CHAPTER 3

Three Hearty Eaters

I. LES GOURMETTES

ONE FRIDAY IN APRIL 1951, I invited eight members of Le Cercle des Gourmettes for lunch at 81 Rue de l’Université. The Gourmettes was an exclusive women’s eating club started back in 1929 by some wives of the all-male Club des Cent (the premier men’s gastronomic club, limited to one hundred members) to show that women knew something about food, too. Most of the Gourmettes were in their seventies, of the right sort of family background, and were mostly French—although their leader, Madame Paulette Etlinger, was a spry old American who spoke in a kind of half-English/half-French of her own. They met for lunches or dinners in a model kitchen lent by the EDF (Électricité et Gaz de France) every other Friday for a cours de cuisine: while a professional chef did the cooking and teaching, the Gourmettes gabbled and gossiped, and sometimes helped with things like peeling and seeding, then sat down to a stupendous lunch.

I had joined the club a few months earlier, urged on by Madame Etlinger, who wanted more American members. It was terribly amusing, as I met all types of Frenchwomen and learned quite a bit about cooking.

I had instigated the Gourmettes’ lunch chez nous because I enjoyed the members’ dedication and wanted to get to know them better. But my real agenda was to help Chef Bugnard, who was retiring from the Cordon Bleu and was looking for catering work and private lessons. Although I never mentioned it blatantly, my plan was that Bugnard would cook such an impressive meal that my guests would want to hire him themselves.

The Gourmettes took themselves rather seriously, and as I rushed about, dusting and straightening things, I noticed that my favorite Aubagne pottery suddenly looked a bit too rustic, and that there was more than one spot where the ancient wallpaper sagged from the wall. We had a lovely set of wineglasses, but I had to run downstairs to borrow some decent silverware from Madame Perrier. No sooner had I finished spiffing up than the doorbell rang.

My eight guests ranged in age from about forty-five to seventy-three, and were all Frenchwomen who had lived elegantly “dans le temps.” Each had a discerning and expectant look in her eye.

Chef Bugnard started us off with tortues of crab pounded together with shrimp and herbs and mayonnaise, served in pastry shells with toast on the side. Then came a fantastic poularde Waterzooi: chicken poached in white wine and white bouillon, on a bed of julienned carrots, leeks, and onions that had been pre-cooked in butter; slathered on top was a sauce made with egg yolks and cream. And for the grand finale, he served crêpes Suzettes flambées, which he presented with a theatrical, flaming flourish.

Sitting back with satisfied smiles at the end of the meal, the delighted Gourmettes agreed that my dear old chef had done a fine job indeed.

When the Gourmettes gathered for a meal, their husbands—calling themselves les Princes Consorts Abandonés—would often meet on their own for a fabulous restaurant luncheon. Paul was visibly excited by this prospect, and was not disappointed by his first outing with the Princes: “This appears to be the group of civilized, witty, intelligent gourmets I’ve been looking for all these years,” he said. On special occasions, the Gourmettes and Princes would share a meal together. Once, a mob of about thirty of us trooped out into the countryside to eat at a charming farmhouse restaurant, and another time fifty of us were taken on a guided tour of the Chambre des Députés, where we saw the speaking room, the wonderful old library, the murals and statues, and had a splendid lunch at the députés’ own restaurant. As with le groupe Foçillon, we felt lucky to have found such an interesting bunch of like-minded, and very French, friends.

ONE NIGHT we hit the town. Paul and I were joined by Cora du Bois and Jeanne Taylor, friends from the OSS days, for dinner at the Tour d’Argent. The restaurant was excellent in every way, except that it was so pricey that every guest was American. At eleven-thirty, we drove up to the Place du Tertre, where we struggled past the barkers and milling tourists in the narrow streets. At the Lapin Agile we paid two thousand francs and squeezed our way to some stools in back. The air was foggy with tobacco smoke, and a chap played boogie-woogie on an upright piano. We ordered brandied cherries, but they never arrived. Finally, a man with a good baritone voice sang four traditional French folk songs, and then we crammed our way outside again and breathed deeply in the cool night air. We strolled along the terrace in front of Sacré-Coeur to stare down at the city. Paris was serene and quiet in the moonlight, and seemed to stretch away to infinity.

Les Halles at night

Working our way over to Place Pigalle, we dipped into Les Naturistes. Drinking demi-blondes at the bar, we watched about twenty young women wearing rhinestone-encrusted triangles walk across the stage in time to the music. The show lacked sparkle, so we headed off to the Left Bank, where we found a jolly nightclub called Le Club Saint-Yves. The walls were plastered with posters, postcards, and handbills from the theater world of the 1890s. The audience was made up of simple folk, all French, who were obviously having fun. What the singers lacked in voice, they made up for with personality and verve. After the club closed, at 3:00 a.m., we went on to Les Halles and walked around admiring the forts des Halles—the barrel-chested market workers—unloading crates of fresh watercress from trucks, stacking freshly cut flowers, and preparing for the day. It was cold and dark, but the vast marketplace was beautiful under splotches of yellow electric light. As dawn lightened the edges of the sky, we found ourselves at Au Pied de Cochon for a traditional bowl of onion soup, glasses of red wine, and cups of coffee. At five-fifteen, we straggled home.

FOR THE FIRST TIME since the war, strikes were legal in France, and now the Communists were having a high old time bollixing everything up—instigating fights in the Chambre des Députés, and starting little strikes here and there. By the spring of 1951, Paris was in the grip of a debilitating general strike led by the Confédération Générale du Travail, or CGT, the biggest holding company for the unions. The CGT was said to be Communist-dominated, and it had cynically prodded gas, electricity, telephone, and dockworkers to strike under the name of “increasing workers’ wages” (which was a legitimate need), but really for the CGT’s own political gain (which was not).

As a result, there were hardly any buses or metros running, little electricity, and just a whisper of gas for our stove. (To avoid an explosive mixture of air and gas seepage, they continued to feed the tiniest bit of gas into the pipes.) Cooking became a challenge. Even a simple dinner of lamb chops (forty-five minutes), boiled potatoes (over one hour), canned peas (ten minutes), and grapefruit suddenly wasn’t so simple. My ten-day supply of cat food came unfrozen in the icebox. And when we gave a dinner party for six, I had to do most of my cooking on the electric stoves in the basement of the Cordon Bleu.

As many streets still relied on gaslit lanterns, the dimming effect was reminiscent of a wartime blackout. Driving at night was hazardous, as pedestrians were invisible, bikes looked like fireflies, and other cars would dazzle you when they flashed on their headlights every few seconds. The few metros that did run were jammed to impossibility, and it took from two to four hours to make a metro trip that usually took forty minutes.

Paul and I initiated the Blue Flash Bus Service, picking up and dropping off embassy staff all over Paris—at Port de Clichy, Gare de Lyon, Nation, and Commerce. We’d never seen such traffic. Half of it was made up of bicycles; the rest was army trucks being used as commuter buses, and any kind of vehicle that could be dragged out of scrap yards and root cellars and made to run on homemade fuel.

During this unsettled period, Paul became preoccupied with two subjects: the fact that most people didn’t believe in the possibility of flying saucers, and the fact that the U.S. wasn’t doing enough to prepare Western Europe for a Russian invasion. In both cases, he claimed, “people need to see the thing in order to believe it.” Paul and Charlie—the sons of an electrical engineer and a bohemian singer—shared a dual nature: they were extremely practical and could build you a house or wire your lamp without batting an eye; but they were also mystical, enjoyed the mumblings of fortune-tellers, and believed in the possibility of ghosts and flying saucers.

I did not share this trait. I was more concerned with the problems in front of me, such as how to get around Paris during the strikes, where to find the best asparagus, and how to further my program of self-education.

I had been trying to read Serious News Articles—a Harper’s essay about post-war England, a Fortune article about free trade—and to remember their facts and lines of argument in order to discuss them intelligently at dinner parties. But it was a struggle. My sievelike mind didn’t want to lock away dates and details; it wanted to float and meander. If I mixed all those facts and theses up with a little gelatine and egg white, I wondered, would they stick together better?

II. HOME LEAVE

DORT AND IVAN were engaged, and the wedding would be held in New York, in June 1951. She blossomed like a peony around him, and I was supportive of their union. But it was no secret that Big John was not wildly enthusiastic about it. Just as I had done, Dorothy had chosen someone completely different from our father to be her life-mate.

We hosted a farewell jamboree for them at 81 Roo de Loo. The pièce de résistance for the evening was a mammoth galantine de volaille, which took me three days to create and had been adopted from a recipe in Larousse Gastronomique. First you make a superb bouillon—from veal leg, feet, and bones—for poaching. Then you debone a nice plump four-pound chicken, and marinate the meat with finely ground pork and veal strips in Cognac and truffles. Then you re-form the chicken, stuffing it with a nice row of truffles wrapped in farce and a fresh strip of pork fat, which you hope ends up in the center. You tie up this bundle and poach it in the delicious bouillon. Once it is cooked, you let it cool and then decorate it—I used green swirls of blanched leeks, red dots of pimiento, brown-black accents of sliced truffle, and yellow splashes of butter. The whole was then covered with beautiful clarified-bouillon jelly.

This exquisite dish took time, but it was great fun. The hardest part was arranging the decorations on top, which in my color-pencil rendering looked meager and childlike. Luckily, that nice Mr. P. Child came to the rescue with a stylish design. The final result, I must say, was magnificent—a suitably grand send-off for the beaming bride- and groom-to-be.

SINCE 1944, Paul and I had spent four and a half years out of the United States and two and a half years in it. On May 4, we would board La Liberté, bound for New York, and excited to see our distant homeland.

Before we left Paris, and with a lump in our throats, we had decided to sell the Blue Flash. The car had served us well—carrying American ham and Burgundy wine and Italian spaghetti and Swiss typewriters and Maine lobsters. But it had a wheeze in every pipe, busted springs, peeling chrome, and a tick in the motor, and was in need of two hundred dollars’ worth of repairs. We ordered a new car, which we’d pick up in the States.

