try to look interested and amused as each costume passes by. A haute couture defile is an oddly heart-lifting occasion, inflected with hope. The fashion editors are hoping that one of the models’ dresses will give them a point, a theme, something to write about. The fashion merchants are hoping that one of the models’ dresses, suitably adapted, will make them a fortune. The aficionados are hoping that one of the models’ dresses will supply a couture moment. The photographers are hoping that one of the models’ dresses will fall off. The press scribbles. The photographers hoot. The ladies fan.

Most of the collections are shown either in the ballroom of the Hotel Intercontinental, which is long and narrow and mock grand siecle, or, like the Valentino show, in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel, which is high and circular and Second Empire. On Sunday afternoon, though, every fashionable person has to find a taxi or get a lift all the way out to the periphery of Paris, where John Galliano is showing his fall collection for Givenchy at the Stade Francais—the old French indoor sports arena. What no one at Givenchy has considered, though, is that holding the show in a stadium means holding the waiting period before the show outside the stadium—in the open air, where few fashionable people are inclined to spend a lot of the day and, as it happens on this Sunday, in a steady Paris drizzle too.

Things get ugly fast. “It is insupportable!” one distinguished-looking dowager is crying as the rain pelts her perfectly constructed face. “I have been a Givenchy client for decades, and now I am being made to stand outside, exposed to the wind, naked to the rain!”

“In the rain! In the rain!” the lady next to her cries out, and she goes on, “I too have been a client for a period of time.” She resists saying “decades,” despite its obvious pathetic force; she is a little younger than the first lady. “The thing is insupportable.”

“No! It is worse! It is a scandal!” the first lady cries, definitively. Insupportable is a bitter word in French, but scandal is a fighting one. Even the Givenchy guards at the chain-link gate, in their double-breasted jackets, are beginning to get uneasy. When the crowd gathered outside the Bastille, the trouble began after some old lady said the thing was a scandal.

At this point the fashion editor Andre Leon Talley comes up, pushing people aside on his way to the ritual “No, you see, I’ve been invited. What! You mean these people have too?” moment. Andre Leon Talley is a big guy, and for a second or two it seems likely that the guards are going to let him in. This makes the dowagers, standing behind me, plain crazy, and they charge, blind to the consequences. We are storming the Givenchy gates when the guards just give way: They open the gate and let everyone walk across the lawn toward the stadium. We file in, feeling vindicated, and take our seats. At least thirty more minutes pass before anything happens.

The Givenchy show, appropriately, takes as its subject the ever-popular fashion themes of decapitation and mass murder. Inside the stadium Galliano has constructed a Fragonard-like forest of feathery trees and dark ferns. Then, instead of sending the models one by one down a runway, he sends them out in groups, to wander around the artificial forest. The setting is meant to recall eighteenth-century French aristocratic life, and the dresses what became of it. The dress worn by Ines de la Fressange, for instance, is frankly described as an “ivory lace Empire Trench with blood pre-guillotine velvet sash.” All the girls are meant to look as if they were on their way to the tumbrels, and in fact the Revolutionary-era Empire dresses, with their long, columnar lines and soft, clinging bodices, in beaded ivories and reds and champagnes and olives and emeralds, are quite unreal in their loveliness. They are by far the most memorable “pure” design of the week and, toned down and deblooded, the obvious tip to become this autumn’s look.

Haute couture, everyone says, no longer has much to do with what normal women normally wear. The besetting sin of haute couture, though, is not unreality but corniness: not that it looks like things no women would actually wear but that it looks exactly like what your aunt Ida always wears “for best”—that shiny black thing, say, covered with sequins and accompanied by a little shoulder-hugging jacket.

This is a thought that occurs on Monday afternoon, at the Ungaro show—a collection of pantsuits and long dresses so standard and uneventful that it gives you a lot of time to think. There is a reason, you realize, that even women who could afford to do not wear what the models in Ungaro are wearing: dresses of floor-length flowing lace. The reason is that fancy clothes look fancy, and fanciness now looks primitive. So many of the clothes, in their elaborately ostentatious materials, just seem regressive, overrich, brutally obvious. In feeling, they date back to a time when a complicated display of expensive materials was meant to be crushing evidence of wealth. Now wealth, wanting to crush, likes subtler evidence; that’s why more wealthy women buy Brice Marden squares than haute couture evening clothes.

Ungaro, though, has intelligently taken his show off the runway too and put it on the floor—in principle, so that you can see the detail work on the clothes, but with the side effect that you can also see a lot of the models inside them. None of the big-name girls are here—not Linda or Naomi or Claudia—but it is the B, or nonname, models who are the most thrilling to look at. This is partly because the name models are phoning it in; Linda Evangelista, at the Givenchy show, had exactly the smug “I don’t have to do this for a living anymore” look that Shecky Greene and Buddy Hackett used to have when they “dropped in” on Merv Griffin. The B list models, on the other hand, work: They throw out their hips, they flirt with their eyes, and when the photographers call out to them to smolder, they smolder. A great deal of time is spent—by regular guys anyway—explaining to themselves why the haute couture models are not really as desperately beautiful as you might think when they are even more beautiful than you can imagine. The trick—or, to put it another way, the consolation—is that their beauty has become so familiar that it is not so much a commodity as a commonplace. Looking at Kate Moss modeling Givenchy, you don’t think, There’s a heartbreakingly beautiful girl. Instead you just think, There’s Kate Moss. The projected fantasy bangs up not against her inaccessibility but, paradoxically, against her familiarity. She offers not a limitless horizon of love and elegance and great clothes but the reality of a known life. (You would have to avoid talking about Johnny Depp. You would have to tell her how thin she looks, or, rather—for it is the New Kate—how zaftig.)

But they are perfect! A twelve-year-old American boy who was visiting Paris that week had come equipped with his skateboard, and, to his shock, discovered in Paris not a skateboard hell but a paradise of broad, flat avenues and, at the place du Trocadero, vast, flat concrete plazas. “How do you find Paris?” he was asked.

His eyes went round and reverent.

“Smooth,” he said.

I find the models smooth too.

One new girl in particular is so perfectly beautiful that she seems a composite of various imaginary smoothnesses. I later learn that her name is Honor Fraser, that she is English, and that she is being tipped by the fancy as the Next Great Model; she will be Miss England in next year’s Pirelli calendar. I feel like a novice horseplayer who has just picked the Kentucky Derby winner.

When the shows were over, I spoke with her about what it is like to be on the runway, instead of watching what happens there. She turned out to be a poised student of her own craft. “I love modeling couture,” she said, with a passionate eagerness. “It’s the only pure expression in fashion—the one part of the fashionable world where there are no commercial compromises at all. There’s something terribly moving about being an element of it—being its vehicle. The purity and the exactitude that the designers devote to every tiny detail of your clothing and accessories, as though they were working from some image deep in their minds, which they’re trying to approximate with you, the way people exhaust themselves in pursuit of an ideal—it’s really very moving. It’s quite extraordinary to be backstage, being made up for two hours, being transformed from who you are into this ideal of beauty that the designer keeps in the back of his mind.

“I love couture modeling too, because you have such a pure feeling of control and power when you’re out there. For a tiny period of time—three or four seconds—you have the chance to hold the entire room. This may seem like a strange comparison, but I’m fascinated by comedy, and I imagine that modeling couture must feel very much like being a comedian; it’s just you out there, having to win over an audience, with nothing except yourself and your attitude to do it. And then I, for one, find the clothes so lovely—those Valentino colors that aren’t quite colors and yet register as though they were. I feel lucky to have been a part of it.” I had never before come across someone who was articulate and knowing about her craft, was big enough to start at power forward, and looked great in a black velvet military coat with rhinestone buttons, black satin trousers, and a black silk top embroidered with black jet. (She had been wearing that, for Valentino, the first time I saw her.)

Tell about the pathetic collections. A certain number of the collections seem intended to be pathetic. Olivier Lapidus’s is my specimen pathetic collection. The house is full, and the B list girls do the modeling, and Olivier, who is the son of the designer Ted, looks like a very nice guy. But it is held at the Carrousel du Louvre, a place designed specially to hold collections—it is big and well lit and clean—which means, naturally, that absolutely nobody wants to show there. Olivier Lapidus comes onstage to point out that his collection is a mixture of past, present, and future and includes the first solar-paneled jacket ever made. He shows it off. You can control the solar panels, turning the heat up or down, and it also has a built-in plug that could brancher you right into the Internet, the first haute couture garment equipped to go on-line. The poor model has to take the plug out of the pocket and show it to the audience. Then you hear the theme from Star Trek. Nobody knows which way to look.

Tuesday night is Christian Lacroix. The show is held in the ball-room of the Grand Hotel, and it is by far the most intently attended defile I have seen yet; even Mme. Chirac is here. Lacroix is of the moment. I associate his clothes with the tasteless things about the eighties, the Ivana Trump era—clothes to wear for the big settlement. Tonight, when the lights go down, Linda Evangelista comes out in the ugliest dress I have ever seen. Even the program’s words can’t disguise its ugliness: “silk-crepe dress stamped with a mauve-and-ochre-green ‘reptile’ design.” I am settling in for a good long bath of contempt.

But then something happens. First, the music begins to take hold. In most of the collections the music is either generic “sophisticated” soprano and synthesizer pop—the kind you associate with the singer Sade—or classical chestnuts, like Albinoni and Mozart. Lacroix, though, has had someone (the program credits a Laurent Godard) with an uncanny eclectic ear arrange his music. We begin with the breathless, chimelike sounds of the Swedish group the Cardigans and switch to Joe Jackson and then, without missing a beat, land in a Bellini aria. Lacroix works through his day wear and moves into the cocktail dresses and then the evening wear. In the program he announces that he has been spending all his time lately “with Vermeer.” He seems to have taken a wrong turn in the museum, for what you see is Goya: Goya’s duchesses, in their mantillas and black satin dresses, but wildly remade, as though for a Balanchine ballet of the life of Goya. There are lots of satins and silks in dark colors—navy blue satin and vermilion satin and black chiffon. The layering is ecclesiastical. For once, the program description actually describes the clothes: a long, lined black crepe sweater-dress tucked up over a crepe underskirt with a fuchsia faille bustle at the back, accented by a pistachio satin knot. The crepuscular colors mute the ostentation, so that it doesn’t look like ostentation at all but, rather, like art, like old painting. The music turns to the Beatles’ baroque period: the string part from “Eleanor Rigby” and then a long cello and harp version of “For No One.” The lovely sad yet modem tunes, the twilight, and the dresses themselves create, against all odds and probabilities, something touching, and even—Honor Fraser’s word is right—moving. The dresses aren’t really dresses at all; they are little buildings of crepe and silk and taffeta. The girls look out from them, like Spanish ladies looking out from a second-floor window. When a model named Victoria appears in a black satin corset with Elizabethan sleeves of tulle and worn over a deep lavender-blue skirt flecked with black lace—she looks like an actress dressed up as Viola for an impossibly beautiful production of Twelfth Night—the audience applauds, genuinely, not politely. When Karen Mulder comes out in a silver lace dress with an iced pearl bodice, I make exclamation points in my program.

It’s all too much, and that’s where the loveliness—the couture moment—begins. The clothes are extravagant and unreal, but they don’t seem camp. They don’t seem artificial or out of this world, just symbolic of a common human hope that the world could be something other than it is—younger and more musical and less exhausting and better lit. It proposes that the little moments of seduction on which, when we look back, so much of our life depends could unfold as formally as they deserve to, and all dressed up. It is as if we were wishing that the rituals of sex, those moments of painful sizing up, which begin with the thought That’s a nice dress, could pass by more consequentially, slowly—love walking down a runway instead of just meeting you outside the movie theater.

Couture is a romantic cartoon. It’s a caricature of the romantic impulse, with a cartoon’s exaggerations but a cartoon’s energy and lighthearted poetry too. The thing you feel in a couture moment isn’t “What a wonderful dress” or, as you do with higher kinds of art, “What a good place the world is,” but, more simply, “I’m in love.” The point of haute couture may be any one of a hundred things, ninety-nine of them sordid or silly, but its subject is women wearing clothes and all the emotion that rises from women wearing clothes. Offering romance in cartoon form, couture helps preserve the habit of romance. The best moments at Lacroix or Givenchy, far from being giddy or empty, were familiar and held out the promise of the beginning of a whole familiar cycle. Soon the fantasies, translated, will become purchases—This Fall’s Dresses—and these will become photographs, the kind you look at five years later (God, that dress is so mid-nineties!) to find that they have become a little piece of your time, a peg to hang a good memory on (“Remember that kind of satiny Lacroix knockoff thing you had? You looked great in that”). The sequence, one of the last romantic sequences we can count on, starts in these hotels; that they happen to be places where rich ladies cool themselves off in the cold seems a small price to pay to keep that emotion in circulation.

The emotion passes quickly, of course. In a minute Love walks back up the runway, changes into her jeans and T-shirt, and is on the phone to her agent. Still dazed by Lacroix, I stumbled across one beauty outside the hotel with her cell phone clutched in her hand. I heard her mutter, firmly, “I know I said I’d do it, but I can’t. It’s only Tuesday, and already I’ve got taffeta coming out my ass.”

Yves Saint Laurent, on Wednesday morning, is the last important collection, and the most “classic.” Here, for once, is a really well-organized show, where everybody slips inside on time. Lacroix is the haunt of the new Gaullist French government establishment; Saint Laurent is still the favorite of the old Socialist aristocracy, and they all turn out. Jack Lang, the former culture minister, is here, looking as though he owned the place. (The Socialists loved Saint Laurent because his clothes promised the pleasures of modernity without the sacrifices of modernism; that was the Mitterrand dream.) Saint Laurentjust shows Saint Laurent, beautiful clothes that he could have shown in 1980 or 1990 just as well. The music is standard opera arias. Everything gets a hand.

The big news for the photographers is that Claudia Schiffer has come to YSL, having been snubbed by Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, and she gets the first-desk position. Claudia, though, is not what you would call a team player. While the other models only occasionally respond to the photographers’ pleas for more, Claudia stands at the end of the runway for what seems like ten minutes at a time, making love to every camera in sight. The other girls, held up at the head of the runway and waiting for her to get through, give her exactly the look you see on the face of an impatient commuter at the Holland Tunnel who is stuck in the exact change lane behind a woman who has entered it on a hunch.

Then the blond, Botticelli-faced Karen Mulder comes out in the costume that every photographer has been dreaming of for years: robe de soir courte de mousseline et satin noir—a sheer dark silk nightgown that, for one reason or another, provides an undergarment below but not above. Karen holds one fingertip precisely in front of each breast, demurely, as she walks down the runway. The photographers go crazy. “Karen! Karen!” they moan. “Give us something.” Karen smiles. Nothing doing. She walks right to the end of the runway—right into the heart of the photographers’ lair—smiling, keeping her fingertips in place, not embarrassed but not giving anything away, either, and then she walks right back. The photographers groan, in disbelieving unison, as she disappears. You could have heard them out on the place Vendome. “There was a fortune in it for all of us,” one of them says mournfully. I notice Claudia, on her way in, giving Karen a look. You have the feeling that Claudia would have dropped her hands, pulled off the gown, and jumped off the run-way to autograph the negatives.

Afterward, in the Saint Laurent dressing room, I see that, while every other outfit, on every other girl’s card, includes three or four accessories, cover-ups, or undergarments, the robe de soir, listed on Karen Mulder’s card, is, by design or mistake, all by itself—nothing to help her out at all. For the first time all week, someone had left a fashionable vacuum. She had filled it with her fingertips.

