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PARIS TO THE MOON

Adam Gopnik

RANDOM HOUSE

NEW YORK

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Much of the contents of this book was originally published in The New Yorker.

random house and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gopnik, Adam. Paris to the moon /Adam Gopnik. p. cm. ISBN 0-679-44492-0

1. Gopnik, Adam-Homes and haunts-France-Paris. 2. Americans-France-Paris. 3. Paris (France)-Social life and customs-20th century. I. Title.

DC718.A44 G67 2000 944'.3600413-dc21 00-037297

Random House website address: www.atrandom.com Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

4689753 Book design by Caroline Cunningham

"I dare say, moreover," she pursued with an interested gravity, "that I do, that we all do here, run too much to mere eye. But how can it be helped? We're all looking at each other-and in the light of Paris one sees what things resemble. That's what the light of Paris seems always to show. It's the fault of the light of Paris-dear old light!"

"Dear Old Paris!" little Bilham echoed.

"Everything, everyone shows," Miss Barrace went on.

"But for what they really are?" Strether asked.

"Oh, I like your Boston reallys'! But sometimes-yes."

-The Ambassadors

THE WINTER CIRCUS, CRISTMAS JOURNAL 1

Distant Errors

The Rules of the Sport

The Chill

A Tale of Two Cafes

DISTANT ERRORS, CHRISTMAS JOURNAL 2

The Cisis in French Cooking

Barney in Paris

Lessons from Things, Cristmas Journal 3

The Rookie

THE MACHINE TO DRAW THE WORLD

The World Cup, and After

The Balzar Wars

Alice in Paris

A MACHINE TO DRAW THE WORLD, CRISTMAS JOURNAL 4

A Handful of Cherries

Like a King

Angels Dining at the Ritz

One Last Ride

THE WINTER CIRCUS

(An American family arrives in Paris, is greeted by bombs and strikes, and a good time is had by all.)

Paris to the Moon 3

Private Domain 19

The Strike 28

The Winter Circus, Christmas Journal 1 36

DISTANT ERRORS

(Emisration becomes expatriation, confusion reigns, and serenity Is sought in the Luxembourg Gardens.)

The Rules of the Sport 61

The Chill 69

A Tale of Two Cafes 78

Distant Errors, Christmas Journal 2 86

Papon's Paper Trail 106

Trouble at the Tower 123

LESSONS FROM THINGS

(Food, fashion, and foibles teach their complicated lessons in the struggle between Administration and Civilization.)

Couture Shock 129

The Crisis in French Cooking 144

Barney in Paris 166

Lessons from Things, Christmas Journal 3 174

The Rookie 196

A MACHINE TO DRAW THE WORLD

(Serenity is found in calm and contemplation, and the deep tragedy of history revealed. All chords are sounded and the bella rung in the birth of a new French baby.)

The World Cup, and After 215

The Balzar Wars 228

Alice in Paris 239

A Machine to Draw the World, Chrismas Journal 4 253

A Handful of Cherries 271

Like a King 296

Angels Dining at the Ritz 312

One Last Ride 331

The Winter Circus

Paris to the Moon

Not long after we moved to Paris, in the fall of 1995, my wife, Martha, and I saw, in the window of a shop on the rue Saint-Sulpice, a nineteenth-century engraving, done in the manner, though I'm now inclined to think not from the hand, of Daumier. It shows a train on its way from the Right Bank of Paris to the moon. The train has a steam locomotive and six cars, and it is chugging up a pretty steep track. The track is supported on two high, slender spires that seem to be anchored somewhere in the Fifth Arrondissement (you can see the Pantheon in silhouette nearby), and then the track just goes right up and touches the full moon up in the clouds. I suppose the two pillars are stronger than they look. The train is departing at twilight-presumably its an overnight trip-and among the crowd on the ground below, only a couple of top-hatted bourgeois watch the lunar ex-press go on its way with any interest, much less wonder. Every-body else in the crowd of thirteen or so people on the platform,

mostly moms and dads and kids, are running around and making conversation and comforting children and buying tickets for the next trip and doing all the things people still do on station plat-forms in Paris. The device on the ticket window, like the title of the cartoon, reads: "A Railroad: From Paris to the Moon."

The cartoon is, in part, a satire on the stock market of the time and on railway share manipulations. ("Industry," the caption be-gins, "knows no more obstacles.") But the image cast its spell on us, at least, because it seemed to represent two notions, or ro-mances, that had made us want to leave New York and come to Paris in the first place. One was the old nineteenth-century vi-sion of Paris as the naturally modern place, the place where the future was going to happen as surely as it would happen in New York. If a train were going to run to the moon, that train would originate from the Gare du Nord, with Parisian kids getting worn out while they waited.

But the image represented another, more intense association, and that is the idea that there is, for some Americans anyway, a direct path between the sublunary city and a celestial state. Americans, Henry James wrote, "are too apt to think that Paris is the celestial city," and even if we don't quite think that, some of us do think of it as the place where tickets are sold for the train to get you there. (Ben Franklin thought this, and so did Gertrude Stein, and so did Henry Miller. It's a roomy idea.) If this notion is pretty obviously unreal, and even hair-raisingly naive, it has at least the excuse of not being original. When they die, Wilde wrote, all good Americans go to Paris. Some of us have always tried to get there early and beat the crowds.