In the meantime, Chef Bugnard had told me that, despite my exam debacle, I was well qualified to be chef in a maison de la haute bourgeoisie. It was a nice compliment, but I was no longer satisfied with being “just” an accomplished home cook. Cooking was so endlessly interesting that I wanted to make a career of it, though I was sketchy on the details. My plan was to start by teaching a few classes to Americans in Paris. My guiding principle would be to make cooks out of people, rather than gobs of money: I wouldn’t lose money, but I’d dedicate myself to the teaching of gastronomy in an atmosphere of friendly and encouraging professionalism.

Still, if Freddie and I were ever going to open the Mrs. Child & Mrs. Child restaurant, I’d need a diplôme from the Cordon Bleu. This meant retaking the final exam.

When I made inquiries, Madame Brassart once again failed to respond. Fed up, I wrote, “It surprises me to see you take so little interest in your students.” Once again, Chef Bugnard spoke to her on my behalf, and once again a date for my test was miraculously set. This time, instead of steeping myself in challenging recipes, I simply memorized the dishes in the Cordon Bleu’s little booklet. When the day came, I took the exam in my own kitchen at Roo de Loo. It consisted of a very simple written section followed by the preparation of a basic meal for Bugnard and my friend Helen Kirkpatrick. I passed.

In September, after we had returned from the States, I finally received my diploma. It was signed by Madame Brassart and Chef Max Bugnard, and had been backdated to March 15, 1951! At last, Julia McWilliams Child could say that she was a full-fledged graduate of Le Cordon Bleu, of Paris, France.

MEANWHILE, DORT and Ivan had a lovely wedding at the St. Thomas Church in New York City. After the ceremony, Paul and I jumped aboard the Chief in Pennsylvania Station and crossed the familiar-unfamiliar U.S.A. to California—where the weather, the flowers, and the trees were always wonderful, everybody had a Cadillac, and where, as Candide put it, “everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”

In Pasadena, we were absorbed into a seemingly endless stream of cocktail parties, lunches, and dinners. The atmosphere of ease and charm there felt both intimately familiar and strangely foreign. I did my best to remain polite and positive during our two-week stay. So did Paul, who nearly strained a muscle trying to create good feelings while staying true to his own convictions. He had to bite his tongue when my father’s friends would casually scorn President Truman, Jews, Negroes, the United Nations, or “all those Phi Beta Kappas” in Washington.

Back in New York we picked up our brand-new car, a gleaming black Chevrolet Styleline Deluxe Sedan, model 2102, which we promptly christened La Tulipe Noire. The Tulipe swept us north along the interstates, to Charlie and Freddie’s cabin in Maine, where the car’s new tires and fenders were immediately christened with some good old-fashioned sticky brown mud. Over the next week, we managed to sun and swim and work California and its discontents out of our systems. While Paul helped Charlie construct a new road, fell trees, and build a new room for the cabin, I busied myself making bread and bouillabaisse in the makeshift kitchen. It was a little slice of heaven. In mid-July we celebrated my thirty-ninth birthday (a month ahead of the actual date) with a picnic on the stony beach, where my niece Rachel presented me with a gloriously silly hat, decorated with wildflowers, seashells, and Slinkys.

Finally, it was back to New York and onto the Nieuw Amsterdam, for an uneventful return trip to France. We arrived in Le Havre on July 27.

After driving to Rouen, we stopped in for lunch at La Couronne, where we ordered exactly the same meal that we’d had on my first day in France, more than two and a half years earlier: portugaises (oysters), sole meunière, salade verte, fromage blanc, and café filtre. Ah me! The meal was just as sublime the second time around, only now I could identify the smells in the air quicker than Paul, order my own food without help, and truly appreciate the artistry of the kitchen. La Couronne was the same, but I had become a different person.

III. LA CHASSE

IT WAS la morte-saison, and an estimated one million Parisians had evacuated the city for their summer vacances. All the decent restaurants were boarded up. So were the laundry places. We had intended to have our kitchen repainted, but could not find anyone to do the work for us. Paul spent an evening on home improvements—patching holes in the Cordova-leather walls in the dining room, hanging a lovely nude painted by Charlie in our bedroom, then using the lumber from the nude’s packing case to add a one-foot extension onto the end of our bed. At last, I could fit my size 12 feet comfortably under the covers, rather than have them sticking out like a pair of gargoyles.

The locals were gone, but the streets of Paris were thick with Youth from all over the world. Many of these were Boy Scouts, returning from a worldwide Jamboree in Austria. One of them, a fifteen-year-old cousin of mine named Mac Fiske, had lunch, dinner, and a bath at our place.

“What do Boy Scouts like to eat, anyway?” I asked.

“A lot,” Paul quipped. And he was right. Mac had the appetite of a Russian wolf. As he departed, Mac said: “You’re such nice people! You’re the only people I seen around here who have a lot to eat all the time!”

IN SEPTEMBER, the weather turned rainy and cool and satisfyingly beautiful, with big shadowy thunderclouds alternating with bright shafts of sunlight. The Tulipe Noire still wore its New York license plates, but the rain washed the New England mud and grit out from behind its ears. Paul was madly busy at the USIS, arranging a fall show of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and going to a million and one official functions.

In October, we were at a cocktail party at Averell Harriman’s house, where I noticed he’d hung photographs of some of his heroes, like General Sherrill, on the wall. This gave me a thought: if I ever went into the cookery business, it would help to have photos of some of my heroes on display—Carème, Escoffier, and, naturellement, Bugnard. One should always prepare for the future!

Autumn was hunting season, “la chasse,” a serious passion in France, and suddenly wild game of every pelt and feather appeared in the marketplaces. Wild hares and rabbits hung whole; haunches of elk, wild boar, and venison were presented with hoof and fur intact. The shoppers insisted on this, Bugnard explained, for how would you know what you were buying if the game was all skinned and wrapped up?

I was eager to try these delicacies, and was thrilled when Bugnard instructed me on where to buy a proper haunch of venison and how to prepare it. I picked a good-looking piece, then marinated it in red wine, aromatic vegetables, and herbs, and hung the lot for several days in a big bag out the kitchen window. When I judged it ready, by smell, I roasted it for a good long while. The venison made a splendid dinner, with a rich, deep, gamy-tasting sauce, and for days afterward Paul and I feasted on its very special cold meat. When the deer had given us its all, I offered the big leg-bone structure to Minette. “Would you like to try this, poussiequette?” I asked her, laying the platter on the floor. She approached tentatively and sniffed. Then the wild-game signals must have hit her central nervous system, for she suddenly arched her back and, with hair standing on end, let out a snarling groowwwwllll! She lunged at the bone and, grabbing it with her sharp teeth, dragged it out onto the living-room rug—luckily a well-worn Oriental—where she chewed at it for a good hour before stalking off. (Even in such intense circumstances, she rarely laid paw on bone, preferring to use her teeth.)

Game birds are especially popular in autumn. You see gaggles of pheasants and grouse, woodcocks with their long thin bills, partridges, and wild duck in the marketplace of every village, hamlet, and town. It seems the French will eat almost any feathered flying creature, from thrushes to swallows to blackbirds and larks (called alouettes, as in the song “Alouette, Gentille Alouette”); on several occasions we ate a tiny but delicious avian called un vanneau, or lapwing.

Partridge was one of my favorite discoveries. During one early-morning exploration of Les Halles, Chef Bugnard stopped at a friend’s stall and, picking up a partridge, said, “Here you see a perdreau.” The generic name for partridge is perdrix, but a young roasting bird is a perdreau. He decided to demonstrate how to make the famous perdreau rôti sur canapé, a roast partridge on a crouton of its own chopped liver.

Bending the tip end of the bird’s breastbone, he said, “Feel that. It bends a little at the end.” With some difficulty at first, because of the feathers, I felt the breastbone. It did indeed have about half an inch of flexibility at the tail end. The bird’s legs and feet were also subjected to Chef’s inspection: if there was a claw above the back of the heel, it was mature; youthful perdreaux have but a nubbin where the eventual claw will be, and their legs are not raddled by age. The feathers, too, tell something, since those of the young have a bit of white at the very tips.

Picking up a mature partridge, a perdrix, he said, “When you feel a rigid bone from neck to tail, you have maturity.” A perdrix wants braising in cabbage, he said, and perdrix en chartreuse is the classic recipe.

At the Restaurant des Artistes, on Rue Lepic, Chef Mangelatte offered a beautifully roasted perdreau nesting on a toasty crouton, surrounded by sprigs of very fresh watercress and a small haystack of just-cooked crisp shoestring potatoes. Its nicely browned head, shorn of feathers but not of neck or beak, would be curled around its shoulder, and its feet, minus claws, folded up at either side of its breast. It’s hardly an American presentation, but a game-lover wants to see all those telltale appendages, just to be sure it’s really a perdreau on the platter.

The patron beautifully and swiftly carved off legs, wings, and breast, and served each person an entire bird, including the back, feet, head, and neck (when eating game, you nibble everything). He had placed the breast upon the canapé, an oval-shaped slice of white bread browned in clarified butter, topped with the liver—which had been chopped fine with a little fresh bacon—then mixed with drops of port wine and seasonings before a brief run under the broiler. The sauce? A simple deglazing of the roasting juices with a little port and a swirl of butter. Delicious!

The bird itself is smallish, with a different whiff, a winey brown promise of rosy dark meat that is also tantalizingly yet subtly gamy. You want it hung just long enough so that when you flare the breast feathers you begin to smell game; then you pluck it and roast it at once.

This is the kind of food I had fallen I love with: not trendy, souped-up fantasies, just something very good to eat. It was classic French cooking, where the ingredients have been carefully selected and beautifully and knowingly prepared. Or, in the words of the famous gastronome Curnonsky, “Food that tastes of what it is.”

IV. SIMCA AND LOUISETTE

ONE DAY IN NOVEMBER 1951, we had a Gourmette, a Madame Simone Beck Fischbacher, to lunch at Roo de Loo. We talked about food, of course. She was a tall, dashing, vigorous française of about forty-two, with shoulder-length blond hair parted on the side, pale milky skin, high cheekbones, dark-rimmed glasses, and firmly held convictions.