The Cisis in French Cooking

Nine o’clock on a Friday morning, and David Angelot, the commis at the restaurant Arpege, on the rue de Varenne, has begun to braise tomatoes for dessert. The tomate confite farcie aux douze saveurs is one of the few dishes in the Michelin red guide whose place on the menu has to be clarified with a parenthesis (dessert), indicating that though it sounds like a veggie, it eats like a sweet. It is a specialty of the kitchen of the great chef Alain Passard, which a lot of people think is the best and most poetic in Paris, and probably all France; it requires a hair-raising amount of work by the commis, the kitchen cabin boy; and many people who care about French cooking believe that it is a kind of hopeful portent, a sign that the creative superiority of French cooking may yet be extended indefinitely. Normally a braised tomato becomes tomato sauce. (“The limitations of this insight,” one of Passard’s admirers has noted gravely, “describe the limitations of Italian cuisine.”) To make a tomato get sweeter without falling apart not only is technically demanding but demonstrates, with a stubborn, sublime logic, an extremely abstract botanical point. Tomatoes are not vegetables; they are fruit.

For David, who may not see M. Passard all day long, they are work. David, who is eighteen and who studied cooking at a government school just outside Lyons, cuts the tomatoes open (about fifty of them, from Morocco, in the winter), scoops them out, and makes a farce, a stuffing of finely chopped orange and lemon zest, sugar, ginger, mint, pistachios, star anise, cloves; then he makes a big pot of vanilla-scented caramel and braises the stuffed tomatoes in it, beating the caramel around the tomatoes vigorously for forty-five minutes without actually touching them. The tomato is a fruit and can be treated like one, but it helps to beat a lot of caramel into its body, to underline the point.

While he works, he thinks about his girlfriend (who is also a cook, and with whom he lives in an apartment in north Paris), his future, and his desire to visit Japan someday. He works in a tiny basement room in the small, two-story space of the kitchen, and he shares that room with another, more experienced assistant, Guilhem, who spends his mornings making bread. (All the bread at Arpege is made by hand.) Guilhem, while he works, thinks of going back to Washington—he calls it D.C.—where he has been before, where there is a constant demand for good French food, and where he has an offer to work in a French bakery. If David’s job at Arpege embodies one of the principles of high French cooking—the gift of making things far more original than anyone can imagine—Guilhem’s embodies the opposite but complementary principle: the necessity of making things much better than anybody needs. This morning he will make three kinds of bread: a sourdough raisin and nut loaf; trays of beautiful long white rolls; and a rough, round peasant bread. All the bread will be sliced and placed in baskets to be presented upstairs in the dining room, and then mostly pushed around absentmindedly on the plates of people who are looking at their menus and deciding what they really want to eat. This knowledge makes Guilhem a little bitter. He thinks about D.C.

In the main kitchen, a short flight up, Pascal Barbot, the sous-chef, is keeping things under control. The atmosphere there, with eleven serious short men in white uniforms going about intricate tasks in a cramped space, does not so much resemble the bridge of a nuclear submarine in an action movie as it does the bridge of a nuclear submarine in an action movie after it has been taken over by the Euroterrorists led by Alan Rickman: that kind of intensity, scared purposefulness, quickness, and heavy, whispered French. The kitchen is white and silver, with a few well-scrubbed copper pots hanging high up—not like the lacquered copper you see in rusticated, beam-heavy restaurant interiors but dull and scrubbed and penny-colored. The richest colors in the kitchen are those of French produce, which is always several glazes darker than American: The birds (chickens, pigeons, quail) are yellow and veined with deep violet, instead of the American white and rose. The assistant chefs start at nine o’clock and will remain at their stages until one o’clock the next morning. When the service begins, around twelve-thirty, they will experience an almost unendurable din, which, after a few days of work, they learn to break down into three or four distinct sounds: the thwonk of metal in water hitting the sides of a sink as a pot is washed by one of the Malinese plongeurs; the higher, harsh clank of one clean saucepan being placed on another; the surprisingly tinny, machine-gun rat-a-tat of a wire whisk in a copper pot; and the crashing, the-tent-just-fell-down-on-your-head sound of hot soiled pans being thrown down onto tile to be washed again. (In a good kitchen the pans are constantly being recycled by the plongeurs.)

The kitchen crew includes three Americans. They have worked mostly at California and New York restaurants of the kind that one of them describes as “grill and garnish joints.” They are all converts to Passardism. There is never anything entirely new in cooking, but Passard’s technique is not like anybody else’s. Instead of browning something over high heat in a saucepan and then roasting it in an oven, in the old French manner, or grilling it quickly over charcoal, in the new American one, Passard cooks his birds and joints sur la plaque: right on the stove, over extremely low heat in big braising pans, sometimes slow-cooking a baby gigot or a milk-fed pig in a pot for four or five hours on a bed of sweet onions and butter. “He’s just sweating those babies,” one of the Americans marvels under his breath, looking at the joints on the stoves. “Makes them cook themselves in their own fat. It’s like he does everything but make them pluck their own feathers and jump into the pan. Fucking genius.”

Downstairs, another of the Americans is slicing butter and teasing Guilhem about his D.C. plans. “Look at this butter,” he says to himself. “That’s not fucking Land o’Lakes.” He turns to Guilhem. “Hey, forget about D.C.,” he says. “It’s cold. There are no women. Where you want to go is California. That’s the promised land. Man, that’s a place where you can cook and have a life.”

Guilhem looks genuinely startled and turns to speak. “You can?” he says, softly at first, and then louder, calling out to the back of the American cook as he races up the stairs with the butter pats for the dining room. “You can?”

Most people who love Paris love it because the first time they came they ate something better than they had ever eaten before, and kept coming back to eat it again. My first night in Paris, twenty-five years ago, I ate dinner with my enormous family in a little corner brasserie somewhere down on the unfashionable fringes of the Sixteenth Arrondissement. We were on the cut-rate American academic version of the grand tour, and we had been in London for the previous two days, where we had eaten steamed hamburgers and fish-and-chips in which the batter seemed to be snubbing the fish inside it as if they had never been properly introduced. On that first night in Paris we arrived late on the train, checked into a cheap hotel, and went to eat (party of eight—no, party of nine, one of my sisters having brought along a boyfriend), without much hope, at the restaurant at the corner, called something like Le Bar-B-Que. The prix-fixe menu was fifteen francs, about three dollars then. I ordered a salad Nicoise, trout baked in foil, and a cassis sorbet. It was so much better than anything I had ever eaten that I nearly wept. (My mother, I am compelled at gunpoint to add, made food like that all the time too, but a mother’s cooking is a current of life, not an episode of taste.) My feelings at Le Bar-B-Que were a bit like those of Stendhal, I think it was, the first time he went to a brothel: I knew that it could be done, but I didn’t know there was a place on any corner where you could walk in, pay three dollars, and get it.

That first meal in Paris was for a long time one of the few completely reliable pleasures for an American in Europe. “It was the green beans,” a hardened New Yorker recalled not long ago, remembering his first meal in Paris, back in the late forties. “The green beans were like nothing I had ever known,” he went on. He sat suddenly bolt upright, his eyes alight with memory.

Now, though, for the first time in several hundred years, a lot of people who live in France are worried about French cooking, and so are a lot of people who don’t. The French themselves are, or claim to be, worried mostly about the high end—the end that is crowded into the Passard kitchen—and the low end. The word crise in connection with cooking appeared in Le Monde about a year ago, with the news that a restaurant near Lyons, which had earned three Michelin stars, was about to close. Meanwhile, a number of worrying polls have suggested that the old pyramid of French food, in which the base of plain dishes shared by the population pointed upward to the higher reaches of the grande cuisine, is collapsing. Thirty-six percent of the French people polled in one survey thought that you make mayonnaise with whole eggs (you use only yolks), 17 percent thought that you put a travers de porc in a pot-au-feu (you use beef), and 7 percent believed that Lucas Carton, the Paris restaurant that for a century has been one of the holiest of holies of haute cuisine, is a name for badly cooked meat. More ominously, fully 71 percent of Frenchmen named the banal steak-frites as their favorite plat; only people past sixty preferred a blanquette de veau, or a gigot d’agneau, or even a pot-au-feu, all real French cooking. (The French solution to this has been, inevitably, to create a National Council of Culinary Arts, connected to the Ministry of Culture.)

To an outsider, the real crise lies in the middle. That Paris first-night experience seems harder to come by. It is the unforced superiority of the cooking in the ordinary corner bistro—the prix-frxe ordinaire—that seems to be passing. This is partly a tribute to the international power of French cooking and to the great catching up that has been going on in the rest of the world for the past quarter century. The new visitor, trying out the trout baked in foil on his first night in Paris, will probably be comparing it with the trout baked in foil back home at, oh, Le Lac de Feu, in Cleveland—or even back home at Chez Alfie, in Leeds, or Matilda Qui Danse, in Adelaide—and the trout back home may just be better: raised wild or caught on the line. Even the cassis sorbet may not be quite as good as the kind he makes at home with his Sorbet-o-matic.

The fear—first unspoken, then whispered, then cautiously enunciated, and now loudly insisted on by certain competitors—is that the muse of cooking has migrated across the ocean to a spot in Berkeley, with occasional trips to New York and, of all places, Great Britain. People in London will even tell you, flatly, that the cooking there now is the best in the world, and they will publish this thought as though it were a statement of fact and as though the steamed hamburger and the stiff fish had been made long ago in another country. Two of the best chefs in the London cooking renaissance said to a reporter not long ago that London, along with Sydney and San Francisco, is one of the capitals of good food and that the food in Paris—“heavy, lazy, lacking in imagination”—is now among the worst in the world.

All this makes a Francophile eating in Paris feel a little like a turn-of-the-century clergyman who has just read Robert Ingersoll: You try to keep the faith, but Doubts keep creeping in. Even the most ardent Paris lover, who once blessed himself at every dinner for having escaped Schrafft’s, may now find himself—as he gazes down one more unvarying menu of boudin noir and saumon unilateral and entrecote bordelaise and poulet roti, eats one more bland and buttery dish—feeling a slight pang for that Cuban-Vietnamese-California grill on Amsterdam Avenue or wondering whether he might, just possibly, enjoy the New Sardinian Cooking, as featured that week on the cover of New York.

I would still rather eat in Paris than anywhere else in the world. The best places in Paris, like the Brasserie Balzar, on the rue des Ecoles, don’t just feed you well; they make you happy in a way that no other city’s restaurants can. (The Balzar is the place that plays Gallant to the more famous Brasserie Lipp’s Goofus.) Even in a mediocre Paris restaurant, you are part of the richest commonplace civilization that has ever been created and that extends back visibly to the previous century. In Paris restaurants can actually go into a kind of hibernation for years and awaken in a new generation: Laperouse, the famous swanky nineteenth-century spot, has, after a long stretch of being overlooked, just come back to life, and is a good place to eat again. Reading Olivier Todd’s biography of Camus, you discover that the places where Camus went to dinner in the forties (Aux Charpentiers, Le Petit St. Benoit, Aux Assassins) are places where you can go to dinner tonight. Some of Liebling’s joints are still in business too: the Beaux-Arts, the Pierre a la Place Gaillon, the Closerie des Lilas.

These continuities suggest that a strong allegiance to the past acts as a drag on the present. But, after several months of painstaking, tie-staining research, I think that the real problem lies in the French genius for laying the intellectual foundation for a revolution that takes place somewhere else. With movies (Melies and the Lumiere brothers invented the form and then couldn’t build the industry), with airplanes, and now even with cooking, France has again and again made the first breakthrough and then got stalled. All the elements of the new cooking, as it exists today in America and in London—the openness to new techniques, the suspicion of the overelaborate, the love of surprising juxtapositions—were invented in Paris long before they emigrated to London and New York and Berkeley. But in France they never coalesced into something entirely new. The Enlightenment took place here, and the Revolution worked out better somewhere else.

The early seventies, when I was first in France, were, I realize now, a kind of Indian summer of French haute cuisine, the last exhalation of a tradition that had been in place for several hundred years. The atmosphere of French cooking was everywhere in Paris then: thick smells and posted purple mimeographed menus; the sounds of cutlery on tables and the jowly look of professional eaters emerging blinking into the light at four o’clock.

The standard, practical account of the superiority of French cooking was that it had been established in the sixteenth century, when Catherine de’ Medici brought Italian cooks, then the best in the world, to Paris. It was not until after the French Revolution, though, when the breakup of the great aristocratic houses sent chefs out onto the street looking for someone to feed, that the style of French cooking went public. The most famous and influential figure of this period—the first great chef in European history—was Antonin Careme, who worked, by turns, for Talleyrand, the future George IV, Czar Alexander I, and the Baroness de Rothschild. He invented “presentation.” His cooking looked a lot like architecture, with the dishes fitted into vast, beautiful neoclassical structures.

The unique superiority of French cooking for the next hundred years depended on the invention of the cooking associated with the name Auguste Escoffier. Escoffier’s formula for food was in essence the same as Jasper John’s formula for dada art:

Take something; do something to it; then do something else to it. It was cooking that rested, above all, on the idea of the master sauce: A lump of protein was cooked in a pan, and what was left behind in the pan was “deglazed” with wine or stock, ornamented with butter or cream, and then poured back over the lump of protein. Escoffier was largely the creature of courtiers and aristocratic patrons; the great hoteliers of Europe, particularly Cesar Ritz, sealed in place the master sauce approach that remains the unchallenged basis of haute cuisine.

It was also an article of faith, dating, perhaps, to Alexandre Dumas pere’s famous Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, that the cooking of Careme and Escoffier had evolved from a set of provincial folk techniques. At the heart of French food lay the pot-au-feu, the bouillon pot that every peasant wife was supposed to keep on her hearth, and into which, according to legend, she threw whatever she had, to stew for the day’s meal. French classic cooking was French provincial cooking gone to town.

I heard another, more weirdly philosophical account of this history from a professor named Eugenio Donato, who was the most passionately intellectual eater I have ever known. Armenian-Italian, reared in Egypt and educated in France, he spoke five languages, each with a nearly opaque Akim Tamiroff accent. (“It could have been worse,” he said to me once, expertly removing one mussel with the shell of another as we ate monies marinieres somewhere on the place de la Sorbonne. “I had a friend whose parents were ardent Esperantists. He spoke five languages, each with an impenetrable Esperanto accent.”) Eugenio was a literary critic whom we would now call a poststructuralist, though he called what he did philosophical criticism.

Most of the time he wandered from one American university to another—the Johnny Appleseed or Typhoid Mary of deconstruction, depending on your point of view. He had a deeply tragic personal life, though, and I think that his happiest hours were spent in Paris, eating and thinking and talking. His favorite subject was French food, and his favorite theory was that “French cooking” was foreign to France, not something that had percolated up from the old pot-au-feu but something that had been invented by fanatics at the top, as a series of powerful “metaphors”—ideas about France and Frenchness—that had then moved downward to organize the menus and, retrospectively, colonize the past. “The idea of the French chef precedes French cooking” was how he put it. Cooking for him was a form of writing—Careme and Escoffier had earned their reputations by publishing cookbooks—with literature’s ability to make something up and then pretend it had been there all along.

The invention of the French restaurant, Eugenio believed, depended largely on what every assistant professor would now call an “essentialized” idea of France. One proof of this was that if the best French restaurants tended to be in Paris, the most “typical” ones tended to be in New York. Yet the more abstract and self-enclosed haute cuisine became, the more inclined its lovers were to pretend that it was a folk art, risen from the French earth unbidden. For Eugenio, the key date in this masquerade was 1855, when the wines of Medoc were classified into the famous five growths in which they remain today. “The form of metropolitan rationalization being extended to the provincial earth, in the guise of the reflection of an order locked in the earth itself,” he announced once, bringing his fist down on the tablecloth. He was a big man, who looked uncannily like John Madden, the football coach.