I've wanted to live in Paris since I was eight. I had a lot of pic-tures of the place in my head and even a Parisian object, what I suppose I'd have to call an icon, in my bedroom. Sometime in the mid-sixties my mother, who has a flair for the odd, ready-made present, found-I suppose in an Air France office in Philadelphia-a life-size cardboard three-dimensional cutout of

a Parisian policeman. He had on a blue uniform and red kepi and blue cape, and he wore a handlebar mustache and a smile. (The smile suggests how much Art, or at any rate Air France, improves on Life, or at any rate on Paris policemen.)

My younger brother and I called the policeman Pierre, and he kept watch over our room, which also had Beatle posters and a blindingly, numbingly, excruciatingly bright red shag rug. (I had been allowed to choose the color from a choice of swatches, but I have an inability to generalize and have always made bad, over-bright guesses on curtains and carpets and, as it turned out, the shape of future events.) Although we had never gone anywhere interesting but New York, my older sister had already, on the basis of deep, illicit late-night reading of Jane Austen and Mary Poppins, claimed London, and I had been given Paris, partly as a consolation prize, partly because it interested me. (New York, I think, was an open city, to be divided between us, like Danzig. Our four younger brothers and sisters were given lesser princi-palities. We actually expected them to live in Philadelphia.)

My first images of Paris had come from the book adaptation of The Red Balloon, the wonderful Albert Lamorisse movie about a small boy in the Parisian neighborhood of Menilmontant who gets a magic, slightly overeager balloon, which follows him every-where and is at last destroyed by evil boys with rocks. Curiously, it was neither a cozy nor a charming landscape. The Parisian grown-ups all treated Pascal, the boy, with a severity bordering on outright cruelty: His mother tosses the balloon right out of the Haussmannian apartment; the bus conductor shakes his head and finger and refuses to allow the balloon on the tram; the prin-cipal of the school locks him in a shed for bringing the balloon to class. The only genuine pleasure I recall that he finds in this un-smiling and rainy universe is when he leaves the balloon outside a tempting-looking bakery and goes in to buy a cake. The insou-ciance with which he does it-cake as a right, not a pleasure- impressed me a lot. A scowling gray universe relieved by pastry:

This was my first impression of Paris, and of them all, it was not the farthest from the truth. To this set of images were added, soon after, the overbright streets of the Madeline books, covered with vines and the little girls neat in their rows, and black and white pictures of men in suits walking through the Palais Royale, taken from a Cartier-Bresson book on the coffee table.

Pierre, though, being made of cardboard, got pretty beat up, sharing a room with two young boys, or maybe he was just both smaller and more fragile than I recall. In any case, one summer evening my parents, in a completely atypical display of hygienic decisiveness, decided that he was too beat up to keep and that it was time for him to pass away, and they put him out on the Philadelphia street for the trashman to take away.

I wept all night. He would sit out with the trash cans and would not be there in the morning. (A little later I read about Captain Dreyfus and his degradation, and the two uniformed and mustachioed figures got mixed up, so perhaps he had been sent to supply intimations of the other, darker side of French life. They were certainly there to be intimated.) What made me sad just then was the new knowledge that things changed, and there was nothing you could do about it. In a way, that was a Parisian emotion too.

***

I saw the real-or anyway the physical-Paris for the first time in 1973, when I was in my early teens. I had arrived with my large, strange family, those five brothers and sisters, and a couple of hangers-on and boyfriends. There were eight of us in the back of a Citroen station wagon. I was the one with the bad adoles-cent mustache. My parents, college professors, were on sabbati-cal, at a time, just weeks before the oil crunch, when the great good wave that had lifted up college professors into the upper middle classes was still rising. At the time we all lived in Mon-treal, and my brothers and sisters went to a French private acad-

emy there actually run by the French government. The corridors in the school were named after Parisian streets: The Champs-Elysees led the way to the principal's office, and you took the rue Royale to the cafeteria for lunch. I was the only one in an English-speaking school and became oddly, or maybe not so oddly, the only one to fall entirely in love with France. (You can never forget, I suppose, that the Champs-Elysees once led the way to the principals office.)

We came in through one of the portes of Paris, the doors that are now merely exits from the peripheral expressway but that still keep the names of the real gates of the old walled city. It was probably the portes d'Orleans. I saw a girl lean over to kiss a friend on a stopped motorbike on the cheek, twice, here and then there. The trees cast patterned light on the street. We went out for dinner and, for fifteen francs, had the best meal I had ever eaten, and most of all, nobody who lived there seemed to notice or care. The beauty and the braised trout alike were just part of life, the way we do things here.

We had spent the previous three days in London. Though the taxis were black and the buses red and Regent's Park green, the familiar street names seemed curiously to belong to another civ-ilization, as though the city had been occupied once by another and more vivid, imperial race and had then been turned over to the pallid, gray people on the streets, who ate sandwiches that turned up at the edges. Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.

We settled in for a long winter. While my parents taught, I spent most of my time going to the movies with my cousin Philippe. You are supposed to be in love with Paris and Philippe and I were both in love. I was in love with Jacqueline Bisset, and he was in love with Dominique Sanda. We went to the movies all the time, looking for them both. I remember finding a fifth-run

movie theater someplace in the Nineteenth Arrondissement, deep in a poor Algerian neighborhood, just in order to see Jacqueline's brief, heart-searing part in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.

