Chapter Twenty-one

En famille

Each night in my little studio apartment, the shutter windows opening up to the lives across the square, I’d been reading my way through dad’s French memoir. Like the figures I saw reading and sipping solo glasses of wine by candlelight, I would pour myself a glass of something delicious, and read my way through dad’s France.

I was up to ‘The Hotel Floridor’, the first place in Paris he stayed when he arrived from Saint Clair in May 1948. It seemed his Paris story started in Montparnasse. The first visit to Paris! What wouldn’t I give to relive that experience of May 1948.

The hotel Floridor seemed to be built over a bicycle shop, the lift didn’t work, the carpet was faded and threadbare, and a strong smell of cooking arose from the patron’s quarters. I liked it at once, and liked the patron, Louis Marandou, a broad-shouldered, red-faced Berrichon whose accent it was to take me four years to understand completely.

The room was large, and so was the bed, there was a small wash-annexe with a hot and cold tap. That was for the look of it only, like the lift, hard experience taught me. A window opened on an exterior square, around which the hotel was built. The sun shone down on washing hanging over window-sills, a glimpse of a woman’s head, a man shaving. I flopped on the wide bed and sniffed Paris smells deeply. The patron made me understand … if I wished to save money, let me just bring back some food from the shops, and a bottle of wine, his wife would cook it for me … I was en famille.

Mademoiselle Moos, an elderly woman with one leg, who had hidden resistance fighters from the Gestapo, had lived a few streets from the Floridor. She welcomed him that first night because she’d once met his sister Kathleen, and offered dad cigarettes before taking him on an express tour of shops that sold food ‘not at black-market prices’, introducing him to people to ensure he had the best knowledge of where to source what he needed during his Paris stay.

Food infused everything, back then, because it was so scarce. Unlike London, where dad had found that knowledge of where to get food was fiercely guarded, in Paris they talked of the black market almost casually.

The Hotel Floridor had been a complete contrast to his first rooming hotel in London, where he’d lie starving upstairs looking at the awful wallpaper as he smelled the cooking food that he wasn’t allowed to eat though the patron had purchased it with dad’s ration book.

According to Google, the Floridor certainly didn’t look like the Palace of Versailles dad had described in wonder, but I was so happy it was still there. I’d be able to get a sense of Paris in 1948 as dad saw it — for it was certainly unrenovated.

I walked up the steps of the Métro station at Denfert-Rochereau to wait for Clém on the busy Avenue du Général Leclerc, just a short walk from the Floridor. Laurence — Clém and Coralie’s mother; Michelle’s oldest daughter — had invited us to lunch, and she and her husband, Arnaud, lived nearby. I spied a street vendor selling fresh jonquils and impulsively bought a bunch.

Underneath my feet lay the skeletons of over six million people in the catacombs. An underground tourist attraction that had repulsed dad, since he’d learned of tour groups accidentally ‘leaving’ people there, it similarly repulsed me. I’d had to quickly deal with my claustrophobia to get around on the Métro, but I wasn’t going to pay to see any tunnels of bodies. The entrance to the catacombs, near the lion of the old city gates, seemed appropriately named La barrière d’Enfer. The Gates of Hell.

Clém greeted me with a kiss and led me laughing to the Floridor, which was still built over a motorbike shop, and still had the ancient steps and carpet. I could even picture dad pushing open ‘his’ front door. In dad’s collection of letters at Ayala’s, we even found postcards from Louis Marandou, sent to dad and Gisèle after they’d married and moved out of the hotel. Dad had returned to stay in 1973!

Clém and I walked up the steps from the front entranceway, which led to a small reception area with a little landing. The first thing I noticed was the low ceiling and the tiny lift. Dad had been over six feet tall — how on earth had he navigated Parisian lifts? It didn’t even look big enough for me.

‘Bonjour!’ a friendly man greeted us, and Clém immediately started telling him (in French) that I was from Australia, and my dad had lived in this hotel after the Second World War, in 1948.

‘Ah! Ah!’ He was smiling and friendly, not even slightly surprised that we were treating the decrepit hotel like the living museum it is.

‘He’s telling me there’s someone in the room that you think your dad described. But if you come back on Wednesday, at eleven in the morning, they’ll let you see it when the man checks out.’

The man behind the counter offered for Clém and I to walk around in the ‘common areas’, so we crept up the sticky stairs to the kitchen. The stairs were so steep, I couldn’t help but wonder at dad’s gasping lungs, still only a few months from recovery from TB. How had he managed it?

The hotel was miniscule, but perfectly situated. A stone’s throw from the Gare Montparnasse and not too far from Saint Germain, there was even a little park directly across the road.

I pictured dad walking home to the Floridor the night he was arrested, unaware of what was about to greet him in the doorway. The hotel was tiny. A swarm of police — or even journalists — would have filled the stairs out to the street.

After the Floridor visit, Clém took me to a market vendor because she wanted me to try a French goat cheese. We stopped into a bookshop where a man was parked up the front with pencils, sketching. Montparnasse, as far as I could tell from walking the streets with Clém, seemed to hold the most beautiful touches of the old Paris.

We rounded the corner to her parent’s apartment, where a Frenchwoman in a leopard-print cloak joined us, talking excitedly as she seemed to know Clém. Thankfully, she didn’t also join us in the lift, which only just fit the two of us. The building, according to the brass panel outside, had been the first meeting place of the leader of the French Resistance, Jean Moulin, and the lift seemed a relic of that time, too.