On that occasion we were eating lunch in one of the heavy, dark, smoky Lyons places that were popular in Paris then. (There is always one provincial region singled out for favor in Paris at any moment—privileged would have been Eugenio’s word. Then it was Burgundy; now it is the southwest. This fact was grist for his thesis that the countryside was made in the city.) The restaurant was, I think, someplace over in the Seventh; it may have been Pantagruel or La Bourgogne. At lunch, in those days, Eugenio would usually begin with twelve escargots in Chablis, then go on to something like a filet aux moelles—a filet with bone marrow and Madeira sauce—and end, whenever he could, with a mille-feuille.

The food in those places wasn’t so much “rich” as deep, dense. Each -plat arrived looking mellow and varnished, like an old violin. Each mouthful registered like a fat organ chord in a tall church, hitting you hard and then echoing around the room: There’s the bass note (the beef), there’s the middle note (the marrow), and there’s the treble (the Madeira in the sauce).

It couldn’t last. “We have landed in the moment when the metaphors begin to devour themselves, the moment of rhetorical self-annihilation,” Eugenio once said cheerfully. This meant that the food had become so rich as to be practically inedible. A recipe from the restaurant Lucas Carton that I found among a collection of menus of the time that Eugenio bequeathed to me suggests the problem. The recipe is for a timbale des homards. You take three lobsters, season them with salt and pepper and a little curry, saute them in a light mirepoix—a mixture of chopped onions and carrots—and then simmer them with cognac, port, double cream, and fish stock for twenty minutes. Then you take out the lobsters and, keeping them warm, reduce the cooking liquid and add two egg yolks and 150 grams of sweet butter. Metaphors like that can kill you.

Something had to give, and it did. The “nouvelle cuisine” that replaced the old style has by now been reduced to a set of cliches and become a licensed subject of satire: the tiny portion on the big oval plate; the raspberry-vinegar infusion; the kiwi. This makes it difficult to remember how fundamental a revolution it worked in the way people cooked. At the same moment in the early seventies, a handful of new chefs—Michel Guerard, Paul Bocuse, Alain Senderens—began to question the do-something-to-it-then-do-something-else-to-it basis of the classic cooking. They emphasized, instead, fresh ingredients, simple treatment, an openness to Oriental techniques and spices, and a general reformist air of lightness and airiness.

The new chefs had little places all around Paris, in the outlying arrondissements, where, before, no one would have traveled for a first-rate meal. Michel Guerard was at Le Pot-au-Feu, way out in Asnieres; Alain Dutournier, a little later, settled his first restaurant, Au Trou Gascon, in the extremely unfashionable Twelfth. In the sad, sedate Seventh Arrondissement, Alain Senderens opened Archestrate, first in a little space on the rue de 1’Exposition, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, and then on the rue de Varenne.

From the beginning, the new cooking divided into two styles, into what Eugenio identified as “two rhetorics,” a rhetoric of terroirs and a rhetoric of epices—soil and spice. The rhetoric of the terroirs emphasized the allegiance of new cooking to French soil; the rhetoric of the epices emphasized its openness to the world beyond the hexagon. The soil boys wanted to return French cooking to its roots in the regions; the spice boys wanted to take it forward to the new regions of outre-mer. Even as the new cooking tried to look outward, it had to reassure its audience (and itself) that it was really looking inward.

On the surface the beautiful orderly pattern continues. Alain Senderens is now in Michel Comby’s place at Lucas Carton and has replaced the timbale des homards cooking with his own style.

Senderens’s rue de Varenne Archestrate is now occupied by Alain Passard, the Senderens of his generation, while the original Archestrate is occupied by a talented young chef and his wife, just starting out, who have named the restaurant after their little girl, La Maison de Cosima.

But twenty-five years later the great leap forward seems to have stalled. A large part of the crise is economic: A hundred-dollar lunch is a splurge; a four-hundred-dollar lunch a moral dubiety. Worse, because of the expense, the cooking at the top places in Paris is no longer a higher extension of a commonplace civilization. It is just three-star cooking, a thing unto itself, like grand opera in the age of the microphone. Like grand opera, it is something that will soon need a subsidy to survive; the kitchen at Arpege depends on regular infusions of range-struck Americans to fill the space left by the French kids who no longer want to work eighteen-hour days for very little money while they train.

And it is like grand opera in this also: You can get too much of it, easily. It is, truth be told, often a challenge to eat—a happy challenge, and sometimes a welcome one, but a challenge nonetheless. It is just too rich, and there is just too much. The new cooking in France has become a version of the old.

At Lucas Carton you begin with, say, a plate of vegetables so young they seem dewy, beautifully done, but so bathed in butter and transformed that they are no longer particularly vegetal, and then you move on to the new lobster dish that has taken the place of the old one. Where the old lobsters were done in a cowshedful of cream, the new lobsters are done, epice style, with Madagascar vanilla bean. This is delicious, with the natural sugar of the lobster revealing the vanilla as a spice—although, for an American, the custard-colored sauce, dotted with specks of black vanilla, disconcertingly calls to mind melted lunchroom ice cream. For dessert, you might have a roasted pineapple, which is done on the same principles on which Passard’s tomatoes are braised: It ends up encrusted in caramel. This is delicious too, though intensely sweet. Lunch at Lucas these days can fairly be called Napoleonic or Empire; the references to the revolutionary principles are there, but finally it’s in thrall to the same old aristocratic values.

Lucas is hardly representative, but even at the lesser, less ambitious places the cooking seems stuck in a rut: a chunk of boned protein, a reduced sauce; maybe a fruit complement, to establish its “inventive” bona fides; and a puree. The style has become formulaic: a disk of meat, a disk of complement, a sauce on top. The new cooking seems to have produced less a new freedom than a revived orthodoxy—a new essentialized form of French cooking, which seems less pleasing, and certainly a lot less “modern,” than the cooking that evolved at the same time from the French new cooking in other countries. The hold of the master saute pan, and the master sauce, and the thing-in-the-middle-of-the-plate is still intact.

Thinking it over, I suspect that Eugenio put his finger on the problem with the new cooking in France when it first appeared. “A revolution can sweep clean,” he said, “but a reformation points forward and backward at the same time.” The new cooking was, as Eugenio said, a reformation, not a revolution; it worked within the same system of Michelin stars and fifteen-man kitchens and wealthy clients that the old cooking did. It didn’t make a new audience; it tried to appropriate the old one.

In America—and in England too, where the only thing you wanted to do with the national culinary tradition was lose it—the division between soil and spice wasn’t a problem. You could first create the recipes and then put the ingredients in the earth yourself. The American cooks who have followed in Alice Waters’s pathmaking footsteps at Chez Panisse, in Berkeley—the generation whom a lot of people think of as the children of M. F. K. Fisher—created a freewheeling, eclectic cosmopolitan cuisine: a risotto preceding a stir-fry leading to a sabayon. Then they went out and persuaded the local farmers to grow the things they needed.

In France the soil boys won easily. Some of what they stood for is positive and even inspiring: The terroirs movement has a green, organic, earth-conscious element that is very good news. The marche biologique every Sunday morning on the boulevard Raspail has become one of the weekly Parisian wonders, full of ugly, honest fruit and rough, tasty country meat. And it is rare for any restaurant in Paris to succeed now without presenting itself as a “regional” spot—a southwest, or Provencal, or Savoyard place. (Even at the exquisite Grand Vefour, at the Palais Royal, the most beautiful restaurant in the world and a cathedral of the cosmopolitan tradition, it is thought necessary to parade around a plate of the cheeses of the chef’s native Savoy.)

Yet the insistence on national, or local, tradition—on truth to terroirs—can give even to the best new Paris restaurants a predictability that the good new places in London and New York don’t share. The French, who invented the tradition of taking things over and then insisting that they were yours all along, are now shy about doing it. The cooking at a French restaurant must now, for the first time, be French. This tendency came to a head last spring, when a group of important French chefs actually issued a manifesto protesting the spread of exotic food combinations and alien spices in French cooking and calling for a return to the terroirs.

Peter Hoffman, the owner and chef of the influential Savoy, in New York, is one of those American chefs who went to France in the early eighties, were dazzled, and now find that the light has dimmed. He likes to tell about his most recent dinner at the three-star restaurant L’Ambroisie, on the place des Vosges. “We went to L’Ambroisie and had a classic French dish: hare with blood sauce. It was fabulous, everything you want rabbit with blood to be. But then I got talked into ordering one of the chef’s specialties, a mille-feuille of langoustines with curry, and it was infuriating. It was a French dish with powder. It was such an insular approach, as though nobody understood that curry isn’t a powder that you apply cosmetically. Nobody had read Madhur Jaffrey, or really understood that curry isn’t just a spice you shake but a whole technique of cooking you have to understand.”

As the writer Catharine Reynolds points out, the new cooking in America and England alike is really Mediterranean cooking, inspired by Italy, Tunisia, and Greece. It suits the fat-allergic modern palate better than the old butter and cream cooking of the north. France, which has a big window south, ought to be open to its influence yet remains resistant. The real national dish of the French right now—the cheap, available food—is couscous. But North African cooking remains segregated in couscous parlors and has not been brought into the main current. A fossilized metropolitan tradition should have been replaced by a modernized metropolitan tradition, yet what took its place was sentimental nationalism.

It was the invasion of American fast food, as much as anything, that made the French turn back to their own tradition and, for the first time, see it as something in need of self-conscious protection. Looking at America, the French don’t see the children of M. F. K. Fisher; they just see the flood tides of McDonald’s, which, understandably, strike fear into their hearts. The bistro became an endangered species. To make still one more blanquette de veau suddenly became not a habit of commonplace civilization but a form of self-defense.

Waverley Root once divided all Gaul into three fats—lard, olive oil, and butter—and said that they determined the shape of French cooking. That you might be able to cook without putting any fat in the pan at all was an unthinkable notion. The charcoal grill, the brick oven, and all the other nonfat ways of cooking now seem normal everywhere except in France. People who look at cooking more practically than philosophically think that that technical lag is the heart of the problem.

“It’s deglaze or die” is how Alexandra Guarnaschelli, an American cook in Paris, puts it. The master sauce approach remains the basis of French cooking, whereas elsewhere it has been overthrown by the grill. The pan and the pot have always been the basic utensils of French cooking—just what was there—in the same way that the grill was the primary element of American vernacular backyard cooking. For Americans, grilled food wasn’t new but familiar, and good cooking is made up of familiar things done right. As the excellent American chefs Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby have pointed out, grilling forced an entirely new approach to saucemaking: With no residue to deglaze, the cook had to think in terms of savory complements rather than subtle echoes. Grilling demanded chutney, fruit mustards, spice mixes. Although the French tradition included these things, they weren’t part of the vernacular.

Alex has seen some of the predicament at first hand. She is twenty-seven; she arrived in France five years ago and, after training in Burgundy, became a commis at Guy Savoys two-star place in the Seventeenth Arrondissement. Within a couple of years she had worked her way up to fish chef, and a little while later Savoy appointed her second-in-command at his bistro, La Butte Chaillot. (This is like a young Frenchman arriving in New York, all enthusiastic about baseball, and ending up five years later as the third baseman of the Yankees.)

The other day, over coffee on the avenue Kleber, Alex, who is from New York (she went to Barnard, Mom’s an editor at Scribner’s, Dad’s a professor), said, “I decided I wanted to chop onions, so I tried the CIA”—the Culinary Institute of America, the MIT of American cooking—“but it was like eighteen thousand a year, tout compris, so I decided to go to Burgundy and chop. I started learning the French way, which is half beautiful beyond belief and half ‘Please shoot me.’ It’s by the book. Really, there’s a book, and you learn it. There’s a system for everything, a way to do it. You can’t cut the fish that way, because ca n’est pas bon. You can’t bone a chicken that way, because that’s not good. ‘We do it the way it’s always been done in France.’ When I first started at Savoy, there was one old stager who, every time I did something, would just frown and shake his head and say, ‘It won’t do it won’t do.’ Finally, I did exactly what he did, and he said, ‘Good, now always do it exactly the same way.’ So I did. You never get a real attempt to innovate, or to use new flavors. You can change an adjective, but the sentence stays the same.

“Whenever we make a classic sauce, everybody gathers around and argues about it. Once we got into a two-hour argument about whether you use chervil as well as tarragon in a true bearnaise. There are certain things these days that I will not do. I will not do mayonnaise or bearnaise. Uh-uh. I don’t have time for the postgame analysis.

“Of course, there’s that tomato at Passard’s place,” she went on. “But have you seen the way the poor kid has to work to make it?”

Alex’s existence helps to explain why the new cooking went deeper in America than it could in France: In America the cooking revolution was above all a middle-class revolution, even an upper-middle-class revolution. A lot of the people who made the cooking revolution in America were doing it as a second career. At the very least they were doing it after a liberal arts degree; David Angelot started slicing carrots at fifteen. The most mocked of all modern American restaurant manners—the waiter who introduces himself by name—is, on reflection, a sign of something very positive. “I’m Henry, and I’ll be your waiter tonight” means, really, “You and I belong to the same social class. Tomorrow night I could be sitting there, and you could be standing here.”

The French system of education, unrenovated for a long time, locks people in place. Kids emerge with an impressive respect for learning and erudition, and intimidated by it too. For an American, getting a Ph.D. is a preliminary, before you go someplace else and find your real work, like opening a restaurant. Nobody thinks of changing metiers in France because it’s just too hard. In America not only the consumers of the new cooking but, more important, the producers and dealers were college-educated. I once met a pair of American academics who had gone off to live with a flock of goats and make goat cheese. They had named the goats Emily, Virginia, Jessamyn, Willa, and Ursula. It was terrific goat cheese too.

Beyond these reasons—the missing grill, the resurgent nationalism, the educational trap—there may be an even deeper reason for the lull in French cooking. A new book, L’Amateur de Cuisine, by an unknown author, Jean-Philippe Derenne, which was published last year, offers an anatomy of French cooking—an effort to organize the materials, forms, and manners of the subject in a systematic way. “This cookbook is a book,” the author writes on the first page, and then attempts to create a whole taxonomy of cooking based not on folk tradition or cosmopolitan recipes but on an analysis of plants and animals and the chemistry of what happens when you apply different kinds of heat and cold to them before you eat them. He begins his market section with the minerals (a crisp page and a half) and then passes to the plants (more than a hundred pages) and the animals, divided into those of the earth and the sky and those of fresh and salt water. (Even “Serpents, Sauriens, Lezards, etc.” get their moment in the sun.) He gives a precise biological description of every imaginable thing there is to eat, then presents an exact analysis of every imaginable method of cooking it and shows how all the glories of cuisine rise out of the limitless intersections of these two forces. It is a vast, eleven-hundred-page volume, comprehensive and radiant; it resembles less a cookbook than a medieval almanac, offering a timeless, secure, benevolent universe of food. Its subject isn’t cooking. It’s plenty.

Derenne is a modest and gentle scholar, not a cook or a critic or even a gourmand. He is a doctor, the head of the pulmonary department at a Paris hospital. Over lunch one afternoon at Arpege, Derenne, a small, good-natured man, with the open face and happy appetites of a Benedictine monk, said, “The same week that L’Amateur de Cuisine came out, I published another book, called Acute Respiratory Failure of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.” That was another thousand pages. This, surely, is a record for total weight by one author published in one week.

Derenne wrote the cookbook in seclusion, in the garden of his little house near Fontainebleau, only to find himself, on its publication, a new lion of the French culinary establishment: the man who wrote the book. He gets reverential, cher maitre—type letters from Paul Bocuse. Passard himself sees him as a friend. Dr. Derenne doesn’t know quite what to make of it all.