Almost incidentally, in love with Jacqueline Bisset, I fell in love with Paris. Paris-and this is the tricky thing-though it is always and indubitably itself, is also in its nature a difficult city to love for itself alone. What truly makes Paris beautiful is the in-termingling of the monumental and the personal, the abstract and the footsore particular, it and you. A city of vast and imper-sonal set piece architecture, it is also a city of small and intricate, improvised experience. My favorite architectural detail in Paris is the little entrance up the rue de Seine, a tiny archway where, as I have since found out, you can push a poussette right through and get to the grand Institut de France. You aren't looking at it; and then you and the poussette are in it, right in the driveway where the academicians go. For a moment you are it. The Insti-tut belongs to you. Ten steps more and you are on the pont des Arts. The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small-to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways-to get it.

What is true for academicians is true for adolescents with a fixation on Jacqueline Bisset. I saw Paris out of the corner of my eye, on my way to the movies, and so a love for Paris came to be one of the strongest emotions I possess. In addition, my father's friend the literary critic and pioneer deconstructionist Eugenio Donato brought me to a seminar that Roland Barthes was giving that spring. I didn't understand a word. (A few years later I met one of the French students in the class, and found out that she hadn't understood a word either.) Then we went home, back to Montreal, where my brothers and sisters returned to that French academy, and I kept my French sharp by reading the sports pages every day about the Montreal Canadiens.

Two years after that first year in Paris, I used the tiny lever of my knowledge of the city to induce-I still won't say deceive-a girl a real girl, I had fallen in love with into running away to Paris with me. Martha, who became and, twenty-five years later, re-mains - and I write these words with a stunned disbelief, shared only by her mother-my wife, loved Paris as much as I did, even though many of the advertised attractions-the seminar with my friend Roland Barthes, for instance-that I had promised her were suspiciously missing from our trip. If she noticed this or was bothered by it, she hasn't mentioned it yet. We spent a happy week in the Hotel Welcome on the boulevard Saint-Germain. The hidden humanism of the classical style, the idea of the intellectual as magician and stylist, and sex in a hotel room: These were the things I took away from a childhood spent continually in a made-up Paris and an adolescence spent, fitfully, in the real one.

***

For a long time New York intervened. Then, in the late eighties, we began to think about Paris again. We sat on the deck of a rented house in Cape Cod and, listening to old Charles Trenet records, thought. . . why not? (This was neither a hard leap nor an interesting one, since the Trenet songs we were listening to had the theme of Paris pretty much to the exclusion of every other human concept.) We watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg over and over. We visited Paris whenever we could, as often as we could. We weren't Francophiles because we didn't know any-thing about France, and still don't. We were just crazy about Paris.

When our son, Luke Auden, was born, in September 1994, we knew that we would have to go to Paris soon, or we wouldn't go at all. In five years, everybody told us, he would no longer be "portable." When we were in Paris, we had hung around the parks and gardens, watching the carousels turn and the children

play and thinking, This would be a nice place to be a child or have one. We also saw all the aspects of a New York childhood that looked less delightful. You would see the five-year-olds at a friend's house already lost in the American media, simultane-ously listening to a Walkman, playing with a Game Boy, and watching a video on the VCR. Perhaps, we thought-however foolishly, however "unrealistically"-we could protect him from some of that if he spent his first five years in Paris.

"You can't run away from (a) reality, (b) American culture, (c) yourself," our friends all said, compositely. "But you can run away," we said under our breaths, and we did. We thought we might stay for good, but we knew that we would certainly stay for the last five years of the century; "We'll stay till the millennium," we could say grandly, and mean it cautiously. The New Yorker, where I worked, was ready to hear what I had to say about Parisian scenes and, more important, was willing to keep sending non-Parisian subjects, from Groucho Marx to the Starr Report, my way too, which let us pay Parisian rates. Martha, for her part, had become a filmmaker, and she had the great portable occupa-tion of the late twentieth century, a screenplay to write (and rewrite and rewrite again). So we went.

The New Yorker has had lots of good writers in place in Paris, but it was James Thurber, whose blind eyes in a photograph on my desk stare at me every morning, whose writing moved me most. Thurber, though he hardly spoke a word of French, wrote once that the surface of manners in France seemed to him the most beautiful in the world, and he was right. The romance of Paris was my subject, and if it is a moony or even a loony one, it is at least the one I get, a little.

This was a hard romance to sustain in most of the last five years, when almost everybody else thought that Paris was going straight to hell. When we first started dreaming of coming to Paris, around 1989, long-termist, infrastructure-building Eu-rope, many people said, owned the future. One only had to com-

pare JFK and Charles de Gaulle airports, the one named after the vital young internationalist and the other after the old reac-tionary, to catch the irony JFK was decrepit, dangerous, and al-most unpoliced; you stumbled off your plane into, of all bizarre things, a linoleum staircase, with a sign above warning you of il-legal livery drivers (whose complexions, delicately, had been made neither black nor white but swarthy, like Barbary Coast pirates). You took a taxi over roads so potholed that the infra-structure was visibly rusted out, ruined. At Charles de Gaulle Airport, on the other hand, you came to a breathtakingly modern terminal, full of odd glass corridors and long, radiating, covered walkways, and exited onto a highway so up-to-date that regular announcements of upcoming traffic were posted along with the waiting time for a reservation at the Brasserie Lipp. No one will believe this now, but that is how it seemed then. (Popular mem-ory may be short, but it is nothing compared with the amnesia of experts.)

By 1995 all that had changed, and Paris and France seemed left out of the new all-American dispensation. London, of all places, had become the town where people went to see new art and taste new cooking. For the first time in modern history it was actually possible to live in Paris for comfort and bourgeois secu-rity and travel to London for food and sex. (My cousin Philippe had, like so many ambitious Frenchmen of his generation, actu-ally fled Paris for London, where he had made a small fortune in banking and was about to finance his own restaurant.)

