Paris to the Moon

The World Cup, and After

The World Cup soccer tournament got off to a strange, promising start with a pageant that closed down Paris—a seventeenth-century-style allegorical masque, with music and dance and speech, which featured four sixty-five-foot-high inflatable giants that walked across the city from four Parisian monuments (the Opera, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the pont Neuf) to the place de la Concorde. The giants were steel-framed latex-covered figures—dolls, really—with fork-lift trucks for feet, and hydraulic hinged arms and hips and shoulders, and even moving eyelids. They turned their heads, and shifted their gaze, and raised their arms in wonder as they slowly shuffled along the Paris streets. Each one was a different color and represented a racial type. There was Romeo, the European; Pablo, the Amerindian; Ho, the Asian; and Moussa, the African (he had purple skin). It took four hours for them to get from their starting points to the place, where they bowed to one another, and the whole spectacle was broadcast live on television, while Juliette Binoche breathed over the loudspeakers on the streets and to the audience at home. (“The giants confront each other, but do they see a stranger or themselves?” etc.) The theme of the masque seemed to be the Self and the Other; the giants, never having seen one another before—or anything else, apparently—wake in the middle of Paris, to find their Selfness in the Others. Apart from that, the commentators on French television were hard put to find something to say as the big guys inched their way along the boulevards toward this revelation and at one point were reduced to noting that the technology that had produced the hydraulic giants had military applications, leaving you with the comforting knowledge that if NATO is ever in need of a crack synchronized team of huge, slow-moving inflatable dolls, the French will be the ones to call. (One sees them cornering a particularly sluggish war criminal in a Montenegrin mountain hideaway with a very large door.)

The vague internationalist symbolism—not to speak of the snail-like pace—seemed the right allegory for the tournament. The Coupe du Monde, which includes thirty-two nations, began on Wednesday, June 10, and continues through Sunday, July 12. I set myself the task of watching it all, wanting to figure out what exactly it is that the world loves in a game that so many American sports fans will sit through only under compulsion.

I understand why people play it. When I was a teenager, I lived in London for a while, and I spent most of my time playing soccer, or at least the middle-class Kensington Gardens version of it. I even learned how to talk the game. It was the opposite of trash talking—tidy talking, I suppose you’d have to call it. If you did something good, it was brilliant; something less than brilliant was useless; if all of you were useless together, you were rubbish;

and if a person did something brilliant that nonetheless became useless, everyone cried, “Oh, unlucky!” By the end of my time in London, I wasn’t brilliant at the game, but I wasn’t useless either. I suppose this was all faithful to the game’s English-school-playing-field origins. “Thoughtful ball,” a commentator on the BBC would say about a good pass. In the papers you’ll read things like “The signs of decline in the still-clever but jaded Teddy Sheringham sadly became too patent to ignore.” “For all his apparent world-weariness, Beckham is still young.” “[Anderton] has been stubborn to the point almost of self-destruction, however, and it cannot happen again this week.” This isn’t sportswriting. It’s end-of-term reports.

As I began watching the cup games, though, I had a hard time making a case for soccer as spectacle. I found myself torn between a cosmopolitan desire to love a game the world loves and an American suspicion that they wouldn’t love it if they had a choice. The trouble wasn’t the low scores, although the ribbon of late sports news often sounded like one of those condensed, hopeless, rising-and-falling monologues about marriage in Beckett: “Nil-nil. One-one. Two-one. One-one. One-nil. Nil-nil.” The trouble was what the scores represent. The game has achieved a kind of tactical stasis. Things start off briskly and then fritter away into desultory shin kicking, like a Wall Street Journal editorial. In soccer the defense has too big an edge to keep the contest interesting, like basketball before the coming of the twenty-four-second clock or the western front before the invention of the tank.

All sports take turns being dominated by their defense or their offense, and fully evolved defensive tactics will in the end beat offensive ones, because it is always easier to break a sequence than to build one up. Eventually the defensive edge will be so enormous that to stay in business as a spectacle, a sport has to change its rules, openly or surreptitiously. The big recent change in basketball, for instance, which took place somewhere between the Julius Erving and Michael Jordan eras, was a silent modification of the rule against traveling, so that now, it seems, a player can take about as many steps as he needs—a fact that only Rabbit Angstrom has officially noted. American football changes its rules every few years to allow quarterbacks to survive and prosper. Even baseball has tinkered with the mound and the depth of the fences. Soccer players, though, have come to accept the scarcity economy—all those nil-nil draws—and just live with it, like Eskimos. The defense has such an advantage that the national sides don’t need their offensive stars. In this cup two of the most inspired forwards in Europe—David Ginola, of France and Tottenham Hotspur, and Paul Gascoigne, of England and whatever pub is open—didn’t even make their national teams.

Since a defensive system keeps players from getting a decent chance to score, the idea is to get an indecent one: to draw a foul so that the referee awards a penalty, which is essentially a free goal. This creates an enormous disproportion between the foul and the reward. In the first game that Italy played, against Chile, for instance, the great Roberto Baggio saved the Italians’ pancetta by smoking the ball onto the hand of a surprised Chilean defender, who couldn’t pull back in time. “Hand ball” was ruled, which, near the goal, meant an automatic penalty and a nearly automatic goal. The other, more customary method of getting a penalty is to walk into the “area” with the ball, get breathed on hard, and then immediately collapse, like a man shot by a sniper, arms and legs splayed out, while you twist in agony and beg for morphine, and your teammates smite their foreheads at the tragic waste of a young life. The referee buys this more often than you might think. Afterward the postgame did-he-fall-or-was-he-pushed argument can go on for hours.

European defenders of the game tend to put on haughty, half-amused looks when the sport is criticized and assume that the problem lies with the American doing the criticizing, who is assumed to love action for its own sake. When you point out that ice hockey, the greatest of all games, shares with soccer the basic idea of putting something into a net behind a goalkeeper and has the added bonus of actually doing it, they giggle: “Oh, dear. In ice hockey you can’t see the ball, or whatever you call it. You can’t follow it. Besides, they fight all the time.” It does no good when you try to explain that you can always see the puck, and anyway, better to fight like heroes than to spend all your time on the sidelines bickering about who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds, the way soccer players do, even though—as a Tom Stoppard character once pointed out—there is absolutely no doubt on the part of those two players about who touched the ball last.

European soccer apologists tend to overanalyze the triumphs of their heroes. In Brazil’s game against Scotland, Ronaldo, the Brazilians’ star, took the ball, faked right, and then spun around to his left, leaving a defender fooled while he rushed forward into the gap. Then he let go a weak shot, and it was over. A nice move—but exactly the same move that Emmitt Smith makes three times a game with three steroid-enraged three-hundred-pound linemen draped on his back (and then Emmitt goes in to score) or that Mario Lemieux made three or four times a period after receiving radiation therapy for Hodgkins lymphoma and having three Saskatchewan farm boys whacking at his ankles with huge clubs (and then Mario would go in to score). In the papers, though, that moment became a golden event. Rob Hughes, the estimable soccer writer for the International Herald Tribune, treated the three seconds of actual activity as though it were the whole of the Peloponnesian War, or a seduction by Casanova. “Receiving the ball from Cafu on the right, Ronaldo lured Colin Hendry, Scotland’s biggest and most worldly defender, to him. ‘Come closer, Big Colin, come to me,’ the Brazilian seemed to say. And Hendry bought the invitation. Tighter and tighter he came until, suddenly, Ronaldo swiveled 180 degrees….”

Soccer writers seemed as starved for entertainment as art critics; anything vaguely enjoyable gets promoted to the level of genius. In the old days, at the Kitchen, it was the rule that three recognizable notes sung in succession by Laurie Anderson heralded a new, generous lyricism. Ronaldo’s magic was like a performance artists lyricism: It existed but was apparent only against a background of numbing boredom.

In the first ten days I watched, by my count, sixteen games, including odd, hallucinatory matchups out of some fractured game of Risk: Denmark against Saudi Arabia (1—0); Croatia against Japan (1-0); Nigeria against Bulgaria (1-0). There were a few players who stood out from the general run of bowlegged men in shorts. There were Englishmen (I root for England, from residual Kensington Gardens chauvinism): the pained, gifted O. J. Simpson look-alike Paul Ince; a speedy, tiny boy with a shining morning face named Michael Owen, only eighteen and just off the Liverpool bench. The French players were dogged, unelectric, powerful, and, as many people pointed out, mostly not ethnically French, with lots of “exotic” names: Zidane, Djorkaeff, Karembeu. Though their countrymen long for the dash and elan of David Ginola and the vanished Eric Cantona, they see the functionary logic of this harder-working, intelligent side. There were the Argentines and the Germans, who never seem quite as glamorous as, say, the Brazilians and the Dutch, but who have a brutal purposefulness. Between them they have won four of the last six cups. And there were moments of wonder, when a previously unknown—and probably soon to be unknown again—ballplayer would shock himself and his teammates with a single stunning moment. A young Cameroonian named Pierre Njanka, with no major-league experience, made his way through the entire Austrian team, his eyes wide as he ducked and swerved, stumbling forward, out of control, hardly believing what he was accomplishing, and then scored. He may spend the rest of his life defined by that run.

But such moments were mostly drowned in tedium and then by something worse. By the time the English players arrived on the scene, on Monday, June 15, everything was already ruined. Hooligans had invaded Marseilles, where England was opening against Tunisia, and not merely got drunk and beat up shopkeepers but overran a beach where Tunisian families were picnicking (there is a big Tunisian community in the South of France) and beat up kids and moms there. Everyone had known that they were coming. One source said that the authorities had done their best to keep out the hardboiled Category C hooligans, but some of them had managed to sneak in—a rare case of England’s having a deep bench.

Though headlines about English hooligans sweep the world, they don’t do justice to the terror involved. “Lager louts” and “hooligans” sound vaguely quaint, but these guys are cruel, violent, and twisted by inarticulate hatred in a way that terrifies the French and makes them wild partisans of the Scottish team. The persistence of English hooliganism—the Englishness of hooliganism—can maybe be explained by the possibility that at some half-conscious level a lot of English people are proud of their thugs and approve of their behavior. This approval consists of a toxic combination of sentimental left-wing anti-Thatcherism (a kind of Trainspotting pride that at least the thugs aren’t businessmen) coupled with a romantic right-wing chauvinism (it’s an English tradition to go to the Continent and hit foreigners). In the Marseilles attacks most of the thugs turned out not to be poor kids, or unemployed kids; they couldn’t have afforded the passage over. The thugs were, apparently, mostly postal workers (what is it about mail?), and they were not going to be damaged in the eyes of their mates for having gone over to France to beat people up, or for being sent back from France for having beat people up.

Despite the reports of violence from provincial fronts, Paris itself has been relatively blase about the cup. The streets are peaceful, the mood is calm, the atmosphere pastoral. The boulevard Saint-Germain has never been so quiet. The morning after the giants’ march, for instance, with Scotland and Brazil about to begin at the Stade de France, the only evidence I saw of anything unusual was the appearance of two Scotsmen in kilts waiting for a taxi on the rue du Bac. Expecting to hear a war cry (“Ay, we’ll leave them samba-dancin’ laddies guid and bloody”), I tentatively wished them good luck. “We’ll need it!” one said feelingly, and the other chimed in, “It’s simply a privilege to be playing Brazil.” They turned out to be lawyers from Hong Kong—Scottish lawyers from Hong Kong, but lawyers. They talked about the Brazilian esprit, and then got in their cab and, in perfect French, ordered the driver to go to the Stade de France.

I saw Italy beat Cameroon, 3—0, from the back of a bar in Venice. Watching soccer in Italy, you have the feeling that you have wandered into a family drama more complex and intense than you can understand. Each player—Vieri, Di Biagio—was greeted with a combination of hoots, cheers, and tears so personal and heartfelt that it was almost embarrassing for an outsider to witness. With Italy into the eighth-finals (eighth-finals!), the papers, from left to right, were bursting with pride. italia padrone! read one headline. “Italy Rules.” The curious thing was that Italy played one of the dullest defensive games of all—the famous “blue chain.” But this didn’t seem to bother anyone. Whatever people were watching for, it wasn’t for fun.

Just afterward I spoke on the phone to an English friend, a big World Cupper.

“How are you getting on with the cup?” he asked.

“It’s a bit—well, don’t you think it’s a bit lacking in entertainment?” I said weakly.

There was a pause. “Why would you expect it to be entertaining?” he asked, reprovingly.

Perhaps that was a clue. I came back to Paris resolved not to be entertained. I watched a double-overtime confrontation between an overmatched Paraguay and an overpressed France. The Paraguayans, who looked worn out from stress, essentially surrendered the idea of scoring and kept dropping back—kicking the ball out, heading it out, willing it out, again and again. It was obvious that their desperate, gallant strategy was to force a nil-nil draw, over 120 minutes, and then “go to penalties,” the shoot-out at goal where anything can happen and anyone can win. The nil-nil draw wasn’t a “result” they would settle for; it was everything they dreamed of achieving. When the game finally ended, as Laurent Blanc (a traditionally French-sounding name) stumbled a ball into the Paraguayan net, what was most memorable was the subdued triumph. The French celebrated, but they did not exult; the Paraguayans cried—really cried—but they did not despair. They did not seem ruined or emptied out, as American losers do. They seemed relieved. The tears looked like tears of bitter accomplishment. We knew we were going to lose, the faces and the back pats said, but, hey, didn’t we hold it off for a while? (“Heroique, heroique,” murmured the French commentator.)

The next morning I slipped in a tape I’d made of the fifth game of the NBA finals, for purposes of comparison. It was a French broadcast, and the commentators announced that the game was a test of truth—une epreuve de verite—for the Utah Jazz. To my surprise, I was, after a week of starvation, used to the austerity of soccer scoring. All those basketball points seemed a little loud, a little cheap. Points coming in from left, from right, cheap points, inspired points, stupid points—goals everywhere you looked, more goals than you knew what to do with, democratic goals, all leveled and equal. It was too much, like eating whipped cream straight. And why had I never before noticed the absurd, choppy, broken rhythm of deliberate fouls and time-outs in the last two minutes of the game?

A few nights later England-Argentina—to see who would go to the quarterfinals. The match started off with two typically exasperating soccer events. After only five minutes David Seaman, the English goalkeeper, lunged for the ball, and an onrushing Argentine stumbled over him. Penalty and, inevitably, a goal. Then young Owen, who, with his brush cut, looks as if he ought to be wearing a blazer and beanie, got tripped. He acted out the death scene from Camille and drew a penalty himself, which was knocked in by Alan Shearer, England’s captain. A few minutes later Owen raced half the length of the field—really sprinting, huffing—mesmerizing an Argentine defenseman, who kept moving back, back, defeated in his own mind, and then he sent it in: 2-1, England! With fifteen seconds left in the half, Argentina got the ball, executed a jagged, pinball-quick exchange of passes and, shockingly, the ball was bouncing in the net, and the game was tied.

At the start of the second half, David Beckham, the blond midfielder who was at the time engaged to Posh Spice, was expelled from the game, leaving England, like the Spices, a performer short. Though England scored on a corner, the goal was ruled out by the referee for a meaningless, barely visible (but undeniably real) elbow. Nothing happened in thirty minutes of overtime, and the game went into the self-parody of soccer: a series of penalty kicks. With England needing only one more to tie, David Batty, of Newcastle, stepped up and, rushing his shot, fired it right into the diving goaltender. The Argentine side rushed out into the pitch, weeping with joy and exhaustion.

The game had been marked by everything that can exasperate an American fan: the dominance of defense, the disproportion between foul and consequence, the absurd penalty shoot-out, the playacting. (In England they will be arguing did-he-fall-or-was-he-pushed about the first Argentine penalty for years.) But it had been as draining as any contest I’d ever seen.

Soccer was not meant to be enjoyed. It was meant to be experienced. The World Cup is a festival of fate: man accepting his hard circumstances, the near certainty of his failure. There is, after all, something familiar about a contest in which nobody wins and nobody pots a goal. Nil-nil is the score of life. This may be where the difficulty lies for Americans, who still look for Eden out there on the ballfield. But soccer is not meant to be an escape from life. It is life, in all its injustice and tedium: We seek unfair advantage, celebrate tiny moments of pleasure as though they were final victories, score goals for the wrong side. (In the first three nights of the World Cup, three of the seventeen goals were “own” goals: A player would head the ball away and watch it backspin past his own goalkeeper, his face a rapidly changing mask of decision, satisfaction, worry, disbelief, and despair.) A bad play or call in baseball—Merkle’s boner or Denkinger’s call - hurts, but usually there’s a saving air of humor. “We’re due,” “It’s our turn,” “Wait till next year” are the cheers of American sport. We are optimists and look to sports to amplify our optimism.

In soccer tomorrow is a long way off, even in ordinary circumstances, and four years in these special ones. By then everything will be different; there are no second chances in the World Cup. It is a human contest on a nearly geologic time scale. Grievances, injustices rankle for years, decades, forever. But along with that comes, appealingly, a sense of proportion. Accepting the eventual certainty of defeat in turn liberates you to take real joy in any small victory, that one good kick. If American sports are played in paradise, soccer takes place after the fall. Even its squabbles have their echoes: Did he fall or was he pushed? It’s the oldest question.

Finally, on a stray, leaking cable channel, I got to see highlights of Detroit and Washington in the Stanley Cup final. I turned it on with joy and then found, to my shock, that… I couldn’t see the puck! It was too small, way too small—a tiny black spot on a vast white surface, with huge men in bright-colored sweaters hulking over it. When a goal was scored (and goals do get scored), I knew it only by the subsequent celebration. I squinted at the set and called in Martha, a purebred Canadian, and asked if she could follow the puck. “I could never follow the puck,” she told me.

Had I been corrupted by the Old World’s game or enlightened by it? Another of the old, unanswerable questions. All I knew was that I was looking forward to the next big match, between France and Italy. Anything might happen, or nothing at all.

Although France didn’t win the World Cup until just before midnight on Sunday, the celebrations in Paris started hours before the game began. By two o’clock in the afternoon the beeping of horns along the Seine had become a din, and the kids with their faces painted red-white-and-blue, heads poking up through the sunroofs of Peugeots racing along the quays, had become a menace. Win or lose, the crise was already over.

Cars are cars all over the world, of course, and horns are horns, and a victory celebration in Paris doesn’t sound much different from a victory celebration in New York or, for that matter, from a traffic tieup outside the Holland Tunnel. Even the theme song of the French victory was not the “Marseillaise” but Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”

Anyway, the whole point of the celebration was that it wasn’t a champagne occasion. It was bottled water and cheap booze and a lot of beer. What made it memorable was that, for once, the carnival atmosphere of the Latin Quarter and the Marais spilled over into official French culture, and kept right on spilling. (By Tuesday morning, it had even spilled over into the garden of the Elysee, where a visibly blanching President Chirac greeted the players to a chorus of “We Are the Champions,” sung, in best Freddie Mercury English, by the crowd thronging the team.)

At one-thirty in the morning after the victory, you could take the world’s most beautiful walk—beginning at the Institut de France and moving across the pont des Arts and around the cour Carree of the Louvre and then to the Tuileries and the Champs-Elysees—and feel as if, in the presence of so many happy people, the grand siecle itself had gone a little lopsided and blissed out. Misrule ruled. A man wrapped in a tricolor was relieving himself against the front wall of the Institut de France—discreetly, with maximum esprit de corps, but, still, relieving himself. Someone was selling beer out of a cooler, violating about twelve hundred French laws in the act, and someone else had one of those pin-ball arcade love-o-meters set up. (Everybody’s hand was hot;

even an American writer saw his score shoot past “Casanova” and all the way up to “Chaud Lapin”—“Hot Rabbit!”) Kids were singing; men were grabbing politely at girls, presumably with a memory of 1944, when the girls were said to have grabbed back. This time they didn’t, but it didn’t matter.

Many people had talked a lot about the ethnic mix of the French team, which was composed of players of Algerian, Basque, and Ghanaian descent, among others, but the players themselves seemed a lot less self-conscious about this than journalists did. French identity is not that hard to achieve; if you speak French, you feel French. What is hard for an immigrant or an outsider in France to achieve is French institutional acceptance, a place in the crowded, ancient French iconography. The faces you saw on the World Cup team—the faces of Zidane and Djorkaeff and Karembeu—are already part of French society. They just hadn’t been integrated before into the French self-image, and now they were.

It’s natural for people to hope that the victory of a multiracial team might be the beginning of the end of Le Pen and the racist National Front, but it probably won’t be. The ability of sports to solve social problems is limited—the Dream Team didn’t change black income levels—and anyway, Le Pen blandly claimed the victory for himself. It was a reassertion of French glory, he said, and who is more glorious about France than he? The logic of nationalism always flows downhill, toward the gutter.

The real victory on Sunday night was a victory for disorder, an unexpected blessing, bonking the head of an unprepared population. On that long, beautiful walk, there’s a moment when you arrive at the gate of the Tuileries and, for the first time, see the expanse of the Champs-Elysees. On Sunday you expected to see what you always see: a line of red car lights going up the right side of the champs and a line of white lights running down the left—two perfect, side-by-side mile-long lines of red and white, framed by the Arc de Triomphe. On Sunday night, for the first time that anyone could remember, the two neat columns of light were gone. The champs, a chaos of people and cars, was a blur of indistinct movement, the lights and colors a smear of milky pink. For once Paris was all mixed up.

The Balzar Wars

The Balzar, on the rue des Ecoles, in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris, happens to be the best restaurant in the world. It is the best restaurant in the world not because it has the best food—though the food is (or used to be) excellent—and not because it is “hot,” or even particularly fashionable, but because of a hundred small things that make it a uniquely soulful and happy place.

The Balzar is a brasserie, which means that it is Alsatian in origin, serves beer, and stays open late. Over the years it has added a full dinner menu, so that it has become indistinguishable from a restaurant. For more than a hundred years the Balzar has been a family business, and each of the families has managed to keep it constant without making it stale. It’s a one-story, one-room spot, small by brasserie standards—with only ninety or so covers—and has a glass front that looks out onto the street; you can see with one eye people boarding the number 63 bus in the twilight, and with the other a pretty little park dedicated to Montaigne, with plane trees and pink-flowering chestnuts.

The Balzar is a democratic place. You are greeted at the door with a handshake and a quick squint of crinkled, harried warmth, by the two maitres d’hotel—one always in a tuxedo, the other in a suit—and are shown to your table with a few pensive words about families, children, and the weather. There’s not a trace of unctuousness or forced familiarity, no appraisal of your wallet, your last review, or your weekend gross. There are long banquettes covered with dark brown leather along the walls, and a T-shaped banquette in the middle of the room. On the tables are white linen and glasses and silver. The light—from eight round globe lamps, high above—is warm and bright, gay without being harsh. The carte is a long printed card, with the dishes listed on the front and the wines on the back, and it never changes. There are leeks and tomato salad and herring for starters—foie gras if you’re in an expansive mood—and then the same five or so plats: steak au poivre, roast chicken, grilled sole or salmon, calf’s liver, gigot with white and green beans. The wine list is short, and usually the best thing on it is the Reserve Balzar, a pleasant red Bordeaux. The only sauces are the sauce au poivre on the steak and a bearnaise for the grilled salmon. The pommes frites are fine, the creme caramel is good, the profiteroles the best in Paris.

It is the waiters—or serveurs, as they’re called—who give the Balzar its soul. A team of the same ten men has been in place for decades: They are courteous, warmhearted, ironic (able to warn a client off a dubious plat with an eyebrow), and mildly lubricious. (They have been known to evaluate, sotto voce, the size and shape of a woman’s rear even as they pull out the table to make way for it.) They work hard. By tradition at the Balzar, the plats arrive beautifully arranged on an oval platter and then are carefully transferred by the waiter to a round plate. This doubles the work but creates an effect. Whenever I am feeling blue, I like to go to the Balzar and watch a waiter gravely transfer a steak au poivre and its accompaniments from an oval platter to a plate, item by item. It reaffirms my faith in the sanity of superfluous civilization.

The other famous Left Bank brasserie, the Lipp, is known as a canteen for the men of power in the Fifth Republic, but when Lionel Jospin, the virtuous Socialist who is trying to transform French politics, was running for president three years ago, he made an event of being photographed, for Paris Match, having dinner at the Balzar. Everyone got the point.