“My editor said to me, when I gave him the manuscript, ‘Why, you’ve written the first humanist history of food.’ I said, ‘No, not humanist. It’s a religious book, really.’ I was inspired by a history of religion by Mircea Eliade, which attempted the same kind of logical organization, rising upward from the types of religious apparition into the possibilities of organized faith. I’ve done for cooking what that author did for belief: shown an underlying logic without attempting to make it logical.”

He went on to talk about a second volume, which he’s just started: “It may be called free cuisine, but really it will be about the rejected cuisine. About everything the world throws out. Shells and guts and leaves—the whole world of the rejected. This is religious too, because religion depends on being able to find the holy in the ordinary. It’s putting together things banal in themselves which nonetheless become transformed into something transcendent. You know who else has this quality? Duke Ellington—he simply used what he had.”

There was something surprising about Derenne’s talk, an expansive, open, embracing ardor that a hundred years ago would have seemed more American than French. It seems possible that the different fates of the new cooking in France and America are a sign of a new relation between the two places.

A century ago Americans used to say that what brought them to Europe was its history. At home, there was “no sovereign, no court… no aristocracy… nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals,” as Henry James’s famous list has it. What really brought Americans to the Old World, though, was the allure of power: cultural power, political power, military power—imperial power, as it existed in Europe and only there. What fascinated Whistler and James in the Old World was not its age but the extreme self-consciousness that comes with power, the way that power could be seen to shimmer through manners—the way that what you wore or how you stood (or what you ate) spelled out your place in a complicated and potent social hierarchy.

Now that that power has passed into American—or, anyway, English-speaking—hands, the trappings of power that come from extreme self-consciousness are ours too. Even our cooking—especially our cooking—has become involved with power. Where you stand on, say, the spread of McDonald’s is a political issue, just as where you stood on the outdoor café was in France a century ago. Even the smaller issues of the palate count. Most American women define their feminism, at least in part, in terms of their attitude toward the kitchen. A century ago the modern form of that self-consciousness was invented in Paris. The limitlessly complicated relation of what you eat and where you eat it to where you stand in the social order is the subject of, for instance, the first two chapters of Maupassant’s Eel-Ami. But now food and cooking in France have begun to take at least a small half turn back toward their other role, as sources of nourishment, comfort, cohesion. The role of food as anxious social theater, seen at its crudest in the endless worry in Los Angeles and

New York about power tables—where you sit at Spago, what time you leave the Four Seasons—is diminishing in France. We are the worldly, corrupt ones at the table now, and the Europeans, in this regard at least, are the innocents. Even their philosophers eat for pleasure.

When the tomate confite, which David Angelot had been working on since nine o’clock, came out at last, Derenne tasted it. Then he said, “You see, he demonstrates for us what we knew from the first: that the tomato is a fruit. Would you call that arrogance or modesty?”

Not long after that I finally did what I had dreaded doing, though it would have been the practical thing to do all along, which was to go back to that first restaurant and see what it was like now. I walked back and found both the hotel and the restaurant, though both had changed their names—the hotel belonged now to the Best Western chain—and while in memory I had kept them on the same street, they were in fact a street apart. But the exterior of the restaurant was unmistakable; I found it by getting the Eiffel Tower in exactly the same area of my eye as it had occupied when I was fourteen. It was not far from—I am not making this up—the avenue Marcel-Proust. The restaurant is now called the Tournesol, and the less expensive prix fixe is 114 francs, or about twenty dollars. I ate a la carte. I had a little foie gras, sole meuniere, and a cassis sorbet.

The food was even better than I had remembered. This proves either that (a) Proust was wrong, and you can always recapture the pleasures of your youth if you just go back to the places where you had them, or (b) there is more good cooking left in Paris than I knew, or (c) I went to the wrong place. Anyway, there’s hope.

Barney in Paris

When people ask why Martha and I, not long after the birth of our first child, left New York for Paris, we can usually think of a lot of plausible-sounding reasons. They vary in tone from the high-mindedly agonized (we couldn’t endure the mailing of our SoHo neighborhood) to the cloyingly whimsical (we wanted to live within walking distance of the Gerard Mulct bakery, on the rue de Seine). The real reason was Barney. We had seen one after another of our friends’ children—charming children of parents who parse Greek texts or write long metafictions set in the eighteenth century—sunk dumbly in front of a television set watching a man in a cheap purple dinosaur suit sing doggerel in an adenoidal voice with a chorus of overregimented eight-year-old ham actors. Just a glimpse was enough to scare a prospective parent to death: the garish Jeff Koons colors, the frantic prancing, the cynically appropriated public domain melodies. And, finally, that anthem of coercive affection—“I love you/you love me/we’re a happy family”—sung, so incongruously, to the tune of “This Old Man.”

The experienced reader will know of course that Barney stands here for the whole of American kiddie video culture. The experienced reader, though, is wrong. We looked forward to introducing Luke to Bugs and Bullwinkle and Bert and Ernie, and even Steve and Norm on This Old House. We just couldn’t bear the idea of his watching Barney The only way, we thought, to be sure that he wouldn’t was to pack up everything we had and move to another country.

So, Paris. “We want him to grow up someplace where everything he sees is beautiful,” we said, and though we realized that the moment our backs were turned our friends’ eyes were rolling, we didn’t care. We knew that our attempt to insist on a particular set of pleasures for our kid—to impose a childhood on our child—might be silly or inappropriate or even doomed. We couldn’t help it, entirely. The romance of your child’s childhood may be the last romance you can give up.

In our first week in our new home on the Left Bank, we were awakened early one morning by loud, oddly fugitive organ music;

it sounded like a carousel yet seemed to be moving closer. We opened the long French windows, looked out—and there was an honest-to-God organ grinder coming along the street, “La Ronde” playing as he turned the crank on his hand-painted hurdy-gurdy. I found a ten-franc piece and threw it down to the street; Luke applauded; the organ grinder caught it with one hand and cheerily, nattily, tipped his cap. Things looked good.

That first year we went to a lot of circuses; in Paris there are usually six or seven in residence. We saw the Moreno-Bormann family circus, which is a true family circus: When any performer does anything slightly dangerous, the rest of the family stand around the ring calling out “Careful!” under their breaths and averting their eyes. We also saw the Mongolian National Circus, in a little tent pitched at the Arsenal. It consists of six broad-faced, smiling Mongolians, who do circus tricks appropriate to a nomadic scarcity economy—they eat a little bit of fire, walk on one broken bottle and save the shards—and finish off with an elaborate, pointless thirty-minute trick using a magician’s cabinet that must have been left in Mongolia by an American illusionist sometime around 1860. (A Mongolian girl gets in the cabinet; Mongolian circus members slowly slide the swords through the slots; spend twenty minutes removing the swords from the slots; and then the girl gets out.)

We went to a lot of parks and rode a lot of carousels. In the Luxembourg Gardens is a completely unsupervised playground that’s run on lines inspired by the last chapter of Lord of the Flies. There is a spinning red platter onto which little children are thrown by bigger ones, who whip it around, with the terrified little ones kept from flying off by sheer centripetal force. There is a weird ski lift-style conveyance that kids cling to with their fingers, dangling ten feet in the air over nothing but hard pavement. There are jungle gyms the kids climb on, to be knocked off the top bars by informal gangs of larger kids. There is not a safety belt, a padded surface, or a liability lawyer anywhere to be found. (Twenty years ago my wife and I, on our first date, saw Truffaut’s Small Change. We loved the sequence in which a child falls out of a sixth-story window and walks away unhurt. In our early Francophile moments we saw this as charming French fantasy In fact, it was pure cinema verite. Luke attends a weekly gym class for two-year-olds, along with heartbreakingly exquisite little girls named Amandine and Jolie and Neige. The children are routinely sent leaping from high, splintery boards onto low, uncushioned ones.)

At dusk, however, a uniformed surveillant emerges from a windowless shed at the center of the gardens and blows a whistle, and everyone goes home. The child who has his hands around your child’s throat lets go, helps him up, dusts off his tablier, takes his mother’s hand, and trudges toward the gates. The vicious big kids help the terrified small kids off the spinning red platter. The play routine at the gardens explains French history: The restrictive Old Regime, represented by the carousel, leads to the anarchy of the Revolution and the Reign of Terror, represented by the playground; then Napoleon emerges in uniform to blow his whistle and call everybody to order. (Or it could be the occupation, the Fourth Republic, and de Gaulle emerging in uniform.) Between the carousels and the circuses and a wealth of Charlie Chaplin movies, to which Luke developed a deep, sober attachment, we seemed, blessedly, to have skipped right past the B’s.

Then, last Christmas, we went back to New York for three days. A friend brought a pile of tapes for a jet-lagged Luke to watch in the bedroom while we had dinner. I should have guessed from the ominous, atypical silence coming from the bedroom that something was off. Scooping up my exhausted little boy at the end of the evening, I noticed that he was looking unusually withdrawn. Then, right there in the backseat of a New York City taxicab, he suddenly looked up and said quietly, “Daddy, I like Barney.”

“You like what?” I said.

“I like Barney,” he said, and he turned over and went to sleep. The next morning we broke down and let him watch the video again—we were pretty jet-lagged too—and that was enough. It was like what they used to tell you about heroin: One taste, and you’re hooked for good.

“I want Barney,” he would announce early in the morning. He began to whine for Barney: “I want Barney, I want Barney.” When we got back to Paris (the tapes somehow got into our bags), the need for Barney went right on. It even got worse. We’d be trying to watch one of the long, thoughtful French things that are good for your soul and your French—Bouillon de Culture or Droit d’Auteurs, or even just the dubbed version of NYPD Blue (“Ah, c’est un houlot difficile, ce travail de policier, Inspecteur Sipowicz”)-—and Luke would appear with a Barney tape. We had fled to Paris to escape our appointment with Barney, and Barney had come to meet us there.

Not wanting to be a bad or unduly coercive parent, I thought, Well, he has a right to his pleasures, but I too have a right—indeed a duty—to tell him what I think of them. We began to have a regular daily exchange.

“Daddy, I like Barney,” he would say with elaborately feigned nonchalance, coming into my office first thing in the morning.

“Well, I don’t like Barney,” I would say, frankly

“You like B.J.?” he would ask, tauntingly. B.J. is one of Barney’s even more inane and adenoidal sidekicks.

“I love Ernie and Bert,” I would say, trying to put a positive spin on my position. “I love the carousel. I love the circus. I love Charlie Chaplin.”

“I like Barney,” he would begin again, and it would go on.

Naturally it occurred to us that the pro-Barney campaign was a resourceful and in many ways courageous and admirable show of independence on the part of a two-and-a-half-year-old who might otherwise have been smothered by his parents’ overbearing enthusiasms. We put up minimal Barney resistance. More tapes arrived from America; more tapes got popped in and played.

We tried to be tolerant, but Barney takes his toll: the braying voice, the crude direction, the inane mummery of the dancing, the witlessness of the writing. Our dreamed-of Parisian life was becoming unendurable. One afternoon around four-thirty I wandered into the bedroom, where the television is. My wife was, uncharacteristically, drinking a glass of red wine. On the little screen Barney was leading all the kids in one more rousing chorus of “I love you/you love me.” We finished the bottle of Burgundy together. On the screen Barney sang, and our son moved his lips in time.

What puzzled me of course was why. Loving Barney in Paris was partly a way of teasing his parents, but it was not simply a way of teasing his parents; it was too deep, too emotional for that. Nor had Barney yet crossed the ocean, so it wasn’t any kind of peer pressure from the French kids he played with in class and in the courtyard every day. In Paris, in fact, almost all the childhood icons are those that have been in place for forty years: stuffy, bourgeois Babar; conniving, witty Asterix and Obelix; and imperturbable Lucky Luke, the Franco-American cowboy in perpetual battle with the four Dalton brothers. Although these characters from time to time appear in cartoons, they remain locked in their little worlds of satire and storytelling. There is no Barney in France, and there is no French Barney. Whatever spell was working on my son, it was entirely, residually American.

There are certain insights that can come to an American only when he is abroad, because only there does the endless ribbon of American television become segmented enough so that you can pay attention to its parts, instead of just being overwhelmed by the relentlessness of its presence. In the middle of the winter I happened to see, during some stray roundup of the year’s events on CNN International, a clip of another familiar American figure, his arms around his wife and child, swaying and humming as he watched fireworks going off. Suddenly I got it. The nose; the rocking motion; above all, the squinty-eyed, aw-shucks, just-a-big-lug smile: Barney is Bill Clinton for three-year-olds. Or, rather, Bill Clinton is Barney for adults. He serves the same role for jumpy American liberals that Barney does for their children: He reassures without actually instructing. The physical resemblance alone is eerie. There’s the odd combination of hauteur and rondeur (both are very tall without really being imposing), the perpetually swaying body, the unvarying smile, even the disconcerting chubby thighs—everything but the purple skin. Barney and Bill are not amiable authority figures, like the Friendly Giant and Ronald Reagan. They are, instead, representations of pure need: Wanting to be hugged, they hug.

For the first time, I also understood Clinton hating, of the violent irrational kind that, when I left America, was being practiced on the editorial page of the Times and in the New Republic and had always seemed incomprehensible, directed, as it was, at so anodyne a character. Suddenly I saw that the psychology of the Clinton hater was exactly that of the Barney basher; the objections were not moral but peevishly aesthetic. Like Barney, Bill stripped away our pet illusions by showing just how much we could do without. We had persuaded ourselves that the modern child needed irony, wit, humor, parody to be reached and affected; Sesame Street and Bullwinkle were our exhibits in this argument. Barney showed that this was not the case. At the same time, we had persuaded ourselves that the modern citizen, similarly wary (he is, after all, merely the Bullwinkle viewer grown old), could be recalled to liberalism only through a heightened, self-conscious, soul-searching high-mindedness. Bill showed that this was not the case. Both dinosaur and Arkansas governor had discovered that the way to win the hearts of their countrymen was to reduce their occupation to its most primitive form. Where Kermit the Frog, on Sesame Street, had sung the principle of brotherhood to children through the poetic metaphor of his own greenness, Barney just grabbed the kids and told them that he loved them and that they loved him too, damn it. Where Mario Cuomo had orated about Lincoln and the immigrants and the metaphor of family, Bill Clinton just held out his arms and watched people leap into them. It turns out that you don’t need to be especially witty or wise to entertain children, just as you don’t need to believe in anything much to be an extremely effective president. All you need is to know your audience’s insecurities and how to keep swaying in time to them forever.

We had kept Barney in quarantine, for the most part, and though Neige and Jolie and Amandine passed through the house, it was mostly to sing lovely French songs—“Pomme de Reinette” and “Frere Jacques”—and play with Luke’s puppet theater. Then we decided to hold a party to celebrate the coming of spring, and I went out to Mulot to get a four-part chocolate cake. When I came back to the apartment, half an hour later, the roomful of lively children whom I had left drawling in haute French was silent. They were all in the bedroom. I walked in—no cuckolded husband can ever have entered his own bedroom with more dread about what he would find there—and saw the three girls spread out on the bed, their crinolines beautifully plumped, their eyes wide, their mouths agape. Barney was in France, and the kids were loving him. The three perfect French children looked on, hardly able to understand the language, yet utterly transfixed. I held out cake. Nothing doing. Barney was swaying. B.J. was prancing. The kids on the show were mugging like crazy and everyone was singing.

It was too late. “How do you sing that ‘I loove you, you loove me’?” Amandine asked haltingly in French, when the program ended.

“I love you, you love me,” Jolie answered swiftly. “Happy family” Luke prompted. For the next week the song resounded from the street the way “La Ronde” had, long before.