The failure of the French model and the triumph of the Anglo-American one is by now a sorry, often repeated fact. For five years hardly anyone wrote about Paris and the French except in a tone of diagnosis: how sick they were, when they got so sick, why they denied that they were sick, and if there was any chance that they would ever get better. (No.) Many journalistic tours d'horizons have been written in the last few years-"Whither France?" and "Whether France ..." and "Weathering France,"

and "France: How It Withers" and "Withering France." We surf the waves of capitalism, from crest to trough and back again, but the funny thing is that no matter how often we ride the wave, no-body notices that it's wet. When we are on the crest, we believe that we have climbed a mountain through our own virtuous ef-forts, and when we are in the trough, we believe that we have fallen into a pit through our own vice.

Whatever else might be true, though, in the last five years of the century, as the world became, by popular report, more "glob-alized" than it had ever been before, France became more differ-ent. "They order these matters better in France," Sterne's opening line for his sentimental journey in France, had a new ring, now. For most of two centuries, after all, what had been so different about France was how central and cosmopolitan it was. Ameri-cans had been going to Paris for a couple of centuries to learn a universal diplomatic language and the central artistic culture and even the most influential manner of cooking. Yet in the time we were there Paris seemed to pass from the place where you learned how to do it to the place where you learned how not to do it-how not to do it in the ordinary American imperial way, the place where you learned how to do it, as the French like to say, autrement, otherly. From the kind of sympathy that labor unions get from their public to the length of time you take to eat lunch, the way it's done in Paris now is not the way it's done in Adelaide or Toronto or Los Angeles or Tempe or Hong Kong or any of the studs on the broad belt of the English-speaking imperium that now encircles the world, with New York as its buckle. Americans still learn about differences in Paris, but now we learn about them not because we are so much closer to the center of things but because we are so much farther away. The light of Paris still shows Americans things as they are (if not as they really are) by showing us how things can look different in a different light, but the light it shows them with now is more mys-terious and singular, a kind of moral moonlight, a little bit harder to see by.

There was no big story in France at the end of the century, but there were a lot of littler ones, and the littlest ones of all seemed to say the most about what makes Paris still Paris. Princesses died and prime ministers fell and intellectuals argued, gravely, about genuinely grave questions, and I wrote about all these things, but I have left most of that writing out of this book. They are important things, but the things that interested me most, in a time of plenty, were the minute variations, what a professor would call the significant absences, between living a family life in one place and living the same kind of life somewhere else. This is a story of the private life of a lucky American family living in Paris in the last five years of the century, less a tour of any horizon than just a walk around the park. To the personal essays about life in Paris, I have added some private journals I wrote every Christmas. These journals, I see in rereading them, are more pensive and even pessimistic in tone than the stories, perhaps because they are notes sent inward rather than letters sent out. (I have also included a long report on the trial of Maurice Papon because it is about the occupation and collaboration, still the great, unignorable black hole at the center of French life, still sucking in the light even of everyday pleasure.)

Family life is by its nature cocooned, and expatriate family life doubly so. We had many friends and a few intimate ones, but it is in the nature of family rhythm-up too early, asleep too soon-to place you on a margin, and to the essential joy-just the three of us!-was added the essential loneliness, just the three of us. What I find is left, after the politics have been re-moved, are mostly stories about raising a kid in foreign parts. Yet since raising a kid is the one nearly universal thing people do, and since doing it in foreign parts is the one time when you get to see most clearly all the bits of doing it that aren't universal- that are inflected and shaped by the local geography and mood and playground equipment-it is in its way, I hope, still a not en-tirely interior subject.

These stories are also, willy-nilly, about bringing up a kid in

foreign parts in a funny time. What made the time funny was that there was as much peace and prosperity in the world as there has ever been and at the same time a lot of resentment di-rected at the United States, the country where the peace and prosperity, like the kid, came from, or which at least was taking credit for it. Paris, which in the first five years of the century seemed the capital of modern life, spent the last five years on the sidelines, brooding on what had happened. Our son's first five years, and the modern century's last five, five years to the end of the millennium and five to grade one in New York, a small sub-ject and a large one, juxtaposed: These stories take one stretch of time and, as they used to demand in exam papers, contrast and compare.

The stories are mostly about the life spent at home and in-clude a lot-some will think too much-about the trinity of late-century bourgeois obsessions: children and cooking and spectator sports, including the spectator sport of shopping. Yet life is mostly lived by timid bodies at home, and since we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains, we see the differences in lives as deeply there too. The real differences among people shine most brightly in two bedrooms and one building, with a clock ticking, five years to find out how and why. Not just how and why and in what way Paris is different from New York, but how a North American liberal, with the normal "universalist," antinationalist reflexes of the kind, might end up feeling about the idea of dif-ference itself-about the existence of minute variations among peoples: which ones really matter and which ones really don't. (By the end of the decade, a new image of Paris, as a multicul-tural metropolis with a thriving entrepreneurial culture, was coming into place. This existed-it always had-but it seemed a little too easily pleasing to Americans, perhaps because it was so familiar, not so different after all, and looked to America for in-spiration. The young soccer players on the champion French na-tional team carefully imitated Sammy Sosa's finger-kissing when

they scored their goals, and French rap, striking though it was, seemed more distinctive from its American sources than really different from them, in the same way that American impression-ism in the nineteenth century was distinctive rather than differ-ent from its models. Anyway, while I greatly enjoyed the Sosa finger-kissing, as I enjoyed French rap, I admired even more the way that the great Zinedine Zidane, when asked about a perfect free kick he had taken, calmly said, "I am at the summit of my

art.")