On a Sunday night in April, Martha and I, with Luke, were sitting at a table in the back, just finishing one in a long line of good dinners and were once again refining our long-term plan to be buried at the Balzar—or, more precisely, to have the urns containing our ashes placed on the dessert counter just above the mille-feuilles and the lemon tart, and on either side of the flowers. The plaques, we decided, should read “A Faithful Client” or, better, should repeat the words of those inscriptions you see all over Paris: “Here, fallen for France…”

Just then Jean-Claude, the maitre d’ in the tuxedo, came over to our table. His gravelly sud-ouest voice was pitched low, and to my amazement, his eyes were glistening. “I’d like to introduce you to someone who’ll be working with us,” he said graciously, and he summoned a melancholy-faced, lantern-jawed man, buttoned up in a good suit, whom I had idly noticed standing by the door earlier in the evening. “This is M. Delouche,” he said. I shook hands with M. Delouche and raised my eyebrows at Jean-Claude.

“The Balzar has been sold,” he said. “M. Delouche is here representing the new management.” He walked away quickly, and M. Delouche followed.

I grabbed our waiter as he came by the table. “The restaurant has been sold?” I said. “To whom was it sold?”

“To the Flo Group,” he answered, in a strangled voice.

The Flo Group! I felt as I imagined I would feel if I had been stabbed: first surprise, then nothing, then pain. The Flo Group is the creation of an Alsatian waiter turned restaurant tycoon named Jean-Paul Bucher, and in Paris it is often referred to as the rouleau compresseur Flo, the Flo steamroller. It is for many people the symbol of the forces of restaurant consolidation, globalization, standardization, and even Disneyfication; Flo runs five restaurants at Disneyland Paris. Over the past thirty years Bucher has bought up some of the oldest and most famous brasseries and bistros in Paris, while also running a chain of lesser Flos, a catering business, and a chain of cheap restaurants called Hippopotamus. Some of the Flo Group restaurants—Julien, Le Boeuf sur le Toit—are actually pretty good. But even the good places have a processed, overwrought quality, and the food at one is pretty much like the food at the others. They lack all the things that the Balzar possesses so effortlessly: distinctiveness, eccentricity, and a sense of continuity.

A few moments later one of the waiters, whom I had known for a long time, and whom I’ll call Thierry, came up to me and suggested, under his breath, that we meet for coffee the next day. When we met, Thierry told me the history of the Balzar, seen from below. He was in mufti, wearing jeans and a jean jacket, a standard uniform for off-duty waiters, like blue windbreakers on off-duty New York cops. The Balzar had never been a perfectly happy place, he maintained, and the syndicat, the union, had suffered a good deal even under the old owners. Nonetheless the garcons loved the work, because they liked the clients and the clients liked them. (I noticed that he referred to the waiters by the usually forbidden, old-fashioned word garcons, or boys, and that he also referred to their metier as restauration, or restaurant work. The two words together gave their profession blue-collar integrity.) He outlined their fears. The Flo people, he said, might close the Balzar “for restoration” and disperse the waiters to other Flo restaurants, all over Paris, never to be reassembled. They express a savoir-faire that dates from 1968,” he said. “Ours dates from 1894.” It was said that the Flo people had arranged to have American tour groups brought to the Balzar; it was also said that they were standardizing the kitchen produce, bringing it in line with the rest of the Flo Group. More immediately, the garcons were appalled because the new man, M. Delouche, had been put “on the service,” drawing his salary from their tips—the 15 percent service charge that is added to all French restaurant bills. (Thierry explained to me that the service charge was real and sacrosanct; before Flo took over, one of the garcons collected it at the end of every evening and put it in a drawer, to which each of them had a key. Now they have to wait five weeks for the same money.) It also turned out that the suit-tuxedo distinction among the greeters was a deeply significant code: A maitre d’in a suit was aligned with the owner, one in a tuxedo with the staff.

Within a week or so a group of Balzar regulars, mostly editors and publishers and professors—the Balzar is around the corner from the Sorbonne—arranged to meet at the apartment of one of the staunchest clients, on the quaiAnatole-France, to think about what we could do. It was a beautiful day, but ominous reports were coming in from all sides. Someone had had a doubtful sole; someone else had noticed that oeufs crevettes, hard-boiled eggs with shrimp, had been sneaked onto the menu. (No, no, someone else said, reassuringly, the oeufs crevettes were there twenty years ago; it was really a restoration.) More seriously, it was said that the waiters were being forced to rush checks to the table. It is a Balzar tradition that you can nurse even a cup of coffee and a plate of cold cuts for as long as you like. Now, it was said, after seventy minutes the waiters were forced to put the check on the table. This was—well, there was no other word for it—so American. You see this in California, someone said; he had eaten once in Santa Monica, and the young woman slapped the bill on the table after an hour and a half. (I could only imagine the waitress, on her way to her tai chi or acting class, dying on the vine while a couple of Frenchmen sat polishing off a bottle and solving the world’s problems.) More horror stories were told; a keen-eyed regular claimed to have spotted a Flo Group camion parked outside the Balzar at six o’clock one morning, bringing in Flo produce.

It was obvious that something had to be done, but what? One person suggested a boycott; another person a sit-in; someone else a campaign of letter writing. We had a left, a right, and a center even before we had a party. Finally a leader emerged, a hand-some, round-faced young publisher named Lorenzo Valentin. He had an excellent plan: Why not invite all the regulars we could find to reserve tables on the same night, occupy the restaurant, make a scene, and demand that Bucher meet with us? Fine, someone else said, but added that if we did it, we had to be sure not to leave the waiters, on whose behalf we were acting, “in an ambiguous position.” If we sat in, occupied the restaurant, and didn’t order anything, they would be the ones to suffer. Therefore we also had to order and eat dinner. Good, one woman said, but we had to be sure to hold on to the tables for the entire evening. “Eat, but eat slowly” would be our motto. Why not order foie gras on toast, she suggested; that could be spread very slowly She mimed just how to do it, like a veteran of many a foie gras slowdown on the barricades. We all watched her studiously

During the next two weeks, as I helped organize the occupation, I felt exhilarated, though I recognized in my exhilaration a certain hypocrisy. Like every American in France, I had spent a fair amount of time being exasperated by the French because of their inability to accept change, their refusal to accept the inevitable logic of the market, and their tendency to blame Americans for everything. As I raged against the changes at the Balzar, I began to hear people repeating to me the same tiresome and sensible logic that I had been preaching so long myself: that nothing stays the same; change must be welcomed; one must choose to live in the world as it is or live in a museum whose walls increasingly recede inward…. It was all true, and when it came to the Balzar, I didn’t care. I would like to say that the difference was that my concern was now attached to particular people—to Thierry and Jean-Claude and the rest. But that would be giving myself too much credit for disinterestedness. The difference was not that it was happening to the Balzar. The difference was that it was happening to me. I was being asked to give up the continuity of a thousand small associations and pleasures—the night we went after we signed the lease, the night we went, still jet-lagged, after a summer away—and I didn’t see why I should.

“Can’t repeat the past?” says Gatsby. “Why of course you can!” And every American schoolchild is taught that in this belief lies Gatsby’s tragedy. But why should the thought be so absurd? Can’t repeat the past? We do it every day. We build a life, or try to, of pleasures and duties that will become routine, so that every day will be the same day, or nearly so, “the day of our life,” Randall Jarrell called it. There seemed to me nothing stranger about my wanting to eat forever at an unchanged Balzar than about my wanting to stay married to the same wife or be father of the same kid. (“M. Bucher has now bought your family, and will be adding a new child to the staff on the same terms. Change is good. Here, try Ralphie for a while. He comes from the centralized nursery and only speaks German, but you’ll soon find that…”) On the day of my life, I eat dinner at the Balzar—the Balzar as it is and was, and not some improved, Flo Group version. I realize that one of the tricks of capitalism is to lure you into a misleadingly unreciprocated love with a cash register, but what impressed me about my friends in the Balzar war was that they weren’t prepared to treat their attachment to the Balzar as somehow less real than the cash register’s attachment to it.

June 25 was picked as the day for our occupation of the Balzar. We carefully arranged to stagger our phone calls to reserve tables for that Thursday night, to avoid tipping our hand. When my turn came, I was so nervous that I had to dial twice, and then, in a high-pitched quaver, I reserved my table. (“Oui, madame,” said an obviously bemused maitre d’.) On the night I arrived with a couple of friends. The tables filled up with regulars, gaily overacting the part of ordinary diners: Oh, how sympa, you’re here too, we said to each other, exchanging meaty, significant winks. We ordered aperitifs and made nervous conversation. Finally, at nine o’clock, the last regular sat down, and, with two taps on a glass, Lorenzo Valentin rose. The revolution was under way.

“We are here tonight,” he said, “to demonstrate our sympathy with the waiters, clients, and tradition of the Balzar.” Valentin stepped away from his table and addressed Bucher’s man, M. Delouche, directly Delouche clasped his hands behind his back and thrust out his chin, both obsequious and defiant. When I saw him like that, bearing the brunt of a sudden wave of disapproval—and, surely, thinking, I’m the working stiff here, these people are rich gauchistes, easy for them—I have to admit that a small whitecap of sympathy for him rose in my mind.

“This is not a personal assault on anyone,” Lorenzo declared. “We have gathered here tonight as, shall we say, an opportunity to discuss the issue at the heart of our concerns about the recent purchase of the Balzar by the Flo Group. Our question is: Is this merely a place to eat or is it something more, and if it is something more, what is it? Our organization, Les Amis du Balzar, is here to safeguard the quality and, what’s more, to defend the spirit and the staff of a place that we believe offers a respite from time itself.” This was grandly said, and he got a big hand.

M. Delouche attempted to defend his position, but his voice was mostly inaudible. All you could make out was “logic,” “safeguard,” “continuity.”

“But what about the staff?” Lorenzo demanded. “What of their continuity?”

“Les serveurs! Les serveurs!” The cry went up from around the room as we pounded the tables and hit cutlery against glasses. The waiters, their eyes fixed studiously on the floor or on the tables, continued to serve.

“Why can’t this place be different from other places bought by Flo?” another protester said, rising to his feet. “We all know what Flo does. How many people here are former clients of La Coupole?”

“Anciens! Anciens!” we chanted in unison, pounding the tables some more, meaning that we used to go to La Coupole and didn’t anymore.

We were building up to an impressive pitch of indignation, but at that point the waiters began to serve the dinners that we had ordered while we were waiting to begin our protest, and this weakened the revolutionary spirit a little. There was, I sensed, a flaw in our strategy: If you take over a restaurant as an act of protest and then order dinner at the restaurant, what you have actually done is gone to the restaurant and had dinner, since a restaurant is, by definition, always occupied, by its diners. Having come to say that you just won’t take it anymore, you have to add sheepishly that you will take it, au point and with bearnaise sauce. It was as if at the Boston Tea Party the patriots had boarded the ship, bought up all the boxes of tea, and then brewed them.

Nonetheless we carried on. We loudly criticized the fish; we angrily demanded a meeting with Bucher; we rose and offered memories of the Balzar, and vowed that we would fight for the Balzar yet to be.

We were hoping for a little mediatisation, and we got it. Pieces about the protest appeared in the magazine Marianne and in Le Figaro. Then, unfortunately, Jean-Pierre Quelin, the food critic of Le Monde, who is a kind of Jonathan Yardley of French restaurant writing, weighed in, announcing that the food at the Balzar had always been terrible—but that he had eaten there since the Flo Group took over, and now it was even worse, so to hell with everybody. Lorenzo thought that this might actually be a useful article for our cause: By defining the Balzar radical fringe, Quelin was allowing us to occupy the rational center.

To the surprise of my American self, Bucher sent back word that he would be delighted to meet with our association, to have breakfast with what amounted to our Directorate at the Balzar itself. At nine on a Saturday morning we assembled at the Cafe Sorbon, across the street and then trooped over to meet the enemy. Bucher turned out to be a simple round Alsatian, wearing an open shirt, and he spoke with the guttural accent of Alsace. We all shook hands—he had a couple of his PR people sitting behind him at a second table—and then Lorenzo Valentin, with quiet dignity, began his speech.

“We are here,” he said, “as representatives of our association, to argue that your regime is not compatible with the spirit of the Balzar. This is not meant to be offensive to you—”

“Not at all,” Bucher said politely.

“But without denying your right of property, we claim for ourselves a kind of right of usage.” And from that premise Valentin carefully outlined our thesis that what mattered was the esprit of the Balzar and that the esprit of the Flo Group was, on the evidence, not compatible with that esprit we were defending. We asked him to keep the Balzar an autonomous brasserie, outside the Flo Group proper, and to make no changes in the staff, in the decor, or in the spirit of the place. After stating these demands, Lorenzo looked at him squarely.

I don’t think any of us were prepared for what happened next. Bucher looked us over, up and down the table. “No problem,” he said, a friendly, gap-toothed smile creasing his face. “No problem. Tell me, my friends, why would I want to change something that is working so well right now, something that works so effectively? I bought the Balzar because it’s the crown jewel of Parisian brasseries. I bought the Balzar because I love it. What motive would I have to want it to be different? I’m here because if I weren’t, McDonald’s would be—and that would be too bad. I sincerely think that we are defending the same thing.”

Our committee exchanged glances. Lorenzo pressed his point. “It’s not just the cuisine,” he said. “It’s something more. A certain relaxation, the feeling of time suspended, the spirit of a place. You see, five hundred and fifty people have already joined Les Amis du Balzar.”

Bucher nodded emphatically. “I know. You are to be congratulated,” he said. “What an accomplishment!” After some more conversation about the cooking—he had brought out the chef de cuisine, who was understandably upset about the piece in Le Monde—he said, “I am sixty years old. I give you a guarantee that I will keep the Balzar as it is. This wasn’t a good buy for me. My accountants advised against it. My analysts advised against it. My heart and my soul told me to do it, and they’re with you. A restaurant this small—it makes no sense for my chain. A hundred covers. It makes no sense for me except as the jewel in the crown of my Parisian brasseries, whose quality and values I’m going to defend.”

We mumbled something and, after more handshaking, withdrew to the sidewalk. We had not anticipated the strategic advantage to Bucher of total, enthusiastic assent. We wanted to save the steak au poivre on the oval plate and the waiter serving it, but you couldn’t argue with the man when he pointed to the steak, the plate, and the waiter and said nothings changed. (Thierry, when he heard of our breakfast with Bucher, said, “It is the old technique of the kings of France: Treat your worst enemy like your best friend.”)

I did not doubt that Bucher was being perfectly sincere, as far as it went, and that in his case as-far-as-it-went went as far it could. The Balzar would stay the same until it changed. The waiters seem encouraged by our actions. When I go to the Balzar now, Thierry, bringing a coupe champagne, slips by and, under his breath, makes a toast: “A la sante de I’association—to the health of the association!” We repeat the toast, under our breaths. It is like being in the resistance. (But when M. Delouche comes over, we shake his hand too. Perhaps that is also like being in the resistance.)

Les Amis du Balzar has sent an eloquent new letter to Bucher, written by Lorenzo Valentin, and describing the objet de nos preoccupations: that no dish will come from a centralized kitchen and that there will be real autonomy for the staff, and real autonomy in the management. My Parisian self is prepared to defend the Balzar to the end, whatever it takes. My American self suspects that the Balzar will stay the same, and then it will change, and that we will love it as long as we can.

Alice in Paris

Not long ago, in the brown dawn light of the western Paris suburbs, three Americans could be seen taking a mildly illicit walk through the Rungis wholesale food market. The three Americans—the California chef Alice Waters, the vegetable scholar Antoine Jacobsohn, and I—all had something on their minds, and all were in a heightened emotional state that had its origins in something more than the very early hour and the very chilly weather.

Alice Waters was in a heightened emotional state because, as many of her friends believe, she is always in a heightened emotional state, particularly when she is in the presence of fresh produce. Alice, who was wearing a wool cloche, is a small, intense, pale, pretty, fiftyish woman, with a quiet, satisfied smile and a shining, virtuous light in her eye, the kind of American woman who a century ago would have been storming through saloons with a hatchet and is now steaming fresh green beans, but with similar motives. Her vision is rooted in the romantic Berkeley politics that she practiced before starting her restaurant, Chez Panisse, with a ten-thousand-dollar loan twenty-seven years ago. She believes in concentric circles of social responsibility, with the reformed carrot in the backyard garden insensibly improving the family around the dinner table, the reformed family around the dinner table insensibly improving the small neighborhood merchants they shop with, the reformed neighborhood merchants improving their city, and so right on, ever upward and outward, but with the reformed carrot always there, the unmoved (though crisply cooked) mover in the center.

Earlier this year Alice was invited to open a restaurant at the Louvre, by Mme. Helene David-Weill, the tres grande dame who is the director of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs there. An enthusiastic article in the Times gave the impression that this was a fait accompli, or nearly so. In fact in September it still existed essentially only as an enthusiasm in the eye of Alice Waters, Mme. David-Weill, and Richard Overstreet, an American painter who lives in Berkeley and Paris and has been the go-between since the beginning. (Francis Ford Coppola was the first person to suggest Alice to Mme. David-Weill.) Alice had come to Paris to move the project along, and Richard had brought her together with Antoine as a possible “principal forager,” on the lines of a principal dancer, for it. Rungis was the setting for their long-awaited meeting.

Antoine Jacobsohn was in a heightened emotional state because he is in a heightened emotional state whenever he visits the Rungis market. Twenty-nine years ago Rungis replaced the great Les Halles complex, which had dominated central Paris from the fifteenth century until after the Second World War and which Zola called, in a novel he devoted to it, “The Belly of Paris.” For Antoine, Les Halles was not just the belly of Paris but its heart, and for him the replacement of Les Halles by Rungis is the primordial sin of modern France—the destruction of Penn Station, Ebbets Field, and B. Altman’s combined.

“When the market moved out of Les Halles,” Antoine was saying, as he led our little party—it was illicit because, strictly speaking, you need a permit to shop at Rungis—“it effectively changed the relationship between pleasure and play and work in all of Paris. For centuries, because the market was at once a center for restaurants and for ordinary people, a whole culture grew up around it. Shopping and eating, the restaurant and the market, the stroller and the shopper, the artisan and the bourgeois—all were kept in an organic arrangement. And because many of the goods couldn’t be kept overnight, it meant that what was left at the end of every day was given to the poor. But for trivial reasons—traffic and hygiene—they made the decision to move the market to Rungis, and left a hole in the heart of Paris. There was no place allotted here for the small artisan, for the small grower, or for the organic market.”

He shook his head in disbelief. Antoine was raised in North Plainfield, New Jersey, by a French mother; he has a research fellowship at the Museum of Vegetable Culture, in the Paris suburb of La Courneuve, a degree in agricultural sciences from Cornell, and a perfect, crisp, contrary French mind trapped in an American body and voice box. Antoine has been known to give his friends an idealized poster of the twenty-four cultivated radishes—some lost, some extant—of the Ile-de-France, and he has written beautifully, not to say longingly, of the lost monstrous spinach of Viroflay and the flat onions of Vertus.

We had been joined by Sally Clarke, of Clarke’s restaurant, in London, who is one of Alice’s many spiritual godchildren. The two chefs seemed torn between delight and surprise—delight in the freshness and green beauty of the vegetables, surprise at the lack of variety.

“I’m going to show you the space left for the local growers,” Antoine went on. We walked through the aisles of the vast, chilly airplane hangars of vegetables: bins of girolles, crates of shiny eggplants. It all looked wonderful but remarkably standardized, explaining the standardization of what the average Paris greengrocer sells.

“Imagine,” Antoine said. “So many radishes gone; the artichokes of Paris, almost gone; the turnips of Vaugirard, gone. There’s a variety of beans that one reads about all the time in nineteenth-century texts. But gone! We’ve kept some seedlings of the plants in the museum, and they could be revived.”

“We’ll plant them in the Tuileries,” Alice said softly, but with determination. One of her dreams for the restaurant is to raise a vegetable garden right outside the door.

Antoine walked along, greeting old friends and growers. “This man has excellent tomatoes,” he now whispered to Alice.

“Does he grow organically?” she asked urgently. In recent years Alice has become a fanatic of organic growing.

Antoine, who had been telling Alice how the French sense of terroir—of the taste and traditions of a local region—was more important to authentic produce in France than the precise rules of organic growing, asked the grower. The man shrugged and then explained his situation. “He says he’s giving up the business, in any case, as it happens, since its becoming hopeless,” Antoine said to Alice. (He failed to add that every French merchant, in every field, will always tell you that it’s hopeless, he’s going to give up the business; when French weapons salesmen go to China to sell missiles, they probably shrug when the Chinese start to bargain and say. Well, it doesn’t matter, we’re giving up the business anyway, it’s a hopeless metier.)

Alice gave the grower a steady, encouraging look. “We just have to get the suppliers to adapt,” she said. “That’s what we did at Chez Panisse. You have to let them know there’s the demand. You have to bring them along with you.” In the early-morning light you could sense Alice Waterss eyes radiating the spiritual intensity that for so long has startled and impressed her friends and admirers and has set her apart from other chefs, making her a kind of materfamilias to a generation of chefs ranging from Sally Clarke to Michel Courtalhac, in Paris. (He keeps a photograph of Alice in the window of his restaurant.) Aubert de Villaine, who is the codirector of the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, the greatest wine estate in France, speaks of her in hushed tones, less as a superior hashslinger than as a kind of cross between Emily Dickinson and La Pucelle. “There’s something crystalline about her, an extraordinary purity of spirit,” he said not long ago. “She’s one of les vigiles en haut, the watchman in the crow’s nest, seeing far ahead. The thing I most admire about Alice is the sense that the sensual is not really sensual if it is not, au fond, spiritual.”

Antoine nodded at another merchant across the way. “Now, this man grows excellent asparagus,” he whispered. “It’s interesting. Two hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago it was always green asparagus; now the demand is for white asparagus.”

He went up to the grower and said, in French, “Why is it that no one any longer grows green asparagus? When was it that people went over to white asparagus?” The man gave him an incredulous look and then said, in the beautiful clear French of the tie-de-France, “You know, I would say that what you’ve just stated is the exact contrary of the truth.” It was a perfect Parisian tone of voice—not disputatious, just suggesting a love of the shared pursuit of the truth, which, unfortunately, happens not to be in your possession right now.

Antoine made the right response. He raised his eyebrows in polite wonder while smiling only on the left side of his face, an expression that means, How greatly I respect the vigor of your opinions, however much they may call to mind the ravings of a lunatic. “What do you mean?” he demanded.

“Well, it is my experience that everyone grows green asparagus now. It’s all you see for decorative plats, that touch of green. In the magazines, for instance, among the fashionable chefs, it’s all you see, green asparagus. It has a much greater decorative effect. It’s obvious.”

“Ah, yes, for decorative effect,” Antoine agreed calmly. Everybody won.

As they were speaking, I was poking a pile of girolles nearby, and wondering if I had made a mistake in not planning to serve some kind of autumnal mushroom plate for dinner the next night. I was in a heightened emotional state because I had offered to cook dinner for Alice Waters, and I had spent most of the summer worrying about what I would cook and how it would taste. I had decided to try and sneak in a little serious shopping while I was observing Alice and Antoine. I had also decided to go out later that day and buy a new set of dinner plates. I had come to both of these decisions more or less in the spirit of a man who, having in an insane moment invited Michael Jordan over to play a little one-on-one, decides that he might as well use the occasion to put down a new coat of asphalt on the driveway.

I had made up my mind to do a lamb braised for seven hours—a gigot de sept heures, as it’s known—which would be cooked in the Provencal style, with eggplant and tomatoes. But to be in Rungis at dawn with two such devoted terroiristes as Alice and Antoine, for whom cooking is meaningful only if it is an expression of the place where the things are being cooked, made me feel a little guilty. I was going to have to get the tomatoes out of a can, and though the canned tomato is absolutely typical of my own terroir, I somehow felt that they would disapprove.

Nearby Alice had found frisee and watercress and was looking at them raptly—not with the greed of a hungry man seeing dinner but with the admiration of William Bennett looking at a long marriage. “There’s nothing so beautiful as French watercress,” she said. “I can recall walking down the rue Mouffetard in 1965, my first year in Paris. I was a girl from New Jersey who’d grown up on frozen food, and to see the baskets and baskets of greens, so many shades of green and red!

“I walked up and down the street, my eyes unbelieving,” she went on. “I had never tasted an oyster. I went through Normandy, eating eighteen at a time, and drinking apple cider, and it was so wonderful that I was just carried away, and I would fall asleep by the roadside. When I got back to Berkeley, I thought of opening a creperie, and I tried to import some of the cider and found out that there was alcohol in it. That was why I kept passing out! I thought it was just the oysters and the apple juice and France.” She was lost for a moment.