Raised in an aristocratic household in Normandy (her grandfather produced Benedictine, a cordial liqueur), she had been brought up partly by English nannies, and could speak decent, if heavily accented, English. She was mad about food, and her specialty was pastry and desserts. She was intensely energetic. Although she never attended college, Simone had channeled her vigor into things like bookbinding, at first, and then into cooking, her true love. She studied at the Cordon Bleu under the famed chef and author Henri-Paul Pellaprat, whom she also hired for private cooking lessons. She had extensive knowledge of the cuisine of her native Normandy, the northern region of France, renowned for its rich butter and cream, beef, and apples.

Simone’s second husband, Jean Fischbacher, was a lively Alsatian and a chemical engineer at the L. T. Piver perfume company. (Her first marriage ended in divorce.) For Simca and Jean, the subject of food was a precious and meaningful thing. During the war, they had faced terrible deprivations: Jean had been captured by the Nazis, and Simca sent him messages sewn inside prunes that were delivered to his prison camp. A humorous and cultured man, he had nicknamed his wife Simca after the little Renault model she drove: he thought it was funny that such a big woman (she stood over five feet eight inches tall—lanky for a Frenchwoman) could fit into such a tiny car.

Simca and I had met earlier that year, at a party for French and Americans involved with the Marshall Plan. Knowing we were both food-obsessed, our host, George Artamonoff, the former president of Sears International, introduced us. Simca and I hit it off right away. For the next hour we talked about food, food preparation, food people, wine, and restaurants. We could have kept talking all night, and agreed to meet again.

A few days later, Simca introduced me to another Gourmette, Madame Louisette Bertholle, a slim, pretty woman with cropped dark hair who had spent time in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She was married to Paul Bertholle, the European representative of an American chemical company; they had two daughters. Louisette was a dear person, small and neat, with a wonderfully vague temperament. As Paul said, she was “every American’s idea of a perfect Frenchwoman.”

Louisette, me, and Simca in the Roo de Loo kitchen, using the famous mortar and pestle and a tamis to make quenelles

Simca and Louisette, it turned out, had been working on a cookbook that they hoped to publish in the United States. (Simca had already published a slim brochure of recipes, Le pruneau devant le fourneau, about prunes and prune liqueurs, for a group of prune-boosters.) Louisette had contributed a few dishes, but, as Simca told it, it was she who had worked like a madwoman to muster over a hundred recipes for their book—ideas garnered from her own experiments, her mother’s notebooks, her family’s cook, restaurant chefs, the Gourmettes, and so on. She had sent the recipes to a family friend in the U.S.A., Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a successful author from Vermont and a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s editorial board.

In her reply, Mrs. Canfield Fisher did not mince words: “It won’t do,” she wrote. “This is just a dry bunch of recipes, with not much background on French food attitudes and ways of doing things.” Americans were accustomed to eating lots of meat and processed foods, she said, and French cooking was virtually unknown there. “You’ve got to preface the recipes and tell little anecdotes—something that explains the whole way the French do things in the kitchen.” Mrs. Canfield Fisher ended her letter with a suggestion: “Get an American who is crazy about French cooking to collaborate with you; somebody who both knows French food and can still see and explain things with an American viewpoint in mind.”

It was good advice. Through a friend of Louisette’s, the would-be authors had placed their collection of recipes with the small New York publisher Ives Washburn. Washburn had agreed to produce and distribute the book, and had given their material to a freelance food editor named Helmut Ripperger, who would get the book into shape for the U.S. market.

It sounded like a wonderful idea, a modest little book filled with tried-and-true French recipes written just for American cooks. I wished them bonne chance!

ALL THIS COOKERY talk made me eager to put the finishing touches on my own recipes and to start teaching. My ideal pupils would be just like the kind of person I had been: those who aspired to be accomplished home cooks, capable of making the basic themes and variations of la cuisine bourgeoise, but didn’t know where to begin. Simca and Louisette and I discussed this idea, and discussed it some more, and before long we had agreed to start up a little cooking school of our own, right there in Paris!

With their knowledge of food and local connections, my recent experience at the Cordon Bleu and access to American students, it seemed a logical step for the three of us to make en concert. We unanimously agreed that our fees would be nominal—just enough to cover our expenses—and that our classes would be open to anyone who wanted to join them. Louisette offered the use of the kitchen in her rather grand apartment on Avenue Victor Hugo, on the Right Bank, once she had finished renovating it. I offered to place an ad in the U.S. Embassy newspaper. In a nod to the Gourmettes that had brought us together, we decided to call our venture L’École des Gourmettes.

V. L’ÉCOLE

IN DECEMBER 1951, Life magazine ran a damning article entitled “First, Peel an Eel,” about the Cordon Bleu. In it, the author, an American named Frances Levison, recounted her six-week elementary cooking course with Chef Bugnard in an arch, amusing style. She made much of the school’s small rooms, non-working ovens, ancient knives, lack of basic supplies, “cryptic” teachers, and the French “attitude toward hygiene and water, neither of which has much appeal for them.” Perhaps she overstated her case for the sake of drama, but her facts were basically correct.

In Paris there was a cry of alarm over what impact the Life story would have on the school. But when Simca and Louisette discussed it with Madame Brassart, she waved her hand dismissively and denied the school had any problems whatsoever.

In mid-December, Chef Bugnard told me that, since the article had appeared, “nothing has been done to improve matters” at the school. And when I attended two cooking demonstrations there just before Christmas, I couldn’t help noticing that there was no thyme, not enough garlic, a broken basket, and no proper pot for cooking nids de pommes de terre. Hm.

ON JANUARY 15, 1952, Paul and Charlie celebrated their half-century birthday on either side of the Atlantic. Paul was alternately vexed by his advancing years, and buoyed by his theory that “old age is a state of mind and a function of mass hypnosis rather than an absolute.” He took to quoting the phrase Illegitemus non carborundum est (“Don’t let the bastards grind you down”).

Over in Lumberville, Pennsylvania, our country cousins Charlie and Freddie began their demi-siècle celebration with iced champagne and continued on in a sort of free-floating bacchanal all night long.

In Paris, meanwhile, the celebration of Paul’s fiftieth birthday was our most impressive party yet. We had six couples for dinner. So that I could avoid hopping in and out of the kitchen all night, we hired Chef Bugnard to cook for us, a maître d’hôtel to serve, and another man to pour wine. Jeanne-la-folle was beside herself with excitement, and she provided enthusiastic help in the kitchen. Paul hand-lettered invitations, and we made spiffy “medals” of colored silk ribbon, enamel pins, and nonsense inscriptions for each guest (mine was labeled “Marquise de la Mousse Manquée”). Paul chose the wines from our cave to match an elaborate menu that Chef Bugnard and I composed: amuse-gueules au fromage (hot pâtes feuilletées topped with cheese, served in the living room with Krug champagne); rissolettes de foie gras Carisse; filet de boeuf Matignon (served with a nearly perfect Bordeaux, Château Chauvin 1929); les fromages (Camembert, Brie de Melun, Époisses, Roquefort, Chèvre); fruits rafraîchis; gâteau de demi-siècle; café, liqueurs, hundred-year-old Cognac; Havana cigars and Turkish cigarettes.

Three days before the party, Paul awoke with a swollen and aching jaw. At breakfast he couldn’t even bite into a soft piece of bread without rising three feet out of his chair in pain. Was it a sign of Creeping Decrepitude? Was it a psychological reaction to turning fifty? Or was it just plain bad luck? Furious at himself, he swallowed fistfuls of Empirin tablets to ease the pain, but they had no effect. “What a cynical little twist of the knob on Fate’s machine,” Paul despaired. The dentist diagnosed Paul with an advanced case of pyorrhea: eventually three of his teeth would have to be pulled. For now, the dentist ground down the surfaces of Paul’s afflicted teeth, scraped away calcareous deposits from under the gums, and injected lactic acid into the pocket.

By Monday evening, Paul had a fever and was hardly the Birthday Boy of our dreams. To make things even more interesting, he had bitten his tongue while it was numbed. Nevertheless, the party went off magnificently.

Paul smiled handsomely in a brilliant-green wool waistcoat with brass buttons, a bright-red tie, and bright-red socks. I wore a wreath of tiny roses around my head, to which I added a golden crown given to me by Hélène Baltrusaitis. Chef Bugnard performed magic in the kitchen, and we all agreed it was one of the finest meals we’d ever eaten, anywhere, anytime.

A FEW DAYS after the party, our vague plans for a cooking school were snapped into sharp focus when Martha Gibson, a wealthy, fifty-five-ish Pasadenan, called to say she wanted cooking lessons. The next day, a friend of hers, Mrs. Mary Ward, called to say she’d like to join in, too. Then a third American, a nifty forty-year-old gal named Gertrude Allison, called with the same request. All three of them had plenty of free time and money in hand.

There was only one problem: we three profs weren’t quite ready for them. Louisette’s kitchen renovation was not finished, we had not discussed menus or even our teaching format, and we had never cooked together before. But is anyone ever completely ready for a new undertaking, especially in a profession like cooking, where there are at least a hundred ways to cook a potato?

Tant pis, we decided: we have three students and three teachers—allons-y!

L’École des Gourmettes convened its first class on January 23, 1952, in our kitchen at 81 Rue de l’Université. We focused on French food, for that’s what we all knew, and classical technique, as we felt that once a student has the basic tools they can be adapted to Russian, German, Chinese, or any other cuisine. There was much discussion parmi les professeurs, as we all had different methods. Whereas Simca and I tended to take a scientific approach (i.e., we measured quantities), Louisette took a more romantic approach (she’d use a pinch of salt or a splash of water, and worked out her recipes by instinct).

My colleagues had a lifetime of eating and cooking in France, and had been working on a cookbook together. I had learned how to clean and carve all sorts of things, make wonderful sauces, and sharpen a knife; plus, I brought an American practicality to such questions as how to shop, cook, and clean without a staff (something that Simca and Louisette did not have a grasp of at all). It took us a bit of time to get used to working side-by-side, but ultimately the combination of our three personalities meshed very well indeed.