I looked for the large in the small, the macro in the micro, the figure in the carpet, and if some big truths passed by, I hope some significant small ones got caught. If there is a fault in re-porting, after all, it is not that it is too ephemeral but that it is not ephemeral enough, too quickly concerned with what seems big at the time to see what is small and more likely to linger. It is, I think, the journalists' vice to believe that all history can instantly be reduced to experience: ("Pierre, an out-of-work pipe fitter in the suburb of Boulougne, is typical of the new class of ch6meurs ...") just as it is the scholar's vice to believe that all ex-perience can be reduced to history ("The new world capitalist order produced a new class of ch6meurs, of whom Pierre, a pipe fitter, was a typical case ...").

What then, the journalist and scholar ask tetchily, what then is exactly the vice of the comic-sentimental essayist? It is of course to believe that all experience and history can be reduced to him, or his near relations, and the only apology I can make is that for him in this case experience and history and life were not so much reduced as all mixed up, and scrambled together, they at least become a subject. The essayist dreams of being a prism, through which other light passes, and fears ending up merely as a mirror, showing the same old face. He has only his Self to show and only himself to blame if it doesn't show up well.

Even if experience shows no more than itself, it is still worth showing. Experience and history, I think, are actually like the

two trains in that Keaton movie where Buster struggles to keep up with the big engine by pumping furiously on a handcar on the adjoining track. It looks as if the little handcar of experience and the big train of history are headed for the same place at the same speed; but in fact the big train is going where it is headed, and those of us in the handcar keep up only by working very hard, for a little while.

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see and sees it, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more. He is constantly comparing what he sees to what he wants, so he sees with his mind, and maybe even with his heart, or tries to. If his peripheral vision gets diminished-so that he quite literally sometimes can't see what's coming at him from the suburbs of the place he looks at-his struggle to adjust the country he looks at to the country he has inside him at least keeps him looking. It sometimes blurs, and sometimes sharpens, his eye. My head was filled with pictures of Paris, mostly black and white, and I wanted to be in them.

I am aware that my Paris, which began as a cardboard con-struction wearing a cape and a kepi, in many respects remains one, an invention, a Bizzaro New York, abstract where New York is specific, intricate where New York is short, though not perhaps more soulful, and that my writing about Paris is very much like my writing about New York in the first five years I lived there.

In fact it would have been a lunchtime's work for my old friend Eugenio Donato, who haunts this book as he haunts my memories of Paris, to insist that this book about Paris is actually about New York. A lunchtime's worth of work yet not perhaps a dinner's worth of truth. The images contain their little truth too, which I grasped even in remnant form in West Philadelphia. We all see our Paris as true, because it is. It is not an old or anti-quated Paris that we love, but the persistent, modern material

Paris carrying on in a time of postmodern immateriality, when everything seems about to dissolve into pixels. We love Paris not out of "nostalgia" but because we love the look of light on things, as opposed to the look of light from things, the world reduced to images radiating from screens. Paris was the site of the most beautiful commonplace civilization there has ever been: cafes, brasseries, parks, lemons on trays, dappled light on bourgeois boulevards, department stores with skylights, and windows like doors everywhere you look. If it is not so much wounded-all civilizations are that, since history wounds us all-as chastened, and overloud in its own defense, it nonetheless goes on. The per-sistence of this civilization in the sideshow of postmodern cul-ture is my subject, and the life it continues to have my consolation. I don't go on a bus in Paris without still expecting my balloon to be barred and the authority figure who oversees it is still a cardboard policeman in a cape. I see the moon these days from Paris because I once saw Paris from the moon.

***

My real life in Paris, as in New York, was spent with a few peo-ple, and, really, only with two, Martha and Luke, and when I think of Paris, I think of them: Martha and Luke in matching fur hats at the Palais Royal; waiting with Luke in the courtyard of our building for Martha to come down the stairs (in long Russian coat and Tibetan hat, cold girl, in mid-autumn); waiting with Martha in the courtyard of an odd building on the boulevard Raspail for Luke to come from his gym class, peering through the dirty windows and the cagelike grille, one child among many, and then getting a Coca-Cola, five francs from the machine. Cyril Gonnolly once achieved an unearned poetic effect by reciting the names in wartime of hotels on the Left Bank. I can some-times achieve a similar one, even more unearned, though not less felt, by reciting to myself the names of restaurants where we ate lunch while Luke slept (or, occasionally, where we wished we

could sleep, while Luke ate): Le Souffle, Le Basilic, Chez Andre, Le Petit St. Benoit, Laduree. I believe in Le Souffle, on a Satur-day afternoon in December, in the back room, with Luke sleep-ing in his poussette, and the old couple across the neighboring banquette, who had been coming for forty years, there with their small blind dog. The waiters in white coats, the owner in a blue sports jacket, and the smell (aroma is too fancy a word) of min-gled cigarettes and orange liqueurs. I am aware that this is what is called sentimental, but then we went to Paris for a sentimen-tal reeducation-I did anyway-even though the sentiments we were instructed in were not the ones we were expecting to learn, which I believe is why they call it an education.

This book is theirs, and I ask them only to share a place at the dedication table with Henry Finder, my first and most patient reader, who had to take what it tasted like on trust.