“You know,” Antoine said, coming over, “there used to be asparagus grown in Argenteuil, just down the river from Paris—great asparagus. And they used to have figs in Argenteuil too. The white figs of Argenteuil, they were called in the nineteenth century. The trees were bent over with weights, so that the branches could be buried in the ground, to protect them all through the winter. Yet we think of figs as a southern fruit.”

“Oh, we have to have them,” Alice said, her eyes moist with emotion. “The white figs of Argenteuil! We’ll grow them again. It can be done, you know.” We had been wandering through the airplane hangars and were standing among towers of carrots and leeks, mountains of haricots verts. She looked upward and, Pucelle-like, seemed to be seeing before her—in a vision, as though they were already tangible, edible—the white figs of Argenteuil: an improbable Berkeley Joan, imagining her France restored to glory.

I had been thinking about various menus ever since I’d had the idea of cooking dinner for Alice, and for a while I’d thought I might do a four-hour braised leg of lamb that I had found the recipe for in the Sunday magazine of the London Independent. Unfortunately I had lost the issue of the magazine. I had the phone number of the editor, but I thought that it was unprofessional journalistic practice, in this day and age, to call up a fellow scandalmongering cynic and ask him if he would mind thumbing through his back issues for a recipe.

Then, this summer, I came upon a copy of a twenty-five-year-old recipe book written by the wonderful (and blind) food writer Roy Andries de Groot. The book was called The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth. Half cookbook, half Lost Horizon remake, it tells about a little inn—the Auberge of the Flowering Hearth—that the author discovered in the French Alps, while he was on an assignment to write something on how the monks down there make Chartreuse. The menu called for mussel soup, poached pears, and a gigot de mouton de sept heures—the same slow-cooked lamb that I had lost the recipe for but, in this case, given the whole, classic nine yards, or seven hours. Sounded great and was in the right spirit for the occasion, part of the history of the American love of French cooking.

Then I had another inspiration. As Alice Waters would have wanted, my childhood had been a series of intense family dinners, evening after evening, with their own set of “social protocols,” and one of the most cherished of these family dinnertime protocols was known as Getting Someone Else to Do the Work. I decided to call Susan Herrmann Loomis, who lives in Normandy, and ask her to come to Paris to help me cook. Susan is the author of books on French and American country cooking and has a ClA-worthy gift for going into deep cover in a strange region and coming out with all its secrets. She cheerfully agreed to help, and after much discussion—she felt that the mussels would be too similar in color to the gigot, a feat of previsualization that increased my respect for the things a professional cook knows that an amateur doesn’t—we decided that we would cook together. We scoured markets and arrived at a menu: steamed autumn vegetables with aioli, or garlic mayonnaise; the seven-hour lamb with eggplant and tomatoes; and an apple tart with rosemary. I went out and got the best bottle of Chartreuse I could find, to keep it honest to de Groot’s memory.

While we prepared, Alice continued her tour of Paris. The idea of a restaurant turned out to have been something of an afterthought at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, which is an annex of the Louvre, out on the rue de Rivoli. For many years, it had been a sleepy, unattended institution, filled with old clocks and settees. Mme. David-Weill’s reign devoted a recent exhibition to the Tati stores, a kind of French Woolworth’s, and has promised in general to be much more swinging. Still, the space that had been put aside for eating, though it looked out from the back of the museum onto the Tuileries gardens, lacked some of the amenities of modern restaurants. “It’s all those kinds of basic things,” Alice explained after she had seen it. “Where do the employees wash their hands? Where are the umbrellas for the rainy days? It’s only ninety covers, which is even fewer than Chez Panisse.” She went on, diplomatically, “It’s really more of a tearoom size than anything else. I worry that the space is too small to express what we’d like to express.”

In a kind of mission statement, she has described the restaurant as she imagines it: “A platform, an exhibit, a classroom, a conservatory, a laboratory, and a garden. It must be, in a phrase, an art installation in the form of a restaurant, expressing the sensuousness of food and putting people in touch with the pleasures of eating and with the connection between those pleasures and sustainable agriculture….All the elements of the collaboration, from the menu to the decor, will clearly demonstrate where the food comes from and how it was grown. The emphasis is going to be on the food, the kind that makes eating a soul-nourishing experience. Amid the grandeur of the Louvre, the restaurant must feel human, reflecting the spirit of the farm, the terroir, and the market, and it must express the humanity of the artisans, cooks, and servers who work there.”

Yet Alice seemed unperturbed by the difficulties; she has the sublime California confidence that all physical problems are susceptible to a little intense spiritual pressure. “I’m not worried,” she said. “If we can solve the space problem, everything else will fall into place. I don’t really want it to be an extension of Chez Panisse in Paris. There will be a vegetable garden, but more important will be establishing a relation to a whole network of suppliers. I’m going to work with Eiko Ishioka, the great Japanese designer, who will do an inspired job. And now I’ve found my forager, in Antoine. This restaurant could be the next step. It could be a statement about diversity on so many levels. It could be the next part of an effort to keep people from perceiving life in the unified way that the mass culture demands.” (When she’s asked if her daughter, Fanny has ever gone to a McDonald’s, she answers, carefully, “She may have. During a soccer match or something. But I’ve told her that while she’s free to do it if she wants to, I would rather not get involved in that kind of activity”)

Alice is acutely aware that there are people who see something hypocritical or unreal about a woman who presides over an expensive restaurant preaching against commercial culture. This is silly, of course—if there’s going to be a faith, somebody’s got to live in the Vatican—but it is also false on its own terms. She has scrupulously kept Chez Panisse out of mass merchandising of any kind. There are no Chez Panisse frozen foods, no Chez Panisse canned sauces, no Chez Panisse pasta. There are only cookbooks and a line of granola. Alice Waters is in every way the anti-Wolfgang Puck. (People who know insist that the restaurant still makes remarkably little money for such a famous place.) In a speech she made recently to teachers involved with the “garden in every school” project, in California, she pointed out that “all too many kids—both rich and poor—are disconnected from civilized and humane ways of living their lives,” and then added the Berkeley Basic Truth: “The sensual pleasure of eating beautiful food from the garden brings with it the moral satisfaction of doing the right thing for the planet and for yourself.”

Most people feel that Alice is the figure par excellence of the great Berkeley Transformation, in which the wise children ate the revolution before it had a chance to eat them. Kermit Lynch, the wine importer, who has done more than anyone else to bring the organic revolution to French winemaking (and has been called a “hopeless romantic” for his efforts), is a product of the same history. “Alice and I both started our businesses around the same time,” he recollected recently. “She started cooking for an underground newspaper in San Francisco, and I was working for the Berkeley Barb—and there we were. Who could have imagined that we’d end up this way? It was very political what she was doing then, and it still is.” Alice herself traces the crucial moment for the creation of Chez Panisse to the defeat of Robert Scheer, now a well-known journalist in Los Angeles, whose congressional campaign she had worked for in 1966. “I was so crushed, and I thought, I’m just going to start my own world,” she says.

It may be this reconciliation of Utopian politics and aristocratic cooking, more than anything else, that has divided the cooking cultures of France and America. The soixante-huitards were as disappointed in France as they were in America, but they drove their political disappointment into more political disappointment. The culture that the French radicals were countering, after all, was already epicurean; there was no cultural space to be found in expanding it. The counterculture in America had just the opposite situation—it was Nixon who ate cottage cheese with ketchup—and anyway, the counterculture in America liked pleasure; its anthem was “Feed Your Head,” not “Clear Your Head.”

Over time, an obsession with sex and drugs slid imperceptibly into an obsession with children and food. This obsessiveness is what separates Alice Waters from all the other “Anglo-Saxon” restaurateurs who have arrived in Paris recently to open restaurants. (Sir Terence Conran, the London food lord, has just remade an old cabaret on the rue Mazarine, for instance, bringing the new English style to Paris.) For Alice, the idea of making the millennial restaurant in France is a way of closing a romantic circle. Like de Groot, she sees France as the cradle of organic culture in every sense: “The restaurant I imagine is a way of repaying that debt to France, of Americans taking the best of ourselves, instead of the worst of ourselves, to help recall the French to their own best traditions, a way that my generation can repay the debt we owe to France.”

On the day of our dinner Kenneth Starr’s report had just appeared, and all afternoon friends from New York were calling me about it. Susan Loomis and I ran back and forth from the study to the kitchen, doing a lot of “Can you believe what he’s saying?” (and also a fair amount of “Can you believe what they were doing?”). I was trying to adjust the heat on the lamb when the phone rang, from Luke’s school. Once again, as he often had since the term began, he had refused to take a nap, and the school wanted me to bring him home. I sighed, forgot about the report, checked the lamb, left Susan in the kitchen, and raced off to pick him up. (I thought ruefully that you could bet a million dollars that if he were in a school in New York, there would be a Nap-Averse Support Group, a special room for the dormitively challenged, and a precedent-setting lawsuit launched by the attorney father of an earlier child, guaranteeing the right of every child to refuse a nap. But this was Paris: strictly no nap, no school.) I hesitated about leaving the lamb in the oven untended, but then decided, well, seven hours…. Throughout the afternoon, instead of feeling, as I had hoped, like Roy de Groot luxuriating in the Alps, I felt a lot like Ray Liotta spinning in the last reel of Goodfellas, when he’s cooking veal for his crippled brother, and the police helicopter is circling overhead, and he and the mule who’s carrying the cocaine have to go and get her lucky hat.

How was the lamb? The evening went well, though all through dinner the Starr report was being taxed to us by a friend; pages—four hundred of them—kept churning out of the machine, just a room away. You couldn’t help hearing them as they arrived, and every now and then I would go in and peek at the latest revelation. There was an odd symmetry: on the one hand, at our dinner table the high priestess of the American generation that has come to believe that only through refined sensual pleasure can you re-create an ideal America; on the other, page after page of legal detail documenting the existence of those who believe that talking about ideals while pursuing sensations is just what makes this generation such a bunch of louses. It was a kind of two-course meal of radical hedonism and extreme puritanism, both as American as, well, apple pie.

But how was the lamb? Alice spoke freely about the problems that the space at the Louvre represented. Listening between the sentences, you could deduce that if she had not lost heart, she had, at least, a larger sense of how vast and difficult a project it promised to be. Susan Loomis’s aioli was fabulous. People talked, as they do everywhere, about Clinton and Monica.

But How was the lamb? The wine was excellent. The tarte aux pommes was fine.

And the lamb? Well. The lamb had a strong resemblance to a third baseman’s mitt—if I had Antoine Jacobsohns gift for precision, I would compare it to Buddy Bell’s glove, circa 1978—with interesting hints of Naugahyde, kapok, and old suede bomber jacket. There were plenty of white beans, though, and some sauce, so everyone pushed it around politely on the plate. I think I know now what went wrong: after three years of a French oven, I realized that it was easy to forget that American cookbooks were still written, so to speak, in Fahrenheit. De Groot’s two hundred degrees were almost half as hot as the two hundred degrees of my Celsius oven.

I also saw that Alice Waters didn’t notice. If you are playing tennis with Martina Hingis, she does not notice when your backhand is off, because she does not notice when your backhand is on. What you have is not what she would call a backhand. At least I was able to explain to the company that the lamb came from Roy de Groot’s book, and I talked about what a haunting image it gave of a now-vanished French cooking culture: the iron pots on the hearth, the shy Provencale lady in the kitchen, the daily bounty from the farms and the hunters. Alice got that look in her eye. “I love that book,” she said. “And I went on an expedition to the Alps just to find the auberge.”

Did that perfect auberge really exist? I asked.

“Well, no, not really. Not exactly,” she said, in a tone that sounded like “not at all.” “I mean, yes, it didn’t, not like that.” She thought for a moment. “Of course, it existed for him. It still exists for us, in the minds of the people around this table. Maybe that’s where the ideal restaurant always will be.”

Postscript: After Alice Waters left Paris, Le Figaro published an interview with her in which she gently reviewed her concerns about the Rungis market. the markets in paris are shocking! was the headline on the piece, whose effect, from a PR point of view, was like that of a Japanese baseball manager who, after a trip to Yankee Stadium, is quoted in a headline saying, “You call that a ballpark?” Alice Waters is learning that the real France is an inscrutable, hypersensitive place.

I have come to suspect that what is called a seven-hour lamb was really meant to be seven-hour mutton. I am aware of course that there may be other, better recipes for this dish and other, more careful cooks who have prepared it. (The four-hour lamb was great.) But it is also my suspicion that like so many vanishing things in French cooking, the seven-hour recipe was actually made for harder sheep in tougher times. In the late-modern world, where we get all the pleasure we can as soon as we can get it and on any terms we can, and none of us wants to take a nap, for fear of missing some pleasure we might otherwise have had—in a world like that, as I say, there may just be no place left for the seven-hour gigot.

A Machine to Draw the World, Cristmas Journal 4

In April the knock we had been fearing came on the door. The owners of our apartment were coming back from Tokyo. The Asian banking crisis had sent them back to Paris a year early, History leaping its track to knock Experience cold. It came as a shock. Three months and we would have to leave, be gone from 16 rue du Pre-aux-Clercs.

The phone call came, exasperatingly, in the French manner, the way the apartment had come: your whole life thrown upside down in an aside. “Oh, the owners are coming home and will need the apartment in July,” the real estate woman said; no apology or even a “sorry for the inconvenience.” We stayed up all night debating, in the way you do with big news: avoiding, digressing, suddenly feeling sick in the pit of the stomach at the thought of leaving. When we lost the apartment, we thought of going home early, and so we asked ourselves what were the things we loved in Paris, really loved, not just officially appreciated or chose to be amused at? Well, the places our child went. The Luxembourg Gardens at three in the afternoon. The Guignols, and Luke saying, “I’m so excited” before the curtain went up.

The curious thing was that with the loss of Paris threatening, we became more Parisian. The same thing, I had noted, had happened in our last few months in New York. The city, which had become increasingly difficult, suddenly seemed like a playground—people eating outside, in T-shirts and shorts and sneakers in the Italian restaurants in SoHo; the open-all-nightness of New York; the sweet funkiness—registered as it hadn’t in years. When we left the loft for the last time, without trouble, with tears, the music box on Luke Auden’s stroller played “Manhattan.”

Now after the knock on the door, it happened to Paris. I began to cook Parisianly. I bought the chef’s cookbook from Le Grand Vefour and began to make the buttery, three- and four-part dishes that I had been exasperated by before: supremes de volaille, with mint, that sort of thing. I even made souffles again. We put Trenet back on the CD player; strangely the clarity of his French had improved enormously over three years, so that now one could understand the meaning of nearly everything he sang. Or maybe it was just a better record player.

Is this simply the unique perversity of the human heart that wants (and wants and wants) what it doesn’t have—Italian food in Paris, American jazz in Saint-Germain—and, only when it is about to lose it, returns to the things that drew it to the desire in the first place? Or was there a kind of peace in it too? We would now never be Parisians or integrate; we might not even stay in town more than another eight weeks. Loss, like distance, gives permission for romance. In a better-ordered Verona, Romeo and Juliet would have grown up to be just another couple at dinner.

Finally we went for a long walk, down to see the boats, by the river, and thought, No, we’re not ready to leave yet, haven’t yet found a good-bye. So we moved. To a bigger, actually nicer apartment. A slight, permanent overhang of depression lifted; the new place was so bright, and it was connected to the street, the life of the city. One by one our stuff came over, three blocks from one apartment to the other.

In every move, I’ve noticed, there is always something—a roll of Christmas wrapping paper, a boxful of hangers from the dry cleaners, a metal extender whose use no one can recall—that is left over in the apartment you’re leaving, which you step around in curiosity and then, on the last trip, take with you. In this case it was an antenna that belonged with something—a shortwave radio? a portable television?—which we could no longer recall, a plastic dagger, with a “Kings and Knights” sticker on it, and a hardcover of Nabokov’s Pnin, which came from nowhere and I could never remember reading in Paris. Leaving 16 rue du Preaux-Clercs for the last time, I opened Pnin at random, to a bit about a boy’s imaginary father, a king: “‘Abdication! One third of the alphabet!’ coldly quipped the King, with the trace of an accent. ‘The answer is no. I prefer the unknown quantity of Exile.’”

Just after the move, for my birthday, Luke and Martha gave me a wonderful toy. La Machine a Dessiner le Monde, a machine to draw the world. Really, all it is is a camera lucida, but nicely done in plastic, with a viewing stand on top. You put a piece of vellum on it, and if the light’s bright enough, and it has to be very bright, it projects the thing you’re looking at right onto the paper. All you have to do is trace it.

All! For just tracing turns out to be the hardest thing of all. All the cliches and exasperating French abstractions about the insuperable difficulties of realism turn out to be plain truth when you have your machine to draw the world pointed out the window at the plane trees on the boulevard Saint-Germain, your pencil poised, and then you try to decide where to make the first mark. The world moves so much—shimmers and shakes like a nautch dancer, more than you can ever know when you’re in it rather than looking at it. You bless any leaf that holds still long enough for you to get it. Hold still, you tell the tree, the light leaping up and down on the balustrade, as though you were talking to a small child as you try to get on its galoshes. Just hold still. Where you finally make the mark is mostly a question of when you finally get fed up.

Tracing becomes a deep, knotty problem, a thing to solve, and I am completely absorbed in it. I take the Machine to Draw the World to the Palais Royal or the Luxembourg Gardens and just watch the screen, pencil poised, at the translation of Paris into this single flat layer of translucent, lucid shimmer. I no longer try to circus it, or mourn it, or even learn from it, since just drawing it is enough. What you really need from the world in order to draw it is a lot of light and for everything to just stand still.

Martha and I went for our Christmas lunch together at Le Grand Vefour. The Palais Royal in December: undecorated sapins line the arcades, and Monet smokiness hangs over the gardens. Christian David, the maitre d’, is suave and perfect and has been utterly worn out, in the five years we have lunched there twice a year, by the experience of having kids. One of his kids, Antoine, has swallowed a peanut, and he has spent six nights in a hospital; the other is having trouble at school, so David has, beneath a crackle of suave, the hollow, thousand-yard stare of the Parent.

He insisted that next time, next spring we bring Luke Auden, and I told Luke (or Luca, as he now likes to be known) about the invitation when we got home. “Is it Chinese food?” Luke asked, eyes alight with faint hope. “Or regular Paris food?” Regular Paris food, I told him. His eyes became doleful. He loves Chinese food.

One of our accomplishments of the year has been to invent Chinese takeout in Paris. There is a Chinese restaurant in the rez-de-chaussee of our new building, Le Coq d’Or or something, and we asked them if we could sometimes simply call them up and have them prepare the food in the kitchen and then let us come down and pick it up. They looked at us dubiously: We would call in advance and have prepared food awaiting us? Yes, we said. They could even, if it were convenient, have someone run upstairs with it; we would be glad to give this messenger a little something extra for his trouble. We now have this system worked out, and it is regarded as very piquant and original.

We were so proud that we tried to extend it to the Mexican place around the corner. This was a new place that had just opened on the little street around the corner called, of all odd things, Spicy Dinners. There is a new, depressingly Japanese-Third World—style enthusiasm in Paris for “American”-style names. Some, like Buffalo Grill, are ordinary enough. Others are alarming: Speed Rabbit Pizza, for instance, a chain that is beginning to blanket the city, with a very up-to-date image of a racing hare. I don’t think that you can actually get a rabbit pizza from them, a pizza au lapin, but they think it looks streamlined, late century, thrillingly global. A speedy rabbit, delivering speedy food. Anyway, Spicy Dinners really did have spicy dinners, and I miss them terribly, spicy dinners. It serves Mexican food basically, though with various West Indian accents. The owner seems to be East Indian, though. We proposed that we try the same system of calling up and coming over to take out, and the owner, after a few unconvinced looks, said fine, that would be good. Around six o’clock we called in our order—burritos and chili and enchiladas—and, eyes alight with expectation (man, at last some spicy food), went around a few minutes later. He had prepared all the dinner on normal plates—big, restauranty white china plates—and had it waiting for us. It was Parisian takeout;

he trusted us with his plates. I held out my arms, and he carefully put one heavy plate after another in them, placing a second plate upside down on the first, to keep everything warm, so that I had six plates and three dinners all in my hands. I felt like a circus juggler. Luke delicately guided me home and, since I didn’t have the use of my hands, had to punch out the code and push open the big courtyard door himself, while I balanced the plates and spicy food as best I could, with visions of crashing china and spilled burritos all over the boulevard. It was quite a weight. “Please bring back the plates,” he had called out as we left the premises. But we ran them through the dishwasher that night, and then Nisha put them away, and we forgot all about them. A month later, when we remembered, the little spicy restaurant had gone out of business. We feel very guilty about the whole thing.

Earlier in December Luke fell terribly sick—far sicker than I ever hope to see him again. We packed him off to his pediatrician, our wonderful Dr. Pierre Bitoun, who looks exactly like a kinder Groucho Marx. When we called him, he picked up the phone himself, as he always does, and said to get him over. Dr. Bitoun looked worried as hell and told us to get him to a surgeon right away. I picked Luke up in my arms, and we ran to the surgical hospital, where the gentle, grave-eyed surgeon, just emerging from an operation, examined him, said that he didn’t have appendicitis but that he was very sick and that we ought to get him over to the Necker Hospital for an emergency workup. The Necker is the central children’s hospital in Paris. We raced over, without an introduction, into the packed emergency ward, showed our carnet de sante, the pediatrician’s record of inoculations and so forth. The girl at the desk barely glanced at it, and within an hour Luke had had a sonogram, an X ray, a barium enema, and various other tests and got examined by three doctors. Two and a half hours later we were back home with a diagnosis. (It turned out that Luke had salmonella poisoning.) It was only after we had left the hospital that we realized that not only had we not paid a penny but that no one had asked us to show our insurance, fill out a form, or do any of the other standard, humiliating things that happen to our American friends with sick children. Nor had any of the procedures had to be run by the profit-and-loss manager of an HMO. This is socialized medicine, of course, which the insurance companies have patriotically kept Americans from suffering under. There are times, as one reads about the uninsured and the armed and the executed, when French anti-Americanism begins to look extremely rational.

The Christmas windows are weird in Paris this year. Every year, in Paris as everywhere else, the American imperium of shopping opportunities continues to rage, unbanked. Yet the windows are weird, a fin de siecle note of disquiet seeping in. The Bon Marche, which usually has hordes of industrious elves and bears dancing at the end of invisible wires, this year has its windows filled with life-size human figures mechanically enacting a story of incest, bestiality, murder, and fashion narcissism. They play out an updated version of Charles Perrault’s story “Peau d’Ane,” in which a king in mourning for his queen threatens to force himself on his own daughter and is outwitted only by the princess’s decision first to distract him with a series of overwrought holiday dresses and then by the killing of the royal donkey, whose dripping skin… well, it’s a long story, and a strange one, and what connection it has with Christmas—or what the Parisian children, pressed toward the animated windows in their duffel coats, careful scarves bunched like packages around their throats, think of it all—is hard to imagine.

Luke and I went Christmas shopping after he recovered. He desperately believes in Santa—we have sold it hard, I don’t know why—and has been trying to arrange his Christmas list to fit the dimensions of Santa’s sack, which he studies in illustration. “You know what is the problem?” he says as he turns from the Bon Marche toy catalog to his Thomas Nast pictures of Santa. “I don’t think that a big race set is a good idea; it won’t fit.” He loves the Christmas windows and a Louis Armstrong song called “Zat You, Santa Claus?”

After nearly four years in Paris he has developed a complicated, defensive sense of his own apartness, rather like his dad’s.

He recognizes that his parents, his father particularly, speaks with an Accent, and this brings onto him exactly the shame that my grandfather must have felt when his Yiddish-speaking father arrived to talk to his teachers at a Philadelphia public school. I try to have solid, parental discussions with his teachers, but as I do, I realize, uneasily, that in his eyes I am the alter kocker, the comic immigrant.

“Zo, how the boy does?” he hears me saying in effect. “He is good boy, no? He is feeling out the homeworks, isn’t he?” I can see his small frame shudder, just perceptibly, at his father’s words. I had thought to bring him the suavity of the French gamin, and instead I have brought onto him the shame of the immigrant child.

I sense too that he is in a larger confusion: What’s French, what’s American, where am I? His French vocabulary is very large, but he doesn’t like to use it, or show it, except in extremis. (He always seems to know the answer to the question, in even the most rapid and complicated French, “Would you like a little treat/candy/pastry?”) A family is a civilization, and a language is a culture, and he is left with a sense of being doubly islanded. Watching the children at the gardens, he turns to me. “All children in New York speak English?” he demands. Yes, I tell him, and he imagines the unthinkable: a world of English speakers, where English is the public, not the private, language.