Laurence was waiting as we creaked our way up to the top floor. Smiling and so typically French, she was familiar from the video Clém sent me of Michelle, a year earlier. The video where Michelle repeated, ‘Where is Denison?’ and Laurence had smiled and replied, ‘in Australia … I think …’

I felt we’d already met.

‘Hello, Lou-ee-sa,’ Laurence greeted me warmly, smiling and kissing me on both cheeks. She led me into the studio apartment, where smiling Arnaud was waiting in a lovely pink sweater, and I received another gentle cheek scatter of kisses and greetings.

Tall and light-filled, the apartment was scattered with a few of Laurence’s oil paintings in progress, a mixture of abstract and impressionist styles, while a large one hung over the living space. I had the sense that I’d entered a gallery. There was so much light, and the view reached over the rooftops of Paris. Despite it still being early March, the sky was bright and blue.

The large windowed doors of the living space opened to a small garden with a table set for lunch. My choice of seat was apparently important, so that I’d have the best view of the Montparnasse rooftops in the sun. Arnaud had a bottle of red open at the ready.

It was a perfect, sunny day. As Laurence fussed with food, she and Arnaud fired me questions like excited cousins.

‘So — when we — ah — learned about this story — about Denison, last year — we wanted to come to Australia!’ Laurence said first, staring at me intently in the same way Marie had done on my birthday. ‘I thought — maybe I have a sister that I don’t know? Maybe we are related?’

Arnaud sat back laughing, and poured me a glass of wine.

Clém winked at me and went inside to make herself a peppermint tea.

As we talked over a beautifully prepared feast of courses — veal and salad, potatoes and more wine, followed by cheese and bread again — I got the sense that my arrival in Paris was a cherished occasion to this warm and beautiful family.

Clém kept saying ‘merci, Maman’ every time Laurence put food on her plate, which triggered the memory of watching French films with my own mum. But I didn’t miss mum, just as I didn’t grieve dad, in Paris. I felt close to mum in this space, because Laurence was a painter, just as mum had been. Her hands even had the same shape as my mum’s, earthy and square, used to constant movement. Like they always needed a brush, a plant, something to manoeuvre into a visual presentation, just so.

Laurence and Arnaud wanted to know all about my research since Coralie’s initial email, and I realised the whole family had been talking about and invested in the story even though miles away in Australia I’d only written to Clém and Coralie. I’d had no sense that this family would be welcoming me like this, and I found it extraordinary to look back at how lonely and confused I’d felt, researching the things I was now happily relaying with a view across the rooftops of Paris.

After a seemingly endless feast of lunch, Laurence brought out the album of Michelle’s family photos. As Coralie had done a year earlier by email, Laurence explained the religious and cultural constraints Michelle had been living under when she returned from London to Paris. But now I had the knowledge of where dad had been, too, and when.

Michelle returned from London to Paris in 1950, as dad had travelled to Vienna and Berlin seeking work as a translator, before returning to France. In 1951, as dad embraced Parisian life by taking a room at the Hotel Floridor for a year while he taught English (in the 14th arrondissement), Michelle married a Frenchman and moved from the 16th the 18th.

I wondered out loud, if Michelle ever saw the newspaper clipping about dad’s mistaken arrest, if she ever saw him walking the streets of Paris …

Laurence looked at me thoughtfully, saying ambiguously that Michelle had always loved the film The Bridges of Madison County.

Clém smiled, in the corner.

‘I think she was quite sad,’ Laurence continued. ‘When she divorced my father, in 1984, she started to talk of this man — Denison. And we never knew who that was. We didn’t know he existed until we found the letters.’

I thought to myself, how different the story would have been if Michelle had known dad had died in 1984.

We talked about art, and Laurence offered to take me on a tour of ancient ateliers, intrigued to know about dad and what I’d found in the memoir, which was that dad couldn’t sell his two original paintings by Foujita that Albert Tucker had given him — instead having a Parisian art dealer accuse him of forgery. Foujita had never been known to paint anything but cats before he’d gifted Tucker the paintings of Japanese girls. Laurence offered to take me to the Montparnasse apartment where Foujita had lived. They all cared about the history, wanted me to know it.

I lingered for hours, not wanting to leave.

When it was finally time to go, Arnaud insisted on planning our next rendezvous.

‘Louisa, I am certain your father would have gone to Les Closeries des Lilas. We are taking you there while you are here in Paris. You are not allowed to go with anyone else!’

How I loved Montparnasse. The streets were wide and light and you could see the Paris streetscape down to Saint Germain. Clém left me to walk happily home from Denfert-Rochereau station.

I had a little list of addresses in my pocket of places dad had visited or stayed — including the homes of Mademoiselle Moos and another Australian artist, David Strachan. They all seemed to be along the circuit from the Hotel Floridor, down the tree-lined Boulevarde Raspail towards Saint Germain.

It was early evening on Saturday as I stopped at La Coupole in all its shiny, Art Deco glory and ordered an overpriced coffee. Well-dressed Americans posed for photos, and I visited the washrooms Alister had described in one of his memoirs. The taps he’d been graciously allowed to use due to his poet status were now the beautiful, glossy bathrooms of the 21st century, no longer holding the ancient plumbing he described.

I walked another six kilometres down the Boulevarde Saint Michel, across the Pont Neuf bridge, and along the Seine to the Egyptian obelisk in the centre of the vast Place de La Concorde, before turning back through the stately Jardin des Tuileries to the pyramids of the Louvre.

Drunk with beauty and history and shiny wet cobblestones in the late winter rain, I finally made it to my little Marais ‘home’.