Every Tuesday and Wednesday, we’d begin our class at ten and would end at one, with lunch. A typical menu would include poached fish, beef knuckle, salad, and a banana tart. Beforehand, we’d pool our money and shop for ingredients; then we’d type up detailed notes on the menu, steps to take in preparation, and the techniques we’d be using. The atmosphere of our classes was just what we’d hoped for—homey and fun, informal but passionate. Everyone was free to comment or criticize, and if mistakes were made we discussed what they were and how to avoid them. In one of the early classes, we made a leek, potato, and watercress soup; instead of using cream, we used some old milk, which curdled. It was embarrassing, but we soldiered on. We teachers were learning just as much as, if not more than, our students!

L’École des Gourmettes

We charged seven thousand francs (about twenty dollars) for the first three lessons, which worked out to six hundred francs apiece per lesson. That included everything, plus about three dollars’ worth of wear-and-tear on our kitchen per lesson.

Chef Bugnard giving a class at our école

My friends in the markets were fascinated by our école. The darling chicken man on la Rue Cler gave us a special price, and was most anxious to give our students a demonstration on how to choose a fine bird. The butcher felt the same way about his meats. Dehillerin, the cookware store, offered a 10 percent discount on all student purchases. Jeanne-la-folle enjoyed the classes hugely; she’d arrive at one to eat leftovers and help clean up. Minette was interested, too, though she felt she wasn’t getting her share of leftovers.

We were lucky in our early students, for they were enthusiastic and hardworking. Martha Gibson and Mary Ward were both widows, and very pleasant, but neither had found a passionate calling in life. Gertrude Allison had spent three years in the cafeteria business, had studied home economics at Columbia University, and had a sound business sense. She ran an inn in Arlington, Virginia, called Allison’s Little Tea House, which catered mostly to officers from the Pentagon at lunchtime and to family groups in the evening. Gertrude said she had taken several cooking classes in New York with the English chef Dione Lucas, whom she found adept but not very precise. I quizzed Gertrude about the economics of her restaurant. She charged $1.75 to $3.50 for dinner, she said, adding that studies showed that restaurateurs shouldn’t pay more than 6 percent of their gross for rent.

One Wednesday, Paul came home to join us for lunch, and he brought Mary Parsons, the USIS librarian, who lived in the same hotel as Mary Ward. We served sole meunière, a mixed salad with chopped hard-boiled eggs, and a dessert of crêpes Suzettes flambées au Grand Marnier. As he watched us bustle about the kitchen, Paul was surprised to see how much fun both the students and teachers were having.

Our pupils had not had much exposure to wine, and kept making uninformed statements like “Oh, wine, I don’t like it.” When Mary Ward said, “I never drink red wine; I like only dry white,” Paul took it as a personal insult. “That’s like saying, ‘I never talk to French people; I only talk to Italians,’ ” he said. Then he offered her a glass of red wine he considered quite good, a Château Chauvin ’29, a flowery, well-rounded Bordeaux. Mary took one sip and said, “Hey, I never realized red wine could taste like that!”

As a result, Paul agreed to give the class a lecture on wines. He explained how to match individual wines to specific food, how to store bottles, cork them properly, and so on. At the end, he served us all a fine bottle of Médoc 1929, and won three new converts.

THE LONGER WE LIVED in Paris, the more the city and its residents got under my skin. We especially enjoyed le groupe Foçillon’s evenings chez Baltru. It was a memorable bunch. Louis Grodecki, known as “Grod”—the intense, thick-lensed Polish art-historian—was about thirty-nine, and was a medieval stained-glass specialist. He had made an important discovery at the Abbaye de Saint-Denis, which dated the original building back to the sixth century, much earlier than his archaeological rivals had. He reveled in his triumph.

Jean and Thérèse Asche had become dear friends of ours. She taught grammar school, and Jean was a professor of the history of structure at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. He was on a strict dietary regime due to the lingering aftereffects of his time in Buchenwald: forced to carry heavy rocks there, he suffered from compressed disks in his back; of the sixteen hundred men in his unit, only two hundred survived the camp. The Asches remained hearty, intelligent, and sensitive people, and Paul and I loved their company.

Our luminous hostess, Hélène Baltrusaitis, remained perhaps my closest friend in Paris. Jurgis, however, seemed to grow more sour, prickly, and egocentric every day. Paul took to calling him Yoghurt. He seemed to ignore his son, Jean, a sweet boy who didn’t have much direction. Paul made a point of talking to the boy and gave him lessons on how to paint with watercolors. We had even agreed that, if the Baltruses were killed in a plane crash, Paul and I would raise Jean.

But people are constantly surprising. Jurgis, we were shocked to discover, was a genuine war hero. In the early 1940s, Hélène’s stepfather, Henri Foçillon, had escaped to the United States, where he broadcast anti-fascist messages back to France on clandestine radio. But in his haste to escape, Foçillon had left behind a mass of incriminating papers in his country house, filled with the names of French Resistance fighters. The house, near Chaumont, was occupied by a group of German engineers, who, as far as anyone knew, had never stumbled on the papers. After a year, the engineers were suddenly transferred elsewhere. Jurgis learned that a new batch of Germans was due to arrive in two days. So he made his way from Paris to Chaumont, broke into the house, found the papers, and destroyed them just before the new contingent arrived. He had undeniably shown selfless bravery.

IN SEPTEMBER 1952, our four-year stint with USIS would automatically terminate. What would happen to us then? No one knew. Despite our best efforts to divine the future, no information of any kind was forthcoming from Washington, D.C. For all we knew, Paul might be offered another post abroad, be recalled to the U.S.A., or be rudely shoved out of government.

I grew depressed at the thought of leaving Paris. Our three-plus years there had been so glorious, had passed so quickly, and had left us with so much more to learn and do, that the very idea of decamping left me cold and disgruntled. Many conversations along the theme of “What Shall We Do Next?” ensued, and the upshot was a fundamental decision: if we were to leave government service, we’d try to find other work in Paris and stay for one more year—at least.

SIMCA, LOUISETTE, AND I had, for diplomatic and psychological reasons, renamed our school L’École des Trois Gourmandes, which I roughly translate as “The School of the Three Hearty Eaters.” Anita Littell, wife of Bob Littell, head of Reader’s Digest’s European office, and a couple of other women had signed up for a class, but before we began this session Simca and I spent hours practicing by ourselves.

We experimented with recipes, tools, and ingredients, and made several useful discoveries. In working on piecrusts, for instance, we had tested French versus American ingredients. To our horror, we discovered that French flour has more body than its U.S. counterpart, and that the French needed a third less fat to make a nice crumbly crust. Why was this? I wanted to know. We supposed that, in order for U.S. flour to last forever on supermarket shelves, it must have been subjected to chemical processes that removed its fats. The French flour, in contrast, was left in its natural state, although it would go “off” more quickly and become maggoty. In order to make our French recipe work for an American audience, we tested different proportions of flour-to-butter, flour-to-margarine (a substance I abhorred and referred to as “that other spread”), and flour-to-Crisco; then we tasted the crusts hot and cold. Based on our experiments, we adjusted our ratios. It was labor-intensive, but a thoroughly satisfying learning process.

Simca was full of inventive ideas for hors d’oeuvres and cakes and pastries, and made delicious things with sugar, egg whites, and powdered almonds. The latter was one of those ingredients I didn’t think were widely available in America. To find out, I wrote Freddie and asked what she could find in her local supermarket. She reported back that, although powdered almonds were not available in her rural corner of Pennsylvania, they might be available in cities like Manhattan or Chicago. This sort of on-the-ground reporting from my belle soeur in the U.S.A. was extremely helpful. She also sent me pictures of the different cuts of meat from her butcher shop, and a set of American measuring cups. In fits and starts, we were making progress!

In the meantime, I had been working on my “hen scratches”—my collection of recipes. I was amazed to learn, upon close inspection, how inexact many of the recipes in well-regarded books were, and how painfully exact ours must be to be worth anything at all. Each recipe took hours of work, but I was finally getting them into order. Through trial-and-error, for instance, I deduced exactly how much gelatin must go into exactly how much liquid per exactly how much mayonnaise so one can make pretty mayo curlicues on a fish dish.

My friends thought I was insane to be spending so much time on such details. But I found the process of getting recipes into scientific workability absolutely fascinating.

Louisette did not devote as much time as Simca and I did to culinary exactness, but she seemed to know everyone. At one point, she had us over for lunch with Irma Rombauer, author of the Joy of Cooking, who was vacationing in Paris. I had always adored “Mrs. Joy’s” book, and liked that her personality shone clearly through its pages. In person, she turned out to be a very likable seventy-year-old Midwestern housewife type. She took great interest in our Trois Gourmandes project and told us all about her book. Joy was aimed at neither the wealthy nor the poor, she explained, but at the middle masses, who did most of their own cooking. Understanding how important time was around the house, she had concentrated on dishes that were not too fancy and didn’t require hours of preparation. She added that she’d had troubles with her publisher: when she wanted to include a detailed index, they refused; plus, she claimed, she’d been weaseled out of the royalties for something like fifty thousand copies of her book. Publishing, it seemed, was a difficult business.

VI. LE PRINCE

ONE DAY LOUISETTE took Simca and me to meet the celebrated gastronome Curnonsky. He was about seventy-nine years old, rotund, with twinkling blue eyes, triple chins, and an eagle beak. His ego was enormous, but so were his charm and the breadth of his knowledge. Curnonsky was most famous for his twenty-eight-volume encyclopedia of France’s regional foods, but he had also founded the Académie des Gastronomes in 1928, and was editor of the French cooking magazine Cuisine et Vins de France.

His real name was Maurice-Edmond Saillant. As a twenty-year-old reporter, Saillant, even then a gourmet, was sent by his newspaper on a routine assignment to cover a feast of Russian royalty in Paris. (All things Russian were very à la mode at the time.) He wrote a magnificent article, but his editor balked at his rather pedestrian byline: “After all, Monsieur Saillant, you are an unknown reporter. If we use your real name, who will ever read this? It’s really a pity you aren’t a Russian noble.”