When we go out to eat—at the Balzar or at a nice French-American place called the Cafe Parisien—we play the game of Imaginary Restaurants, making up places we would like to open. (My best so far is a Franco-American inn specializing in game, called Les Fauves.) He has invented a restaurant that will be called the Toy Store Restaurant, and will serve an eclectic menu, French and American: baked chicken—fresh from the oven, hamburgers—fresh from the oven! And something everyone likes (dramatic pause): fruit salad! He has intuited his way toward a New York coffee shop.

But: “No French people,” he says decisively. “No French people!” I say, with genuine shock; increasing his French-bashing was not the reason we came here.

“No,” he says. “I’m the owner, and it would be too nervous.” He sees himself as the next Toots Shor, and wants to feel relaxed, ready to put an arm around his clients and pound their backs, without worrying if he remembers the word, which language he is speaking.

In other, unconscious ways he is thoroughly French and will, I fear, be lost in New York when we go back. He ate a hamburger for the first time on July 4. He took three bites, pushed it away, had some ice cream, his normal routine, but the next morning he said, “I liked the hamburger”—decisively—“but I did not like that sauce you served with it.”

“What sauce?” I said, puzzled. I hadn’t made a sauce. “That red sauce,” he said, disdainfully, with exactly the expression I have seen on the face of Jean-Pierre Quelin, the food critic of Le Monde, when he gets a corked glass of wine. “I did not like that red sauce.” He means, of course, the Heinz ketchup, bought at La Grande Epicerie, in the American specialties section.

When he went back to New York, his one trip, to interview at a New York nursery school, where you have to go a year and a half before you enter, he was asked what he liked to eat for breakfast, and he said, “Croissants and confiture.” Everybody laughed, thought it was cute, though he was being serious as hell. It is, perhaps, a truth of expatriate children that rather than grow up with two civilizations, they grow up with less than one, unable somehow to plug in the civilization at home with the big one around. They grow up, we have noticed with other kids, achingly polite, and watchful and skilled, “adult,” and guarded.

His one island of calm and certainty remains the Luxembourg Gardens. He is master there, and he has his itinerary nearly perfectly arranged: first the playground, then the carousel, then the ponies, if there’s time, and then a crepe from the crepe man. He rides the horses now, upright, and I feel sure that any day now he will ask for a stick.

Nothing stops the wheel, though, and now even the puppet shows have been revolutionized: Las Vegasized, Americanized, globalized. At God knows what expense, and rolling dice of a size I can only imagine, this Christmas M. Desarthis discarded the reliable run of Cochons and Tresors and launched an entirely new kind of spectacular called La Valise Enchantee, complete with an original recorded score, with drums and organs, and black backgrounds and animated fluorescent fish and squirrels. In terms of his little park theater this is a ratchet up of enormous dimensions—and all very well done by a staff of four new puppeteers, though with the slight tang of the lounge act.

I can only imagine that M. Desarthis, in the French manner, decided that he was slipping behind the times and thought of this as a way to modernize. It couldn’t be a bigger hit with Luca, who plays the cassette we bought of the show and has committed it to memory, racing over the French word he doesn’t know with suave Sid Caesar inventions: “Quand il etait tres petit, sa maman s’amusait… hunsta whoosta weestsa….” I like the new show, but I am worried about what is going to happen to the Cochons.

On Christmas Eve we saw a department-store Santa at Hediard, shopping for champagne. We stood in line behind him; Luke was not a bit shaken. When we got home, he said to his mother:

“We saw Santa at Hediard. I think he was just getting a little cheap wine for his elves.”

The lyceens, the high school students, are on strike this Christmas, and we see them march by the windows of our new apartment along the boulevard Raspail. Like the protesters in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno who march with the banner “Less Bread! More Taxes!” the lyceens are, officially, striking for more classes and harder teachers. But their strike has nearly universal support: The government is for it; the opposition is for it; the press is for it.

What is startling and instructive to an outsider is how earnest the French lyceens look as they march; they have a worn-out, exhausted, genuinely oppressed look that is miles away from the overfed, ironic complacency that American kids of the same age have. This is the consequence of the school system. The lyceens normal, nonstriking day begins at eight-thirty in the morning and often runs to six o’clock in the evening and, for all the reforms that have been attempted in the last twenty years, is still conducted in an atmosphere of rote-learning, reflexive authoritarianism. (You see even ten- and eleven-year-olds emerging from school at the end of the day pale as veal, clutching for a pain aux raisins, starved for a little pleasure.)

Outside the Galeries Lafayette are stationed official city guards in uniform and a store surveillant, telling everyone how to get up to the windows and which way to walk once you’re there, directing traffic, with no appeal. Everyone meekly obeys. The authoritarian impulses shapes everything, even the traffic by the windows.

The weird thing is that by taking tracing on as an ambition, I’ve become more in tune with the fundamental French temperament. The will toward contemplative observation is the keynote of French sensibility and tied, in ways both beautiful and horrible, to French indifference. My favorite French writers when I arrived were, dutifully, Proust and Camus and Stendhal, who generalize, brilliantly; now my favorites are Colette, Antoine Blondin, and Maupassant, who above all look, who are part of the great French Machine to Draw the World.

The greatness of Colette and Maupassant, who is the real father of modern writing, have leaked out back home (though I think Maupassant is still known as the father of the trick ending), but I think Blondin is just about completely unknown in America. He was a French newspaperman and essayist, thriving in the 1950s and 1960s, who wrote novels and reportage and essays for the French papers. He is most famous for writing a kind of all-purpose column in the French sports daily L’Equipe.

Blondin is a wonderful, easy writer, and what I admire most about him is the fluency, the particularizations of his language. Everything seeks a joke, but nothing misses a point. He captures tiny moments of reality: a rainy day in the stadium where someone is listening to the radio of the rugby game below, and the crackling broadcast is more real than the game it is describing, which takes you back outside the stadium, is more real than the game it describes. His most emphatic aphorism was simple:

“The only duty of the writer is not to have one.”

Against the official French culture of the academy, the French empirical tradition has to keep itself alive in the oddest corners, like Blondin in L’Equipe. Manet’s lemons and asparagus are its best emblems. It produces an atmosphere of calm. The calm of Manet’s flowers, the calm of Colettes dialogue, the precious, life-enhancing calm of the Palais Royal at three in the afternoon, the last coffee on the table, the light slanting in, French calm. Has anyone ever thought how incongruous and touching the use of that word is in the Baudelaire poem, the Matisse title? “Luxe, Caime and Volupte”? Luxury, Calm and Voluptuousness. Calm and Voluptuousness? Not hot and voluptuous or funky and voluptuous? We have grown accustomed to it by familiarity, but really, Calm—it is as if one put some other flat, bourgeois word in there: Luxury: nice and voluptuous? Luxury: comfy and voluptuous. And yet it works. It is the essence of the French vision. Everybody calm down. (Luke Auden about the excitable little boy in his class: “He was nervous, but Sonia calmed him up.”) Matisse, Manet, calm us up.

In France private life still turns on the closed seventeenth-century model of ce pays ici, this little country here. The crucial unit of social life in France is the Cohort, rather than the social Class, as in England, or the Clan, as in Italy (or the Company, as back home in America). These Parisian cohorts—loosely defined working alliances of people in politics and art and literature, who draw together in youth for one purpose or another and then remain linked, if only in mutual hatred, for life—get drawn from a lot of different social classes and clans and therefore need neutral places to inhabit. This has produced the unique Parisian commonplace civilization of parks and cafés and salons, which give the illusion of democratic entry.

It is only an illusion, though. What looks like a café is really a kind of club, and you can no more really enter it than you can enter White’s or Boodle’s in St. James’s just by walking in there. The cohorts of Paris—the impressionist group is a perfect example of the kind—look open but remain essentially closed to anyone not in at their formation. Pressed beyond a polite point, they clam up as firmly as an Italian family.

John Singer Sargent’s relations with the impressionists are a perfect example of how this works. Throughout the 1870s he stood right on the friendly edges of the impressionist cohort, knocking politely on the door again and again. They looked him over, but they never let him in. All that’s left to the outsider is the beautiful surface. The two favorite sites of Sargent—the Luxembourg Gardens and the Winter Circus—strike a guilty chord;

parks and circuses are open and seem to offer the illusion of assimilation. You end up by walking around and around the Luxembourg Gardens. French life just goes on, with its enormous insular indifference. Americans and Frenchmen always agree that they share something, something deeper than anything they share with any other people—the love of happiness, perhaps, or of social pleasures. Really it is this insularity that they share, as they discover sadly in the end. Americans welcome everyone with open arms and forced smiles, and in the end the immigrant-expatriates discover that that’s the problem; the next man off the next boat is just as welcome too. Paris is open to anyone, but what is open isn’t entirely Paris. It is another, simulacra Paris, which wraps around the real one and is there to be looked at, to be seen. About all you can do is paint it, and Sargent did that about as well as it could be done for about as long as it could be done. It was a great subject, but never Home, and Americans want home.

More comfort: Food here is comfort, not theater. Last night we had our good friends B. and R. over, and we had champagne (Drappier ’90) and then lemon tart from Laduree, where Luke and I stood in line for half an hour. It’s a beautiful Proustian store on the rue Royale with a pale green wooden front, old wooden tables, and absolutely no line discipline. We get bilches from Laduree too. Tonight, Christmas night: a brined turkey Brussels sprouts with creme fraiche, chestnut stuffing, and those buches de Noel. As always in Paris, each thing has a thing associated with it, a story: The turkey was ordered, argued over (take two small ones, I don’t want two small ones, etc.).

I was, if anything, a slightly too complacent universalist when I arrived in Paris and have become a far too melancholic particularist as we get ready to leave, someone who believes in the spirit of places, although he always expects to be outside them, and can pay them only the compliment of eternal comparison.

Luke, once this winter, brought home the school goldfish, Swimmy, for the weekend. He got up on a chair to stare at his bowl and said hello. No answer. Then he recalled what kind of goldfish it was. “Ca va, Swimmy?” he said at last, “ca va?” speaking the goldfish’s language to the goldfish.

It is better to speak to the goldfish in their own language, and better still just to jump into the bowl and become a goldfish yourself, or try to. Without that immersion you feel a constant temptation to compare them with the nongoldfish you know back home, to say what they are like, to engage in the constant stilted game of comparison. In the end it is better just to say what goldfish do than to say what they are like, goldfish, like Parisians, in the end not being “like” anything, but just busy being, like everything else. Yet the attempt to say what the goldfish are like—they’re swimming, they’re gold, oh, how they shine—is in its way the sincerest tribute to their glitter.

Once again, and reliably, the Christmas lights got themselves tangled, and this time, since the ceilings in the new apartment are higher, and the tree we bought taller, I had to go out and get even more new ones. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars have now been spent by this family on French Christmas tree lights, which will have absolutely no use when we go home. I had to get on a really high ladder this year to toss them onto the tree and felt like something between Will Rogers and one of those people on the old Don Ameche circus show. Luke followed me up the ladder, “helping,” and I could sense in him this year not so much admiration as sheer impatience, an almost unbeatable Oedipal urge. I can do that as well as the next guy, as well as you can.

Our Parisian friends Agnes and Richard came over this year for the tree trimming and laughed as they saw me lassoing the tree. “No, no,” Agnes explained, “the idea is to hold them up in two strands and drape them on like an apron, and then they tie in the back.”

“I can’t believe he never thought of that,” Martha said. The real Christmas story is not about Jesus and/or Mary, or the Wise Men, but about poor Joseph, sound asleep under the stable, glad that this first time, at least, everyone is busy, and no one is counting on him to put up the lights.

All I can do is trace something, flip open the red plastic lid of the machine to draw little bits of Paris. Luke’s school, for instance, is on the rue Saint-Dominique. You take the 69 bus to get there, and it goes down the rue du Bac, and then along the rue de Grenelle, narrow and twisting, with the high walls and plastered fronts of other schools for older children and government buildings alongside, broken now and then by a lace curtain front on a bistro where no one ever seems to go. Often, the 69 can’t make the turn onto the rue de Grenelle because someone has parked on the sidewalk, half on the street. Then the bus driver just stops, blows his horn, and folds his arms. We’ll wait it out, like a war. In a rush, a high, the bus breaks out after three minutes into the esplanade des Invalides, the huge, flat, officially forbidden lawn—though, on a Wednesday afternoon, I once did see two brave and determined Americans playing Frisbee there (you could tell they were Americans because they looked thirty and were dressed like six-year-olds). The golden covered dome of the church stands straight up behind, not looming but preening, and the Invalides itself sits below, an old military hospital with the two horses incised on its front, combining splendor with the odd barrackslike solidity, the bureaucratic confidence of the architecture of the grand siecle.

The bus whizzes across, witness to this old beauty too many times, and pushes along to the real heart of the Seventh, and Grenelle warms up. The rue Cler, which breaks off it, is one of the nicest shopping and marche streets in Paris, and it acts as a heart for the neighborhood, warming even the chilly great avenues of Tour Maubourg and Rapp. They are lined with chestnuts and planes, and there is more art nouveau architecture there than perhaps anywhere else in Paris save the Sixteenth.

Luke’s school is a block up, on the rue Saint-Dominique; Grenelle is one of those sandwiched streets, between the truly busy Saint-Dominique and the rue Cler, where there are two lingerie stores to a block (how can women wear so much underwear?). Luke’s school has an archway for an entrance and is set back in a deep courtyard, with geraniums and ivy tumbling over the courtyard walls. On warm days the single classroom window is open, and you see the (overregimented) kindergarten children, already in their rows. Since we still feel that eight-thirty to four-thirty is just too long a day for a four-year-old, we have arranged for me to pick up Luke every day at three.

I catch Luke’s eye, and we wave. He is breaking out, free, and sometimes we have an omelet and a grenadine in the café down the street, where Luke likes to pull the lace curtains and the old lady who is always there has an old black cocker. Then, by now four o’clock, violet twilight falling, watching that sky that looks as though it were ready to snow though it never does, we get the bus back home. Going home, it goes down Saint-Dominique, gently, formally, perfectly curving across the Left Bank, rather than snaking, as Grenelle does. Saint-Dominique is lined with wonderful shops: butchers with fat-wrapped noisettes d’agneau and bakers with various-sized tartes Tatins, all caramel-colored, and children’s clothing stores, their windows filled with violet coats for small girls. They believe in blitz advertising in Paris; usually all the poster columns and the sides of all the buses are covered with the same image of the same single thing: Julia Roberts’s teeth; or a girl, seen from shoulder to knee in black and white, perfectly lit, sculpted lit, lingerie, snapping her garters; or Johnny Hallyday’s face on a new issue of Paris Match. Once there were a thousand images of a woman behind a gold yellow champagne glass, Le Moment Taittinger. That time I remember that I looked up the rue Jean Nicot and could see lights twinkling, like fireflies, right across the Seine, filling the trees. I went to investigate another day and found out that they were just lights strung in the trees to draw tourists to the bateaux-mouches.

The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York or Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they’re your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o’clock when you’re walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river—only twinkling in the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still… —you feel as if you’ve escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they’re transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven’t seen before, either.

It’s true that you can’t run away from yourself. But we were right: you can run away.

I brined the turkey for Christmas dinner in a big white pasta pot that Martha and I bought years ago on lower Broadway. I put it out on our tiny terrace overlooking the boulevard Saint-Germain, covered with foil—all night long a shiny white ceramic and silver foil American beacon on the boulevard.

And a Christmas surprise! We’re going to have another kid, a small French child! The big Machine to Draw the World, which traces from two objects at once and makes something of the superimposition, is drawing a new one, down in Martha’s belly. Stow the elegies, pal; we can’t leave, not quite yet.

A Handful of Cherries

Quite a few people have asked me to tell them what happened at the Brasserie Balzar, after its friends occupied it in order to protest its purchase by M. Jean-Paul Bucher, the owner of a large and (we thought) unfeeling and soulless chain of brasseries and restaurants. I’ve wanted to write about it for several reasons: because it sheds some light on the French struggle with change;

because it touches on the differences between French and American attitudes to food, which have been filling the papers a lot lately; and because it presented me with the one moment when for a brief moment—seconds, really—I actually felt fully French. But I’ve also been reluctant to write about it because in the end it was a sad, typical story about the struggle for small values during a fin de siecle dominated by big money.

In plain English, we fought, and we lost. Not miserably, though, and perhaps not entirely. We saved something, if only our own amour-propre, and the solidarity of our organization, so that there is a conceivable, half-plausible sense in which, in ornamental French, we won.

The first Balzar meeting was held in June 1998, just after the purchase of the small, perfect, century-old Left Bank brasserie by Bucher. The friends of the Balzar organized a group, led by two honorable men. The first, the delegue du personnel, or steward of the waiters, can now emerge from behind the pathetic false mustache he was provided in my first account and appear under his real name, Claude Blanchot. The other leader was Lorenzo Valentin, a startlingly handsome and eloquent young publisher whose offices were across the street from the Balzar. We banded together a collection of regulars, the clientele—mostly writers and publishers and professors from the Sorbonne—to protect the Balzar. The first meeting was a kind of sit-down and dine strike at the Balzar itself. We infiltrated about sixty members inside to protest, and almost everyone judged it a great success.

The evening had gotten a lot of attention in the press and produced a breakfast meeting at the Balzar of our executive committee with M. Bucher himself. He freely gave any number of assurances to protect the staff, the cooking, and the distinct traditions of the place. They were, I thought at the time, both very sincerely made and utterly worthless, since he had no more obligation to keep his promises than he had to come to our apartments and cook us breakfast.

By then it was late July, though, and nothing happens in Paris in late July. (If the king could have kept things calm around the Bastille for another three weeks, France would still be a monarchy.) Right on date, August 1, everyone went one way or another:

Lorenzo to Italy and the rest of the committee to one or another French resort. (All the garcons, as I had learned, rather reluctantly, to call them, went home too, mostly to the small towns in the Massif Central and the South and even Alsace where they came from.) The pattern of internal emigration, as described by Balzac, youth coming to the capital, remains as powerful in France as it was a century ago. You come to Paris to make a reputation, as a writer or a waiter, intending to go home, soon, to run the local paper or to open your own brasserie on the town square, but then you don’t, except in August.

We had the habit of going back to America for two or three weeks in August, to be washed over by the cold waves of American ocean and the warm spit of American opinion and to see our family. First we would go to see Martha’s family in Canada (who said, Canadianly, “Oh, you live in Paris. How stimulating,”) and then to the little shack in Cape Cod where we had first sat out and watched the sunsets and dreamed of going to Paris.

And then back home to Orly, where, bleary-eyed, airsick, after the tightly sealed flight, we would feel our hearts lift as the taxi turned in the early-morning flat white light into the porte d’Orleans, and then up the avenue du General Leclerc, past the place Denfert-Rochereau, where I once lived as a kid (and where I could still see the window where Melissa, the baby of the six kids in my family, had once stood and semaphored to me, across the street, not to forget the long, round bread.) Then past the Belfort Cafe (where, twenty years before, I had once sneaked down for a pain au chocolat and my first café serre) and up the boulevard Raspail, where they were already setting up the marche biologique, and back to our apartment. “This is home,” Luke said once, and our hearts skipped, because we knew it wasn’t, quite, and were glad he thought it was.

The trees would already be shedding, and the streets would be filled with brown leaves, skipping across the empty boulevards. We always missed the fall coming to Paris; coming back after Labor Day is too late. Of the great argued-out differences between New York and Paris, none is more important than the simple difference that Paris is farther north than New York is. The end of August is still mostly high summer in America, at least on the East Coast, with days in the nineties and hazy sun and hardly a hint of autumn in the air. Labor Day hits Americans like a ton of bricks; we’re going back to work so soon? And then, of course, Americans, for all their cult of summer and fussing about summer and idealizing summer have no summer at all to speak of. The two-week paid vacation, now made for the no-collar classes almost no vacation at all by the fax machine and the computer, is a small favor taken from a restless, impatiently toe-tapping employer. In France everyone—Luke’s baby-sitter, the man who sells cheeses, President Chirac, Bernard Arnault, Bernard-Henri Levy—is guaranteed five weeks of vacation by law, and just about everyone takes it. (There would be no point even for an eager beaver, overachieving tycoon to stay on the job since there would be nobody there for him to motivate.) When people say that Paris closes down in August, they don’t mean the pace slackens a little. They mean it closes, like a box.

The funny thing is that the cool weather comes to Paris right around the middle of August, so that by the time everyone comes back for the re-entree, it feels like autumn, and everyone is ready to start life over. People, ordinary people, are actually fed up with their vacations and glad to get back to town. (I once saw one of the inconsolably grumpy women who works at Michel Chemin, the bakery near us, come in on the first day of September and actually grab the other inconsolably grumpy woman who works there and kiss her, fully, on the cheeks.)

As soon as I was back in town, I got a call from Lorenzo, to tell me that things were going very badly at the Balzar. The waiters were nervous; they had felt abused and overtaken by events; their grievance hearing at the tribunal des Prudnommes—the labor court—had been postponed. It seemed that Bucher was about ready to fire everybody, or that at least was the rumor. Tour groups of Americans were being sent in by concierges of large hotels. Our only hope, it seemed, was to mediatiser some more and then to… well, to have another meeting. There was one called that week at Mme. de Lavigne’s apartment over on the quai Anatole-France.

I was the only American there, and this unexceptional fact made me unreasonably self-satisfied—the Tom Paine of the Balzar insurrection (although it seemed to me that I recalled from some sixtyish piece of guerrilla theater that, bad omen, Tom Paine ended up in prison during the Terror and died drunk in New York). While I was away, the great liberal paper Le Monde had come out with another piece outlining our struggle to save the Balzar, by the oddly dyspeptic food writer J.-P. Quelin, the Hilton Kramer of French cuisine. Why should people whose lives are devoted to the study of pleasure be so charmless, so lacking in joy, I have often wondered? The answer is simple, I now thought. They were not drawn to their subject for pleasure; it was the absence of pleasure they felt that made them so tense and talky. This is the Devil’s Theory of what draws critics to themes, and I am sure that it is true. The people who take natural pleasure in pictures, whom you see haunting the Museum of Modern Art at lunch hour, or eating with a copy of Le Monde at the old Balzar, are completed by the pleasure, as most of us are by sex. They feel no more need to discuss it than most of us want to discuss lovemaking; the drowsy commonplaces are, for them, the appropriate speech act, the only appropriate speech act. People who don’t actually enjoy eating are the ones with the attention to look around the room—where are people sitting? Who likes what?—and absorb both the abstract system of snob values and the social comedy of it. The people who actually write well about food—M. F. K. Fisher or Seymour Britchky—are oddly abstemious, austere, even, in a way, anti-sensual, for the same reason that Ruskin, a man who recoiled in horror at his wife’s pubic hair, could write so well about the hidden message of the pointed arch. Not really liking it much is a precondition of art criticism of all kinds. This is why embarrassingly, thunderously obvious thoughts—beauty counts, power matters, pictures sell for money—are often presented by critics with such shocked or plaintive intensity. All critics are food fusses, not wanting to try the green stuff, even when the Mother-MOMA tells you it’s good for you, and then announce darkly that it’s poison, any child can see it is. (This is why Tom Wolfe could be both absolutely right and wrong about American art. Not wanting to eat, he alone would notice the odd order of the cutlery on the table.)

At the meeting there was a general feeling that we needed to placate Quelin. We had a cross section of waiters and clients there that afternoon: Claude and Guy from the staff, and a left-wing journalist who I thought was looking at me darkly, having spotted not Tom Paine but a smoothie from the CIA.

Lorenzo led off with his usual quiet authority. He was in his usual costume: a soft black turtleneck and flannel slacks, with a scarf thrown, Little Prince style, around his throat. He has a round face, with an absolutely beautiful, warm smile. He has two registers at his command: a low, troubled one that he uses when he is reviewing the agenda and another, higher, and more plaintive one that he uses when he is exhorting us publicly, for instance when we occupy the restaurant. He outlined the problems. The waiters felt abused and uncertain because the standards in the kitchen were declining and Bucher was still letting the new manager take a chunk of their service money. “How were they declining?” someone asked. The fish was no good; the sole was being parboiled before it was grilled; someone else thought a supplier was coming in from the Flo Group with ordinary beef. “Well, I had a steak there the other night,” someone began… but we all shushed him. The food, good or bad, was not really the point, we all said. The point was the spirit of the Balzar. If we did not act quickly and more decisively, the brasserie, and the garcons’ security, would be lost. The guys had decided to stage a one-day wildcat strike, and it was important for us to support them—perhaps by occupying the Balzar the same day, perhaps on the night before. In any case, the crisis of the battle was approaching, and we could not be lazy or indecisive in our actions.