A couple of weeks later, at breakfast, Luke made an announcement. “Daddy,” he said, “I don’t like Barney.”

“You don’t like Barney?” I asked, incredulous, delighted. “No, I don’t like Barney” He paused. “I like to watch Barney” He had stumbled, in a Barneycentric manner, on the essential formula that could be applied to almost every American spectacle: I don’t like the 0. J. Simpson trial, I like to watch the O. J. Simpson trial; I don’t like Geraldo Rivera, I like to watch Geraldo Rivera. And most basic of all: I don’t like television, I like to watch television. When he watches Barney now, it’s with a look in his eye that I know too well and that I can only call the American look, the look of someone who, though he has seen right through it, still can’t take his eyes away—one of us, despite it all.

Lessons from Things, Cristmas Journal 3

A French school term that I have learned to love is lecons des choses, lessons from things. It refers to a whole field of study, which you learn in class, or used to, that traces civilization’s progress from stuff to things. The wonderful posters in Deyrolle, which Martha and I love and have collected, were made for lecons des choses. They show the passage of coffee from the bean to the porcelain coffeepot, of wine from the vine and soil to the bottle, of sugar from the cane to the clafoutis. They always show the precise costume that the beans and grapes and stuff end up in: the chateau bottling, the painted coffeepot, the label on the jam jar. The Deyrolle posters simultaneously remind you that even the best things always have some stuff leaking out their edges—a bit of the barnyard, a stain of soil—and that even the worst stuff is really OK, because it can all be civilized into things. The choses, the things, are what matters.

Of all the lecons des choses I have absorbed in Paris, the most important has come from learning to cook. I cooked a bit in New York, Thanksgiving dinner and a filet mignon or two, and summers by the grill, like every American guy. But here I cook compulsively, obsessively, waking up with a plat in mind, balancing it with wine and side dishes throughout the working day (“Do I dare poach a Brussels sprout?”), shopping, anticipating six o’clock, when I can start, waiting for the perfectly happy moment when I begin, as one almost always does, no matter what one is cooking, by chopping onions.

The beautiful part of cooking lies in the repetition, living the same participles, day after day: planning, shopping, chopping, roasting, eating, and then vowing, always, never again to start on something so ambitious again… until the dawn rises, with another dream of something else. (Hunger, I find, plays a very small role in it all.) I have learned to make fifty or sixty different dinners: roasted poulet de Bresse, blanquette de veau a vanille; carre d’agneau; gigot de sept heures. I can clafoutis an apple, poach a pear, peel a chestnut. Big dishes, big food. Much too big food, the old cooking. (There is a little culinary bookstore on the rue du Bac that sells menus from the turn of the century. How did people, rich people, middle-class people, eat so much? Our stomachs must have shrunk, an argument for the plasticity of appetite, or at least of tummies. Is it fashion, culture, though? Or is it simply central heating; is it that we need fewer calories now than then and eat like West Indians—ginger and lime and rum marinades—because our indoor climate is now West Indian?)

I shop every day, making the rounds: the nice butcher on the rue de Verneuil, the grumpy butcher on the rue du Bac; the expensive excellent vegetable shop on the rue de Grenelle, or the homey mom & pop cheaper vegetable place on the rue de Verneuil. The one good fish place on the rue du Bac, cheese from Barthelemy on the rue de Grenelle (which Luke won’t enter, from dislike of the smell, and so he waits outside, picketing). Maybe a bottle of wine at Le Repaire de Bacchus, where we discuss what I’m cooking; dessert from the grumpy ladies at Michel Chemin or the smooth, charming, expensive ladies at

Dalloyau, and then I come home, my hands torn and aching from all the plastic bags biting into them.

Shopping in Paris, even for a simple family dinner, takes a solid hour, since everything has to be picked over, made ready, sorted out. (Of course, there are supermarkets, but real supermarkets—grands espaces, large spaces—are not allowed into Paris proper, and, anyway, the local merchants still thrive.) The chicken must have its head cut off, its feet cut off, and then it must be gutted. There is really nothing I enjoy more than watching a good butcher gut a chicken; it is a legon des choses with bloody hands. The butcher incises the gut and then reaches in and pulls out the -whole insides, a (shocking fact this, to a supermarket-stupid American) long, squalid string of mixed-up stuff, guts and gizzard and liver and heart, and then neatly shifts the disgusting to one side and the palatable to the other. You calm down—oh, look at that, that’s nice, that’s nasty—although at the moment that he actually pulls out the guts, your North American nice-nasty meter has been swinging wildly from one end of the scale to the other. Guts to one side, liver and heart to the other:

That’s just stuff, but that’s a potential thing, and what about the neck? Might possibly with a lot of work become a thing, but it’s discardable as stuff too if you feel that way about it.

The sublime moment of cooking, though, is really the moment when nature becomes culture, stuff becomes things. It is the moment when the red onions have been chopped and the bacon has been sliced into lardons and the chestnuts have been peeled, and they are all mijoteing together in the pot, and then—a specific moment—the colors begin to change, and the smells gather together just at the level of your nose. Everything begins to mottle, bend from raw to cooked. The chestnuts, if you’re doing chestnuts, turn a little damp, a little weepy. That’s what they do; everything weeps.

I suppose there must be a good evolutionary psychologist’s reason for the appeal of this transformation, some smart, smutty thine about color change and female rears, but cooking isn’t really like sex: appetite and satiation and appetite again. Sex is ravenous rather than reflective. The passage from stuff to things, the moment when the vegetables weep, is a meditative moment and has no point, really, except the purely ephemeral one of seeing it happen. You cook for yourself, or I do anyway. Martha picks through things, New York girl with a New York appetite, and Luke, like an astronaut, would prefer to live on a diet of milk shakes and nutrient pellets. Cooking, for middle-class, end-of-the-century people, is our only direct, not entirely debased line with the hermetic life, with Zen sitting, with just doing things without a thought. No wonder monks make good cheese.

(I tried teaching sublime and beautiful as categories to Luke the other day. He brooded. “Daddy,” he said at last, “an example of the sublime: dinosaur bones. An example of the beautiful: Cressida Taylor.” Cressida Taylor, I have since learned, is a four-year-old girl with a long blond braid in his class at school with whom he is, understandably, in love, and who is in fact perfectly beautiful. The other day he also came home and said, “That Cressida—she’s quite a dish!” I don’t know where he gets this slang. The other day I also heard him say, “Oh, brother, what a peach!” about someone or other.)

The absence of stuff may be what makes writing so depressing and cooking so inviting to the writer. (To the yuppie-family-guy writer anyway. It used to be not cooking but its happy, feckless near relation drinking that writers looked forward to at twilight. Perhaps for the same reason; it gives you something to do with your hands at six o’clock other than typing.) Writing isn’t the transformation of stuff into things. It is just the transformation of symbols into other symbols, as if one read recipes out loud for dinner, changing the proportions (“I’m adding fifty goddamn grams of butter!”) for dramatic effect. You read out the recipe and the audience listens, and pretends to taste, the way Martha does when I force her to listen to jazz records. Mmm, delicious. Sometimes, if you change the proportions dramatically enough—nothing but butter! no butter at all!—the people listening gasp, as though they really could taste it. (This is the way Burroughs and Bukowski write.) Fortunately they never have to. Writing is a business of saying things about stuff and saying things about things and then pretending that you have cooked one into the other.

This may be why I like this year to take a fundamental lecon des choses by going up to Sennelier, the beautiful art supply store on the quai Voltaire, and just buying some stuff that artists use to make things. Ingres paper, or oil pastels, or just a comet, a notebook. How can artists ever make anything ugly at all? you wonder; just a black mark on thick white paper is so beautiful. I feel serene surrounded by paper, having learned that things give lessons enough.

We’ve gone traveling a lot this year, to Budapest and London many times and to Venice and to Bruges. The weather on CNN, at least, whichever hotel room you find it in (and you find it in them all) always continues cheerful. (“And, hey, would you look here? A big low-pressure area is going to drop snow all over the east, from Danzig right out to Ukraine….”) I always imagine the businessmen, selling Dunkin’ Donuts franchises and Internet stocks from Bucharest to Ulan Bator, checking the weather on CNN every night. Our peculiar American toothless bite is there. (But then I recall a theory Luke and I have learned this year about the T. rex: that it didn’t actually bite at all but just grabbed and tore at its prey, half the time leaving it just wounded, but with enough toxic T rex slime in the wound to infect it fatally. All the T. rex had to do was follow the poor sick guy around and watch until he dropped. American capitalism seems to work this way too. Toothless bites, it seems, are the worst bites of all.)

We followed CNN from motel to hotel, Michelin guide to Michelin guide, as we traveled. When I was in New York, all-news radio had the stock exchange highs every day, waiting for the Dow to break a number (eight thousand? ten thousand? It breaks the next one so quickly that we can’t recall), the way we waited for a ballplayer to break a record.

Traveling around France, we’ve been out to the Loire, down to Grenoble and the Savoy, up to Normandy. I begin to get it. France is a big, rich country. It has a lot of people; they have a lot of good things to eat; they don’t see why anyone should push them around. France doesn’t believe that it was once the big one, as Holland or England does, by virtue of a special mission and an exceptional national character. France believes that it is naturally the big one, like China or America. The big one by virtue of its size, its abundance, its obvious cultural hegemony (all cultural hegemonies are believed to be natural by the people at the core of them). It was not so terribly long ago that everybody took this status for granted, and speaking French was like speaking English now: not strictly an accomplishment but a necessity for a cosmopolitan life. It was not so long ago that France was almost lazily the big one, as we are now, so to be told, again and again, that not only is it not the big one but not even among the bigger ones riles the French.

Luke decided this year to penetrate farther into the Luxembourg Gardens. He is the Amundsen, the Peary, though I hope not the Scott, of the Luxembourg Gardens. His whole life is devoted to penetrating its mysteries, hoping eventually to get to its core. Someday he will enter the surveillants’ shed, where the policemen sit and warm their coffee and watch for park infractions, and it will be time to go home. Or else he will spend the rest of his life as a Paris policeman; he will become Pierre! On the carousel he is now up and mounted on a horse, with the leather rope tight around his waist, eyes fixed straight ahead, hands clutching the pole, still too unsure for the stick and rings, but looking at them, hard.

This year he penetrated into the inner temple of the gardens. He went to a puppet show. It was a huge move, much meditated on and discussed in advance.

“Daddy, I think I want to go to the puppet show,” he said sometime this spring, and then, having chosen Les Trois Petits Cochons, The Three Little Pigs, as his first show, we debated for a week, before the fateful Saturday matinee arose, what it was going to be like. He would jump into bed at seven in the morning with a new theory. “I think they’ll dance like this,” he said worriedly one morning, putting his hands on his waist and oscillating his torso back and forth mechanically. Then he stopped and looked even more worried. What if they did dance like that, God help us?

“I think there will be a wolf in it,” he said on another morning, “and he will look like this,” and then he grimaced, horribly. (I realized that he had become a precise replica of the young Marcel getting worked up about seeing Berma for the first time. It is a French moment, though not exactly the one we had in mind, puppets as pigs rather than Sarah in Racine, still…)

Saturday came around at last, and we lined up at the entrance to the puppet theater, just to the left of the playground, where we have gone so many afternoons. The owner—proprietor—producer-chief puppeteer is named Francis-Claude Desarthis, and he walks up and down the gardens with a bell before each show begins, ringing hard—not ringing to be fetching but ringing to fetch. As so often in Paris, it is hard to know if the puppet theater is making a mint—it charges twenty-four francs a ticket, about five dollars, and on weekends always seem full up—or hanging on by its nails.

Desthartis’s father started the theater back in the thirties. His framed picture is still in place on the facade of the theater, looking plaintively at a puppet. Many of the shows seem to have been left untouched since then. The performance of Les Trois Petits Cochons, for instance, uses, with slight variations, many of the devices, not to mention the music, of the Disney version of the story from the thirties. There are French touches, though. The catastrophe, or climax, occurs when the wolf pretends to be a minor official come to read the water meter. The pigs have to let him into the one remaining house; the French little pigs have to open the door to administration, even when it has bright white teeth and an immense jaw and sixty white papier-mache teeth. Fortunately the day is saved, first by a series of electric shocks administered by the smart pig to the wolf by way of a rigged water meter and then by a snapping crocodile that arrives wrapped in a package (who sent him isn’t clear, at least not to me). Finally, before the hunter arrives, the day is really saved by a black American boxer (Joe Louis?) with gleaming white teeth and thick lips and a terrific, wolf-devastating right uppercut.

There are dances—various animal puppets leaping up and down in time—at regular intervals, even when some necessary question of the play has yet to be resolved. The line to the seventeenth-century theater—for Moliere too is full of arbitrary dances—is real. The puppet shows are real puppet shows. They use puppets, the kind you hold with your hand from beneath. They’re big puppets, with overlarge, papier-mache heads and long arms, but no legs.

The no-legness of the puppets puzzles and discourages Luke. Far from seeming to him an invisible artistic convention, I think that he believes it to be a notable, disturbing piece of amputation. He thinks not Well, their legs are represented by sheets of fabric but, rather, Their legs have been cut off, and they have been forced to perform in a theater! In every show the hero is always Guignol, a kind of Puck or Trickster puppet, with a long Chinese braid. It is alarming to see his face, since it is obviously modeled on that of M. Desarthis himself—or, even scarier, on that of his father, who, from his portrait on the side of the building, seems to have had more or less the same features. They have passed themselves, it seems, into Guignol, who is, interestingly, amoral. Guignol takes the splinters out of the paws of wounded tigers (“Le pauvre,” he soothes) but is in business for himself, and mocks and bedevils the well-meaning admirals and librarians and magistrates he always seem to encounter. (Many of these, interestingly enough, have British accents.)

So far we have seen Les Tresors du Sultan (first a mixup on a ship and then a second act on a desert island, including, oddly, a tiger with a thorn in its paw and that noisy, impressively snapping crocodile. Also highly Semitic caricatures of the pirates and the sultan), Minochet (a cat in a Paris garret), Le Cirque en Folie (the Mad Circus, many animals, including, again oddly enough, a tiger and a crocodile), Le Rossignol et I’Empereur de Chine (adapted, the sign says honorably, from the comte of Hans Christian Andersen, although, interestingly, a tiger and a crocodile have been added), and, of course, those pigs.

As in any vast dramatic corpus, the puppet plays are of varying styles, ranging from the classic heigh-ho heartiness of Pigs and Tresors (as they are known to scholars) to the darker, more static style of Minochet and Le Vieux Chateau—the problem puppet shows, as they are known. (Le Vieux Chateau begins with a long, endless sequence in a scholar’s library, and Minochet with an act, half Celine and half Beckett, about the poor cat, Minochet, trying to have her little supper while a mad butcher searches for her to turn her into cat sausage.) All of course are in French, using recorded voices that must have also been registered sometime in the late thirties—you can practically see the Pathe rooster on the side of the box that the records are kept in—and since the language is idiomatic and jokey, it is often hard for me to follow. Luke, whose French, despite his going to a French school, is in and out—as Hemingway’s friends said about him, you never know if he knows a lot or a little—kneels up on the seat beside me and demands translations. (“What’s he saying?” “That they’re going to kidnap the princess… no, now he’s saying something else”… etc.)

That first performance, though, the epochal Pigs, was so overwhelming that he couldn’t sleep, and so we tried a usually reliable soporific: walking him down to the Seine in his poussette to watch the boats from the ponts des Arts. Usually, almost always, he falls asleep on the walk back. This night, though—a wonderful May night, chestnuts in blossom, a month later than the song advertises—he couldn’t sleep, and his troubled, obsessive mind kept returning to the puppet show, to the struggle between damnation and impassioned papier-mache.