Private Domain

A bomb went off under my bed the other morning. It was early on a gray Tuesday when I heard a flock of ambulances some-where near my Left Bank street, making that forlorn, politely in-sistent two-note bleating all Paris ambulances make. I went downstairs and outside and found-nothing. The street sweeper with the green plastic broom was sweeping; the young woman who keeps the striped-pajama boutique across the street was reading her Paul Auster novel. ("You left New York for Paris?" she demanded incredulously when I introduced myself not long ago.) Only in the early afternoon, when Le Monde came out, did I realize that the Islamic terrorists who are now working in Paris had left a bomb in an underground train and that, give or take a few hundred yards, it had gone off beneath the second-floor refuge on the Left Bank that my wife and I had found this sum-mer, after a long search. The ambulances were heading for the Gare d'Orsay, where the wounded were being taken.

"Gardez votre sang-froid" is the single, self-sufficient impera-tive posted on the what-to-do-in-an-emergency placard in the courtyard of our building, and on this occasion people had. The bombings here, though sometimes murderous in their effects, haven't caused any panic or even much terror. Though Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Ameri-cans do, that they are invulnerable by right. But even if our apartment building had been officially declared the epicenter of the bombing campaign, I don't think I'd move. Terrorism is part of life, while a nice apartment in Paris is a miracle.

For the new French prime minister, Alain Juppe, the bombing campaign has come as a vast, if unadmitted, relief, since he fi-nally has a subject to talk about in public other than I'affaire des logements, which has dominated the news here for four months and once seemed likely to sink his government. For most of those months, in fact, Juppe has probably been the only person more preoccupied with apartments on the Left Bank than I was, though he and I approached the matter from opposite ends. I;

was trying to find one, while he was trying to explain to the French people why he had so many and what all his relatives were doing living in them.

Juppe has been prime minister for just under six months. He is a long-fingered, elegant man of fifty, with the kind of enviable, aerodynamic baldness that in America only tycoons seem able to carry off-the Barry Diller, Larry Tisch style of baldness. Juppe comes from a simple family down in the Landes country. He did well in school and was eventually admitted to the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, in Paris, the tiny institution that pro-duces nearly the entire French political elite. He came to the attention of an older fellow enarque, Jacques Chirac, and when Chirac was mayor of Paris, in the 1980s, Juppe became his "fi-nancial adjoint"-more or less the city comptroller. Then, when the conservative parties won the legislative elections two years ago, Chirac, though he had prudently decided not to seek the of-

fice of prime minister, arranged for Juppe to be named the min-ister of foreign affairs, in which position, Bosnia aside, he was thought to have done well. So when Chirac was elected presi-dent this May, it seemed inevitable that he would make Juppe

his prime minister.

Like all ambitious French politicians, Juppe chooses to present himself as a literary man. He has actually written a book of reflections titled La Tentation de Venise-"The Venetian Temptation." Juppe's Venetian temptation was to retire to a house there, where he could escape from political life, admire Giorgione's Tempesta, drink Bellinis in the twilight, and think long, deep thoughts. La Tentation was regarded as a fighting campaign manifesto, since it is as necessary for an ambitious French politician to write a book explaining why he never likes to think of politics as it is for an ambitious American politician to write a book explaining why he never thinks of anything else. Juppe, ahead of the pack, had written a book asserting not only that he would rather be doing something else but that he would like to be doing it in a completely different country. The romance of retirement is still extremely powerful in France, descending, as it does, from Montaigne, who remains the model here of pen-sive, high-minded reclusion, even though he spent an important chunk of his life as the boss of a tough town. In Juppe's case, the descent from Montaigne, who supplies the epigraph for La Ten-tation, is easy to show: Juppe is the mayor of Bordeaux, as Mon-taigne was. (French politicians often hold more than one office at once, just in case.) Among French politicians, in fact, ostenta-tious displays of detachment are something of a competitive sport. After being succeeded as president by Chirac, Francois Mitterrand gave an interview to Christine Ockrent, the editor of L'Express, simply to announce that he was now taking long walks in Paris and looking at the sky. It was understood as his way of keeping his hand in. Not long ago the former prime minister Edouard Balladur, who had been so busy looking detached from

politics that he forgot to campaign for the presidency this time around, sneaked an item into L'Express announcing that he too was taking walks and looking at the sky. It was the start of his comeback.

Then, at the beginning of June, the weekly comic paper Le Canard Enchaine revealed that Juppe, when he was the financial adjoint to Chirac, had taken the lease on an apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement that belonged to the domaine prive of the City of Paris. The domaine 'prive is a peculiarly Parisian estab-lishment, although even after four months of scandal, no one knows exactly what it is, how the City of Paris came to possess it, or how you get into it. At first many Parisians confused the do-maine prive with the general stock of public housing that the City of Paris has built since the First World War; most of that housing is on the periphery, and a lot of it is in the less desirable neighborhoods of the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Arrondissements. It turns out, however, that the City of Paris also owns a small, semisecret group of apartments and apartment buildings that are given out at the discretion of whoever happens to be running Paris. These domaine 'prive apartments came into the hands of the Parisian government in all kinds of interesting ways. Many of them are on the beautiful old streets of the Left Bank, near the river, because of various failed city plans that left Paris with a lot of property, which the city fathers eventually started renting to one another. Until 1977 the prefects of the Paris arrondissements controlled the domaine prive, but then the system was reformed, which, as often happens in France, managed to make the mechanics of it even murkier. Today no one seems to know exactly how many domaine prive apartments there are. One estimate puts the number at about thirteen hundred; an-other puts it at about fifteen hundred; still another says that there are more than four thousand.