Claude spoke next. He was angry and at the same time, and for the first time, a little pleading. The garcons were planning to walk out on Thursday, he explained, and he hoped that we, the members of the association, would come out to support them. We would have Bucher foxed coming and going.

I could sense a reluctance to do this on the part even of our elite radical circle; this would be going beyond the politesse of our arrangement with Bucher, moving toward open warfare. “Attention!” someone said, a real interjection in French. “This could put us in a dangerous position.” I feared too that Claude’s ideas about the power of the association were greater than the power of the association deserved. I noticed that he liked to say the term the association, and he always referred to Lorenzo as “M. le President.”

I was becoming a little dubious, especially so because Lorenzo, for some reason, I thought, kept looking at me for ideas. I said, at last, that the only threat that had any meaning to Bucher was the threat of more bad publicity; that in effect, a boycott of his other restaurants would scare him more than anything else we could do. But I was also pretty sure that Bucher would never sell, and I feared that if the garcons walked out, he’d just replace them. Perhaps, I hinted, I gulped—I sensed the left-wing journalist looking at me with increasing disgust—we needed to start moving toward an exit strategy (I couldn’t think of the French, so I said, scenario de sortie, which was more or less right). Did we have an exit strategy, aside from victory? What if Bucher held fast and didn’t move? Could we get the garcons out in decent shape and not just blow up the Balzar, so to speak?

I was rewarded with steady, opaque looks. Having arrived at the logic of war, one of us—the American—was trying to wriggle out of it at the first sign of opposition. (I remembered what an American diplomat negotiating with the quai d’Orsay had once said to me: “It is hard enough to get them to start, and once they start, you can’t get them to stop.”)

Then Lorenzo and Mme. de Lavigne together raised another, stranger, and more tempting vision. What if we were to buy the Balzar? What if Bucher could be convinced that the cost to him in bad publicity and harassment was just too great, didn’t make sense for his chain, and that, finally, in a moment of facesaving capitulation (but why would this be facesaving for him? I let it pass) he could sell to a group of actionnaires—i.e., us.

Lorenzo had a nice rhetorical formula for this transaction: “M. Bucher wants to join the association, but the association would like to join the Flo Group.” Mme. de Lavigne had been in the restaurant business; it would not be hard to do. We could each own a little piece of the Balzar, the gargons too, and, run as a cooperative, a kind of writers and waiters cooperative, we could make it rentable.

It sounded like just about the best idea I had ever heard. Like many Americans of my generation, I am a fanatic restaurant imaginer: I think that someday I will open a restaurant called La Chanson, to serve French-American cooking: roast chicken with caramelized carrots and broccoli puree and pecan pie for dessert; then there is my favorite idea for a restaurant called Les Fauves, which would serve only game—taglietelle with wild boar, pheasant stuffed with chestnuts—or else to open—and this I was sure would make a fortune—a place to get real Montreal bagels, better than any other kind, boiled and then baked, sweet and chewy whereas New York bagels are bready and tasteless….

So this was the hand that we would play, or try to play at least. We would have another sit-in at the Balzar, the night before the meeting, and we would threaten Bucher with still more mediatisation. The next day, independently, the personnel would stage their wildcat strike, and the two actions together would, somehow, sufficiently intimidate a whipsawed Bucher and he would crumble and sell us back the Balzar.

I can only say that at the time it did not seem like a completely crazy scenario. What we could not understand, I suppose, was why Bucher would want to buy the Balzar only in order to destroy it, why, after it had been clearly shown to him that he could not understand the institution, grasp its traditions, perpetuate its values, he would still want to hold on to it. For the money? It was too small for his chain; he had said as much himself. He could make more money in a single sitting at one of his Right Bank atmosphere factories—the vast art deco Boeuf sur le Toit, or the belle epoque Julien—than he could in a week at Balzar. It wasn’t as if we had anything against him personally; if he wanted to come and eat at the Balzar, we’d welcome him, anytime. But why own it only in order to ruin it? Where was the logic in that?

I suppose we couldn’t realize, or could realize but couldn’t accept, that the logic of business is not a logic in that sense. It’s not only a narrow consideration of profits and losses, but a larger logic of, well, appetite. To buy something is to assert oneself, and to sell it, for whatever reason, is to collaborate in one’s own diminishment. We were asking him to regurgitate in public, and even if we offered him the feather with which to tickle his own throat, he wouldn’t want to do it. A man in his position couldn’t afford to regurgitate, not in public, because then he would look ridiculous.

Anyway, we all clasped hands and swore to be at the Balzar on October 7 to reoccupy the place. Everybody had bought some food to the meeting—I recall that Claude had brought a particularly beautiful and fragrant Cantal, a wonderful cheese—and we soon broke for some wine. I buttonholed Guy after the meeting and asked him what we could really do, what the guys, the garcons, really wanted. Did they really want us to try to buy the place? He said, We want it to stay the same. To continue doing what we’ve always done. And to serve good food—the food isn’t good enough. The food should be excellent.

This was curious, I thought. We radicals had decided that it was a red herring, so to speak, to make too much of an issue of the quality of the cooking—that wasn’t the point, we insisted grandly—yet the garcons made much of it, made more of it than anything else. Some fundamental part of their metierhood is offended by the knowledge that the cuisine is being degraded. There is a real decent impulse on their part to put down a plat on the table with real enthusiasm: You’ll enjoy this.

As I thought it over on my way home, it occurred to me that this is after all the deepest altruistic impulse that we have, food sharing being the most fundamental gesture of selflessness. I thought I was at last beginning to see the deeper motives, the real human basis of their indignation, beyond the few pennies here and there that they were losing. In the old regime they had been the tribal chieftains, the ones doing the sharing, and this more than compensated for their otherwise servile-seeming role. If they served good food, then they were practicing, if only by proxy, the primal role of the provider; if they served bad food, then they were just waiters in a restaurant. Beneath the “French” aspect of the Balzar wars—the mistrust of change that is not merely, or not merely foolishly and emptily, “nostalgic”—there was a deeper impulse, almost an instinctive one. Of course they wanted to protect their share of the service, and they wanted to keep their old working conditions. But they also were terrified of a loss of status, of being publicly shamed. To be a server at all is to dance on the edge of shame all the time. “Sale metier,” Bemelmans’s waiters famously mutter to themselves as they go in and out of the kitchen, “filthy profession,” and it is easy to understand why. Bucher was reducing them to food bearers, rather than food sharers, and it made them feel as if they were being eaten alive.

October came, and we occupied the Balzar again. The second reunion had a different feeling from the first, both gayer and angrier and more hysterical. At the first meeting the near absurdity of what we were doing had given everything an edge of comedy. Can we really be doing this? Well, -yes, we are. We are! At the second reunion things seemed tougher, rockier. There were far more of us, for one thing, and not everyone could find a seat. People were waiting outside, thronged outside, trying to come in. The Balzar wars had been mediatise as something amusing—a fronde parisienne, one of the papers had called it, a Parisian civil war. Those of us on the inside knew that the real action would take place the following day, when the gargons walked out, and we felt both anxious not to tip their hand and eager to let them know that we were with them.

Lorenzo was sublime. At the appointed hour he rose again from his seat, “We are here tonight not to make demands, not to protest, but to inquire,” he began. “We are here to inquire of M. Bucher if, though he owns the name Balzar, if anyone can purchase its spirit. Is that spirit truly for sale? Can it be bought and sold? Or can it only be protected? We are not here to criticize the cuisine or to give M. Bucher lessons in the management of his affairs. We claim no expertise in that.” Lorenzo gave a just so slightly sardonic inflection to these last words, implying that this was an expertise that one would hardly want. “But we do claim to understand the spirit of this place, the thousand tiny interchanges between the personnel and the place that have made it something more than a place where one exchanges money for food, and from which one would go elsewhere if more food could be had for less money. We are here to inquire about the nature of possession, about what it means to possess something and about who truly possesses a place: the man who owns the chairs and tables or the people who sit at those tables or those who have devoted their working lives to those tables. We want to ask: To whom belongs the Balzar? Does it belong to those who own it or to those who love it? Above all, we are here to inquire if any of us can feel at home in this place if the personnel of the Balzar do not feel at home in it. For they are the carriers of the spirit of this place. I say to the personnel: We are with you, right to the end.” The room exploded in applause.

People began to rise and make seconding speeches themselves. Many of them, I am bound to report, had a slight edge of anti-Americanism, although no American was involved in this struggle, one way or another. (Apart from me, I mean, and I was there strictly as an honorary Parisian, or Quisling.)

For instance, a man rose from one of the banquettes at the end and cried, “You must let Bucher know that this is not a small war!” Applause. “Not a little brushfire that can be put out.” More applause. “Let them know that this will not be the Gulf War!” Wild applause. “It will be Vietnam!” Madly enthused applause.

But after the meeting I went over to talk to this Danton, and he turned out to be a French-American businessman who lives in San Francisco. He gave me his card. Finally, and one by one, the waiters came out to bow, and we rose to our feet to applaud them. They looked genuinely touched, and we swore that we would not let them be betrayed.

The next day at lunch the waiters walked out. I went over to the rue des Ecoles to see what was going on and found all of them on the street, in mufti, carrying placards. Their union had put out a table, and there was a petition that you could sign to show your support for the Balzaristes. The garcons looked happy, and Jacques, a friend of Lorenzo’s, was there with a video camera, documenting the event.

Our next meeting, in late November, was the strange one. Bucher had invited a little group of us to have breakfast with him once again, and on the eve of that meeting, we decided to have a serious meeting—an assemblee generale of Les Amis du Balzar. We held it, now, as serious meetings should be held, not at the Balzar or in Mme. de Lavigne’s apartment, but in the classroom in a film school in the Twelfth Arrondissement, at nine o’clock at night. There was a pretty good turnout, considering, but now the alacrity and lightness had been lost, and the meeting had the air of, well, of a meeting. We all sat on school chairs, uncomfortably, and Claude, looking surprisingly uncomfortable too, droned on about the position of the waiter’s grievance in front of the labor court.

Then Lorenzo took over and talked about the three plans that were open to us: We could continue to mediatiser and agitate about the Balzar, but that did not seem like a promising strategy, since in the meantime Bucher could simply wear us (and the waiters) down. We could attempt to buy the Balzar from Bucher—but he would almost certainly not sell. (I do not know to this day why Lorenzo had become pessimistic about this possibility, though I am sure that he was right. Perhaps he had another conversation with Bucher when they arranged the breakfast meeting.) The third possibility was to raise enough money to, in effect, start our own Balzar—a Balzar des refuses, a real Balzar, under some other name, while Bucher’s Balzar continued its impersonation. We all looked cheerful at this possibility, though it obviously demanded an infusion of capital. But a possible site had already been located farther down the rue des Ecoles, and one of our members had long experience in the restauration… it might be done.

The conversation batted along, sometimes with animation, sometimes in a desultory way, for the next couple of hours. We pursued dead ends (could another, more sympathetic, buyer be found?) and digressions (what was the precise status of the garcons after the strike?) and kept circling around the central point. We needed to show Bucher that we were in earnest about opening another Balzar, in order to get him to, perhaps, perpetuate the current one. Like all public meetings of “causes,” this one had a curious sideways, crab-walking momentum of its own. Somehow, the notion that we ought to show Bucher we were serious metamorphosed into the idea that the only way to show him that we were was to ask for a subscription of some real but small sum—say, six hundred francs, about a hundred dollars—from all the members of the association, which in turn metamorphosed into the idea that we ought to put the idea of the subscription to a vote of the membership. We voted on this resolution, and it passed.

The whole thing made no sense at all, as we all knew perfectly well the moment we left the classroom and went back out into the cold early winter air and headed for the Metro. The sum involved was both ridiculously small—Bucher was hardly about to be intimidated by it—and at the same time sufficiently noxious to keep a lot of people from wanting to offer it up. (I did not look forward to explaining to my own wife that we needed to pony up a hundred dollars in order to open up a new brasserie.) And to put it to a vote simply attenuated things still more. It was one of those bizarre decisions that are arrived at in protest meetings by a process of drift and uncertainty, in which a backwater suddenly for a moment looks like the way to the blue ocean and then, even when only moments later everybody knows that it’s a dead end, we still close our eyes and pretend that we are going somewhere.

I do not want to give the impression that once the drama and steak au poivre had been removed from our movement, it lost momentum or seriousness. The classroom was full; the debate was intense; the purpose was firm. It was just that the strongest part of our case was its presentation, and once we moved away from our proscenium, there was not very much we could do. We had moved in a single November night from ideology to politics—from what you want to what you do—with the usual disappointing results. “We have gone from ’68 to ’81 tonight,” a friend sighed in my ear as we walked home. He meant that we had gone from Utopian vision and slogans to the realities of the assumption of power, or from Mao (the make-believe French Mao) to Mitterrand.

I walked all the way home from the Twelfth, across at the Gare d’Austerlitz and then all the way along by the river. It was a cold night, winter really, and the few leaves left on the trees shivered sympathetically above, like waiters carrying trays.

On November 30, that Tuesday, we met with M. Bucher early in the morning at La Coupole, the vast twenties brasserie that he owns down on the boulevard du Montparnasse. It was eight-thirty in the morning—much too early, we all agreed—but that had been M. Bucher’s hour, and we did not want to change it, I suppose for fear of seeming sluggish.

Bucher was as agreeable as ever. This time, though, instead of the short sleeves and open shirt that he had worn at our first breakfast together at the Balzar, he wore a suit and tie, pressed tightly over his belly. He began by smiling and shrugging and making the significant admission that maybe M. Delouche, the new maitre d’, was the wrong man to be fronting the Balzar. He complained again about the mediatisation, meaning, I think, M. Quelin and Le Monde, which Lorenzo agreed had been unfortunate, but then pressed on to his hard, blunt point: Thegarcons will leave with a fat envelope, and that’s it.

“They drove the old owner into the bushes like a hunted animal,” he says scornfully. “Not me. All this”—he meant the war of the garcons—“belongs to another century.” He caught himself, knowing that he mustn’t seem too harsh, too “liberal.” “But you know, on reflection, that’s why I like it. I value it. That’s why I want to be a member of your organization.”

He agreed, after much tender pushing by Lorenzo, to meet himself with the garcons. The strike had shocked him. “Ninety-five percent of my media is about Balzar and point two percent of my business. Listen, I’ll talk to them, I’ll try to make them happy. But if they want to leave with a fat envelope, they can leave.” He swore, forcefully, that there are no tour groups admitted to the Balzar.

Then Bucher did something, amazingly, intuitively shrewd. Before he had always spoken of the alternative to his ownership as McDonald’s—“Listen, if you don’t want me, maybe McDonald’s will take over”—and we knew this to be pure rhetoric; McDonald’s was not about to take over the Balzar, in the first place, and in any case, McDonald’s bashing of that kind was too generalized, too vague an ideological gesture to have any weight. It was a purely rhetorical turn, recognizable as such. But now he turned to another potential owner.

“Listen,” he said, “I hear you’d like me to sell. OK. Maybe you want me to sell out to M. Conran? I’m sure he would love it.” Terence Conran is the English restaurateur and furniture tycoon who a few weeks before had just opened his own new brasserie, L’Alcazar, over on the rue Mazarin. It was the first attempt by a major figure of the London cooking renaissance to establish a beachhead in Paris, and it had been getting a lot of press.

Bucher shrugged. “I think he has nothing to teach us about how to run a brasserie. I’m trying to defend a ‘Franco-Francais’ tradition but…”

A little of the air seemed to pass right out of our movement at that moment. The anti-Americanism that lent a piquant, alarming note to the Balzar wars had been, as anti-Americanism most often is in France, not quite real, an abstract idea, a speech act with very few barbs in it. (Lorenzo, Claude, and I had once had a long debate, over dinner, about the relative merits of John Coltrane, whose pianist, McCoy Tyner, Lorenzo’s brother had studied with, and Cannonball Adderley, favored by Claude.) Anti-Americanism in France at the end of the twentieth century is in fact in some ways like anti-Catholicism in England in the nineteenth century. It is a powerful, important, influential, official doctrine, but it is also not entirely real: English people imprecated against the Catholics and the pope, but that didn’t stop them from loving Venice, traveling to Florence, worshiping Raphael, and filling their houses with Italian pictures. Even the much-publicized fusses about American mass-produced food and French peasants “trashing” McDonald’s are almost pure media events. The French farmers knock down a McDonald’s for the benefit of the French media, which publicize it in Le Monde in order to see what The New York Times will have to say about it the next day. Anti-Americanism has enormous life as an abstract ideological principle and a closed circle of media events of this kind, but outside of a tiny circle on the elite left and, surprisingly, a slightly larger one on the elite right, it has almost no life as a real emotion. But suspicion of the English is a permanent feature of the French psyche. Anti-English sentiment in France is like anti-French sentiment in nineteenth-century England: inarticulate but real. Those people just annoy the hell out of you. This contempt for the English, as opposed to the love-hate relation with Americans, is seen, for instance, in the almost open disdain that the French press has displayed in its investigation of the death of Diana Spencer, as it prefers to call her. Or at a more obscure level it can be seen in the magazine Le Point, which is usually pro-American in the neutral, hidden sense (it runs endless reviews of American music and movies and television), but when it ran a cover story on the British invasion of the Dordogne, the story was full of mistrust and contempt.

So for Bucher to say that McDonald’s was coming was a mere ideological gesture, instantly seen as one. But to say that he could sell out to Terence Conran was to speak to a real, and completely annoying, possibility. Afterward, when our committee gathered in a café across the street from La Coupole, with two new members of the group—whom I didn’t know but whom Lorenzo had invited along after the meeting earlier that week, Lorenzo having a good left democrat’s desire to keep the leadership in touch with the masses—we all felt unhappy. The two new guys were sure that there was a complot of some kind, a hidden history, that was being kept from them. Discussing the possibility of our new Balzar, they also seemed unable to accept the logic of capitalism in any form, including one we would own ourselves.

Above all, they were offended by the very existence, the very idea, even in a purely hypothetical form, of Terence Conran. “I wouldn’t go to England and give them lessons on making tea,” one of them said, bitterly. Lorenzo, I thought, looked unsettled.

It was around that time that I finally went to have lunch with J.-P. Qu6lin, the biting food critic of Le Monde. I was almost, though not quite, an official emissary from the friends of the Balzar to him, hoping that he would tone it down a little. We went to Aux Fins Gourmets, the Basque bistro downstairs from our apartment, where I have been going for several years now and where, to my surprise, Quelin had never been.

Quelin turned out to be from central casting. (But then we are all from central casting: I running down, without extra forethought, from the apartment, in sneakers and sweater and beige Levi’s, and at my age too.) He was wearing what I have come to think of as the Uniform, the standard gear of French journalists who still see themselves as men of letters: black and beige houndstooth jacket, white cotton shirt, black knit tie. He has a perfect hatchet face, a long jaw, a clear enunciation, and he smoked American cigarettes square in the middle of his mouth. He looked nearly exactly like Ian McKellen playing Richard III.

I came in, took my table, and noticed him, thinking, This can’t be J.-P. Quelin; he looks much too characteristic for that. But of course, it was, and he smiled, sardonically, and pointed: So it is you. He had invited along his editor, who turned out to be a lovely, worried-looking, square-built blonde—a mum (French writers and their editors, Frenchmen and their mums). He was brutal with the waiters and decided at last on haricot de mouton and a bottle of Madiran. I had sworn to have an omelette and no wine at all, but took the wine as a challenge to my—well, if not to my masculinity then to my Franco assimilation, my right to live in Paris and call myself a writer.

We talked about cooking and restaurants. “There is an Anglo-Saxon contempt for French food and a love for it all the same,” Jean-Pierre Quelin began. I tried, tactfully, to argue that while the top heights of French cuisine remain unique—Passard, Gagnaire—the everydays might be more pleasurable now in New York or even London. He was dubious about the second proposition but agreed about the first: They are cooking, he says, at a level of originality that defies judgment, defies criticism, defies the grammar of cuisine. (This, I think, is true. When I took my brother to L’Arpege for his birthday, we got fourteen [small] courses, mostly of vegetables—haricots verts with peaches and raw almonds dressed with basil and fresh mint; fresh shell beans with onion ravioli and tomato coulis—that made even the best of old cuisine look like sludge.)

We kept pouring the Madiran, and to my alarm, a second bottle followed the first. I saw the afternoons work disappearing. In voicing my own tentative criticisms of the state of French cooking—mild and commonplace—I realized that Quelin was completely insulated from the general opinion that the new Mediterranean synthesis that reigns in New York and London is simply the thing and that the French two-tier system—three stars for the millionaires and occasions; the same old same old forever elsewhere—is defunct. He just had never heard the idea. I didn’t even try to convince him otherwise, though, not that I could.

Quelin’s editor left and, the bottle still there, we began confiding—no, not confiding, engaging in that level of frank, let’s-call-a-Medusa’s-head-a-Medusa’s-head honesty that is one of the pleasures of the end of a two-bottle lunch in Paris. We shared philosophical reflections on our sons, our lives, the impossibility of journalism. “The voluptuous cruelty of filling pages,” he said, “the voluptuous cruelty of filling pages is what kills us.” We talked about his time in the army in Algeria, when a Breton peasant under his command tried to rape a local girl. He stopped him, and the peasant drew his revolver: “I looked death, in all its absurdity and horror, right in the face for fifteen minutes.” Then we talked about our sons. The day will come when they condescend to us, when they feel themselves to be our intellectual superiors, “and in that moment of pity we will find our pride.”

It occurred to me then that the paradoxes that litter French writing are deeply felt among all French literary people. The pity and pride of paternity; the absurdity and profundity of death, the voluptuous cruelty of journalism—these antinomies are not affectations but part of a real heritage of feeling. They mean it. In my heart, I suppose, I don’t believe that something can be horrible and beautiful; I am too American for that, though I suppose I believe that something can be voluptuous and cruel. A child of the occupation—his father escaped twice from prison camps, to see him as a baby—and the Algerian War, he knows in his blood that it is so, that life is damnably double, whichever way it falls. It may be an affectation, but it is not a pose.

Over the third bottle—a title for a French memoir—I tried out my pet theory: that France is marked by a struggle between its pompous official culture and its matchless vernacular, commonplace civilization—and that what makes France unique is that so much of the pompous, abstract, official culture has spilled over into the popular “culture,” so that every man sees himself as an aphorist, his own Montaigne in his own tower. He pointed at me again. “That,” he said dramatically, “is an idea of merit. You must write it up for us in the context of cuisine.” I said that I would try.

When the bill came, he handed the waiter his carte bleu and was told, as I knew he would be, that they don’t take cards. Without looking up again at the waiter, he reached into his wallet and handed him his Le Monde press card. “Send it to me,” he said icily, meaning the bill. The insolence was enormous. Not even an essay at a smile. Afterward, as we left, he searched out the thin, intellectual owner of the restaurant, Michel, who had been giving us the same indulgent, fixed half-smile for three years and told him that he admired his navarin. Michel looked at him with hungry gratitude and then at me with disbelief—this one brought this one?—and I looked back at him in quiet, sneaker-bound triumph.

That Wednesday I appeared in Quelin’s column in Le Monde, as a brave joyeusement americain who had introduced him to the bistro where they still know how to master the difficult art of the navarin, etc. Later on that year I even made a second appearance, at Quelin’s invitation, and under my own byline, explaining my theory about civilization and culture in France and even making a terrible French pun on the words moss and mass.

Quelin never again made fun of the friends of the Balzar, so I feel that this diplomatic negotiation had, at least, been well conducted. At the end of the lunch, though, I wasn’t just muzzy but absolutely knocked cold by the Madiran. I went back upstairs and slept for two hours.

And then it was over, all over by Christmas. One by one, the garcons each decided to take the “fat envelope” Bucher was offering them, and retire. They had to. There was nothing we could do. We walked into the Balzar one December evening, and everyone—Jean-Michel, Claude, Robert—was gone, gone for good. They had decided to take the fat envelope—just how fat it was I’m not sure, though it was said to be about a year’s salary, in addition, of course, to their pensions—and go. Only two of the old garcons remained. We had lost.

Guy, who remained, spoke to me under his breath, sadly, as we shook hands, defeated. “A handful of cherries,” he said softly. “They gave them a handful of cherries for a lifetime of work. What can I do? I want to work for a while longer.”

I felt blue. Without the regular guys it was not the same place. They had an English menu now, and they forced it on me when they heard me speak in English to Luke. I told them to take it away and bring me the proper menu. The new garcon looked haughty and insulted.