We wandered through the Sixth, taking what I still think is the most beautiful walk in the world: up the rue de Seine and then right through the little, unprepossessing-looking arch—a hole punched in a wall—that gives no promise at all that it opens right onto the esplanade of the greatest of grand siecle buildings, the Institut de France, Mazarin’s great curved library topped by its perfect dome. Passing through the tiny, poussette-wide arch onto the curved esplanade is like walking backstage through a flat and onto a great set.

There are no guards, no guardrails—nothing between you and the great building. It’s all just there, and you can push a child’s poussette back and forth in front of the institute entrance and even lean on the door to rest, though it is the center of French civilization. It is one of those odd Parisian absences that are as strange as the pervasive presences elsewhere. (There are enough policemen in the Luxembourg Gardens for each to be assigned one child each, but not a single guard anywhere here.)

Luke all the while was keeping up a running, troubled commentary on Les Trois Petits Cochons. “Why there were two wolves?” he would spring up, sleepy, from his poussette, to demand. (Actually there was just one, but he would appear, with sinister effect, on either side of the proscenium.) “Why he wants to eat the pigs?” “Why that man knock him?” “Why that crocodile bite?” Why why, why… the question the pigs ask the wolf, that the wolf asks the hunter, that the hunter asks God—and the answer, as it comes at midnight, after all the other, patient parental answers (“Well, you see, wolves generally like to eat pigs, though that’s just in the story.” “Well, hunters, a long time ago, would go hunting for wolves with guns when they were a danger to people”), the final, exhausted midnight-in-the-lamplight answer, wheeling the poussette down the quai Voltaire, is the only answer there is, the Bible’s answer to Job: because that’s the way the puppet master chose to do it, because that’s the way the guy who works the puppets likes to see it done.

Wednesday afternoons, Luke and I take our local bus, the 63, which runs down the boulevard Saint-Germain toward his school and the Seventh Arrondissement, back up toward the Jardin des Plantes and the Fifth, to visit the dinosaur museum. Luke has been following a course in Picasso and dinosaurs in his maternelle. I had already taken him round the Picasso museum, which Luke liked, and the dinosaurs were an even bigger hit. He talks knowingly, familiarly, of the brachiosaurus and pterodactyl. I have told him that dinosaurs were defeated by an alliance of daddies, that only daddies can defeat dinosaurs. Look around, I ask, are there dinosaurs? (No.) Are there daddies? (Yes.) Well, then… He sees the flaw in this argument more quickly than I expected. Daddies came long after dinosaurs; daddies claimed the terrain of power only after dinosaurs had already abandoned it. That’s the way the dinosaurs tell it, I say. Long discussions. Long pause. Finally: “Here’s one dinosaur you can never defeat [dramatic pause]… T rex!” He needs an undefeatable dinosaur, a dinosaur beyond the reach of a dad.

The entrance to the paleontology museum at the Jardin des Plantes is graced by a statue of Lamarck, with the engraving “The Father of Evolution,” in giant letters, on its pedestal. Darwin, on the other hand, is nowhere in sight.

There is nothing more exasperating than French monuments to unheroic local heroes. In the Luxembourg Gardens, where I run many mornings, there are statues of the great writers of France, genuinely towering and Olympian figures—real all-stars, the greats. Baudelaire scowls at the southern end of the gardens;

Delacroix is greeted by angels at the other end. I salute them both every morning, while jogging by Verlaine and Sainte-Beuve. In the midst of them all there is a statue to a man whose name I, at least, have never heard, a guy named Branly, whose pedestal proclaims him to be the father of the wireless communication, radiotelegraph, and television. I am skeptical of this claim. It is a few feet away from the small, just larger than life-size Statue of Liberty, made by Bartholdi for fund-raising back when. This Liberty looks, well, sexy, free.

At last we get to the big Hall of Evolution, and Darwin sneaks in there—sideways. He gets a plaque. The Hall is filled with stuffed animals, giraffes and elephants, from another time, all apparently done by the artisans of Deyrolle but now placed in modernized half-light, the same kind of light you see in the fish restaurants of the Seventh Arrondissement. Recessed lighting says modern in France the way that a pastel arch says postmodern in New York.

The boy, however, wants to see his dinosaurs, so we go down in the gardens to the old Hall of Paleontology, off by itself down by the entrance to the gardens. It is two floors of pure bones—all bones, wall-to-wall bones, more bones than I have ever seen. At the entrance, a few feet from the Lamarck memorial, there is a statue by Fremiet of the Eternal Struggle. It shows a great ape—a species unknown to nature, with the ears of an elephant, the face of a magazine executive, and the grin of a Santa Monica maitre d’—who, clutching his (her?) infant, has just wrapped his hands around the throat of a beautiful human youth. The youth, before being killed by the ape, managed to plant his ax in the ape’s side, where it has left a hideous and gaping wound, perfectly cut out in stone. It is lurid, preposterous, and loud, the most improbable memorial, and this by the guy who made the golden and boring St. Joan on the rue de Rivoli. It defeats my dusty and out-of-date attempts at iconographic analysis, despite Luke’s constant questions: Why the ape, why the man…? Does it represent the triumph of Lamarckian evolution? Then the man with the culture (i.e., the ax) should be triumphing over the ape. It can’t represent the domination of the ape-in-man over the beauty-in-man. Is it the Triumph of the Monkey in Us? Or is it simply (simply!) a lurid show piece? Eugenio would have pointed out that the “trope” or conceit of the ape-on-the-loose is a rich nineteenth-century Parisian one, ranging from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to this. Man and Ape in Evolutionary Metaphor… these days you could probably put it out front of the Concorde and redub it “France and America.”

The dinosaurs are upstairs. They are enormous and articulated to look big. Of course, this is easy: They are big. But they are made to look even bigger, perhaps by contrast with the delicate beaux arts architecture. They loom. There is a single mold of a T rex head, which turns out to be a copy taken from the New York T. rex. Just as the famous mechanical nightingales of Byzantium that Yeats admired so were, as you discover when you read Byzantine history, the same damn bird, brought out century after century to impress out-of-town visitors, until the paint was peeling off the thing, so the T. rex that has scared several generations of schoolchildren in the two cities is the same damn lizard, dead so many million years.

In the new New York hall, where we took Luke last Christmas, the dinosaurs look wise and cunning, balanced forward on their middle feet, delicate little hands trembling like base stealers. They have fabricated fiberglass skins too, in gleaming, subtle, elegantly understated two-tone, Armani colors. Here, in Paris, in the old museum, they are still upright and looming and stolid. There is even a brontosaurus, still called that, though I think I read that there never were brontosauruses, that they were a false association of two different animals.

The force—I suppose I have to say the image—of the dinosaur, as it was understood by the nineteenth century, comes through here, terrifyingly. It is like reading Conan Doyle’s “Lost World.” The giant Irish elk (a mammal and, anyway, not that amazing—just a big moose) shares pride of place here with the big lizards, as he does in Doyle’s story. The reason, I suspect, is that it wasn’t so much the distant, scary past that drew the nineteenth century, but the simple specter of giganticism, bigness itself. They wanted their dinosaurs to loom over them, as their tycoons did. In the “Lost World” of Conan Doyle, in fact, the dinosaurs are constantly being called Gothic. They were interested in big, whereas we are interested in mean. (Was this because bigness was their problem—mass armies, mass society, massive-ness—whereas meanness is ours—small wars, horrible murders?) The difference between the old Parisian and the new New York dinosaurs is the difference between an industrial dinosaur, big and dumb and looming, and the postindustrial dinosaur, swift and smart and a scavenger. We make our monsters according to the armature of our fears. They wanted what loomed over them to be huge, stolid, immovable, and a little slow, like J. P. Morgan or Mr. Frick. We want them now to be smart, fast, mean, ugly, and wearing expensive suits, like Barry Diller or Rupert Murdoch.

A little while later I visited the new Bibliotheque Nationale, the big—the unbelievably vertigo-inspiringly enormous—library, out at the other end of the quai in the Thirteenth. It seems to have been designed by a committee made up of Michel Foucault, Jacques Tati, and the production designer of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The whole thing is set up, way up, on a wooden platform the size of six or seven football fields, high up off the street. There is an unbelievably steep stairs, leading up to this plateau, which is like nothing so much as one of those stepped pyramids where the Aztecs plucked the hearts out of their sacrificial victims. Then there are four glass skyscrapers, each one set at one of the corners of the platform, and all very handsome, in a kind of early-sixties, post-Lever House, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill way. The vast space has been planked with teak boards, to make it “warmer,” but this just makes it more slippery. They have had to put down cheap-looking runners on a sticky backing, to keep people from breaking legs. (Apparently there were quite a few victims early on.)

The vast, windswept plaza, with the four towers at its corners, is so vast that it creates what one would have thought would be a perfectly predictable wind tunnel effect. This not only means that you walk with your head down against the gusts, even in the middle of July, but also means that all the bushes and shrubbery that were meant to “humanize” the wooden plaza had to be put inside vertical cages of mesh, which in turn are placed between white bunkers. Left out on their own, the shrubs would just die in the wind. It looks like a bad conceptual art installation about the domination of nature by man. (This is the Foucaultian part.) A stray piece of foliage peeks out forlornly from some of the enclosures, like Hans’s fingers from the witch’s cage. Looking across the platform toward the tiny and impossibly steep steps, you cannot see the stairs at all; it simply looks like a platform from which one could leap, suicidally, gratefully.

Downstairs you wait at the accueil for your card. This is done with the usual French functionary hospitality: Who are you, what do you want, what makes you think, etc.? Finally, after an hour, you may get a card. First you visit the desk of one severely disciplinary young lady, who takes your coordinates and enters them into the single-overseeing computer system that was intended as the glory of the place. You are now sent to another young woman, who reenters and corrects all the information the first girl entered, and then asks if you are ready for your picture. (This is the Jacques Tati part.) You nod and rise, looking for the photo booth. She shakes her head gravely and tells you just to sit back. A camera, mounted to your right and above, swivels, moves down on its track, and gawks at you, musing in and out. Don’t move; your hostess has just become Annie Leibovitz, she is the photographer. She clicks her mouse forward onto the next screen of her computer, and there you are: The photo system is computerized too. She waits, thoughtfully for the moment of maximum exhaustion, and snaps your picture. You can, if you crane your head a bit, see a thousand images of yourself on the screen, being entered into the system.

When you at last have your card, you begin your descent into the vast underground caverns, the sous-sol, where the reading rooms are. (The books are, famously, all up in the towers.) First you go to a kind of master computer terminal and enter your request for a seat. The computer lets you know that there is no room for you in L, M, and disdainfully awards you your number, the new you: N-51. You repeat your name to yourself.

You insert your card into a turnstile; it takes its time and then lets you pass into a tiny space with a spiked metal floor, which leads in turn toward two immense two-story-high brushed metal doors. There is no signage or any indication of where you are going—because where you are going is into another turnstile, another spiked metal floor, and another pair of vast metal doors. Windows and sunlight have been left far behind. Once you are through those, you get on an escalator for a ten-story descent into the basement; there are concrete pillars around the escalators, winsomely decorated with iron-mesh hangings, that in the context look like chintz.

When you come to the end of the escalator, there are two more turnstiles and two more windowless metal doors to pass through. Now you are into the entrance to the reading rooms, and you see that the reading rooms are built around a grass court, which opens to the sky, high, high above. In the glassed-in court is a bizarre amenity, a garden—no, a small forest of immense trees, pines and evergreens mostly, all planted close together in tight rows, in the shallow green center block of grass. Their grass base is surrounded by a margin of concrete. The trees are so shallowly rooted, though—or else, according to other people, the wind sweeping down from above is so strong—that they have all had to be chained to the concrete floor. Each one has at least two guy wires leading down to stakes in the ground, crisscrossing diagonal lines of black and steel cable. The bushes above in cages, the trees below in chains.

Step up three or four shallow steps from the glass wall enclosing the trees and wires—it is absolutely forbidden, by the way, for anyone to pass through the seamless glass walls and into the garden—and you are in the main reading room: dark, gloomy, and at once terrifyingly vast without being compensatingly magnificent. It is just one huge horizontal space, broken by discreet letter indicators telling you that you have passed from N to M and onward. Searching, at last you find your seat, N-51, which is simply a single space at a vast table with several hundred such spots marked. You feel more like an ant than an archivist.

Then you search, among consoles set off near the walls, for an empty, operating computer terminal on which to make your book requests. Most of the terminals are out of order, and when you insert your identity card, they sigh and say that they are initializing. After fifteen minutes you give up and walk up and down the great hall, looking for a terminal that works. When you find one, you can penetrate the catalog fairly quickly; then you claim the page and demand the book; the computer registers that you have made the demand and tells you to go sit back down. The entire library is, in principle, served by, or subject to, the same vast, single computer system, which knows who you are, where you are, what you’re doing, and what you want, can track you from visit to visit, and anticipate your interests, etc. This of course means in practice that any tiny bug in one part of the system destroys the entire operation of the library. The latest bugs are posted on photocopied sheets Scotch-taped to the terminals: Please, don’t ask to “resee” your list, they say, just ask to “revise” it, etc.

Now comes the part that transcends ordinary functionary fiendishness to touch the high, misty edge of French bureaucratic-sadistic genius. The keyboard on the computer terminals is almost, but not exactly, an ordinary keyboard. It looks like an ordinary QWERTY keyboard—it doesn’t just have some entirely new, Pierre Boulez—inspired keyboard, so that you’re warned in advance to watch your step, or finger—but three characters have been moved. Q is exchanged with A, and the comma with the period, and, I think, the E with the O. This means that if you are a touch, or just a plain, mildly experienced, typist, you feel exactly as if you were having a stroke, since you have to interrupt the flow of typing each time you make a tiny error, and pretty soon you are so scared that you stop trying to maintain your normal speed and begin to hunt and peck.

On the desks there is a single red light that is supposed to illuminate when your books arrive, but these lights have never been known to work. Or, rather, they have been occasionally known to work. So you have to get up regularly and check your computer terminal again, to see what’s up. The light may be off because the books haven’t arrived yet, and it may be off because it’s not working. This means that if you go to the main desk, thirty yards away, to check, and the books aren’t there, everyone will be annoyed at you for taking up a place in the line. There is usually at least an hourlong wait for books and a sharp limit (eight, right now) on how many you can take out. Guess wrong, and you’ve wasted a day. There is no cafeteria, only an appalling, gloomy little café near the subterranean entrance, with a view of the gagged and bound trees straining toward the invisible sky. Americans working there have taken to sitting on the steps that run down toward the atrium, where there is at least some light, though of course, it is also extremely hot; given the underground location and the abundance of plate glass, you are always either freezing or baking. But clerks come to shush them. “After the shock of the first few days, you get used to it,” someone says.

It is not cheap-looking, God knows, very much not. It is in the style of Totalitarian Luxe, which was the Mitterrand trademark. The materials are rich: brushed steel, mesh curtains, thick carpet. The trees alone, their purchase and upkeep, must have run into the millions of dollars. The floor on the concourse is made of teak. You see the production values but worry about the production. It is the largest and most depressing of all the monuments of pompous official French culture that have been produced in France since the war, the administration’s ultimate revenge on the individual. All that French wit, all that charm, all that gaiety, all that somber pessimism, even all that intelligent despair sunk deep into the earth like a missile installation, with bad sandwiches and a chained and bound garden. I ordered a book by Blondin and a picture book on Trenet, just to recall that there was something gayer in Paris, up there above, where the light was.