“That’s simple to fix,” replied Saillant. “I’ll sign it ‘Prince Curnonsky.’ ” And he did. He had cleverly created this vaguely Russian-sounding nom de plume from the Latin words Cur non and the English “sky” (“Why not sky?”).

The “prince’s” article was read by le tout Paris. “Who is this fabulous Curnonsky who knows so much about our cuisine?” everyone wondered.

Les Trois Gourmandes having dinner with Curnonsky

By the time the truth leaked out, several months and several more articles later, Curnonsky was established. And he’d written—and eaten and drunk—off his reputation ever since.

The day we met him, Curnonsky greeted us at four in the afternoon in his apartment, dressed in a billowing nightshirt and red bathrobe. He was eating a boiled egg. As usual, he would go out to tea, or for a cocktail, a bit later. Come evening, his biggest decision would be which invitation to accept, as there were always more offers than he could accept. After an enormous meal at one or another of Paris’s best restaurants, followed by the theater or music or the latest nightclub (always at someone else’s expense), he’d retire by 4:00 a.m.

Simca and I immediately fell for him. He struck me as a character out of a novel, or from another century. I couldn’t imagine a person like le prince coming from anywhere but France.

DORTIE WROTE TO SAY she was pregnant, and described herself as “fat and helpless.” I was so happy for her now that she was a full-fledged woman, with a breast-full of milk. Ivan had quit the government, and they had moved to San Francisco, where he was learning the clothing trade at Garfinkel’s department store.

Friday, August 15, 1952, was Assumption Day: not only a national holiday but the very nadir of la morte-saison in Paris. Paul telephoned nine different restaurants in an attempt to secure a table for my fortieth birthday, but not one of them was open. We finally ate lunch at the Hôtel Ritz, which was fine. That afternoon, we walked over to the Île Saint-Louis, to visit Abe and Rosemary Manell, some friends from the Foreign Service. Abe was a natural politician, loud and quick-minded, and knew all the embassy gossip. Rosie was a large, blonde Californian painter, an Earth Mother type, and we became fast friends. They had wonderful views of Paris from their apartment. Paul was so smitten he’d return to make sketches and take photos of the canted, tiled rooftops in preparation for a series of paintings.

That evening we had a second fancy meal in celebration of my fortieth, at the three-star Lapérouse. We arranged to sit in a back room with seven tables, so as to have some (but not too many) other people to look at. Because of the season, and the prices, every table was occupied by Americans. Paul and I began our meal with sole aux délices (sole in a wondrous cream sauce with truffles) and half a bottle of Chablis. Then we had roast duck with a not-too-heavy sauce and a bottle of Chambertin ’26. Then cheese, coffee, and raspberry liqueur. It was delicious and expert and pleasant. Despite my advancing age, I still had an appetite!

I gave my first solo cooking lesson, on pâte feuilletée (puff pastry), to Solange Reveillon, a Parisienne friend. Though I’d made pâte feuilletée many times, I did it again before Solange arrived, in order to think deeply about what I was going to say and do. The lesson went well, and we filled the pâtes with mushrooms and cream sauce and ate them for lunch. It was such fun! And I learned so much by teaching. I would have gladly paid Solange for the chance to teach pâte feuilletée, rather than vice versa.

Later, I critiqued my teaching technique. When people pay good money for a class they expect skillful professionalism, and I decided that, though the cooking we’d done was fine, my presentation had not been very clear. I lacked experience and self-confidence. Paul, who had taught school for seventeen years, reminded me that when teaching one must be willing to “play God” for a bit—in other words, to be an authority. I knew he was right, but I have never liked dogmatism. I was more inclined to tell my students what I don’t know, or that there are so many other ways of doing things, and admit that I am aware of only a few of the possibilities. Ah me, there was still so much to learn, and cooking was only half of it. I felt I’d have to teach at least a hundred classes before I really knew what I was doing.

OUR TENANTS had moved out of our Olive Avenue house in Washington, and the real-estate agent wanted to know if he should rent it again. We didn’t have an answer. Nor did anyone else in the U.S. government, apparently. It was maddening. Paul and I didn’t want to change our life pattern, nor did we fancy standing in the middle of the prairie with no options at all. So he began to agitate quietly behind the scenes. “I understand how government works,” Paul wrote his twin. “To the boys in Washington . . . I am just a body. If there is a slot in Rome, or Singapore, my body could be plunked there—or Zamboanga.”

Abe Manell, a bureaucratic operator par excellence, said he’d try to pull strings so that Paul could take over Abe’s previous job as public-affairs officer (PAO) in Marseille. “That’s the best job in France!” Abe declared. “You should snap it up in a minute.” A PAO was a number-two man to the consul general in a place like Marseille. The PAO was a jack-of-all-diplomatic-trades: a public-relations man (who promoted the U.S.A. and French-U.S. relations), a political officer (who sized up Communist influence), a cultural impresario (who acquired American movies and books that local residents might like, worked with educational exchanges, spoke to the press, and arranged sporting events), and diplomatic factotum (who made speeches, laid wreaths, unveiled statues, arranged dances for U.S. Navy sailors, etc.).

“Well,” we said to each other, “Marseille is our second-favorite city in France. If we get the PAO offer, why not give it a whirl?”

Feeling a premonitory sadness at leaving Paris, we walked up to the edge of Montmartre to see a movie. Afterward, we wandered over to the Restaurant des Artistes. We arrived late, and as there were no other clients we had a sort of family get-together with Monsieur Caillon, his daughter, and Roger the waiter. We all sat around a big table and chatted in a very familiar way. After that, we walked down the hill and home through streets wet with the rain that had fallen while we were inside. The lamplit city glittered in its puddles, and Notre Dame loomed out of the mist, giving our nerves a twinge. When you know your time in a place is running out, you try to fix such moments in your mind’s eye.

VII. OPERATIONAL PROOF

AT NINE O’CLOCK on the night of August 25, 1952, all the bells of Paris began banging and clanging and tintinnabulating at once. It was a remembrance of the Liberation of Paris on that day in 1944. Anyone who had heard the carillon then and heard it now must have had chills running up and down the spine.

A few days later, Simca and Louisette got word that Helmut Ripperger, the freelance editor hired by Ives Washburn to shape their cookbook for the U.S. market, had upped and quit, leaving his work only partly done. My colleagues were distressed, and told me the history of their book. They had started working together in 1948. Once Ives Washburn agreed to take them on, in 1951, the “food adviser” Helmut Ripperger was hired at sixty dollars a week to produce a little booklet, based on their work, as a teaser. Called What’s Cooking in France, by Bertholle, Beck, and Ripperger, it looked fairly attractive, and the introduction and bridge passages were charming, but the recipes were not very professional. It was sixty-three pages long, contained fifty recipes, and, priced at $1.25, only sold about two thousand copies. Simca and Louisette were angry that they hadn’t even been shown a proof before it was published, and felt embarrassed by it. Now Ripperger had thrown in the towel—or had the towel thrown at him—and disappeared without finishing work on the “big” book.

My disheartened friends now faced the daunting job of finishing their work without a real understanding of how to write for the American market. As we talked it over, they almost shyly asked if I might, perhaps, be willing to help them finish their book.

“I would be delighted to!” I answered, almost before the question was out of their mouths. And so our collaboration began.

I FIRST READ their nearly six-hundred-page manuscript in early September 1952. Its problems and its potential immediately jumped out at me.

Simca and Louisette had created a big jumble of recipes, like any other cookbook. Their language wasn’t “American.” Most of the directions struck me as needlessly complicated where they should be clear and concise. And the overall conception of the book was not well suited for the American home kitchen. In fact, I didn’t like it at all. On the other hand, I wasn’t aware of any book that explained la cuisine bourgeoise the way this one did.

The more I thought about it, the more this project fired my imagination. After all, the lessons embedded in these recipes were a logical extension of the material we used in our classes. I liked to strip everything down to the bones; with a bit of work, I thought this book could do that, too, only on a much more comprehensive scale. I had come to cooking late in life, and knew from firsthand experience how frustrating it could be to try to learn from badly written recipes. I was determined that our cookbook would be clear and informative and accurate, just as our teaching strove to be.

If my co-authors agreed, not one of the recipes would stand as written. I’d turn this from a rewrite job into an entirely new book. I girded my loins, spit on the old Underwood, and began to type up my suggestions—clickety-clack—like a determined woodpecker.

Part of my problem as a practical American was the deeply ingrained chauvinism and dogmatism in France, where cooking was considered a major art: if Montagne said such-and-such, then it was considered gospel, especially by the men’s gastronomical societies, which were made up of amateurs—and, my, how they loved to talk! The history of a dish, who said what about it and when, was terribly important to them. But, as Paul liked to say, “The word is not the thing” (one of his favorite utterances, borrowed from the semanticist Alfred Korzybski). As I worked on the manuscript, I reminded myself not to accept Simca and Louisette’s directions at face value. I subjected every recipe to what we called “the operational proof”: that is, it’s all theory until you see for yourself whether or not something works.

I checked every recipe in the manuscript on the stove and on the page. I also investigated various old wives’ tales that weren’t in the regular cookbooks but that many people were “certain” were true. This took endless amounts of time.

Working on soups, for instance, I made a soup a day chez Child. On the day for soupe aux choux, I consulted Simca’s recipe, as well as the established recipes of Montagne, Larousse, Ali-Bab, and Curnonsky. I read through them all, then made the soup three different ways—following two recipes exactly as written, and making one adaptation for the pressure cooker (the stinking, nasty, bloody pressure cooker—I hated it! It made everything taste nasty! But it was popular in U.S. households). At dinner, my guinea pig, Paul, complimented the three soupes aux choux, but I wasn’t satisfied. One of the secrets to make this dish work, I felt, was to make a vegetable-and-ham stock before the cabbage was put in; also, not to cook the cabbage too long, which gives it a sour taste. But should the cabbage be blanched? Should I use a different variety of cabbage? Would the pressure-cooked soup taste better if I used the infernal machine a shorter time?

I had to iron out all of these questions of how and why and for what reason; otherwise, we’d end up with just an ordinary recipe—which was not the point of the book. I felt we should strive to show our readers how to make everything top-notch, and explain, if possible, why things work one way but not another. There should be no compromise!