I spoke to Lorenzo and Claude on the phone that week, and everyone agreed that this was the best thing for everyone: There was no sense in allowing the personnel to hang on waiting for some quixotic scheme for a new Balzar to hatch—though, they both added quickly, hatch it might, hatch it might. We rung off.

I stopped going to the Balzar. The food was fine, I was told, and I would still send visiting Americans there. But I no longer loved it, and without Jean-Pierre welcoming us, it was not the same place. Fortunately a good cookbook had appeared—by the American Daniel Young—with a couple of Balzar recipes that I liked, and I would stay home and make them for my family on Sundays: gigot d’agneau avec flageolets and profiteroles.

Then, one night at the beginning of May, I got a call from Claude. How was Madame and the heritier? Fine, fine, how was he? Oh, it was going for him. Listen, he said, the old guys had decided to come together for a night and give a dinner of their own for the people who had helped them in their fight. They would love to have us. Could we join them? Yes, of course, I said. We wouldn’t miss it for the world. He gave me the date a couple of weeks off, at the end of May, and the address of a restaurant up in the Ninth, the Relais Beaujolais. The owner was a friend and was glad to be hosting the dinner.

By then Martha was already five months pregnant and very big, and it was a hot and humid night. It was a nice place, though, and we arrived at eight-thirty. There were two or three big tables set up, with familiar faces all around them. Everyone was there:

Claude and Guy and Lorenzo…. All the garcons of course were in plain clothes, jeans and short-sleeve shirts mostly. There was a lot of chilled Beaujolais and a dinner of piece de boeuf chasseur, roast beef in a mushroom-wine sauce.

The startling and instructive thing was that the garcons seemed, on the whole, happy, free, and content. They were genuinely philosophical, in the old-fashioned sense, about what had happened—meaning stoic but articulate. They could see their own situation against a broader background.

I sat across from Robert, one of the oldest of the old garcons, a small, mustached man in his late fifties. “A handful of cherries?” he said when I repeated, a little dolefully, Guy’s comment. “Perhaps. But a handful of cherries is better than an empty hand.” He was in a rust-colored short-sleeve shirt, and his mustache was turning white. “Anyway, it is only in moments of crisis that we find lucidity about ourselves—though only after the crisis is over. Still, that’s enough lucidity for anyone. Anyway, it is all the lucidity that life will give you. The crucial thing is that it was our choice. We made it. We chose to leave. I’m rather old to do this. The younger fellows… but it’s over, we made a good choice. And it was our choice.”

We talked about more general subjects: Corsica, the Clinton affair. “We can’t understand your society,” he said, shaking his head, “at once so violent and so puritanical, so authoritarian and so anarchist.” But of course, it turned out that he had someone, a son, in America, who was always inviting him over. He had been once and was going to go again. He liked it there.

“I love to study the problem of being,” he added abruptly, and he told a long and tragic story about one of the other personnel, a maitre d’ who had worked at the Balzar once, whose daughter, the light of his life, had committed suicide. Her father could not stop thinking of it and talking about it, all the time, his grief so deep, while he gave orders and cleaned tables. Though I knew him, in my callowness I had never sensed the tragedy of this man.

“His problem,” Robert went on gravely, “was that he could not arrive at an abstraction of himself, only at a version of me, a me in some other form. He could not see himself as he was, see himself from outside himself. He was trapped in himself from the failure to make himself into an abstraction.”

I looked up. Lorenzo was shaking hands and I could see was being urged to make a speech, a toast, but he was politely declining, smiling and shaking his head. La guerre est finie.

“That’s a formidable guy,” Robert said, nodding at Lorenzo. “Once he is wound up, ah, he can go on brilliantly, passionately. And Claude too. We were lucky to have them.”

I thought the most irritating thing about life in France, as I had described it so sapiently to the readers of Le Monde—the insistence on the primacy of the unspecific, on turning things into abstractions of themselves at every turn—was a gift. The civilization I had praised, and the culture exasperated me, and by civilization, I had meant small shops, and by culture, big buildings. In the end, though, the small shops were special in Paris because they were always in the shadow of the big buildings. Take the small shops away (and the streets the shops sit on and the quartiers that the streets sit in) and you would have nothing—not Rene Clair or Trenet and Lartigue or the whole of this great and beautiful bourgeois civilization. But take away the big buildings, with their abstract ideas and grand manner, and the special quality of the Parisian shops—of the brasseries and cafés, of the glass houses and glass domes—their quality of being the stage sets of a modern drama, something more than just shops, would go too. The lucidity of Parisian empiricism was bought at the price of the grandiosity of Parisian abstraction, and you couldn’t have one without the other, no matter how much you wanted to or how hard you tried.

We finished dinner, and I asked the owner—who had been up on a ladder most of the night, fussing with the single unworking fan that was supposed to cool off the entire salle—to call us a cab. My wife was large and easily tired. But just as the owner came to tell us that the cab had arrived, Claude at last rose and began to make a presentation to Lorenzo of a single immense, earthenware tray “A gift of friendship,” he said, “of simple friendship.”

Lorenzo Valentin rose to his feet reluctantly, hugged Claude, and began to sit down. “No, say something, say something,” everyone said. He shook his head again. People began to pound the tables, as they had done at the Balzar a year ago. Now he was on his feet again, and I could see that he was about to begin.

It seemed like a good moment for us to slip away to the taxi, and we got up and tried to duck our heads down and go back up the stairs to the front room and the street. But Claude saw us going and cried out and called for a round of applause.

I stopped and turned and bowed. I had fallen in love all over again that night with the lucidity and intelligence of Parisian civilization, and I said, in my ornate, brutally accented, abstract French that we were leaving so precipitously simply to defend the health of one more child who would—that there would be a child who would be, to be born in Paris, and who would love Paris too—who would in some way be French. It was playing to the gallery, I suppose, but it got a round of applause, and I still tell myself they meant it.

We went out into the street, found the taxi waiting in the rain, and went home. From the street, as I helped Martha into the cab, I could hear the first murmur of Lorenzo’s voice, rising in interrogation, just one last time, to inquire about the complexities of ownership, the love of a lieu, the hold of memory, and the meaning of possession, as it is felt both by the possessor and by the possessed.

I was so overtaken by the excitement of the strike and the action, and then I was so happily filled with a sense of moral indignation, and self-righteous pleasure, that I kept away from the Balzar, and for a while I didn’t miss it at all. As generations of French revolutionaries have discovered, moral self-righteousness is a very good short-term substitute for pleasure, but it wears out. Now I realize that the Balzar still exists on the rue des Ecoles and that I have lost it for good, and I think about the light coming in on a spring night, and the way the waiters took the food from the oval platters to the circular plates, and the simple poulet roti, and how good it all was, and I miss it all the time.

Like a King

When we discovered that the child we were going to have in Paris last fall would be a girl—we already have a boy—everybody told us that we had been blessed with the choix du roi, the king’s choice. “Why, it’s the choix du roi!” the technician said as she looked at the sonogram, more or less in the tone of the host on Jeopardy! announcing the Daily Double. “It’s the choix du roi!” said the woman in the two-hour photo place on the rue du Bac when we told her. “A little girl coming after a little boy?” said my friend Pascal, the philosopher, with evident pleasure. “Why, then, it’s the choix du roi!”

Martha was delighted to be having a girl, however the king felt about it. She had always wanted a son and a daughter, and as she only now explained to me, one of the reasons she had been so eager to leave New York four years earlier, just after the birth of our son, was that all her friends there who had two children had two boys, and she was starting to believe that two boys were just one of the things that happened to women in New York, “like high-intensity step classes and vanilla Edensoy,” as she put it. Also, she said, she was worried about having to succumb to the New York social law that compels you nowadays to name your sons exclusively after the men your grandfather used to take a shvitz with. In our New York circle of under-tens we already had, in addition to the requisite Maxes, a Harry, a Joe, a Sam, an Otto, and a Charlie—the whole senior staff of Benny’s Market: Lowest Prices in Town. “Even if I had had another boy, at least in Paris I wouldn’t have had to call him Moe,” she explained.

I was pleased by the news too, of course, but a little mystified by the expression. To be brutally frank, what mystified me was why a king would choose to have any girls at all. If I were a king, I would want only boys, so that the succession would never be challenged by the sinister uncle with a mustache lurking behind my throne. Or only girls and an immortality pill. What puzzled me even more was the way the phrase, though you heard it on Parisian lips, had a slightly disconcerting air of peasants-in-the-spring ecstasy about it, the kind of thing (“C’est le choix du roil”) you would expect to hear set to a Trenet tune and sung by the villagers in a Pagnol film when the baker’s daughter gives birth to little Lisette.

I soon sensed, though, that while people meant it, they also didn’t mean it, that it was a thing you said both as a joke and not as a joke. After four years in Paris I have come to realize that this is where the true cultural differences reside: not in those famous moments when you think that a joke was meant straight (“My goodness, the dessert grand-mere is not made by Grandmother!”), or you misunderstand something that was meant straight as a joke (“The tete de veau is actually the head of a calf!”), but in those moments when you are confronted with something that is meant both as a joke and seriously. This zone of kidding overlaid with not kidding is one that we know at home. When a New Yorker passes out cigars in the office after the birth of his child, for instance, he is both making a joke about passing out cigars—with unspoken but quickly grasped reference to all the episodes of Bewitched and I Love Lucy in which Darrin or Desi or some other fifties-ish father passed out cigars—and sincerely celebrating the birth of his child. (The proof of this doubleness is that the cigars he passes out will actually be good to smoke, while mockery would make do with a bad or unsmokable cigar. Nobody tried to eat Warhol’s soups.)

In Paris, the obstetricians all wear black. When your wife goes to be examined, the doctor who comes out into the waiting room is not a smart Jewish girl in a lab coat, as in New York, but a man with a day’s growth of beard, who is wearing black jeans and a black silk shirt, like a character in a David Mamet play about Hollywood producers.

I first became aware of this when we went to get the first of many sonograms of the new baby. The sonogramist we had been sent to performs in a nineteenth-century apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement, with wainscoting and ceiling moldings and windows that open like doors. A curtain was drawn across one half of the living room, and couples sat on two sofas in the other half, turning the pages of Elle (Elle is a weekly in France) and waiting to be called.

After about ten minutes the curtain parted, and the sonogram specialist came into the room. He had on black jeans and a black silk shirt, open at the front and plunging down toward his navel, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. A day-old growth of beard covered his face. He smiled at us and asked us to come in. We sat down in front of a handsome Louis XV desk—the sonogram equipment was over in the other corner of the office—and he asked us when the baby had been conceived. My wife gave him the likely date.

“Was that at night or early the next day?” he asked. It took me a moment to realize that he was kidding, and then another moment to realize that he was not, and then still another moment—the crucial cultural gap moment—to realize that he was neither kidding nor not kidding. That is to say, he was kidding—he knew that it didn’t matter—but he was not kidding in the sense that he was genuinely interested, considered that it was part of his profession to view that precise moment of passion or lust with a special tenderness. The moment of conception, the sexual act, was, in his schema, not incidental information to be handled discreetly or pushed aside altogether, as American obstetricians do—all American “What to Expect” books begin with the test, not the act—but the prime moment, the hallowed moment, the first happy domino that, falling, caused all the other dominoes that had brought the three of us together to fall, and (his eyes implied) it was our special shared knowledge that that domino had not in fact fallen but had been nudged, deliberately, and by us. Then he asked Martha to get undressed. There was, to my surprise, no changing room or even a curtain, so she did, like that. (I was the only embarrassed person in the room.) The elaborate hospital rigmarole of American hygiene and American obstetrics—the white coats, the dressing rooms, the lab gowns—is dispensed with. They make no sense, since a pregnant woman is not only not sick but in a sense has doubled the sum of her health.

We looked at the baby on the sonar screen, as though she were a character in a Tom Clancy novel. “She’s pretty,” he said at last. Then we got a package of fifteen or so pictures of our daughter in embryo, full of allure, as the receptionist said. The pictures were stapled, in neat, ruffled rows, into a little wallet, with sans serif lowercase type, like an e. e. cummings poem.

“In New York the obstetricians all wear white, and they all have books out,” Martha said to me one afternoon. She had called up an obstetrician in New York that day, before her appointment with her French doctor. “She covered me with congratulations, and then she told me all these tests I ought to take. Week ten the CVS, then in week fourteen an early amnio, and then in weeks eighteen to twenty a targeted ultrasound to test for neural tube defects, and then I’m supposed to get genetic carrier blood tests for all these other things.”

“What did the French obstetrician say when you told her that?”

“She made that ‘oh’ face—you know, that lips-together, ‘How naive can one be?’ face—said that it was far too dangerous to do the CVS, and then she prescribed a lot of drugs for pain. I’ve got antispasmodics, antinausea drugs, painkillers, and some other ones too. Then she told me I could drink red wine and absolutely not to eat any raw vegetables. She keeps asking me if I’ve had any salad. She says ‘salad’ the way the doctors in New York say ‘uninsured.’”

French doctors like to prescribe drugs as much as New York doctors like to publish books. I suppose that it fulfills a similar need for self-expression with a pen, without having to go to the trouble of having your photograph taken with a professional yet humane grin. You cannot go into a French doctor’s office for a cinder in your eye and emerge without a six-part prescription, made up of pills of different sizes to be taken at irregular intervals.

I wanted to meet Martha’s doctor, who would be delivering the baby while I “coached”—I am of the Phil Jackson school as a coach; you might not actually see me doing much, but I contribute a lot to the winning atmosphere—and so I accompanied her to the next appointment. We sat in the waiting room and read Elle some more. By now Martha was nervous. An American friend who lives in Normandy had gone into labor a few days before, only to find that all the anesthesiologists had gone out on strike that morning. She had delivered the baby, her second, without any epidural.

“I want to go to a place where the anesthesiologists are scabs,” Martha said. “Or nuns or something. I don’t want to go to a place where the man with the epidural is on a picket line.”

While we were in the waiting room, a man in black jeans and a black silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and with a Pat Riley hairstyle, peeked in and mischievously summoned one of the women in the waiting room. “Who’s that?” I asked. “The other obstetrician,” Martha said. “Does he always dress like that?” I demanded. “Oh, yes. He’s very nice. He examined me last time.” Martha’s doctor was wearing black stretch slacks, a black tank top, and a handsome gold necklace. She was very exacting about appearances. “You have gained too much weight,” she said to Martha, who had in fact gained less than with her first pregnancy. “Start swimming, stop eating.” (Martha says that a friend who went for an appointment two months after the birth of her second baby was told by the same doctor, “You look terrible. And do something about your hair.”) We did another sonogram. “Look at her, she’s pretty,” the doctor said as we looked at the sonogram. “There’s her fille,” she said, pointing to the sex. Then she again counseled Martha to swim more and gave her a prescription for sleeping pills. We talked a bit about the approach of those hard, exhausting first weeks with a newborn. “Get a night nurse,” she advised. “Go out with your husband. Be happy again.”

In New York, in other words, pregnancy is a medical condition that, after proper care by people in white coats and a brief hospital stay, can have a “positive outcome.” In Paris it is something that has happened because of sex, which, with help and counsel, can end with your being set free to go out and have more sex. In New York pregnancy is a ward in the house of medicine; in Paris it is a chapter in a sentimental education, a strange consequence of the pleasures of the body.

In America, we have managed to sexualize everything—cars, refrigerators, computers, Congress—except the natural consequences of sex. Though it is de rigueur for every pregnant super-model to have her picture taken when she is full-bellied, it is always the same picture. She covers her breasts, she is swaddled below in some way, and she looks off into the middle distance, not dreamily, as she might when wearing lingerie, but slightly anxiously, as though she could not remember if she had left her husband’s electric guitar turned on. The subject, the hidden subject, is not the apotheosis of sexuality but its transcendence into maternal instinct: babe into mother by way of baby.

In France, though, a pregnant woman is alive, since she has demonstrated both her availability and her fecundity: We Have a Winner. Though Lamaze method childbirth began here, it remains cultish and sectarian. Most women nurse for three months, no more. (It shrinks your breasts and gives you an uncomfortable accessory.) And when the anesthesiologists are not striking, they are, as our baby-sitter says, fully busy. (Two French friends of ours talk about natural childbirth: “What is the English for accouchement sans douleur’?” one asks. “A lie,” the other answers.)

The prohibition on uncooked vegetables, by the way, turns out to have a solid scientific basis. Toxoplasmosis—a mild parasitic infection that is devastating to unborn children—though it’s rare in America (it’s that thing you can get from cat litter), is common in France. Red wine is recommended, in turn, because it is high in iron and acts as an effective antispasmodic.

By law a French woman who is going to have a baby is guaranteed—not merely allowed but pretty much compelled—to stay four or five nights in a clinic or a hospital. In New York, when our son, Luke, was born—in the Klingenstein Pavilion of Mount Sinai Hospital—we had two days to have the baby, bond, and get out. French law is specific and protective about the rights of pregnant women. If you are a salaried employee, you get six weeks of prenatal leave and ten weeks of paid leave after the baby is born. For a third child, you get eight weeks off and eighteen more, and if you have three at once, you get, in all, forty-six weeks of paid leave. (The leave is paid, through a complicated formula, by your employer and the state.) The law is as finely tuned as a viola d’amore. There is even a beautiful added remarque, right there on the government document: “Les artistes du spectacle, les mannequins des maisons de couture,” and others who do work that is plainly incompatible with the state of pregnancy (i.e., a bigger belly) are assured of paid leave after the twenty-first week. In France, Cindy and Paulina and the rest would not just be having their pictures taken. They would already be on the dole.

The system, Martha’s doctor observed once during a visit, is “royal for the users, good for the doctors, and expensive for the society.” There are many rational arguments to be made about whether or not the outcomes justify the expenditures, and in any case, the level of care that the French have insisted on may be unsustainable. But the people who are being treated “royally” are ordinary people—everybody. For many, perhaps most, French people, life at the end of the century in the American imperium may look a bit like a typical transatlantic flight, with the airless, roomless, comfortless coach packed as tightly as possible, so that the maximum dollars can be squeezed out of every seat, with a few rich people up front. I am American enough to understand that this is, so to speak, one of the prices of mass travel—that there is no such thing as a free lunch, or clinic—and yet have become French enough to feel, stubbornly, that legroom and a little air should not be luxuries for the rich and that in a prosperous society all pregnant women should have three sonograms and four nights in a hospital, if they want to. It doesn’t seem particularly royal to have four nights in a clinic when you have a baby or aristocratically spoiled to think that a woman should keep her job and have some paid leave afterward, even sixteen weeks, if she happens to be a mannequin in an haute couture house. All human desires short of simple survival are luxurious, and a mothers desire to have a slightly queenly experience of childbirth—a lying in rather than a pushing out and a going home—seems as well worth paying for as a tobacco subsidy or another tank.

In preparation for our own four-night stay we had first to search for the right clinic. Friends recommended two: the Clinique Sainte-Isabelle, in the leafy suburb of Neuilly, and the Clinique Belvedere, in Boulogne-Billancourt. We went to tour them. Both clinics had a pastoral, flower bed, medical but not quite hospital feel, like the sanitarium to which they pack off Nicole in Tender Is the Night. I liked the Belvedere best. The rooms there had a nice faded white and pale blue look, like the room in Madeline where she goes to have her appendix taken out and sees the crack in the ceiling that has a habit of sometimes looking like a rabbit. The cracks in the ceiling at the Belvedere were expressive too, and for a premium you could have a room with French doors leading out onto the garden. (The ordinary rooms were less grand, though they mostly had garden views too.) But what I really liked about the place were the clippings in the formal salon—the waiting room—downstairs, which was filled with dusty silk roses and blue and gold Louis XVI furniture. The clippings chronicled the birth of minor nobility in the halls of the Belvedere. A Bonapartist pretender had been born there, I remember, and also I think a prince of Yugoslavia. I liked the kingly company, particularly since it was such cheesy kingly company.

Martha, though, as we toured the clinics, kept asking gentle, pointed questions about labor relations with the anesthesiologists. Now, the anesthesiologists here—were they unionized? Did they have enough vacation time? Would the clinic manager say that they were happy with their working conditions? How long had it been since they signed a contract? Were there any. well, radicals among them, the kind of ex-Trotskyite soixantehuitards who might suddenly call for mass action by the workers? Eventually, we settled on the Clinique Sainte-Isabelle, which seemed to be the sensible, primly bourgeois choice of all our friends and which had a couple of full-time anesthesiologists on call, neither of whom looked like a sansculotte.

Everything was going along fine, in fact, until our meeting with the sage-femme, the wise woman, or, in American, the midwife. She was in yet another of the suburban clinics, an odd Jacques Tati modern place. This meeting was brisk, and it concentrated on two essential points: breathing and lying. The breathing bit we had heard about before—you are supposed to breathe from the diaphragm—but she emphasized that it was just as important, for a happy birth, to remember never to tell a taxi driver that you are in labor. Whatever you do, she said, don’t say that you’re in labor, or might be in labor, because no taxi driver in Paris will take a pregnant woman to her clinic, for fear other having the baby in his car. (You can’t call an ambulance because an ambulance won’t go over the city line, and our clinic was out in Neuilly.)

Then how were we going to get to the clinic? Martha asked. (We don’t have a car.) It’s no problem, I interrupted, we’ll simply walk over to the taxi stand. (You can’t call a taxi, because there is a stand right across the street from our apartment.)

“I won’t be able to stroll across the street and stand in line if I’m in labor,” she objected. “I’ll wait in the courtyard. Just get him to do the demi-tour.”

At these words my heart was stricken. Demi-tour means literally a U-turn, but in Paris it is also a half-metaphysical possibility that exists on the boulevard Saint-Germain just across the street from our apartment building. The boulevard itself runs one-way, from east to west. There is, however, a narrow lane carved out on it, for buses and taxis, that runs the other way, toward the place de la Concorde and the quai d’Orsay and, eventually, if you turn right over a bridge, toward Neuilly and the clinic too. Leading off this lane, at a single light about a hundred feet from our building, there is a small, discreet curved arrow marked on the asphalt. This arrow means that a taxicab—and only a taxicab—can make a U-turn there and go the other way, with the rest of the traffic. In principle, I could get a cab going against the traffic, have him do the demi-tour, pick up my pregnant wife, and then go back against the traffic. The trouble is that, though I have sometimes succeeded in persuading taxi drivers, when we arrive from the airport, to make the demi-tour, I have just as often failed. “It’s impossible,” the cabbie will tell you, when you ask him to do it.

“No, there is an arrow printed on the pavement that advertises the possibility of this maneuver,” I will say. (When I’m under stress, my French becomes very abstract.)

“I’ve been driving a taxi for twenty years, and it doesn’t exist,” the cabbie will say. Then you either give up or get hot under the collar, and neither approach helps.

If I asked a Paris cabdriver to attempt the demi-tour at, say, five in the morning, to pick up a very pregnant-looking woman, he would know that the only reason was that she was in labor, and to the insult of being instructed would come the injury of being asked to ruin his cab.

For the next few weeks I became obsessed by the logic and strategies of the demi-tour. What if I couldn’t pull it off? The only thing to do was to rehearse, just as we had done in New York in the Lamaze class. So I began walking over to the taxi station at all hours of the day and night, getting in a cab, asking the driver to make the demi-tour, and then going, well, someplace or other. Then I walked home. Sometimes the driver made the demi-tour, and sometimes he didn’t. I was determined to keep practicing, until it felt as natural as breathing.

We still hadn’t got to the bottom of the whole choix du roi thing. Martha had decided to give in to the obstetrician’s insistence that she start swimming, and one day, with Luke, we got into a cab to go to the pool. The taxi driver was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and had gray hair and a lot of metal teeth. Suddenly he chuckled and said, of Luke, “Why, he speaks so well. Tell me, is it a little sister or a brother?” A sister, we said, and I grimaced and tightened inside as I prepared myself for the response, which, of course, came on cue. “Ah,” he said, slapping the steering wheel. “C’est le choix du roi!”

I was so fed up that I said, “Please explain it to me.” It was an ironic, rhetorical question. But he didn’t miss a beat.

“I will be happy to explain it,” he said, and he actually pulled over to the curb, near the Crillon Hotel, so that he could speak in peace. “In Latin countries we have what we call Salic law, which means that only your son can inherit the throne. You Anglo-Saxons, you don’t follow Salic law.” I let the Anglo-Saxon thing go by. “For your Anglo-Saxon royal families, it doesn’t matter if the king has a nana or a mec.” A nana is a doll, and a mec is a guy. “But you see, a French king, under Salic law, had to consolidate his hold on the throne by having a boy. And he had to have a girl, so that she could be offered in marriage to another king, and in this way the royal possessions would be expanded, since the daughter’s son would be a king too. He,” he said, gesturing toward Luke in the backseat, “is your strong piece, to be kept in reserve, while she”—he gestured toward Martha’s belly—“is your pawn to build your empire. That’s why it’s the king’s choice: first a boy to hold the throne, then a girl to get another. Tendresse has nothing to do with it. That is why it is the choix du roi.