When I left at last and saw, on the quai, with the cars rushing by, a typically French beauty poster—this one for Lancaster sun cream: a perfect girl’s bottom, bare and in full color, five times normal scale, with a gold sheen in the summer light—I was pathetically grateful for the sight of something humanly beautiful, curved and soft to the eye. French civilization is all the more a miracle, given the obstacles the French put in its way.

The curious thing about all of Mitterrand’s grands projets—the Bastille Opera, the pyramid of the Louvre, above all, this library—is that though they are big, they don’t feel big. They don’t feel big the way the dinosaur museum feels big, the way the Parisian monuments of the last century still do, even when those old monuments are actually smaller than the new ones. The new grands projets don’t feel big so much as claustrophobic and confusing and stifling—emotionally trivial, small. The grands projets of the last century were either the biggest of their kind or else a kind unto themselves. The Eiffel Tower maintains its aura of height partly because it really is tall and big and partly because there is still nothing like it anywhere else. (The radio masts and post office towers and skyscrapers that have been built since and that in some ways resemble it really don’t, since its form is uniquely feminine—not phallus into sky, but skirt into bodice into long throat.) The pyramid of the Louvre, though, looks like a shopping center, a mall, because that kind of Plexiglas and aluminum architecture has been done so much bigger elsewhere.

There is here a fundamental lesson from a thing, a leqons des choses. Architecture at its most successful passes from stuff (bricks and mortar and metal) through things (buildings) all the way to thats, single unforgettable objects, instantly recognizable, the thumbprints of the world. Their closed, permanent, pyramid-like thatness is its glory. Paris has perhaps more thats—the tower, the Louvre, the arch, the palace—than any city in the world, a greater concentration of distinctive monuments. Yet despite its best efforts, the grands projets fail to achieve the requisite thatness. They fail because of their comparative smallness, of course, when compared with other things in our mental library, but also because they lack something else, a kind of confidence in the things they enclose. The last thing the new Opera makes you think of is music; the last thing the new library makes you think of is books. The paleontology museum is at least a semi-that, so filled with stuff that has been dignified into things, animal dust made hard and significant, that it becomes a that by virtue of the immensity of the thingness it encloses. The new library, the Bibliotheque National, isn’t even a thing, much less a that. It evokes, after you have experienced it, merely a huh? and, like all failed monuments, in the end resolves in memory merely into a vast and barren and echoing Why?

I realized this year that the appeal of jazz in France, and the reason for its holding a place so much higher in the French estimation than in America, where it remains a cult enthusiasm, is the exact equivalent of the American appreciation of impressionism (which held, and to a degree—look at the way the pictures are shown at the Musee d’Orsay!—still holds a much higher place in the American estimation than in the French one).

Jazz, like impressionism, gives dignity to comfort. Resting in an apparently artless myth of bourgeois pleasure—Gershwin and Kern melodies play the same role for the great jazzmen that the outdoor cafés in Argenteuil played for Renoir and Monet—jazz, like high impressionism, reaffirms the simple, physical basis of powerful emotion and removes it to a plane of personal expression that we recognize as art; it gives us a license to take pleasure in what really provides our pleasures. You play “All the Things You Are” and you are playing the beautiful tune, and you are playing more than the beautiful tune, in the same way that Manet is painting just the asparagus and more than the asparagus without venturing into asparagus symbols or the grand manner of the asparagus. But the tune is there, even if the more pretentious kind of jazz critic doesn’t like to admit it, just as the asparagus is there, even if the more pretentious kind of art critic doesn’t like to admit it. A Bill Evans playing “Someday My Prince Will Come,” like Manet painting a lemon, is a stuff into things—into more than things, all the way into thats.

In every period, every century, there is one art form or another that is able to combine simple affirmation of physical pleasure with a quality of plaintive longing, and this becomes the international art form of the time. Living abroad convinces you that just as French painting was the event of the nineteenth century and Italian painting of the fifteenth—the one universal language—American popular music is the cultural event of our time. It is the one common language, the source of the deepest emotions and the most ordinary ones too. The taxi driver hums the riff from “Hotel California,” and the singer Johnny Hallyday, simply by impersonating Elvis, in some decent sense inhabits Elvis (just as Childe Hassam, impersonating Monet, at some decent level inhabited him too). Every epoch has an art form into which all the energies and faiths and beliefs and creative unselfconsciousness flows. What makes them matter is their ability not to be big but to be small meaningfully, to be little largely, to be grandly, or intensely, diminutive.

The best lesson I have learned from a thing this year, perhaps in all my time in Paris, occurred on another afternoon this spring. I was sitting on the bench under the metal and glass porte-cochere at the playground at the Luxembourg Gardens, watching Luke climb up the sliding board, the “toboggan,” the wrong way—glancing warily over his shoulder for the surveillant to whistle him down—when I looked down at the plastic-cupped café creme that I had bought at the little entrance shed a few moments before. About to unwrap the sugar cube, I saw that the little paper wrapping had a picture of the poet Mallarme on it—an odd, Benday-dot, unintentionally Lichtenstein-like portrait of him—while on the two other faces of the sugar cube there were quotes from his poems (“Et finisse I’echo par les celestes soirs, Extase des regards scintillements des nimbes!”) and a brief, summary life (“LIBERTE SANS MESURE: STEPHANE MALLARME, POETE 1842-1898”). The fourth face just had the name of the sugar company, Begin Say. The sugarcane had not only become a sugar cube, like the one in the Deyrolle poster, but been wrapped in a picture of a poet. I saved it to keep on my desk in my writing room and for once drank my coffee unsweetened. A lesson from a thing, and thrown in for the price of the coffee too.

The Rookie

I don’t really remember how we first thought of the Rookie. I think it may have been right after I saw Luke, who had just turned three, playing with a soccer ball in the Luxembourg Gardens. It wasn’t just the kicking that scared me but a kind of nonchalant bend-of-the-body European thing he did as he rose to meet the ball with his head. Next, he would be wearing those terrible shorts and bouncing the ball from foot to foot, improving his “skills.” He had been born in New York, but he had no memory of it. Paris is the only home he knows. (Or, as he explained to a friend, in the third person he occasionally favors, like Bo Jackson or General de Gaulle, “He was born in New York, but then he moved to Paris and had a happy life.”)

“You want to have a catch?” I said, and he looked at me blankly.

That night at bedtime I said, “Hey, I’ll tell you about the Rookie.” It was eight o’clock, but it was bright outside. Paris is a northern city, on a latitude with Newfoundland, as New York is a Mediterranean one, on a latitude with Naples, and so the light here in the hours between seven and nine at night is like the light in the hours between five and seven in New York. The sun is still out, but the sounds have become less purposeful—you hear smaller noises, high heels on the pavement—and though it is a pleasant time to lie in bed, it is not an easy time for a small boy to go to sleep.

I had been drawing storytelling duty for a while and had made increasingly frantic efforts to find a hit. A story about a little boy who turned into a fish in Venice hadn’t gone anywhere, and a remake of The Hobbit had done no box office at all. This story, though, rolled out easily. Every dad has one good bedtime story buried in him, and desperation will bring it out,

The Rookie (I said) was a small boy in Anywhere, U.S.A., in the spring of 1908. Out walking with his mom one day, he discovered that he had an uncanny gift for throwing stones at things. He picked one up and threw it so hard that it knocked a robin off its perch a mile away, and then, after his mama chided him, he threw another one, just as far but so softly that it snuggled into the nest beside the bird without breaking an egg. His parents, a little sadly but with a sense of obligation, immediately sent him off on the train to New York, to try out for the New York Giants and their great manager, John J. McGraw. All he took with him was a suitcase that his mother had packed for him, filled with things, including his bottle, that she thought might be useful in case of an emergency. (At that point the contents of the suitcase were unparticularized, but they eventually included a complete dictionary of the animal languages, a saxophone, a design for the first car radio, compressed early rocket ship refueling pills, a map of Paris, a window defogger, a time machine, a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, a map of a secret route to the South Pole, and reindeer medicine for Santa’s team.)

He got out at Grand Central, took a cab all the way uptown to the Polo Grounds—his mother had told him to take taxis in New York—and asked to see John J. McGraw. McGraw, staccato and impatient, was at first skeptical, but he finally agreed to watch while the kid threw, because he was so polite and the letter from his parents was so insistent and because, well, you never know. He called Big Six, the great Christy Mathewson, out of the dugout to watch, and Chief Meyers, the great American Indian catcher, to get behind the plate. The Chief came out, with a weary, crippled, long-suffering gait, and squatted. (I thought of the Chief as a creased veteran, though the real Chief was still in his twenties and not yet even a Giant.) The little guy walked to the mound, tugged at his cap—not a baseball cap, the cap of his knickers suit—and let fly.

Everybody was impressed, to put it mildly. “Hey, Mr. McGraw!” cried the Chief. “I ain’t never seen speed like that, and ain’t he got movement on it too!”

“Well,” Matty said mildly, peering at the tiny, doughty figure on the mound, “when you think about it, he’s more or less got to have that upward movement on his fastball, don’t he?” (My ideas of credible 1908 ballplayer dialogue were heavily influenced by Ring Lardner.)

McGraw shrugged, since tryouts were one thing and baseball was another, but in the end he decided to give the kid a start that Sunday in a big benefit exhibition that the Giants were playing at the Polo Grounds against the Detroit Tigers.

I stopped. Outside we could hear the steady stop-and-start rhythmic passage of the sanitation workers. Impossibly chic, in grass green uniforms with a white stripe running down the side, the men of the Paris Propre come down our street every night to collect the garbage. The garbage is put out by gardiens in city-issued green plastic canisters, and the garbage men place the canisters on little elevators, one on each side of the rear of the truck. The containers are lifted, turned upside down, shaken out, and returned trembling to the ground. Then the truck proceeds, at a stately, serene, implacable pace; a cabdriver who gets caught behind one on a little street lets out a moan, like a man who has just been bayoneted.

At this point I decided I’d made a decent start and was getting ready to say good night. “Go on,” he said, muffled but sharp, from under his covers. An order.

In the benefit exhibition that Sunday (I went on at last), the big bathtub-shaped stadium, with its strange supporting Y beams, was packed with fans, come to see the three-year-old phenom. The Rookie took the mound, throwing smoke, and it looked as though it might be a first, a perfect perfect game, twenty-seven men up, twenty-seven Ks, until, in the sixth, he had to face the Terrible Ty Cobb. (I realized that I had a problem here since Cobb should have been batting cleanup from the start; I explained that he had been late suiting up, because he insisted on extorting extra payment from the Tigers’ management for playing in a charity exhibition, even though everybody else was playing for free. Cobb was just like that, I explained: terrible.) The crowd quieted as the confrontation neared. Cobb came to the plate, sneering and drawling.

“Hey, baby,” he called out, taunting the Rookie. “Looks to me like you’re nothin’ but a baby.” (Luke’s whole body stiffened. If there was a worse insult, he hadn’t heard it; Jackie Robinson, in his first year with the Brooklyn Dodgers, had never been called a name so vile.) Shaken, the Rookie lost a bit off his heater. It was still blazing, though, and Cobb just got a piece of it, dribbling it toward first; he took off, and the Rookie, who knew his assignments, dutifully scampered over to cover. Cobb came in hard, hard as he could, his spikes sharpened to razor tips, and stamped down on the Rookie’s three-year-old foot. The Rookie dropped the ball. Safe! Stinking rotten way to get on base, but safe all the same. Shaking off a couple of tears, the Rookie went back to the mound. “Hey, I reckon you’re a crybaby. Hey, everybody, look at the crybaby! Looks to me like you’re nothin’ but a crybaby” came the taunting Georgia drawl from first, and the Rookie pitched out of trouble. But the pain lingered, and in the top of the ninth, the Giants having pushed over one run on a hit-and-run executed by the Chief, he made a few mistakes, walked a couple of batters—hey, he was three—and left himself with the bases loaded and the Georgia Peach due up again. The crowd was going crazy, and now the taunting began again, worse than ever. (“Hey, baby! Hey, crybaby! Whyn’t ya cry some more, crybaby?”)

The Rookie knew what he had to do. In the dugout he had taken his old bottle from the suitcase his mother had packed for him when he went off to join the Giants, just in case, and stowed it under his cap. Now he dripped a couple of drops of milk onto the seams of the baseball, the Rookie’s soon-to-be-notorious bottieball. It was before they brought in the rule against foreign substances on the ball, I explained. The Rookie was playing fair. (“Hey, when are you guys going to sleep?” Luke’s mother’s voice came from the other room. “Soon,” I called back abruptly. The lights of the traffic on the boulevard Saint-Germain came in through the windows, but I didn’t even draw the curtains.)

The Rookie stretched and threw, and the bottleball dipped and twisted and dipped and twisted again, curving all the way out to the third-base line and then cruising halfway toward first before finally slipping in, softly and cleanly, right across the plate, a strike at the knees. Cobb had time to take a really good cut—he had all day—but the pitch had him so fooled that he didn’t just whiff, he twisted himself in knots while he whiffed: real knots, his whole body pulled around like a wet washrag, hands ending up back of his butt. (Luke chuckled deeply at that.) “Steer-rike-uh three,” cried the umpire. The bleachers of the Polo Grounds went nuts.

The Rookie trotted off the field. “Who’s the baby now, Mr. Cobb?” he asked, with quiet dignity, on his way back to the dugout.

My kid sat up, shot up in bed, like a mechanical doll, as though he had a spring hinge right at his waist. Christy Mathewson (I went on) didn’t say anything—that wasn’t his way—but he went over as the Rookie came into the dugout, took off the Rookies cap, and mussed up his hair. Outside, the crowd wouldn’t leave. They chanted, “Rookie! Rookie!”

Now the only sound from Luke’s pillow was of short, constant breathing. I had the uncanny knowledge of a kind of silent excitement, the certainty—I have witnessed it once or twice on opening night in a theater, though I had certainly never created it before myself—that what we had here was a hit. The Terrible Ty Cobb had called him a baby, and he had thrown the bottle-ball, and then who was the baby?

That night (I said) the Rookie was offered a contract with the Giants (doubtless a mean, exploitative contract, but I left that out), and the team got on the overnight sleeper to St. Louis, heading out to steamy Sportsman’s Park. (I knew that the Browns, not the Cardinals, played there, but I liked the way it sounded.) The Chief tucked the Rookie into his berth and, before he went off to play pinochle with the guys, asked him, gruffly “You OK, Rookie?” “I’m OK, Chief,” the Rookie said, and then he listened to the sounds of the train tracks clacking and the whistle blowing and the other ballplayers in the next car, laughing and playing cards, before he fell deep asleep, somewhere outside Columbus.

“I’m OK, Chief,” Luke repeated, and he did something he had never done before, or at least not in my presence: Without negotiation or hesitation, without tears or arguments or requests to come and sleep in the big bed, he rolled right over and fell asleep.

From then on we had a story about the Rookie—Luke called it the Rookie story—every night. The characters firmed up pretty quickly. The Rookie was an earnest, resourceful, somewhat high-strung little hero. The Chief was blustery and honest, wanting nothing more than to settle in with his copy of the Police Gazette and have a peaceful afternoon at McSorley’s. The Rookie’s triumph over Ty Cobb, though, had bad consequences. Cobb developed a bitter, unappeasable Tom DeLay-type enmity toward the Rookie and set himself the task of doing anything he could to destroy his career. John J. McGraw, thumbtack sharp and demanding, and Christy Mathewson, handsome and deep-voiced and friendly, though a little remote—on a couple of occasions, when the Chief left town to go on a scouting trip to Cincinnati, he was the Rookies baby-sitter—filled out the dramatis personae.

