Lessons from
Things,

Christmas Journal 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

There is nothing more exasperating than French monuments to unheroic local heroes. In the Luxembourg Gardens, where I run many mornings, there are statues of the great writers of France, genuinely towering and Olympian figures—real all-stars, the greats. Baudelaire scowls at the southern end of the gardens; Delacroix is greeted by angels at the other end. I salute them both every morning, while jogging by Verlaine and Sainte-Beuve. In the midst of them all there is a statue to a man whose name I, at least, have never heard, a guy named Branly, whose pedestal proclaims him to be the father of the wireless communication, radiotelegraph, and television. I am skeptical of this claim. It is a few feet away from the small, just larger than life-size Statue of Liberty, made by Bartholdi for fund-raising back when. This Liberty looks, well, sexy, free.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now comes the part that transcends ordinary functionary fiendishness to touch the high, misty edge of French bureaucratic-sadistic genius. The keyboard on the computer terminals is almost, but not exactly, an ordinary keyboard. It looks like an ordinary QWERTY keyboard—it doesn’t just have some entirely new, Pierre Boulez–inspired keyboard, so that you’re warned in advance to watch your step, or finger—but three characters have been moved. (I found out later that this is a standard French keyboard, but I had never used one before. Writers are married to their keyboards, as to their passports.) Q is exchanged with A, and the comma with the period, and, I think, the E with the O. This means that if you are a touch, or just a plain, mildly experienced, typist, you feel exactly as if you were having a stroke, since you have to interrupt the flow of typing each time you make a tiny error, and pretty soon you are so scared that you stop trying to maintain your normal speed and begin to hunt and peck.

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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