Wiping my hands on my apron, I scribbled my questions and corrections in the manuscript’s margins and pressed on. A pile of wrinkled and stained pages grew steadily on the counter next to my stove.

As I went, I made some discoveries in measurement that were every bit as important to me as a groupe Foçillon scholar’s unearthing of an ancient tomb was to him. In preparing béchamel (white sauce), for instance, French cookbooks give the proportions of butter to flour in grams. But American books instruct their readers to use, say, “a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of flour,” which gives you proportionally much more butter to flour than the French method. This realization forced us to rethink the recipe. In working up our own instructions for béchamel, we told our readers to use two tablespoons of butter and three tablespoons of flour for the roux. This may seem rather dry stuff to some, but to me it was a process of discovering an important and overlooked step, and then devising our own rationally thought-out solution. In short, a triumph!

I HAD BEEN WRESTLING with the subject of butter in sauces when Paul took me to a little bistro way over on the Right Bank, off the Avenue Wagram, called Chez la Mère Michel. The house specialty was beurre blanc nantais, a wonder-sauce used on fish. It is a regional, not classical, recipe, and the leading French cookbooks, from Carème right up through Ali-Bab, Larousse Gastronomique, and Curnonsky, were all extremely vague on the subject. I could find no complete and clear description of how to make beurre blanc. So I decided to do a bit of investigative reporting.

Walking into the restaurant, we met La Mère Michel herself: a small, white-haired, capable woman of about sixty-two. She had come to Paris from Nantes, on the Loire River, in 1911, she told us, and had started her restaurant fourteen years later. Her husband’s job was to eat, drink wine, and talk to the customers, and he was good at it. The little restaurant could only hold about twenty patrons, but it had survived quite nicely, largely on the strength of its beurre blanc—a thick, creamy sauce that is really nothing but warm butter held in suspension by an acidic flavor base of shallots, wine, vinegar, salt, and pepper. It is traditionally a sauce for fish, vegetables, or poached eggs; when served with pike, the dish is known as brochet au beurre blanc.

The Michels were extremely friendly and forthcoming, and during a lull, the chef invited us into her kitchen to show us how she made her famous sauce in a brown enameled saucepan on an old household-type stove. I paid careful attention to how she boiled the acidic base down to a syrupy glaze, then creamed tablespoon-sized lumps of cold butter into it over very low heat. When we sat down to eat a carefully poached turbot crowned with a generous dollop of beurre blanc we found it stunningly delicious. The whole evening was filled with a sense of glowing satisfaction.

Back in my Roo de Loo laboratory the next day, I whipped up a few batches of beurre blanc à la Me`re Michel, then wrote up what I believed to be the first clear and comprehensive recipe for the sauce. The final test came one evening when I cloaked a conger eel in beurre blanc for a small group of friends. It was of a perfection historique.

WE THREE GOURMANDES were a good combination of personalities. Louisette contributed some valuable suggestions of the novelty type—how and where to add flourishes of, say, garlic, shallots, fresh peas, or strips of tomato—which were thoroughly French but in the American spirit. People in the U.S.A. loved food novelties. Simca and I were more straightforward chef-type cooks.

Simca was roaring along on her recipe-testing and note-taking in a very professional way, sometimes for ten hours a day.

As for me, I knew nothing about publishing, other than that it was a cutthroat game, but I had decided that cookbook writing was just the right job for me. I found myself working for entire days on the manuscript with hardly a break. The house was becoming a wreck, but I hardly noticed (and Paul was understanding). Late one afternoon, our friends the Kublers drove up unexpectedly in a big red Jeep. We all trooped out to Chez Marius for supper. It was fun. But as soon as I got back to Roo de Loo, I sat right down at the typewriter and stayed there till 2:00 a.m.

Now that I had started writing, I found cookbookery such fulfilling work that I intended to keep at it for years and years.

VIII. FRENCH HOME COOKING

ONE NIGHT, at a dinner chez Bertholle, there were a dozen people at the table. The eight women and three of the four men began shouting at each other instead of talking—a French habit. They were having a fine old time arguing about Catholicism versus mysticism, about America’s policy in Morocco, car accidents, how to mix a rum sour, and so on. I dove headfirst into the verbal maelstrom. But Paul, the only quiet one at the table, was miserable. He whispered that he wanted to leave. Well, this was one of our differences. On the way home in the car we had a spat. It began as a disagreement over what I saw as Paul’s wish to withdraw from Life and go live in an Ivory Tower, and then it somehow devolved into a silly argument over Time magazine. Of course, the nub of our argument was probably something else entirely, like the uncertainty of our future.

The U.S. government still hadn’t decided what to do with us. Our time in Paris was extended “temporarily.”

In October 1952, the cold, gray, wet curtain of winter gradually dropped down around Paris, and word came down from on high that Paul would not get the coveted job as PAO for Marseille after all. The current PAO, who had been on an extended home leave, was returning to work. The news was deflating, but Abe Manell assured us, “You may still have a chance for the job.” Two new possibilities had opened up: PAO in Bordeaux, or exhibits officer in Vienna. Paul and I talked it over and decided that we both loved France, spoke the language, had friends and contacts there, and were just not ready to leave yet. So—Bordeaux was our preference.

IN NOVEMBER, I received a letter from Sumner Putnam, head of the Ives Washburn publishing house, about our book, tentatively titled French Home Cooking. “After a year of frustration, we are still a long way from a completed book,” he wrote. “The big job now rests on your shoulders and you must be the absolute boss of what goes into the book and what stays out.” He noted that Ripperger’s work on the big book was “by no means polished,” and said, “You may want to throw out his efforts entirely.”

He continued: “The American woman who buys French Home Cooking will probably resent advice on how to arrange her kitchen, set her table, handle a skillet or boil an egg: she learned those things from her mother or Fannie Farmer, don’t you think? She expects a book that will show her how she can give her cooking the French touch. . . . If the recipe . . . can’t be easily used by the stupidest pupil in your school, then it is too complicated.”

Putnam’s letter set off a frenzy of discussion amongst us authors, our husbands, and our friends. He seemed serious about publishing French Home Cooking, and he had absolutely charmed Louisette when she had visited him in New York a year earlier. But I had learned from friends in the States that Ives Washburn was not a very well-respected house. Mr. Putnam had money, apparently, and had gone into publishing as a hobby; he knew little about cooking, did little advertising for his books, and was said to keep slipshod accounts. We were committed to him morally, but not legally, for we had signed no contract and he had paid us no advance. He wanted to see a polished manuscript by March 1, 1953. How should we respond?

Simca and Louisette argued that we should stay the course with Ives Washburn. We were unknown authors, they pointed out, and Mr. Putnam was a nice man who liked our book. What good would it do to rock the boat?

I was not convinced. Though I quite appreciated that we were unknowns, I saw no reason to crawl about on our bellies. I felt that our revamped book was good enough that, in the right hands, it would sell itself. We were professionals, we had a clear vision, and our book was going to be something new and exciting. I even predicted, without modesty, that it might one day be considered a major work on the principles and practice of French cooking. Therefore, I saw no reason to waste our efforts on a no-account firm.

We talked and talked, and finally agreed to proceed with Ives Washburn—for the moment.

On behalf of the Trois Gourmandes, I wrote Sumner Putnam, explaining that the new version of French Home Cooking would not be just another collection of recipes but, rather, an introduction to the methods of French cooking plus recipes. Our approach would build off the Bugnard/Cordon Bleu system of teaching “theme and variation,” as well as the methods we three had developed in our École des Trois Gourmandes classes. We’d write in an informal and humane tone that would make cooking approachable and fun. But the book would also be a serious, well-researched reference work. Our objective was to reduce the seemingly complex rules of French cooking to their logical sequences, something never before attempted either in English or in French.

“It is not enough that the ‘how’ [of making hollandaise or mayonnaise] be explained. One should know the ‘why,’ the pitfalls, the remedies, the keeping, the serving, etc.,” I wrote. “This is a new type of cookbook.” I concluded: “Competition in this field is stiff, but we feel this may well be a major work on French cooking . . . and could continue to sell for years.”

Mr. Putnam did not reply to my letter. Nor did he respond to our chapter on sauces, which I had sent him by diplomatic pouch. It was very odd.

In the meantime, I sent three top-secret sauce recipes—for hollandaise, mayonnaise, and beurre blanc—to four trusted confidantes, for them to test in real American kitchens with real American ingredients. We referred to these ladies—Dort, Freddie Child, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Mrs. Freeman Gates (a friend of mine)—as our “guinea pigs,” and asked them to try making each sauce just as we had described it and to give us honest feedback. “Our object is to explain ‘how to cook French’ for beginner and expert cooks,” I wrote in a cover letter. “Do you like our vocabulary? Do you care about such a book?”

IX. AVIS

IN THE SPRING of 1952, Bernard De Voto had written an eloquent complaint about the quality of American-made cutlery in his “Easy Chair” column in Harper’s Magazine. He was incensed about stainless steel, which may have been rust-resistant but was also resistant to keeping a good edge. This happened to be a favorite complaint of mine, too. So I wrote De Voto a fan note and enclosed two non-stainless French carbon-steel paring knives.

I got a lengthy, stylish letter back—from Mrs. De Voto, writing from their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her name was Avis. She was the one who used the kitchen knives in their household, it turned out, and had suggested the subject to Bernard. Not only was Avis a stylish writer, she was a devoted cook. So began a regular correspondence back and forth, mostly about food.

Avis’s letters gushed for five, six, seven pages at a clip. In one she wrote about a wonderful pipérade—an omelette with peppers, tomatoes, bacon, and onions—she’d had at a restaurant in Paris. The sense memory of that dish had lingered with her ever since, and she wondered how they made it. So Paul and I tracked the place down to have a look. It was unremarkable-looking and crowded inside, with people shouting and a radio blaring. I wouldn’t go back there, but the pipérade was indeed excellent, and I took mental notes.