“It is very odd,” he went on expansively, “because in the Hundred Years’ War the king of England, as duc de Guyenne, a title he had inherited from his grandfather, was subject to Salic law too. The story of how this worked itself out in the making of the two monarchies is a passionately interesting piece of history. I recommend the series Les Rois Maudits [the damned or cursed kings], which is a fascinating study of this history, particularly of the acts of John the Good and what he did as an act of policy to accommodate the Salic principle. The books are by Maurice Druon, of the Academie Francaise, and I heartily recommend them. Passionately interesting.”

We sat in stunned silence.

“Ask him does he do demi-tours,” said Martha.

“You’re wearing stripes?” she asked. I had put on a striped shirt a few minutes before, in the excitement, but I quickly changed it. I put on a suit and tie, in fact—a nice maroon cotton number—thinking that though my New York child had been born with me watching in jeans and a collarless shirt, my French kid ought to see a dad who had a touch more finish.

The drama had begun a few hours earlier, in the middle of the night, and now it was five o’clock and we were on our way to the clinic. At five-thirty, with a baby-sitter for Luke and a suitcase in hand, we were out on the boulevard. I walked to the curb, held my breath, saw that there were cabs at the taxi stand, and, head down, told Martha to wait where she was while I started across the street, preparing to ask a taxi driver to make the demi-tour, my moment come at last.

Far down the boulevard, a single cab with a firelight light appeared. Martha stepped out into the street, just as though it were five-thirty in the evening on Sixth Avenue, got her right hand up in that weird New York Nazi taxi salute, and cried, “Taxi!” The guy came skidding to a stop. She got in, and I followed.

“Twenty-four boulevard du Chateau in Neuilly,” I commanded, my voice pitched a little too high (as it also tends to get in French). “Just cross the street and make the demi-tour,” I added fairly casually, and docilely, at five-thirty in the morning, he swung the cab over to the taxi lane, on other side of the street, and did a full U-turn. He Hew along the boulevard. I took the hand of my queen.

“You’ve got him going the wrong way,” she whispered.

He was too. I waited a few blocks and then told him that I had made a mistake, could he turn around and go the other way? He shrugged and did.

When we got to the clinic, it was shut tight, no lights on at all. The advantages of a big hospital up on Madison Avenue became a little clearer. No one was answering the door, a thing I doubt happens much at Mount Sinai. We banged and cried out, “Allo! Is anybody there?” Finally, an incredibly weary-looking sage-femme—not our own—wearing sweater and slippers, sighed, let us in, hooked Martha up to an IV, and asked to see our papers. She shuffled through them.

“Where is your blood test for the dossier?” she asked at last. “The doctor has it,” I said. “She’ll be here soon.” “That the doctor has it is of no consequence,” the nurse said. “If your wife wishes to have an epidural, she must have that paper.”

“It’s all the way back home,” I protested, but of course, nothing doing. It looked as though Martha’s epidural, having escaped French syndicalism, was about to be done in by French bureaucracy. Having lived in France long enough to know there was no choice, I found another taxi, rushed all the way home, ran upstairs, tore open the filing cabinet, found the paper, and then took a taxi back, setting some kind of land speed record for trips from central Paris to Neuilly. The sage-femme slipped the paper into the dossier, yawned, put the dossier down on a radiator, and nobody ever looked at it or referred to it again.

The labor got complicated, for various reasons—basically the baby at the last moment decided to turn sideways—and Martha’s doctor, acting with the quiet sureness that is the other side of Parisian insouciance, did an emergency cesarean. It turned out that behind a small, quaint-looking white door down in the basement there was a bloc—a warren of blindingly white-lit, state-of-the-art operating and recovery rooms. They hadn’t shown it to us when we toured the clinic, of course. It seemed very French, the nuclear power plant hidden in the bocage.

The baby came out mad, yelling at the top of her lungs. In New York the nurses had snatched the baby and taken him off to be washed behind a big glass nursery window and then had dressed him in prison garb, the same white nightshirt and cap that the hundred other babies in the nursery had on. (The next day there was also an elaborate maximum security procedure of reading off the bracelet numbers of mother and child whenever either one wanted to nurse.) Here, after the sage-femme and I had given her a bath, and the sage-femme had taped her umbilical remnant, the sage-femme turned to me.

“Where are her clothes?” she asked. I said I didn’t know, upstairs in the suitcase, I guessed, and she said, “You’d better get them,” so I ran up, and came back down to the bloc with the white onesie and a lovely white-and-pink-trimmed baby-style cat suit, which her mother had bought at Bonpoint a few days before. All by myself I carefully dressed the five-minute-old squalling newborn and took her back to her mother, in the recovery room. A day later I would walk the six blocks to the mairie, the city hall, of Neuilly-sur-Seine and register her birth. The New York birth certificate had been a fill-in-the-blanks, choose-one-box business, which we had filled in on our way out of the hospital. The French birth certificate was like the first paragraph of a nineteenth-century novel, with the baby’s parents’ names, their occupations, the years of their births and of their emigration, their residence, and her number, baby number 2365 born in Neuilly in 1999. (It’s got a big hospital too.) After that, of course, would come the weeks of exhaustion and 3:00 a.m. feed-ings, which are remarkably alike from place to place.

But just then, looking at the sleeping mom and the tiny new-born in her arms, I had a genuine moment of what I can only call revelation, religious vision. When people talk about what it is to have a baby, they usually talk about starting over, a clean slate, endless possibility, a new beginning, but I saw that that is not it at all. A birth is not a rebirth. It’s a weighty event. A baby is an absolute object of nature and an absolute subject of civilization, screaming in her new Bonpoint jumper. Life is nothing but an unchanging sea of nature, the same endless and undifferentiating human wave of lust and pain, and is still subject to a set of tiny cultural articulations and antinomies and dualities and distinctions and hair-splittings so fine that they produce, in the end, this single American baby lying in a French nursery in her own fine new clothes, sipping her sugar bottle. In a telescopic universe, we choose to see microscopically and the blessing is that what we see is not an illusion but what is really there: a singularity in the cosmos, another baby born in a Paris suburb. The world is a meaningless place, and we are weird, replicating mammals on its surface, yet the whole purpose of the universe since it began was, in a way, to produce this baby, who is the tiny end point of a funnel that goes back to the beginning of time, a singularity that history was pointing toward from the start. That history didn’t know it was pointing toward Olivia—and, of course, toward Salome over in the other corner of the nursery and little Francois just arrived, not to mention Max and Otto and possibly even Moe, just now checking in at Mount Sinai—doesn’t change the fact that it was. We didn’t know we were pointing to her either, until she got here. The universe doesn’t need a purpose if life goes on. You sink back and hear the nurse cooing in French to the mother and child (“Ah, calme-toi, ma biche, ma biche,” she says. “Be calm, my doe, my doe,” but which one is she talking to?) and feel as completely useless as any other male animal after a birth and, at the same time, somehow serenely powerful, beyond care or criticism, since you have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it.

Angels Dining at the Ritz

When Martha was still pregnant, we decided to join the pool at the Ritz hotel on the Place Vendome for eight weeks. We had, as I’ve said, thought about it once before, during our adventures at the Regiment Rouge, but had gotten scared off by the expense and by all those tea sandwiches on silver platters. For four years we had been swimming at the public pool of the Sixth Arrondissement near the old Saint-Germain market, a nice place, with families splashing in one part and solitary fierce-looking swimmers doing laps in the other—though, like every French public institution, terribly overcharged with functionaires, in this case officious, functionary lifeguards. But then the same friend who had invited us there that first time invited us to the Ritz pool again, to spend a Sunday away from the August heat. With Martha pregnant and more or less immobile, we weren’t able to go away anyway, even though everyone in Paris goes away in August. (The five-week mandatory vacation is part of the inheritance of the old Popular Front of the thirties, one of the laws put over by the saintly Socialist leader Leon Blum.) Anyway, we couldn’t go anywhere, not with Martha that big, and we were cool and comfortable there at the pool. Paris is hot in August—really, suddenly hot—and not many places are air-conditioned. Even the ones that claim to be climatise are not really air-conditioned as public places are in New York. Instead a trickle of chilly air floats someplace around the baseboards.

The pool at the Ritz hotel in Paris—they actually call the place the Ritz Health Club, in English, although I think this is designed less as a concession to Americans than as a lingering sign of old-fashioned Parisian Anglomania, like calling the Jockey Club in Paris the Jockey Club—is intended to look “Pompeian” in a way that I suppose makes a strong case for Mount Vesuvius and molten lava. There is a high domed skylight, held up by painted Ionic columns with rosettes along their pillars and bordered by a bas-relief frieze of classical figures standing around in a line, as though waiting to check out of the hotel. There is a trompe 1’oeil ceiling painting of old Roman bathers looking down at contemporary French swimmers, with more colored architectural drawings of Roman temple fronts decorating the locker rooms and the showers, and, on either side of the pool, two enormous murals of Romans in togas standing around on terraces, all painted in a style someplace between Victorian-Academic and New York Pizzeria.

My favorite detail at the Ritz pool is a pair of mosaics on the bottom of the pool, right where the shallow end starts to incline and deepen a little, of two comely and topless mermaids, with long blond hair—tresses, really—floating off to one side. With one hand they reach down modestly; with the other each holds up one half of the great seal of the Ritz. (Where most mermaids have fishtails that begin at their waists, these mermaids have fishtails that begin only at their shins.) These are real mosaics, by the way, assembled shiny shard by shiny shard, and they probably would be a treasure if they had actually been made by a Roman artisan and dug up by an archaeologist. The line between art and kitsch is largely measured in ruin.

Martha felt cool there, and cool matters a lot to a nine-month pregnant woman. We sat by the edge of the pool in white terry-cloth robes, surrounded by thin rich women with very high hair, who were listlessly turning the pages of magazines and occasionally going into the pool to swim. They swam like nervous poodles, with their heads held high, high, high—up out of the water on their long necks, protecting their perfect helmets of hair from the least drop of moisture.

We ate lunch up on the curved terrace overlooking the pool and thought, only with a little guilt. Well, this is nice. So we inquired and found that we could get an eight-week nonpeak hours, never-on-Sunday family membership for a lot less than it cost us to rent a cottage in Cape Cod every summer for two weeks—and in Cape Cod, we work all day and night, sweeping the sand out of the house and bringing up the laundry and stoking up the grill and then cleaning up the kitchen. So with a slightly nervous sense of extravagance, we decided to subscribe to the Ritz pool for the minimum off-hours “family” membership, a little joke, we assured ourselves, laid at the altar of the old Hemingway-Flanner Paris. I felt a little guilty about it, I guess—I felt a lot guilty about it, really—but I also thought that Leon Blum, all things considered, wouldn’t get too mad at me. I gave it a vaguely Socialist feeling; it was our five weeks.

Since our experience at the Regiment Rouge I had been improvising exercise. For a while we had gone running with the rest of the Americans, and the French riot police, around the Luxembourg Gardens. The gardens are filled with busts and statues of writers, which make it easy to mark your progress as a runner. A half lap of the gardens, for instance, takes you right to a bust of Sainte-Beuve, the good literary critic whom Proust attacked; the two-thirds point is marked by another bust, this one of Baudelaire; and then finally, completing the circuit, you go past the Delacroix monument, with angels looking up admiringly at his haughty, mustachioed head. At the start I could do a Baudelaire and then, after a couple of months’ practice, two full Delacroix’s, not bad. The trouble was that the great men seemed to look out disdainfully from their pedestals at the absurdity of Americans running today in order to run more tomorrow. Get drunk instead, Baudelaire seemed to counsel, intelligently, with his scowl. Eventually we bought a stationary bike, and I tried to do twenty-four minutes a day on it, re-creating the conditions of the New York Health and Racquet Club on Thirteenth Street, more or less in the dubious, perverse spirit of a British lieutenant wearing flannel and drinking tea at five o’clock in the Sahara. I had even bought a pair of dumbbells.

After a couple of weeks, though, Martha was too big to do much of anything, and then Olivia Esme Claire, our beautiful little girl, was born. But we still had six weeks to work out on the membership, so Luke Auden and I kept going. I was nervous and interested. I associated the Ritz with a kind of high life that makes me uneasy, and this is not because I do not like expensive and “exclusive” pleasures, but because I do, and always feel unskilled in their enjoyment. I knew that the Ritz in Paris had once been dashing and elegant but also knew that now there was, as with so many old places of luxury, a note of unhappy rootlessness to the place. It was the capital of the non-Paris Paris. It had what we would have called at my high school bad karma. While we were living in Paris, it had been the place where Pamela Harriman had passed out—“I go badly,” she had said, and went—and where Princess Diana too had left on that last car trip. English politicians in particular seemed to come to grief there; one prominent MP, I had vaguely heard, had spent a night, had it paid for by the wrong person, and lost his reputation. There was about it now, for all that it was still frequented by high-living Parisians, a note less of old Parisian high life than of new, late-century overclass big money, with big money’s unhappiness about it, that high-strung video surveillance watchfulness of the very, very rich. I liked arriving at the Ritz and having a little commis in uniform spin the revolving door for me, but I was always worried about the way I looked when he did. I am hedonistic but not at all heedless, a bad combination. I watch the meter in the limousine, the revolving door as it spins.

Luke of course took it for granted, as children take all things. He learned to swim there, first backstroke, then “frontstroke.” I felt a vague feeling of paternal pride about him, though I hadn’t really taught him. Just dropped him in, really.

Then something really nice, genuinely terrific happened. Earlier that year, at the school he went to at the American Church, he had fallen in love. The little girl was named Cressida Taylor. She was the dish, the girl he had said was “quite a dish.” (I had finally tracked the expression down to a three-hour compilation of Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes from the forties that we had bought for him. Bugs Bunny says it about, well, about a dish.) I met her at the school, and she was quite a dish, the most beautiful five-year-old girl I have ever seen. She had fair skin, and high blue eyes, and two long golden braids of hair, mermaid tresses, really, and an Audrey Hepburn voice, that elegant, piping voice of children who have been raised in both French and English. (Her mother was a sensible Englishwoman, and her father, I think, some kind of French banker.)

Unquestionably a dish, she was also a peach. It had been Cressida who had finally gotten Luke past the nap crisis at school, generously holding his hand when the teachers would insist that the children “take a rest” and he would go into a panic. She had come over to play a few times. (No one used the expression play date in Paris. Kids just came over, played, and then their mothers picked them up and took them home.) They played intensely, and there was, I thought, fondly, a kind of Gilberte and Marcel quality to their playing. They just played, you see, and all the other things that pass between boys and girls just passed, without comment or too much oversight from their parents. Martha was relieved at least. In love with her son, she was already worried about the woman who would take him away, and I think that she would have betrothed them on the spot, like seventeenth-century royalty, if she could have. But Cressida had left his school, and now we saw her, wistfully, only every now and again.

On that memorable Wednesday afternoon Luke and I went to the pool. Though he liked to swim, he went, to my puzzlement, mostly to take home the little shower caps that were placed all around the locker rooms. They were just shower caps, but they came in blue cardboard boxes, with the Ritz coat of arms printed in gold on them, and he would sneak home ten or eleven at a time, tucking them under his arms, hiding them in the pockets of his white terry-cloth peignoir, and then sticking them in his jacket—why and to what end, I was never sure.

We were strangers at the Ritz. I was nervous, self-conscious about seeming too loud or too American. “Lets kiss the mermaids,” Luke would insist, every time we went swimming, and though they were scarcely five feet down, within easy dive-and-kiss distance, I never could. I was too self-conscious about splashing a lot on my way down, my flattish feet waving, and about what the ladies with the tall hair would think about it. Luke couldn’t do it either, since five feet was still far too deep for him to go, but he tried, manfully, and didn’t care if he splashed or not.

On this Wednesday, though, after the furtive theft of a few shower caps, and the endless irritating “Please stand still!” of a father changing a kid into his swim trunks, we got to the pool. Normally he couldn’t wait to jump in, but now he stood utterly still at the edge of the water. I saw his small, skinny body in the madras trunks stiffen, and then he got a shy, embarrassed smile on his face and backed away.

“Daddy, look,” he whispered.

“What?” I said.

“Daddy, look,” he repeated urgently, still under his breath. “It’s Cressida.”

It was too. And the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, right there in the middle of the Paris Ritz pool. She was floating as elegantly as an angel, just above the mermaids, a little on her side, her long blond braids trailing in the water behind her. I think my heart stopped a little bit at that moment too.

Luke’s certainly had stopped and then restarted. He leaped right in, before I could stop him, and head up—like a puppy, like a millionaire’s wife—he swam out to his love in the water.

Cressida, it turned out, after a few minutes of splashing, happy greeting, was there with her best friend and constant companion Ada. (The year before, Luke had complained to me about how inseparable they were: “It’s like they’re twins or something.”) Ada turned out to be a startling, perfect, central casting best friend, with a throaty, husky Glynis Johns-Demi Moore voice, the perfect sultry sidekick to perfect radiant beauty. They both were there with Cressida’s nanny, a jolly Australian girl named Shari, who played the trombone, and whom I can describe only by saying that she looked like a jolly Australian girl who played the trombone.

The two little girls were excellent swimmers, veterans of the Ritz pool, I supposed. They splashed back and forth easily, and Luke manfully struggled after them, head up, losing it, swallowing water and coming up exhausted and clinging to the side and spitting out, his face scrunched up in misery, but then shaking his head violently (“I’m fine! I’m fine!”) when I came up and, a little too paternal, a little too obvious, pounded him on the back and asked him if he was OK. Then he shot back out to the girls in the middle of the pool. Pretty quickly he worked out a good method of getting around; first clinging to the side of the pool, then shooting out in backstroke, and then going into a quick three-stroke combined breaststroke-doggy paddle over to the girls—a wonderful simulacrum of a guy who is just an easy, varied swimmer. (He swam, I realized, exactly the way that after five years I spoke French, which also involved a lot of clinging to the side of the pool and sudden bravura dashes out to the deep end to impress the girls, or listeners.)

I hovered around him, worried—I was snob enough to be tickled that he had learned to swim at the Ritz pool in Paris but insecure enough to worry about what his mother would say if I lost him at the Ritz pool; after all, it was, at its deep end, effectively as deep as the ocean, three times over the head of a small boy—only to have him shake me off, again and again.

I didn’t mind, really I have never seen a human being before in a state of pure liquid unadulterated joy. The little girls, to my surprise, for I had had more bitter experiences at his age, seemed to accept him absolutely as an equal and fellow diver and Ritz habitue, a bee-fin of this damp beau monde, albeit one with a bit of water in his lungs from time to time. And if his lungs were filling up with water, swallow by swallow, he didn’t care. He just followed the red bathing suit and the blond braid, wherever they led him.

The Australian au pair and I huddled around the edges of the pool and made conversation. She had been in Paris for only a couple of weeks, she explained, had flown right over from Sydney. She seemed unperturbed, not even much interested in her surroundings, Australians being like that, I suppose: From the Sydney beach to the Ritz pool, all just water, isn’t it?

After about half an hour Ada paddled over. “I want a chocolat chaud,” she said, imperiously. She looked at me just the way that Lorelei Lee must have looked at her sugar daddy at the Paris Ritz, so I gathered up the children—Luke could barely speak, he was so filled with water—and we went up to the café on the terrace overlooking the pool. I strode up as boldly as I could manage to the white-shirted attendant behind the counter and ordered three hot chocolates and three cakes for the children and then a café creme for me and a Badoit for the Australian girl. I shuddered inside, imagining what it was all going to cost. As I say, I am hedonistic but not heedless, and like Luke, only with less fortitude, I knew that I was out of my depth and swallowing water.

After a mysterious fifteen-minute wait the attendant reemerged with the chocolate in silver pitchers and the cake—simple pound cake with lemon glaze—on silver plates and served them to the children. Ada looked bored and indifferent and demanded some more lait chaud for her chocolate, after she had tasted it. She soon had a chocolate mustache, but it didn’t make her look like a child. She looked more like Aramis, the youngest and most imperious of the musketeers.

Luke, never a big eater, watched Cressida. I saw what there was to watch: She sipped her chocolate, daintily but not as one making a big deal about daintiness. She was just a naturally elegant sipper. I drank my coffee, gulped it, really, and thought, gracelessly enough, about the bill running up. The two girls chatted in the way children do, effortlessly and seamlessly and in this case in two languages but without actually seeming to exchange information. (“You know what? You’re a Looney Tunes.” Laughter. “No, Oscar is a Looney Tunes.” More laughter, in which Luke joined.)

After the first hot chocolate had been dispensed with, Ada summoned over the waiter with a wave of her hand and said, “Encore un chocolat chaud”—that is, “Another hot chocolate.” “Say please,” I said instantly. She gave me a steady, opaque, not-only-are-you-not-my-father-but-you-couldn’t-begin-to-afford-to-be-my-father look. But then she said please. We all went for a second round, hot chocolate and cake and bottled water, and I felt like Charlie Chaplin in The Immigrant—it had been Luke’s favorite movie, back when he would stay home all day and watch Chaplin videos while I worked—when Edna Purviance starts ordering beans and he reaches into his pocket to count his change and finds the quarter he had picked up on the sidewalk isn’t there anymore. A third round of cake followed the second round of hot chocolate—Luke left his untouched, leaving three cakes on the plate in all, which I eventually ate—and then I told Luke it was time to go.

“No,” he said definitely. And the children ran back down the stairs to the pool and played some more, dodging in and out among the chaise longues. I went over to the attendant, asked for the check, and signed it, trying to feign the nonchalance of Hem ordering another bottle of Dom Perignon for Sister Dietrich, of Dodi Fayed before his last journey.

I got him home at last, around six o’clock. Martha was mildly irascible, nursing the baby on a chaise longue near the window, all by herself all afternoon, but she melted a little when I told her the story. “You won’t believe who we met at the pool today,” I began. Luke seemed quietly happy, nonchalant. The improbability of the encounter simply hadn’t struck him. That Cressida Taylor would be swimming in a red one-piece at the Ritz pool on the same Wednesday afternoon that we were there… He had no sense of the size of the world or even of Paris. His haunts were the world’s haunts; his world was the world. This is an emotion shared, I suppose, only by children and aristocrats; everyone goes where we go. Where else would you expect to meet people? (I have none of it and in my heart always expect to be alone, the one man sitting awkwardly at a table in the wrong restaurant after everyone else has left it. When I see my wife and children coming down the boulevard to meet me, I am dazzled. The baby, Olivia, was, I could see, a little like me, constantly pulling away from her mother’s breast to give me the same anxious, reassuring smile: You of all people! Here of all places!)

For the next four weeks we went every Wednesday to the pool at the Ritz, to meet Ada and Cressida and their nanny and to swim and treat to hot chocolate and cake. Although Ada was a constant presence (“I don’t think I shall swim today,” she would say. “She’s a bit moody,” Cressida would explain, unemotionally), I could sense that a bond, a romance had begun between Luke and Cressida, in the simple sense that the unstated had emerged from the informal. I recognized the signs: It lay not in their having fun together but in their not needing to have fun together, in a quiet, you-here-me-there, however-deep-you-can-go-in-the-deep-end-I’ll-go-deeper understanding. I remembered the words that Gilberte had said to Marcel, somewhere in Proust, I think in that beautiful section titled “Place-Names: The Name,” where the two children—if they are children; I can never really figure out in Proust if they are eight or eighteen—meet at the Champs-Elysees. “Now we can begin,” Gilberte says. “You are on my side.” The two of them were on the same side too.

You are on my side. Martha and I had once always been on the same side too, and without thinking about it at all. Now, here in the city that a notion of romance, a need for one last romantic adventure, had led us to, we found that we didn’t care for each other less, yet loved each other differently. Our moving to Paris, which was intended, almost too self-consciously, I suppose, to extend that feeling—to keep each other on each other’s side without the fretfulness and noise of New York life, without dinner parties and gallery openings and Burmese takeout and the number 6 uptown for life—had had the unexpected effect of plopping us down in the same pool with the same hot chocolate to sip day after day after day, and this at a time when we both were already, so to speak, practiced swimmers. We began to take almost too much pleasure, I suppose, almost too much delight, in the passage of our son’s first romance because it recalled to us the landscape of limitations that surround all romance, the way that romance is a thing always best allied to difficulty: the water pouring into your lungs; the trombone-playing Australian looking over your shoulder and calling you into a towel; the encumbering presence of a moody hot chocolate—addicted best friend. Martha and I had always been so close; but now we were so near, and that is different.