Juppe's apartment, on the lovely rue Jacob, was a lavish spread, complete with garden and terrace, that he had in effect

rented to himself for a little less than three thousand dollars a month-well below the market price. When this arrangement was challenged, Juppe announced that he felt "serene" and that he couldn't see what the fuss was about, since anyone could have found out that he lived there by looking at the mailbox. There was something equally off-key about Chirac's later defense of his protege. During a televised press conference, he declared himself "profoundly shocked" by "the exploitation of a fact that no one should contest." Here, he explained, Juppe was actually paying about three thousand dollars a month in rent, while there were tens of thousands of people in France living in subsidized apartments who did infinitely less service for the nation than

Juppe.

As it happened, Martha and I arrived in Paris to look for a place just as the news of Juppe's arrangement broke, and we soon discovered what Juppe obviously knew to be the vital fact but was having a very hard time saying outright: All apartments in Paris that you would long to live in belong to the domaine prive. This is to say not that they all belong to the city govern-ment but that they can be obtained only through membership in one or another of the political or literary or fashionable keiretsus that dominate Paris. Though Paris is in many ways a grasping and commercial city, it is not ruled by the market in quite the way that most other Western cities are.

Martha and I, eight-month-old in tow, learned this quickly as we wandered from apartment to apartment. We discovered that apartments came in three varieties: sad apartments that no one would want; interesting apartments that would require grands projets to make them work; and nice apartments that had a long private history or, to put it another way, a catch and so were in a domaine prive of their own. This one came with a sister in Amer-ica, who might or might not eventually return. Another was avail-able only if the divorce that had led to its emptying out was concluded. (With tears in his eyes, the previous resident made it

a condition that we buy the espresso machine that he and his de-parted love had picked out in happier days.) That one belonged to a philosopher who had changed his sexual orientation, and it was available with the proviso that if he changed it back, he would need the apartment again. The inwardness of Paris rules out the illusion created by the renting of an apartment in New York, the illusion of renewal, of starting over. An apartment in New York is a blank slate. In Paris it is an already parsed sen-tence, a string of imperfect verbs, hidden conditional construc-tions, and long, intricately wrought clauses in the past tense.

Juppe would probably have been able to survive the revelation of his living arrangements if only Le Canard Enchame hadn't published, a couple of Wednesdays later, the news that when Juppe was a city official, he had taken apartments in the domaine prive for his son and daughter as well and that these apartments too were right there on the rue Jacob. Then it turned out that both Juppes ex-wife and his half brother had apartments cour-tesy of the City of Paris. (The former Mme. Juppe was lodged across the river, on the Right Bank, presumably out of deference to the sensibilities of the new Mme. Juppe.) At this point l'affaire des logements became a little more serious. Le Canard published a document apparently showing that Juppe had approved a rent reduction on his son's apartment from seven thousand francs per month to six thousand (a difference of about two hundred dol-lars). This might have contravened an all-purpose law against ethical backsliding on the part of public officials, a law whose worst penalty, sweetly enough, was that the offender would be prohibited from ever again being elected to office.

Things got so bad that Juppe had to submit to a humiliation that the French had previously considered fit only for American politicians. He had to go on television and answer questions from reporters. (De Gaulle spoke directly to the French people or else in highly choreographed press conferences; Mitterrand would tolerate a few friendly journalists but would explain to

them why the questions they were asking were not of a standard that could decently be put to the president of the republic.) Juppe, by contrast, had to give one of those jumpy, undignified, I-have-nothing-to-hide performances beloved of American han-dlers.

Juppe did his best. He pointed out that members of the French press had been around for dinner at the now-famous apartment on the rue Jacob, and nobody had seemed upset about the apartment then. (This argument was regarded as fight-ing dirty. The next day Le Monde haughtily noted that it was not proper for guests to ask their host how much he paid in rent and who owned his apartment.) Juppe also announced that he had lowered the rent on his son's apartment only because he was afraid of contributing to a general inflation of rents in the city. It didn't help much. In July a local lawyer with Socialist party con-nections began filing letters of complaint against Juppe with the state district attorney in Paris, Bruno Cotte, who would therefore have to decide whether to go the Italian route and indict the prime minister of France (and, not incidentally, launch his own political career) or go the honored French route and let it all pass.

By this time I had come into possession of what I thought was the lease on an apartment and so found the later stages of I'affaire des logements very diverting. There is nothing like being even an honorary, part-time insider to make insiderness look cute. Then, just as we were about to leave Paris to go home and collect our furniture, I got a call from the real estate agent. "I have bad news," she announced. "Your apartment is off the mar-ket. She made it sound as though the apartment had won a prize.

Things worked out better for us than they did for the prime minister. We came back to Paris at the end of September and managed, through various routes, to find an apartment at 16 rue du Pre-aux-Clercs in the Seventh Arrondissement. The story

with this one was that it belonged to a young man who had just been posted by his bank to Tokyo; the apartment was affordable because he and his wife had left it half renovated and half a wreck. On the other hand, they would want the apartment back when they returned from Japan, at some unspecified date, which makes us leap every time the doorbell rings.

Bruno Cotte has at last offered his judgment on the Juppe case. He declared that he would not indict Juppe for what he had done with the domaine prive apartments, provided that the prime minister of France get out of his apartment and rent one someplace else. This may have been a first in the history of ju-risprudence: an eviction notice issued by a magistrate against the prime minister of a major Western power. "This was more cruel than an indictment, which at least had the savor of persecution," a veteran Parisian journalist said to me of the Cotte verdict. "An indictment might have been insupportable, but an eviction is merely ridiculous."