I sent Avis a copy of our sauce chapter, and explained about the troubles we’d had with Ives Washburn. She wrote right back, saying she thought our manuscript had the potential to be made into a splendid book, and asked permission to show it to Houghton Mifflin, her husband’s publisher. Avis pointed out that Houghton Mifflin was well established, had plenty of mazuma, and had a cooking expert on staff, a Mrs. Dorothy de Santillana, who would know how to evaluate the manuscript from a culinary standpoint—a skill that Ives Washburn clearly lacked. Avis vouched that Houghton Mifflin were honest, generous, and wonderful to work with.

I was thrilled. But when I brought this idea up with my colleagues, Louisette balked: she felt we had an obligation to keep working with Sumner Putnam. I disagreed, saying that, in light of no advance, no contract, and, lately, no communication from him whatsoever, we had no obligation to the publisher. After some hedging, Simca sided with me. Louisette, feeling guilty, relented.

With a sigh of relief, I dashed off a note granting Avis permission to show our sauce chapter to Houghton Mifflin. Then we Trois Gourmandes crossed our fingers and got back to work.

ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28, all of France’s best-known eaters, drinkers, food-sellers, preparers, and writers gathered for a fabulous banquet in Paris. These evenings were costly and could be taxing on the digestive system, and up until now we had always declined to go. But this one was special: it was in honor of Curnonsky’s eightieth birthday.

There were 387 guests, each of whom was a member of one of the eighteen gastronomic societies of Paris. I belonged to Les Gourmettes, and Paul belonged to Le Club Gastronomique Prosper Montagne (named after the legendary chef, whom many club members had worked with). We couldn’t help noticing a few cold stares from the Gourmettes when we sat at the Prosper Montagne table. But we had decided the Montagnes would be a more interesting lot, because they were all food professionals, whereas the ladies were enthusiastic amateurs.

The crowd was hearty and festively dressed. The women wore fancy hats, and the men wore brightly colored ribbons around their necks, medals, gold chains, badges, and rosettes (based on medieval guild symbols) signifying that they were important. It was snazzy and fun, and those in the know could point out to us Ignorants the difference between un chevalier du Tastevin, un chaîneur des rôtisseurs, and un compagnon de la belle table.

On my left sat an aubergiste-chef who owned a two-star restaurant in the countryside. On my right was a big-shot butcher from Les Halles. Paul was bracketed by the men’s wives, and we made a jolly sextet. Each place had nine glasses, and over the course of the meal we were ushered through a wonderful array of juices from a Pineau des Charentes to an 1872 Armagnac. The foods were superb, too: oysters, turbot, tournedos, sherbet, partridge, salad, cheeses, and ice cream. (The turbot and partridge were special “creations” to honor Curnonsky.) It had required sixteen chefs, no doubt working themselves to exhaustion, to prepare this magnificent feast.

The birthday cake was a massive ziggurat, eight layers high, decorated with eighty candles and florid fondant-sugar outbursts by a Parisian pastrymaster.

After coffee, an aged member of Le Cercle des Écrivains Gastronomes with flowing Einstein-like hair stood and gave a lengthy tribute to Curnonsky. After fifteen minutes of ponderous oration, the audience grew restless. After twenty minutes, there was a noticeable babble of talk around the edges of the room. After half an hour, the venerable homme de lettres began to pause every few minutes to glare and scold the crowd: “If the art of eating is the only art you are capable of appreciating, and the literary art means nothing to you, then I suggest you go home!”

Each of his asides was met with genial cheers and whistles.

When he finally lumbered to the end, there was loud applause and all sixteen of the chefs trooped out from the kitchen. Curnonsky beamed with pleasure, and kissed the top three chefs on both cheeks. It was now 12:45 a.m., and as more speeches began we drifted out homeward.

As a final salute to the great gastronome, twenty-seven of Paris’s leading restaurants had little brass plates made with Curnonsky’s name engraved on each. They were fixed to the best seats in every establishment. Anytime he felt like it, Curnonsky could call up, say, Le Grand Véfour, and his place would be automatically reserved and he’d be served a meal free of charge.

MY STEPMOTHER, Phila, had an operation to remove a polyp from her intestines. I arranged a three-minute call to Pop, in Pasadena. Once he’d told me the polyp was benign, we had another two minutes and forty-five seconds left on the call. With the urgent news taken care of, you never know quite what to talk about in those situations. I said: “Well, I guess you Pasadenans are pretty glad about Ike’s election results.”

“Glad? I should say we are!” Big John thundered. “Why, who wouldn’t be? Everybody’s glad! But of course you people over there, you wouldn’t know how the country feels—all your news is slanted.”

This was hard to take, especially from the man who read only the right-leaning L.A. Times. For the record, Paul and I were avid devourers of the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, Le Figaro, Time, Fortune, The Reporter, Harper’s, The New Yorker, even L’Humanité, not to mention the flood of embassy cables, intelligence briefs, and twenty-four-hour wire-service and ticker sheets pouring in from around the world. So—whose news was slanted?

A few days later, I received a note from my dear stepmother, Phila, telling me that her health was fine and asking me to please stop riling Pop up about politics, as it was too upsetting. Then my brother, John, chimed in, and told me to keep my liberal views to myself. Ye gads!

I wrote Pop religiously every week, but now that I couldn’t mention politics, or my general philosophy of life, it would be pretty dull going. He was a darling man, a generous father, a real do-gooder in his community. In fact, he had everything it would take to be a real world-beater—except that he grew violently emotional over politics (so did I, but I was training myself to be more intellectually objective). He’d gone to Princeton, but was not intellectual, and was intolerant and incurious. He absolutely dismissed Paul as an “artist” and “New Dealer,” which meant that there could be no real affection between my father and me. He was an example of how not to be. It was too bad.

IN THE FIRST WEEK of January 1953, we received a letter from Avis De Voto, which I read aloud to Simca and Louisette:

I’ve just finished reading your manuscript. I must say I am in a state of stupefaction. I am so keen about this proposed book that I am also feeling that it can’t possibly be as good as I think it is. . . . I want to take the manuscript to Dorothy de Santillana’s house right away. I know she will take fire as I have. . . . If this book makes out as I believe and hope it will it is going to be a classic, a basic and profound book. . . . I like the style enormously. It is just right—informal, warm, occasionally amusing. . . . If it gets the right publisher it wont matter how long it takes to test and try out and edit. If the publisher is interested he will wait until you have finished your book. Alright. I just got D. Santillana on the phone and I’m going to her house tomorrow with the manuscript, which I hate to let out of my clutches. She is excited. . . . We will now join in a moment of silent prayer. . . .

X. A CURRY OF A LIFE

ON JANUARY 15, 1953, Paul turned fifty-one, and was informed that it was “98 percent sure” that he would be named public-affairs officer for Marseille after all. We’d have to start the new job almost immediately, probably in March, our embassy sources said. But as we hadn’t gotten official orders yet, it was all very hush-hush.

My first thought was: What wonderful luck! We could have been sent to Reykjavík or Addis Ababa, but instead we are staying in France! My second thought was: A sudden move to the other end of the country will be tough on our cookery-bookery, not to mention the Trois Gourmandes classes. We’ll manage, somehow.

The impending shift got the old beehive buzzing. We romantically hoped that Paul’s salary would double (after four-plus years in Paris, he had yet to receive a single raise or promotion), or that the ambassador would request that we do nothing but travel slowly around France, learning new recipes, taking pictures, and making friends. We’d be sipping tea and reading the morning paper when Paul would suddenly say, “I think it would be a smart idea to have calling cards printed before we go down to Marseille, don’t you?” Or we’d be walking along the Seine and I’d blurt out, “I simply won’t take a house that hasn’t got a wine cellar. I don’t care what they say!”

But then the horrors of moving would creep up on us. “Honestly, I groan when I think of starting over in a new place,” Paul grumbled. “No wonder newborn babies cry so much. . . . If variety is the spice of life, then my life must be one of the spiciest you ever heard of. A curry of a life.”

He’d heard that when you’re a PAO the weekends are sometimes your most concentrated forty-eight hours of work in a week. “I don’t think I’m going to like this job,” he wrote Charlie. “When do you pause? When do you paint or pant? When write family, loll on moss, hear Mozart and watch the glitter of the sea? . . . Clearly, I am softened by the luxurious style of our Parisian life: comes Friday night in Paris and down comes that iron curtain between job and what I really like doing. Wham!, and I’m off with Julie on the flying carpet. . . . No backing-out now . . . Slide’s all greased, and they’re almost ready to give me the Old One-Two. . . . Hold yer hats, boys—here we go again!”

ON FRIDAY THE SIXTEENTH, we received a magnificent six-page gusher from Avis. Bernard was a meat-and-potatoes man, she wrote; he loved spicy food (especially Mexican and Indian), and wines, but was essentially wedded to the martini. Avis had secondary anemia, but was able to control it through diet; her tastes in food and drink were much like ours. As for our manuscript and Houghton Mifflin? Cautious optimism. Avis’s impression was that our sauce chapter had been well received and there was a good chance they’d want to publish our book. But it was too soon to break out the champagne.

We still hadn’t received so much as a postcard from Sumner Putnam.

I wrote to my fellow Gourmandes: “If HM [Houghton Mifflin] does happen to like our book and want it, we shall have some delicate dealings with Putnam if he also wants it. My great inclination would be to have ourselves with the HM Company, as they are one of the best. . . . I’m sure [Putnam] is a terribly nice man, but I don’t feel he is able to bring up our baby the way the other chaps could.”

A FEW DAYS LATER, Simca arrived in my kitchen with Chef Claude Thilmont, one of the great pâtissiers-en-chef de Paris, and a fine, honest, salty technician with a ripe accent. He came to teach, not to eat. We pupils showed that we could bake a cake and decorate it, too. But old Thilmont was tough, just as he ought to be, with high standards and a thorough teaching method.

“Good,” he judged our first efforts at cake, “but not nearly good enough!”

Soon we had Chef Thilmont making a guest appearance at L’École des Trois Gourmandes. He had a magical touch with piecrusts. And when you saw him squeeze decorations onto a cake, you came to appreciate the famous saying “There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry—architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter.”

