Rue Férou, Paris 6me. July 1927. 1 a.m. Dizzy from three bottles of wine shared with Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, unused to modern plumbing, yanks what he believes to be the lavatory flush in his new apartment and instead pulls a skylight down on his head. Waiting to be sewn up at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly, he’s reminded by the pain, blood, and chloroform of being blown up on the Italian front in 1918. The idea of a novel based on those experiences forms in his head; call it A Farewell to Arms.
AS OF 2017, THE WORLD’S TOP TEN PREFERRED TOURIST DESTINATIONS, in order of popularity, were France, the United States, Spain, China, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Thailand, and Malaysia.
Anything seem odd about this list?
Most people traveling to Spain, Italy, Mexico, Thailand, and Malaysia cite “climate” as an attraction. All are warm countries. Many visitors to the United States likewise head for Florida, California, and Nevada—sunshine states.
And yet France, not notably sunny nor rich in tourist resorts and, moreover, hampered by a difficult language and a population not always welcoming to foreigners, tops the list, and has done so consistently for decades.
What is it about France?
The words change, but the question people ask is always the same: Why do we idealize France above so many other countries?
Not that the others don’t have their champions. A villa in Tuscany figures in the fantasies of many. For others, it’s the sun of Greece or Spain. A smaller percentage seeks the asceticism of Scandinavia or the sprawl of Russia and China. Some even raise their voices in favor of Australia.
As for cities, it would be a dull stick who was not drawn to Rome’s antiquities, the seething energy of Beijing and Tokyo, culturally rich New York and Berlin, the pageantry of Madrid, the grace of Saint Petersburg, and what Jorge Luis Borges called the “splintered labyrinth” of London.
But no capital excites the passions like Paris. Berlin, far from being a moveable feast, remains stubbornly immobile. No woman speaks with longing of “a Brussels dress,” nor do we, in search of culinary excellence, head for Zurich. And not even the most bittersweet reminiscence of Prague or Lisbon or Athens conveys the poignancy of “I remember . . . once . . . in Paris . . .”
So I ask again: What is it about France?
Truthfully, we who live here can no more understand our fidelity than we can analyze the attraction of a loved one. The question belongs with that other exasperated query, “What do you see in him?”
I had plenty of time to ponder this question as I suited up that Christmas Day for my walk with Paul. Only when I’d wrapped myself in enough heavy clothing for a trip on a deep–sea trawler did I dare step outside and guide him down the village’s main street.
We were, not surprisingly, entirely alone. Even the dogs that on a normal day would have signaled our passing with a barrage of barks and snarls had the sense to remain indoors. Before Pieter Brueghel in the sixteenth century, European artists shunned winter, painting only green fields and sunny skies. One could see why. December was not a month of which anybody would wish to be reminded.
I led Paul around the highlights of Richebourg, such as they were: Its sole shop, shuttered and derelict since supermarkets opened in nearby towns. The marketplace next door, once the site of busy trade on weekends with farmers selling their produce, now used as overflow parking for the village’s biggest employer, a hospital for brain–damage cases. Many of them were survivors of accidents on France’s widely admired freeways, like the one a kilometer away, whose traffic was audible on quieter nights.
Rural decline was nothing new. Richebourg had been going downhill since the Middle Ages. Farmworkers weren’t the only people forced off the land by mechanization. The thirteenth–century church where Louise had been christened was, as usual, bolted shut. With religion at a low ebb, mass was celebrated here only one Sunday in four, the same priest serving three other dioceses in rotation. For the christening, we’d had to hire a priest from a pool of the unemployed. He arrived with his own vestments, like a bit–part actor who supplies his own tuxedo. Have Faith, Will Travel.
A narrow lane between rough stone walls led to the village’s communal laundry. The oblong pond, fed by a spring and edged in granite slabs, where generations of women had knelt to pound their washing, looked almost quaint, though the thought of immersing my hands in that gray water was enough to freeze my blood.
Yet Paul, even as we trudged into a wind loaded with stinging fragments of ice, seemed to be enjoying himself.
There was a Viking strain in the British character that drew them to harsh places: T. E. Lawrence to Arabia, Robert Falcon Scott to Antarctica, George Mallory to Everest. Before Mallory left for the ascent from which he never returned, someone asked why he was risking his life to climb a mountain. One can imagine the pitying look with which he gave his famous response: “Because it’s there.”
The British are, after all, the only nation with a Christmas carol that actually celebrates the cold. Who else would sing words like this?
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
I’d heard Paul argue that fresh air ventilated the sinuses and cleansed the lungs. In this spirit, whole generations of Britons had endured cold showers and plunged into ponds from which the ice had barely been chipped. As a boy, travel writer Eric Newby was taught to sniff some saltwater every morning. “As a result,” he wrote in his memoir Something Wholesale: My Life and Times in the Rag Trade, “I contracted sinusitis, and was told by a specialist I consulted that this was an outmoded exercise that led to acute inflammation of the nasal cavities.” Ronald Reagan articulated the American view of such practices. Of his presidential opponent Jimmy Carter he said, “A man who says he enjoys a cold shower every morning will lie about other things.”
Paul and I each represented a national response to the weather. Britons defied it. Australians like me—and Americans, come to that—ignored it until some hurricane or flood or bushfire overwhelmed them. And the French?
Contradicting Mark Twain, who, among many others, said that everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it, the French embraced it.
Assessing how it might be most agreeably enjoyed, or at least endured, they created rituals to extract the maximum satisfaction from the climate and its seasonal variations. Weather was woven into the culture in a manner that made even minute variations a pretext for reflection, celebration, and delight.
Once, driven by ambition and misplaced patriotism, some men even tried to redesign the year to fit France’s idea of the seasons. How that came about, what grandiose individuals were behind it, and what became of them and their project says a lot about the nation where I’d decided to make my home.