After a couple of months I went down to the cellar of our building and got out the few baseball reference books I had brought to Paris and never unpacked. (This cellar is an honest-to-God cave, a stone cellar with little arches where you could keep wine. I kept meaning to bring the wine down, but I never remembered to do it, and instead the books were there, moldering away.) The 1908 National League pennant race, which I had plucked out of the air and dim memories of The Glory of Their Times, turned out to be even more interesting than I’d thought. It was a three-way race—Cubs, Giants, Pirates—that included Merkle’s boner and the season-capping rematch it produced, and in a sense, it made baseball in America. I discovered that 1908 had been a kind of watershed year, a time when baseball had, for the last time, an air of improvisation about it, with, as someone said of those days, “stupid guys, smart guys, tough guys, mild guys, crazy guys, college men, slickers from the city, and hicks from the country.” If a three-year-old with a major-league fastball had ever existed, 1908 would have been the right season for him to play, and he probably would have been roomed with an American Indian catcher.

I even found a wonderful photograph of the Polo Grounds in that magical year, and we hung it over Luke’s bed. It shows a hundred or so fans lining up on Coogan’s Bluff, overlooking the ballpark—too poor or, more likely, too cheap to buy tickets, since you can see that there are still a few seats left in center—backs turned and heads bowed as they stare down at the field. Every single one of the men (there are no women) is wearing a derby; the kids are wearing cloth caps. One kid and an elderly gent have got up on a barrel, and five men in suits and hats are standing, precarious but dignified, on a plank that slopes down from it. You can’t really see a thing going on in the park—not a baseline, not a ballplayer, not a glimpse of a dugout or a bullpen, nothing except the outfield grass down below, a perfect and absolute blank. It’s as good as a Magritte: the solemnly dressed businessmen, backs turned, gazing out at the bare and uneventful field. Of course Luke didn’t have to be told whom they were looking at down there, and why; we both could see it plain as day. They were watching the Rookie, pitching his way out of another pinch.

Yet I began to wonder: What picture did he summon up when, night after night, he heard the words Polo Grounds, full count, all the way to the backstop? Not an inexact picture; no picture at all. He had never been to a baseball game, never seen a bat or a glove, never been inside a ballpark or even watched a ball game on television. He spent his days in parks where kids played soccer on dusty gravel, and you put a toe in the grass on pain of being whistled down by the surveillant, watching from his shed. No one Luke knew played baseball, no one talked about it; the words and situations were pure language, pure abstract lore. The cliches I rolled out—“He had all day” “steamy Sportsman’s Park,” “no foreign substances on the old pill”—what did he think, what did he see when he heard them? I knew that he wanted to hear the words as much as I needed to say them—he zipped through dessert to get to bed every night—but what did the words mean to him?

I had spent my adult life believing that storytelling depends on the credibility of its details, and now, finally, I had made up a story that someone liked, and the details had no credibility at all, no existence except as sounds. You are supposed to use a word, I had always been taught, to point at a thing and hope that the thing will somehow end up pointing at a symbol: a feeling, a state of mind. When I lived in New York, I had on occasion even brought this faith to writing students. (Not that they cared. The fetching female ones listened gravely and then came up after class to ask if I had Gary Fisketjohn’s phone number.) But now I said “Polo Grounds” or “full count” and the words called up in my son a powerful reaction. What of that second range, where the words were supposed to become things, even just images in his head?

There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn’t. Sometimes the words fly right over the fence and all the way out to the feelings. Make them do it one time out of three in private, and you’ve got a reputation as someone who can play a little, a dad who can tell a decent bedtime story. Do it three times out of three in public, and you’re Mark McGwire or Dickens.

And I needed the words too, just as words. After four years in Paris I found that though I missed American sports a lot less than I had thought I would, I missed the lore of American sports keenly. I didn’t really miss sports; I missed the sports pages. I didn’t miss the things—sometimes the baseball season was twenty or twenty-five games old before I knew it had started—but I missed the words that went with the things. My passion for baseball, which at one point in my life was pretty intense, is now almost gone. My team, the Montreal Expos, is on the verge of going out of business; when I visit New York, I no longer know, or can even guess, which player is wearing which cap.

I still care about the words, though. One day, shopping for dinner along the rue du Bac and waiting in one of the interminable lines that are created by the individual care of French service—a line that is briskly, infuriatingly violated by the same arrogant dyed-blond woman in a fur coat and with a great jaw—I thought. Nobody in this line but me knows what an RBI is, or who Gene Mauch was, or what Jarry Park used to look like, or what a twinight doubleheader is. And I felt yearningly, unappeasably homesick. (This was not a rational emotion, since I have lived for years with a woman who doesn’t know what an RBI is either.)

The things an American who is abroad for a very long time misses—or at least the things I missed—I was discovering, weren’t the things you were supposed to miss. We are supposed to come to Europe for leisure, sunshine, a more civilized pace, for slowness of various kinds. America we are supposed to miss for its speed, its friendliness, for the independence of its people and the individualism of their lives. Yet these were not the things I missed, and when I speak to Americans who have lived abroad for a long time, those are not the things they seem to miss either. I didn’t miss crosstown traffic, New York taxicabs, talk radio or talk television, or the constant, appalling flow of opinion that spills out like dirty floodwater. (Paris is an argumentative but not an opinionated city; it is the ideal of every French newspaper columnist to have premises so inarguable that the opinions can more or less look after themselves while he goes to lunch.)

I didn’t miss American “independence” either. If anything, I missed its opposite, American obsequiousness, that yearning, beseeching tone of a salesman trying to sell something that you never hear in statist Europe. (The French, I think somebody said, have every vice except obsequiousness.) Buying shoes for my son, I missed the shoe salesmen of my childhood, my own uncles among them, their glasses held together with tape, their voices keening as they got down on their knees to tie the laces and make the sale. “Now the youngster can wear this shoe as a sports shoe or a dress shoe. Yeah, you got plenty of room there at the toe, young fellow—stand up. Now show your mom these shoes. Walk around.” Quieter: “I have it in burgundy, in brown, in blue…” A French shoe salesman, indignant at his position, laces the child’s shoes in silent anger and rises to his feet pretty much shaking his fist in your face.

I found, to my surprise, that what I missed and longed for was the comforting loneliness of life in New York, a certain kind of scuffed-up soulfulness. In Paris no relationship, even one with a postman or a dry cleaner, is abstract or anonymous; human relations are carved out in a perpetual present tense. There’s an intricacy of debits and credits. Things have histories. The little, quickly forgiven bumps of New York social life—the missed phone calls, the suddenly canceled lunches, the early exit from the dinner party, which are, if anything, signs of status, of “busy-ness”—are sources of long grievances, permanent estrangements, endless reexplanations. It isn’t possible just to remove yourself from a friendship in Paris for a month or two, as you can in New York. (“What have you been doing?” “Working.” “Oh.”) Even the most apparently professional relationships get overloaded. The dry cleaner is recovering from cancer, and her visits to pick up the clothes are scheduled around her treatments, with enough time to talk about them; the man who puts up shelves is a jazz guitarist, and an extra hour must be budgeted in to trade licks and discuss Jim Hall. On your way down the street in the early morning to run with all the other Americans in the Luxembourg Gardens—only Americans and French riot police go running; the Americans you know by their music festival sweatshirts, the French police by their flattop cuts and thoughtful, coiled power—you hear footsteps coming after you, and you worry that you have violated some ordinance, stepped on some forbidden grass. It is the fishmonger. “The wild salmon went well?” he demands anxiously. You find a café where you feel at home—and then become reluctant to go there, since it will involve such a wearing round of handshakes and “How is Madame?”

New York is devoted to the cult of busyness, but like all cults, it has at its heart the worship of a single, unforgiving idol, the office. After the idol has been served, life can be pretty formless. The things Americans miss tend to involve that kind of formlessness, small, casual, and solitary pleasures. A psychoanalyst misses walking up Lafayette Street in her tracksuit, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup with the little plastic piece that pops up. My wife, having been sent the carrot cake that she missed from New York, discovered that what she really missed was standing up at the counter and eating carrot cake in the company of strangers at the Bon Vivant coffee shop. I thought I missed reading Phil Mushnick in the sports pages of the Post; when I read him on-line, I discovered that what I really missed was reading Phil Mushnick on the number 6 uptown train on a Monday morning around ten.

It was, in a way, the invisibility of the men up on Coogan’s Bluff in 1908 that drew me to them. The consensual anonymity of men in crowds is what we are escaping when we leave, and then it is what we miss. You can be alone in Paris a lot, but it is hard to be lonely; there is always another pair of eyes, not unfriendly, appraising you. (The French husband of an American friend will not meet her in the park in his tennis shorts. He does not know who will see him, but he is sure that he will, in some way, be seen.) You are a subject, not an object, and if this is part of the narrow, centuries-old happiness of life in Paris, it is also one of the things that narrow that happiness. Walk into Central Park to watch the sea lions, and you disappear from the world for a little while. In the Luxembourg Gardens, or at the menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes, you are always conscious of the long allees leading you back the way you came; of the surveillants’ shed at the center of the park, where the two uniformed men sit with their hot plate, warming up coffee and watching the world; of the lion looking back at you. We go to cities to be invisible, or to be invisible and visible by turns, and it is hard to be invisible in Paris. The light at night is too strong. Gershwin got this right at least: The car horns and the syncopations in An American in Paris are all French. What that American misses is the blues.

After about a year of telling the Rookie story, I went to New York to give a talk, and I turned the trip into a literary mission, a sort of Rookie collecting expedition. I wanted to bring home tangible evidence of something that, as a matter of fact, had never taken place there. I bought a baseball encyclopedia and a box of books on the Cobb era and borrowed a Ken Burns video. A vintage Giants cap, child size, which I thought would be the hardest thing to find, turned out to be absurdly easy; the past is so neatly packaged now that I just walked into a memorabilia store on Lexington Avenue and found a replica cap, no problem.

When I got home, I put on the video, from the PBS Baseball series, which I had never seen, and we watched all those flickering, overfrantic little ghost figures racing around. One by one the faces and bodies and actions that you couldn’t see in the photo above Luke’s bed were being filled in. There was Ty Cobb, looking appropriately evil; there was John J. McGraw. There was pitching and batting (I realized, from Luke’s comments, that he had them the wrong way around). There was baserunning.

There was Christy Mathewson, and then a picture of Matty, handsome and assured as ever, slowly dissolving into a picture of a small, serious boy with blond bangs, wearing a baseball cap and a perfectly sober expression, going into a pitching windup. I still have no idea who he actually was (it’s not Christy Mathewson’s kid; I’ve found a picture of him, and he had darker hair), but of course Luke knew, perfectly well.

“There he is,” he said. “Rewind it.” We watched Matty and the Rookie appear again, and then he told me to turn it off. He was uncharacteristically silent for the rest of the afternoon, but before dinner I heard him talking to his mother in the bath. “He had his hands up like this,” he was saying chattily. “I don’t know why.”

Sometime that month I began to think that it was time to round off the Rookie story, give it a suitably grand ending, turn the legend into a myth; I would find another story. I was having a hard time thinking of new plots, and anyway, it had been two years.

It was, at last, the seventh game of the 1908 World Series.

The Rookie had started three for the Giants, Matty the others. (Of course we had made the Giants, not the Cubs, grab the gonfalon on the final day.) It was the bottom of the ninth, the score tied one to one on homers by the Chief and Sam Crawford. Cobb was up. He dragged a bunt and headed for first, and this time he didn’t just spike the Rookie; he actually slid into first base, razor-clad feet up. Hit hard, the Rookie held on to the ball. But the umpire ruled that the ball had rolled foul down the first-base line. The Rookie was bleeding, fed up, homesick, crowded by a ringer like Gizmo McGee, a Tiger midget pretending to be a four-year-old, and he had endured a full season (in two years) of cruel torment at the hands of this terrible man. So he did an awful thing: He loaded up and threw his best fastball right at Ty Cobb’s head, threw so hard that Cobb’s head came right off, popped up high, before settling back down, with a surprised look, on his shoulders.

Umpire Bill Klem checked out Cobb—he was OK; the Rookie knew what he was doing—and then looked at the Rookie. “You’re outta here, Rookie,” he said, giving him the longest, slowest, saddest thumbing heave-ho that the major leagues have ever seen. “There’s just no throwing at people in baseball.” The crowd sat silent, disbelieving. The Rookie, head bowed, walked off the field.

And (I said) he kept walking. The Chief and Matty and Mr. McGraw were waiting for him in the dugout, but he walked away from them, didn’t even stop to take off his uniform in the center field clubhouse, just kept walking, right out of the Polo Grounds, day after day, week after week, until he was back in Anywhere, U.S.A., still in his uniform. His mother didn’t ask any questions. She hugged him, helped him out of his uniform (she hung it in the closet), and asked him if he wanted something to eat, and the next day he went back to school. His legend grew, but he never picked up a ball again.

Luke sat up. “He did not go home to his mother,” he said clearly. I felt horrible, as evil as Ty Cobb. I saw in his eyes what seemed to me not anger, exactly, but something more like doubt, religious doubt as it is described in nineteenth-century novels. What if the Rookie hadn’t risen again? What if the story had been only a story? What if someone was obviously manipulating it for a moral purpose? He had the relics and the photos, but like a true believer, he knew that it was all just talk if the Rookie didn’t rise again.

“He did not go home to his mother,” he said again, and as quickly as I could, in a panic, I turned it around. Of course not, I said. He went home for that day, to relax. The next day a delegation from both leagues was in his front yard, insisting that he come back to the Giants. “Baseball can’t survive without you, kid,” said Ban Johnson, president of the American League. Even Cobb himself, bandaged and sheepish, was there. Finally the Rookie agreed to come back—“But no more dirty tricks,” he said—and they played an eighth game (as they’d done once before), which he won.

“You told the story wrong,” he said finally. (And the next day he said to his mother, “Daddy told the Rookie story wrong.”) So the story goes on, only now it is much more under the child’s control. The Rookie soon entered a Gothic phase, as the little boy began to demand scary Rookie stories (“With a real witch. Not Ty Cobb dressed up like a witch. Not the Chief dressed up like a witch. A real witch”) and, more recently, a decadent phase. The current story, for instance, involves Sherlock Holmes, the genie from Aladdin, a T. rex, and the Pirate King from Pirates of Penzance. Having been, if only momentarily, betrayed by the story, he was doing what the literary critics would call “contesting the narrative.” The story belongs to him now.

My Rookie never really played ball again, no matter how many stories I tell, any more than Sherlock Holmes really came back alive from the Reichenbach Falls, no matter how many stories Conan Doyle wrote about him afterward. I think the Rookie just went home to Anywhere, U.S.A., and back to school like all the other kids.

Luke and I tried playing a little catch this spring in the Luxembourg Gardens but gave up after about five minutes. For a present, around that time, he asked us to make him his own carte d’identite, marked with a metier de journaliste—a press pass from the government—so that he could pretend to cut through red tape. We made him an impressive-looking fake government document, with a black-and-white photo and lots of cryptic, official-looking stamps. At bedtime now before the Rookie story starts, he likes to act out a French bureaucratic drama: I play a functionary guarding an entrance to something or other who scowls at him until he haughtily flashes his carte, and then I let him pass with many apologetic, ah-monsieur-I-did-not-recognize grimaces and shrugs, while his mother acts out the role of irate bystander, fuming in line as the privileged functionary serenely passes by. I suppose it is about time we took him home.

I don’t think about the Rookie as much as I used to, but when the bombs began to fall in Serbia I began thinking about that other Serbian conflagration, in 1914, and everything it had led to, and I realized with a start that by making the Rookie three years old in 1908, I was leaving him, unprotected, to the century’s horrors. Then I did a quick calculation and realized that he would have been far too young for the First War, and just too old for the Second. The Rookie was lucky that way, I think.