We had run away to Paris that first time, twenty years earlier, back when we had known each other for six months, and even though it would be possible to say that that first time we were merely playing at running away, since we had families and houses waiting safely for us back in Montreal, the truth is that the existence of the families and houses was what made it, weirdly, not play at all. There really was someone back there waiting for you with a towel and calling you out of the pool, and we had decided not to listen. This time running away was a kind of play, since there was no one to run away from save ourselves, and your self always catches up.

Perhaps in the end this is why Paris is “romantic.” It marries both the voluptuous and restricted. It is not the yeses but the noes of Paris, not the licenses it offers love but the prohibitions it puts in its way, that makes it powerful. All the noes of French life, the way that each gate to each park is bounded by that endless ten-thousand-word fine-print announcement from the government announcing all the things you are absolutely not allowed to do in the park, contribute in some odd way to the romance of Paris. Strictness, rules, disciplines, boundaries dam the libido, as Freud knew, even when you are five, and make it overflow backward. It is the knowledge of how awkward your splashing feet will look to the rich women on the chaises that prevents you, tantalizingly, from kissing the mermaid’s invisible nipple.

Sometimes now, watching Martha—watching her nurse the new baby, or just lying beside her at night and watching her sleep, practically gobbling up sleep, her brow furrowed, in her new mother exhaustion—I thought that though I knew her better than I had ever known anyone, I didn’t know her now nearly as well as I had when our days were broken with the thousand small distractions of life in New York. She had been my Cressida, unique in a pool, and in Paris had had to evolve from a fantasy figure into a reality principle for a chaotic husband and a small boy and then a baby. In New York we would meet at dinner and spill out the day’s discontents, and they were always discontents with other people. Our discontents now crystallized not so much around each other—we hadn’t come to that quite yet—as around tiny things that we held each other responsible for and that each of us pursued with silent, independent fury. Instead of rebelling together against our common prohibitions, we nursed our little exasperations.

I, for instance, had become absolutely furious about the long hallway in our apartment, which ran all the way from the kitchen, where I cooked, way in the back, to the dining room up in front, a constant jostling corridor of plates, forgotten Evian water, and spilled spices, like a trade route in the Byzantine Empire. Back and forth we went, again and again, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (Kitchens in Parisian apartments are always off at the back, at the end of a long corridor, since there were originally no kitchens, or else because they were for servants, who were expected to be Out There in Back.) I didn’t exactly blame Martha for the length of time it took to get dinner to the table, cold, but I didn’t exactly forgive her for it either.

Martha’s exasperation, for which she didn’t exactly blame me, but which she thought I might have done something about if I were a more efficient person than I am, was the absence of a decent copy shop. She looked after the bills and the dry cleaning and the rent—all the small logistics of life—and she couldn’t find places where you could just go in, hand in a manuscript, and have them copy and collate it, one, two, three, just like that. They had instead machines where you had to feed in two-franc pieces, page by page. (The government discourages video rental stores in Paris, in order to protect the little repertory cinemas whose business, its quite true, would otherwise be destroyed. I don’t know who’s being protected by the discouragement of Kinko-style copy shops; the remaining scriveners and clerks and copyists, I suppose.) The absence of napkins drove her crazy, too. She loved order and cleanliness, and the refusal of a French take-out shop to give more than one napkin per sandwich made her wild. “They hoard napkins,” she would complain. “It’s as though it’s still wartime.” New York, America, where paper napkins shower down like confetti on New Year’s Eve, had become, in her memory, napkin heaven, napkin world.

One day, when I was working in my little office on the latest subject that the office at home had sent in, Martha came storming into my office.

“What’s this?” she said, angry as I had ever seen her, waving a sheaf of envelopes and paper with a blue and gold crest on it.

“What’s what?” I asked, though I knew, or thought I knew.

“These bills,” she said, waving white paper with a blue and gold crest on it. “What is this all/or?” she cried.

“Hot chocolate,” I said weakly.

“Hot chocolate,” she repeated scornfully.

“And cake,” I added.

“Do you know how much this costs?” she said.

“Of course I know. But what can I do? It’s Cressida.”

“Say no.” She looked at me darkly. “That’s a lot of hot chocolate,” she added suspiciously.

“It’s Ada too,” I explained. “She has a habit.”

She walked away. I wondered if she really thought I might be having an affair at the Ritz and if, in some secret way, she wished I were.

Three weeks, and then four went by, and I depended on the children’s happiness to support, to float my own. Luke and I, in the vestiaire, would always have the same two conversations or variations on them. First we would have a sharp, pointed exchange about the nature of buoyancy. What makes people float in water? Well, people are lighter than water, I explained. If you were made of water yourself or well, metal, or something, you would sink. He thought this sounded weird, and I thought so too, actually. People certainly don’t seem lighter than water. They seem just the opposite. People seem heavy as can be compared with water. People are obviously heavier than water; just touch them and then touch water. I knew it was the right answer, but it seemed as unconvincing to me as it did to him. Then we would discuss the conventions of nudity. Why was it OK to be nude in the vestiaire but not in the pool or around the pool? It was a matter of custom and convention, I explained, or tried to. The metaphysics of modesty was even harder to explain than the physics of floating.

I joked with him about the little girls. The sublime Ada and the glorious Cressida, I called them, and those became their names. “What means sublime?’ he demanded, and I gave some more examples of things, besides Ada, that were scary but irresistible (though I will say right here that I have never met anyone quite as sublime as Ada).

(What does make things float, by the way? That they are lighter than the thing they float in sounds fine when you say it—I know it is the right answer—but it is not a convincing answer because things, however much lighter they may be than the thing they float in, are still so heavy, too heavy to keep up.)

Finally, after about four weeks of joy, Luke had to miss a Wednesday session, I forget precisely why: His class was going on a trip to a goat farm to see how chevre is made or off to an apple farm to help press cider. They were always doing things like that. Anyway, I went to the Ritz myself, as always, feeling the eyes of al Fayed on me, in the person of the sunglassed security men who hid discreetly at the entrance. I got into my swimming suit, my body tensed for the contest to get Luke’s suit on and get him pointed in the right direction, down toward the pool, and I was a little disconcerted when I found I didn’t have to do it.

The girls were already in the pool.

“Where’s Luca?” Cressida cried when she saw me. “Where’s Luca?” She always called him Luca, in the Italian manner, and said it with that funny trans-European intonation, the accent oddly placed on the first syllable: “Where’s Loo-ka?,” just like Audrey Hepburn saying, “Take the pic-ture,” in Funny Face.

He couldn’t come, I explained; his school was doing something that day.

“I’m so sad,” she said, and made a face. “I’m so very sad. I wanted to swim with Luca.” And she swam away, inconsolable. I swam a little myself, and then I slipped away before I could buy hot chocolate for the rich little girls, half expecting to be expelled from the Ritz, a child masher, buying hot chocolate only to serve his son’s romance.

I enjoyed having the Ritz to myself, for once, though, before we had to leave it. I went down to the hammam—that’s what the French call a steam bath—and read the instructions. There were nearly as many prohibitions as those posted on the gates to the public park, although these were more varied. Translated, they read:

“Obligatory,” “forbidden,” “strongly discouraged,” and “not authorized”: four ways of saying “not allowed,” each slightly different, each implying slightly different penalties. Such elegant variations on the theme of No! And these intended for the rich too. You can’t do that here, the French taste for order reaching even into the rich man’s locker room. Who would want to read a newspaper in the steam bath? The ink would get all over your hand. It was like the warnings on the park gates. Who aside from a French functionary would think so encyclopedically about all the things you can’t do in a park? But then only if you can’t, do you want to. If you can, you don’t.

When I got home, I sought Luke out right away. “Hey, you’ve made quite a score with Cressida,” I said. “She was just broken up because you weren’t there today.” “What did she say?” he asked.

“She said, ‘Where’s Luca? I miss Luca, I wish Luca were here to swim.’ Like that. Nothing would cheer her up.” He seemed to take it only half in.

The next Wednesday came, and I stopped work early and went to collect the bathing trunks and towels.

“Hey, come on, let’s hustle up,” I said to Luke when he came home after a half day of school. “We have to go to the pool today to meet Ada and Cressida.”

He shrugged. “Daddy, I don’t really feel like going.”

I was dumbfounded, really struck dumb.

“You don’t?” I said at last. “Why not?”

“I just don’t feel like it,” he said, and went into his room to play.

Fifteen minutes later I tried again. “C’mon,” I said, “the sublime Ada and the divine Cressida are expecting us.”

“I just don’t feel like going,” he repeated. Then he looked up at me, a strange half-smile that I had never seen before on his face. “Daddy,” he said, “what will Cressida say if I’m not there?”

“She’ll say she’s sad,” I said, not sure where we were going.

“No, but what will she say exactly. What exactly will she say?”

Then I got it. “I don’t know. I guess, ‘Where’s Luca? I wish Luca were here? I miss Luca so much.’”

“What else?”

“I don’t know. Just like that.”

“No, say exactly what she would say Tell me exactly what she would say.” His face was shining.

“You know.” I groped. “‘I miss Luca. I wish he would come swimming with me.’” I felt vaguely as if I were reciting pornography.

“I’m not going,” he repeated.

The eternal, painful truth of love had struck. Proust wasn’t exaggerating, I realized. Five was fifteen, five slipped into fifteen—or thirty-five, or fifty for that matter, I suppose—seamlessly He was struggling with the oldest romantic-erotic question. Was there more pleasure to be found in sharing Cressida’s company or in feeling the power that he held by making her suffer from his absence? More pleasure to be found in sharing joy or in denying joy, in knowing that he now possessed the power to make her miserable, change her entire emotional state, simply by his absence?

I was already at the door, and was already turning the handle to leave, when he popped out of his room at last.

“OK,” he said, “I’ll go.” I was glad, of course. We went to the pool, and they had a good time, though I noticed that now Cressida, ever so slightly, swam toward him, I bought a lot of hot chocolate, and everybody drank it.

I told Martha the story that night, and she seemed somehow stirred. She wanted to know what Cressida had said, too.

“Well, what exactly did she say?” she said. “What exactly did she say when she saw him?” His absence was alive in her too.

Was it an accident or not that we shared a bottle of champagne, our own chocolat chaud, that night for the first time since she had become big with Olivia, right in the living room, with Tony Bennett singing the English lyrics of our favorite old Michel Legrand song, one of the songs that had gotten us here onto the boulevard Saint-Germain, “You Must Believe in Spring”? Could it have been that her son’s first thrill of sadism with a woman had reawakened her own sense of the fragility of desire, of the urge to renewal that runs through the eternal possibility that Wednesday will come and someone will not be at the pool, no matter how many wet Wednesdays there have been before? I don’t know. There was at least for a moment present again between us the central elements of love: buoyancy, seminudity, and uncertainty, that mixture of imperfect faith and intoxicating drink that is desire.

Our abonnement was running out that next week. From now on, I knew, we would have to cadge invitations to swim on Wednesday from Cressida and Ada and couldn’t just show up as equals. But I didn’t have the heart, the courage to explain to Luke that we were rubes, just visiting, trespassers of a kind. I just told Luke that we wouldn’t be swimming there anymore. It didn’t seem to bother him any more than our going there together had impressed him. In childhood, I suppose, you are always a little lighter than your circumstances and just keep floating. He worried more about getting his pleasures than about keeping them. He would make me promise him things, in precise order: “First we’ll go to the pool, then we’ll have hot chocolate, then we’ll have dinner, then we’ll play a game, then we’ll have the Rookie story….” He knew that if he didn’t get a contract written down in advance, you could lose any part of it, and that worried him. On the other hand, he didn’t worry that the pleasures would ever run out. Life was full of good stuff. The budget of pleasures is tighter in childhood, but the economy of pleasure at least is always in surplus.

We had one last thing to do, of course. We had tried to kiss the mermaid so many times, and we had always failed, because he was too short and I was too scared.

“Let’s just touch the mermaid,” he said wisely, this time, and we held our breaths together, and then we did.

When we were getting ready to leave Paris, I found several hundred shower caps, pristine in their gold and blue boxes, hidden in his bottom drawer.

One Last Ride

Paris won the century, against all odds. At least we won the party, which is the next best thing to dominating the period. In London they had built a giant wheel and a giant dome and a great big rhetoric of newness to greet the next thousand years. In New York, unduly jumpy despite all the money and power, our friends’ major millennial ambition seemed to be to keep out of midtown. One couple we knew had decided to drive down from the country, where they were hunkering down in Y2K alert, park on Ninety-sixth Street, go to a midtown party, and then get back in the car and get home, before the lightning struck, keeping Times Square at a safe and wary distance.

But that was New York, where everything was happening anyway, one millennial party more or less hardly mattered, everybody there was probably on to the next millennium anyway. London was more annoying. We would arrive at Waterloo Station on the Eurostar—transplanted Americans, of course, but still patriotic Parisians—and feel vaguely ashamed, cheesed off, even sort of country cousinish. Where did London come by this feeling of confidence, this sense of entitlement, all this girder and vinyl construction? My cousin Philippe, who had once wandered with me through the outer arrondissements of Paris in search of von Stroheim festivals and Dominique Sanda memorabilia, had moved to London now too and was dropping me E-mails about the progress of his fish restaurant, disparaging the provincial cooking in the country he had left behind.

Yet on the night, Paris shone, scored a clear and beautiful triumph. It had, to be sure, been a weird run-up through Christmas week. A siege of flu had struck Europe. It hit our family right in the kisser. Everyone was sick. I had been banished to the sofa, in fear that my flu would spread to the baby (It did anyway) I shook with the chills on the sofa all night, only to find a fevered Luke sympathetically jumping in every night alongside me. (Sympathetic? Or just so satisfied by the idea that Daddy had at last been banished from the marriage bed that he wanted to make sure that he didn’t stray back?) Anyway, there is nothing so strangely comforting in sickness as the feeling of an all-elbows-and-knees five-year-old with a 103 fever, shaking alongside you on a narrow velvet sofa.

It was Christmas Eve by the time we had all recovered, and Martha and I had to crowd all our shopping into that single day, rushing from Au Nain Bleu for a two-wheeler with training wheels for Luke up to Bonpoint for a sea green tulle first dress for Olivia, and then quickly into line at Laduree for our bucize de Noel. (We actually got summoned out of line, as people who had wisely ordered in advance, and got our buche from an efficient but unprepossessing-looking Laduree bakery truck, parked at the curb on the rue Royale.) Parisians are efficient Christmas shoppers, I suppose, or maybe everybody else was home sick with the flu. Anyway, the rue Royale was pretty much empty by five o’clock, and Martha and I, walking out into the pure violet and gray light of the place de la Concorde at twilight in December, had it to ourselves. The Concorde at Christmas at five o’clock has as many subtly distinguished shades of gray as a pair of flannel pants painted by Manet.

Christmas was nice. Luke liked his two-wheeler enough to want to try it out right away (with training wheels) in the little park down the rue du Bac, and after a single fall, he went right around the bust of Chateaubriand on it. The flower store on the commercial part of the street was, to our surprise, open, although there was no one minding the store. We searched a little and found the entire flower family having Christmas lunch in the little shed behind the flowers. The madame wiped her mouth and sold us some tulips and threw in some of the painted white twigs as a gift. Everyone came out to admire Luke’s red and chrome two-wheeler.

On Christmas night the wind, following the viruses, socked it to Paris all over again. We woke up at five in the morning, thinking that someone was trying to push open our front door. Nobody there. It was just the wind, blowing away inside the building—blowing so strongly even in the corridors that it pressed against every door. Then we went to look out the windows and saw it blowing so hard that you felt, at least, as if you could see it, as streaking lines of force, like the pen streaks behind Superman’s cape. A hundred-plus-miles-an-hour wind blew for an hour. It lifted up the awning on the café across the way, tore wooden shutters off old buildings, and even made the outer walls of our building shake—really shake, stone shaking, a scary sound. The winds lifted all the Christmas trees that lined the street right up and sent them blowing like tumbleweeds down the boulevard Saint-Germain. One of them still had its lights on, plugged in on a long cord, writhing and blinking.

There was a lot of damage outside Paris—the park at Versailles may be a century returning to what it was—and even in Paris most of the parks, including the little one where Luke had taken his first bike ride, were closed for a few days. But the city was more or less patched up by New Year’s Eve, or Saint Silvestre, as the French more often call it. We went out for a walk at six and went back to the Concorde with the children, the baby sleeping in her poussette. There were wheels, small Ferris wheels, set up all along the Champs-Elysees, and then one big Ferris wheel, covered with white lights, at the Concorde—a big wheel, sure, but the same wheel they put up there every Christmas, no big London-type deal.

It was a winter evening like every other winter evening in Paris: the temperature somewhere in the forties, with a little damp mist and a white-gray sky. The whole place had a nice, easy, almost small-town flavor. People strolled. A guy climbed up the face of the obelisk in the center of the place and then climbed back down. The police grabbed him, and the crowd booed. We went home, bedtime for the kids, thinking, only a little ruefully, that with two children, the night of the millennium in Paris wouldn’t be a lot different from Arbor Day in Kalamazoo: Bedtimes (and bedtime stories and bedtime stalls and bedtime nursing) rule all, even a fete that came once a thousand years. Millennial time is public time, history time; children’s bedtimes are experience time, the real clock that ticks in life.

Then, at midnight, we opened our living-room windows and stepped out onto the tiny balcony outside. We had the TV on, CNN bringing the millennium from around the world. The London party, for all its buildup, seemed, we thought from watching it—and even heard from a few English friends who had called—actually a bit of a dud, with long lines and damp squibs and a nonworking Ferris wheel (our wheels were smaller, but they spun like crazy). We felt meanly, smugly glad.

Then we heard bangs from away down left down the boulevard, over by the Invalides, and a muffled roar. We looked at the television screen and saw the Eiffel Tower, all lit up. They had set up fireworks so that they began at the base of the tower, exploding in gold and violet around its piers, and then dramatically in gold bursts and haloes, working their way up to the top. As the fireworks reached the top, the entire tower turned on; twenty thousand or so small flashbulbs that had been wired to the tower went off at once, blinking hyperfast. The tiny constant explosions of the little bulbs made the tower look as though it had been carbonated, injected with seltzer bubbles. It was a beautiful sight. I thought of going out to see it firsthand, like a responsible reporter, but it was late—hey, come to think of it, it was after midnight—and anyway, the children were asleep. So we watched the whole thing on TV, and were proud anyway, one last virtual CNN experience, but with a living room window open, and the cold air coming in, and one ear at least hearing the muffled bangs of the real thing taking place a few blocks away.

I was still kicking myself for missing the show when about a week later Luke and I went to the big Ferris wheel for an after-school ride and stopped to buy a crepe creme de marrons—still his favorite Paris treat—and then decided (I decided; Luke accepted) to walk home across the Concorde bridge. We stopped to admire the searchlight that had also been placed on the top of the tower, sweeping around Paris, when suddenly the whole damn thing exploded all over again, the thousands of little flashing lights sparkling and shooting off and raising hell, just the way they had on New Year’s Eve. I looked at my watch; it was five forty-seven on an ordinary Wednesday. Either an haut fonctionnaire in the mayor’s office, following an inscrutable but precise schedule, had set the whole thing off again on the minute, maybe in honor of some visiting dignitary, or some elevator operator or janitor working in the base of the tower had thrown the switch again, just for the hell of it. Either some official in a big building had set it off, or else it was just some little guy with a taste for mischief—culture or civilization, one or the other, and you would never know which just by looking.

The tower with all its dancing lights, seen real, looked a thousand times more beautiful than it had on television, though it also looked a little as if it had been hung with a giant garland of those vulgar, blinking Christmas lights that Martha had nixed for our tree that first Christmas, when Luke was still a baby. “It looks like champagne,” Luke said, and we laughed, he with pleasure at scoring a simile, and I with pleasure that the simile he had scored was, well, so French. We stood on the Concorde bridge and watched the towering, immense spire sizzle for five minutes, and then ten.

I thought: Here we were, at the end of the century and that’s what we have to get excited, same old belle epoque, fin de siecle stuff, champagne, and the Eiffel Tower? That exhausted stuff, that dead stuff. Only it isn’t dead, or even really sick or, in a certain sense, even old. It’s here right now, we’re looking at it right now, Luke is young in Paris right now, and in that sense, the sparkling tower is the same age he is. He’s going to take it with him through life, not as part of the lost glory of the French past but as part of what happened to him when he was a kid. “It looks like champagne,” he said again, meaning to please me. I recalled the other night not long before when I had been trying to read one of those knotty, dense books about evolution and consciousness that are popular now and had come across an argument about whether, as a human invention, you should value more Newton’s Principia or the Eiffel Tower. The argument, surprisingly, came down in favor of Eiffel, on the grounds that the principles of physics have a permanent general existence outside ourselves and, had Newton never existed, would eventually have been discovered by Schnewton, while the tower, in all its particulars, could have been built only in Paris at Eiffel’s moment by Eiffel, even though it was, after all, only a “minor piece of romantic engineering.”

We went to New York first in December and then in January, to find a place to live. The forces drawing us home were pretty strong and even pretty attractive: We wanted Luke to go to a New York school, for one thing. “We have a beautiful existence in Paris, but not a full life,” Martha said, summing it up, “and in New York we have a full life and an unbeautiful existence.”

Luke had come to associate French, for us the language of romance and the exotic, with authority and order, with school. It was his German. Sometimes, at home, he would pretend to be Zeus and call out to his French teachers from the top of Mount Olympus. “Oui, oui, oui?” he would then say, mimicking their high, humorless accents as they turned their heads to look up at the god on the mountain. Then, zap, right between the eyes with a thunderbolt. He would produce what I believe is called a mirthless laugh, even with French administration at last.

Martha had at least been allowed to glimpse a proper copy shop in Paris. It was down near the rue Vavin, just outside the Luxembourg Gardens. We came across it one day, on one of our last strolls, walking home from the playground. A vast glass front, pristine, humming, superfast color Xerox machines, ten or twenty of them, right in front, eager attendants in white T-shirts, ready to collate a manuscript or laser-copy a photograph: It was her Xanadu, right there where you needed it and just as we were leaving.

When we got back, still cold February weather, we went up to the Luxembourg Gardens again, and Luke, slightly to my surprise, said that he wanted to go on the carousel. Martha sat on the little bench with Olivia, nursing discreetly. (“You can’t really nurse in Paris openly,” she said the other day, “the way I could in New York. I’m always putting on a scarf, and I feel people staring at me. It’s not puritanical, really, more sort of the opposite. It’s that baring your breast here is really meaningful and loaded.”)

Luke got up on one of the beat-up and beautiful old horses. There were a couple of other kids up there too in the cold weather—Paris winter, neither bitter nor chilly nor sunny, life under the perpetual gray skies. Luke asked for a stick when the guy offered them around and held it tight, and I recalled the near baby who had come to Paris five years before.

The carousel started up, and Luke, back absolutely straight, brow slightly creased, watched the man holding the rings. His stick dipped to pick up the ring, and angled to let the ring with its little leather tag drop to its end. One. Once around again the second time, back straight, stick out, ring on—perfect. The carousel picked up speed, and since it has no music, the only sound you could hear was the sound of the ancient wheezing fan belt going faster and faster as it drove the horses and carriages around. Bang, bang—two more rings, picking them like cherries:

back straight, stick out, unsmiling, taking one ring after another and slipping it down his wood baton.

I was unreasonably pleased and then felt a little guilty about my own pleasure. It seemed so American, so competitive; the other French fathers on the bench just sat there, watching with sober pleasure, not seeing even a carousel as a competitive sport. But as Luke whirled around, now really going fast, and grabbed still another ring—I only knew it now by the slight clang of wood on metal and the ring missing—I couldn’t help myself.

“Hey, sir”—I call him sir a lot, Johnsonianly—“you’re unconscious.”

Luke, a blur of gray coat on the brown horse.

“What means unconscious?” I heard him ask, his voice clear and then fading away as the carousel whipped him around.

“It means you’re doing great without even thinking about it,” I called out.

The carousel was beginning to slow down now—the normal five-minute ride at an end. I saw the man’s hand on the lever, bringing the ride to its close.

“Daddy,” Luke said, and I thought I heard a little concern in his voice, a small edge of worry, “Daddy, I am thinking about it,” he said, and he didn’t even try for the one last ring that the man held out, before the carousel stopped for good and the man took back the stick and shook off the rings, so dearly won, to give to the next child who would get up on the carousel in the Luxembourg Gardens and give it a try.