That January, when I made Paul a fifty-first-birthday cake using my new skills, my husband lauded it as “a mistresspiece.” Thilmont himself described it as “not bad,” which was just about his highest form of praise. I puffed out my (modest) chest in pride.

THE MISTRAL was a luxurious and speedy Paris-to-Marseille special train, and in mid-February 1953 it rocketed us down the length of France—a rainy, half-flooded, snow-speckled, khaki-colored landscape—in seven hours. We arrived in Marseille at 11:00 p.m. for a preliminary scouting trip.

The venerable port city spread out and slanted down to the Mediterranean under a clear, star-spangled sky. We were met at the station by Dave Harrington, the man Paul would replace as public-affairs officer. He took us on a long hike around town that ended at a bar, where we drank beer and learned about the consulate and the many duties of a PAO. Then we went to another bar, for more beer and talk. Harrington was charming and easygoing and had made wide-ranging local contacts. But something, evidently, had poisoned his relationship with Consul General Heywood Hill. This gave us pause. Harrington didn’t seem like the type to make enemies. As we walked back to the hotel, Paul and I reassured each other that CG Hill would turn out to be a nice guy.

The next morning, we awoke to a bright, sunny day filled with noise. “I always forget between visits what a raucous, colorful city this is,” Paul wrote. “There seems to be 10 times as much horn-blowing, gear-clashing, shouting, whistling, door-banging, dropping of lumber, breaking of glass, blaring of radios, boat-whistling, gong-clanging, brake-screeching, and angry shouting as anywhere else.”

I didn’t agree that the locals’ shouting was “angry.” It seemed to me that the Marseillais were having a wonderful time communicating, and they liked to do it at the top of their lungs. The people were extremely friendly, the food was highly seasoned, and the wines were young and strong. In other words, Marseille was everything you’d expect in an ancient Mediterranean port city.

While I stayed in the hotel feverishly typing our culinary research, Paul went to the consulate to meet people, ask questions, and go over papers, reports, and figures. In his brief meeting with Heywood Hill, the consul general did not ask Paul a single question and hardly let him get a word in edgewise. Instead, he treated his new PAO to a treacly monologue, along the lines of: “Our little consular family is probably one of the most cooperative and smoothly working teams in the whole Foreign Service . . .” etc. Paul described his new boss as a twitchy fussbudget who had survived twenty-five years in the Foreign Service by being careful and mediocre. But this was based on only a seven-minute meeting, he admitted, and perhaps Hill would turn out to be an excellent boss after all.

On Friday the 13th, we woke to find the tropical palm trees, red-tiled roofs, and stony Mediterranean beaches covered with snow! It was beautiful but barmy. Paul drove off on the slushy road for a whirlwind of meetings with local mayors, university presidents, music-festival directors, newspapermen, real-estate agents, and other muckety-mucks in Aix, Avignon, Nîmes, and Montpellier. In subsequent days I’d join him for trips to meet another slew of mayors and editors and academics all over the hill and dale of his new terroir. We ranged as far west as Perpignan, near the Spanish border, and as far east as Monte Carlo, and along the way I was falling in love with the Côte d’Azur.

The people were hearty and idiosyncratic, the Mediterranean lent its salty-sparkly charm, the mountains were rough and rocky, and there were kilometer after kilometer of vineyards. (The French government subsidized wine-growers. Result: too many people grew grapes, and not enough of them made money, thus requiring more subsidies. A crazy system.) The weather was constantly changing. One day, the skies were piercingly blue and the wind was chilly. The next day, we’d be baking in the hot sun as we ate lunch under an orange tree and basked in the glow of a field of mimosas. And the day after that, a freezing wind called a tramontane whistled and buffeted the bony landscape, ferociously whipping the trees and bushes and grasses and grapevines this way and that.

“God, what a pile of stuff!” Paul exclaimed, as we began to pack up at 81 Roo de Loo. Sorting through our accumulated this and that, I wanted to keep everything while Paul wanted to toss it all out. (In one of our throw-away moods some years back, we threw out our marriage license, which was going a bit far.) We cursed and sweated and eventually compromised, with only a few misgivings. We were a good team.

My biggest challenge was to pack up The Book—pounds and pounds of manuscript pages, reference books, file boxes, and loose notes. It filled two wretchedly heavy steamer trunks, and then there was my typewriter and kitchen equipment. There was no room for all of this inside the Tulipe Noire, so Paul had to use a sort of weightlifter’s technique to hoist the trunks onto the roof rack: ground to knees, breathe; knees to shoulder, breathe; shoulder to rack, gasp.

To get Madame Perrier’s apartment looking the way it had when we moved in, we had to remove from storage every stick of moldy furniture and rehang every gewgaw and gilt-edged mirror in the salon, reinstall the fifty-seven objets d’art in our bedroom, neaten and clean, label every packing box, and fill every little scratch on the parquet floor with brown shoe polish. Every key had to be returned, and every clause of the lease gone over once more. Looking at the old apartment now, with its red velvet chairs, rickety tables, cracked china, torn rugs, and rusted or dull kitchenware, I wondered how we ever found it so “charming” in the first place.

The Perrier/du Couédics were an adorable family, with honor, principles, and lots of mutual affection. But we worried about them. Madame Perrier owned the building, and since the general’s death had made all of the decisions about it. She was eighty-two, and growing vague and forgetful. To make matters worse, her son-in-law, Hervé du Couédic, had suffered a bizarre accident the previous summer, when, at their house in Normandy, a tree fell on his head and badly injured him. Now his speech remained thick, his walk halting, and his mind cloudy. He was fifty-five, too young for retirement. Although he continued to go to the office three days a week, the poor chap knew it was useless and had basically given up.

What this meant was that the brunt of the family’s weight fell on poor Madame du Couédic. She had to support the family and keep up the building, but for the sake of family pride had to pretend it was her mother and husband who were in charge. It was awfully tough. She had lots of character, but could be oddly shy and insecure at times. To add further worry, Michel, her youngest son, a naval officer, was about to ship out for the war in Indochina. It was common knowledge that France was losing as many officers there every year as were graduating from military academies.

From what we could tell, our landlords had little outside income, and would be subsisting largely on the rental of our apartment. We had been trying like crazy to find someone to take the place, but without luck. When a young American couple dropped by, they spent four horrified minutes gawking at the decor and said, “We could never stand it!”

Paul and I sat down with Madame Perrier and Madame du Couédic and said, in effect, “Look, kids, if you’re going to raise the rent and want to get foreigners in here, then you’ve got to clear out some of this floozy stuff, put in some new lights, and get a telephone.”

“But those red velvet chairs are from the Belle Époque,” Madame Perrier protested, “and the velour, tout cela va ensemble!” She simply couldn’t fathom why we young American whippersnappers didn’t see the quality of the dark-green moth-eaten velvet-on-mahogany that, back in 1875, had been the chicest thing in all of Paris. And General Perrier, she added, he never wanted more light than what a twenty-five-watt bulb gave off. And this “need” for a telephone was utter nonsense—“Mon grand-pe`re n’en a même pas eu un, vous savez”—and if renters wanted one, they could just go get it themselves.

“Well,” we said to each other, “we tried.”

What to do with Minette Mimosa McWilliams Child was our last bit of business. I hated to leave her behind, but we simply didn’t have room to take her to Marseille, where we didn’t yet have an apartment. In search of a good home for her, I went to la Rue de Bourgogne to consult Marie des Quatre Saisons, who knew everyone and everything and was one of my most favorite women in Paris or anywhere. She knew exactly what to do, of course. She took me to see Madame la Charcutière, who had just lost her cat to old age. Madame took a look at Mini and smiled. I felt good about the arrangement, because Madame lived right above the charcuterie, along with a nice old dog, and Mini would be treated to all sorts of heavenly meat scraps.

When we were finally ready to move, les emballeurs arrived at Roo de Loo at 7:30 Monday morning, and inside of an hour the place looked like Ali Baba’s cave after an explosion. We were knee-deep in excelsior, crates, paper, trunks, furniture, art materials, wine bottles, paintings, photographs, bed linens, Venetian glass, Asolo silks, and cookware. Twelve hours later, the movers and I called it quits. I was exhausted. Paul had spent the day wrapped in red tape—filling out things like Form FS-446, “Advice to the Department of Initiation of Travel,” turning in our gas and PX cards, arranging for the shipment of household effects, the disbursement of paychecks, etc.

All of this frantic activity drove home the sensation that we were truly severing our umbilical ties to Paris. Woe!

Simca and Louisette threw a farewell dinner party for us, chez Bertholle. There were a dozen guests, including a special surprise: Curnonsky! When the old buzzard and I spotted each other, we hugged fondly. Simca and Louisette had begged Paul to bring his camera that night, but wouldn’t tell him why. Now it was clear: they wanted him to take photographs of Les Trois Gourmandes with le prince. So he snapped off a few, using a new gizmo called a “flash gun.”

The tone that night was celebratory rather than melancholy, for Paul and I had convinced ourselves that, rather than focus on the fact that we were leaving our beloved Paris, we were embarking on a grand new French adventure. Most important, Dorothy de Santillana had written to say she was “thrilled” with our manuscript and that Houghton Mifflin was prepared to offer us a publishing contract—whoopee!

In the nearly two months since we’d sent Ives Washburn the manuscript, we hadn’t received a single word of any kind from anyone there, which was highly unprofessional. At the end of January, we sent them a letter-of-dismissal by registered mail. A few days later, I received a blustery letter from Mr. Putnam, although he ended it with a gracious note: “I wish you luck.”

Houghton Mifflin would pay us an advance of $750, against a royalty of 10 percent, to be paid in three $250 installments.

“Don’t worry about Ives Washburn,” I told my nervous colleagues. “This isn’t a loss, it’s a gain. Houghton Mifflin is a much better publisher.” Simca and Louisette nodded warily.

THE NEXT DAY, the air was warm, the sky was a moonstone-blue, and we drove south against a constant stream of traffic—mostly cars with ski racks returning from Switzerland. Patches of snow lay along the shady north sides of ditches and forests, but the fields were sunny and already dotted with peasants seeding the ground.