Naturally, American and British journalists have tried to ana-lyze l'affaire des logements and, interpreting it in the light of Anglo-American politics, have concluded that Juppe has suf-fered because he was seen as a member of an unduly privileged elite. This is in fact almost the direct opposite of the truth. The Frenchmen who are currently the most enraged at the govern-ment-the functionaries who stopped all business in Paris sev-eral weeks ago-are not protesting against the accumulated perks of a privileged class. They are the privileged class, protest-ing on behalf of their accumulated perks. What made them mad about I'affaire des logements, and Juppe's conduct, was not that it revealed to them something they hadn't known but that it re-minded them of something they knew all too well-namely, that the system of acquis sociaux-entitlements-runs so deep in France that to abolish it would be in some sense to abolish French life itself. Every Frenchman who is not outright destitute sits in the middle of a domaine prive-that is, within a domain of

private benefits that he enjoys by virtue of his place in civil soci-ety The triumph of the Fifth Republic was to have expanded that domain so that it included nearly everybody But it may no longer be capable of any expansion at all. The people who are left outside now seem to be left outside for good. The North African immigrants, in particular, who fill the Paris banlieue that the po-lice have largely abandoned are not just a minority; they are with-out any entree at all. They are called, simply, the excluded. Some of them set bombs off under your bed.

Juppe's serenity is certainly gone for good. Already he is speaking plaintively of his fate. "But why have they done this to me? I am honest!" he told an interviewer recently. "Had I known, when I was foreign minister I could have moved to the quai d'Orsay, where I would have had at my disposal two hundred and eighty square meters and a chambermaid, and nobody would have reproached me at all." People agreed that he had a point, but they also noticed the way he was able to rattle off the square meters by heart.

After brooding on this affair, the French elite has decided that the cure for the kinds of hidden deals that fill French public life is transparence, which has become (along with exclusion) the word of the moment here. By transparence people just mean that everybody should see everything that is going on. A lot of Parisians would now settle for having a Paris that is transparent the way an ant farm is transparent: with a cutaway front so that you can see the action even if you can't affect it. But what has al-ways given Paris its peculiar grace and favor is that things that are hidden away elsewhere (like, say, adulteries) are all out in the open here, while things that are all out in the open elsewhere are hidden away here (like, say, the way you get an apartment). A Pans you can see right through hardly seems worth having.

The Strike

The "generalized" strike that the big French labor federations have called-making a fastidious distinction between what they're doing now and the "general" strike that they may yet get around to-has shut down Paris. The commuter and intercity trains haven't run for two weeks, not even the TGV, the famous fast train between Paris and the South. The Metro is closed down (the crickets who live beneath the rails are said to be perishing for lack of the heat they normally get from the friction of the trains running above, and their plight has become a minor cause celebre here). There are no buses, and the post office has stopped deliv-ering the mail. Even le Paris touristique has been snapped shut. The Ritz has had a dropoff in occupancy of 25 percent (at the height of the terrorist bombing campaign, a few months ago, the rate was near normal, which suggests that the rich would rather risk being blown to bits than have a hard time finding a taxi). The Louvre, like a city under siege, has been struggling to stay open

and can guarantee only a narrow access corridor, leading directly from the entrance to the Mona Lisa. The government has even commandeered the bateaux-mouches-those ugly, flat-bottomed open-air tourist boats that ply the tourist sights year-round-and has turned them into ferryboats to get commuters up and down

the Seine.

I think that I only really began to grasp just how serious the strike was when the chickens stopped rotating at the outdoor market in my neighborhood. Several poultry merchants there keep chickens and coquelets and rabbits and pheasants spitted and broiling on outdoor rotisseries all through the year, even in August and in the quiet days after Christmas. One afternoon a few days into the strike I walked over to the market to check on the progress of a turkey I had ordered from one of the rotisseurs, to be sent up from the country for a belated Thanksgiving, and I noticed that he had unspitted all his birds and turned off the grill. This seemed to me one of those signs that reporters abroad are supposed to treat as portents ("It has long been said in the bazaars that when the chickens stop turning, the government will fall"), and as I approached to ask what he was doing, he ges-tured grimly in the direction of the boulevard Saint-Germain.

"Ca commence," he said grimly. It's beginning, though what, exactly, was beginning I wasn't sure.

"The turkey, it's still on its way?" I asked, with the stupid in-consequence common to people caught up in revolutions. ("Rien," Louis XVI noted in his diary the day the Bastille was stormed.)

He shook his head gravely, implying, I thought for a moment, that the strike might have spread to the fowl too. Then he ges-tured again toward the boulevard.

For about ten solid blocks, on each side of the boulevard aint-Germain a row of tourist buses was parked; that, considering the severity with which the cops normally enforce the no-parking regulations, was in itself a near-insurrectionary sight.

The buses bore on their windshields notices indicating where their journeys had begun-Lyons, Grenoble, Bordeaux-and, in their side windows, little stickers saying "FO," for Force Ouvriere, or Workers' Force. (Despite the militant name, it is the more moderate of the big French labor federations.) Inside, the bus drivers looked bored and sleepy after the long trip in from the provinces. But between the two rows of buses thousands of FO members, from all across France, were marching up the boulevard, three or four abreast. Then came a rear guard of stu-dents armed with batons and occasional bricks. The noise, oddly, was confined, cozily insulated by the parked coaches, a revolu-tion taking place in a bus depot. Farther east on the boulevard, beyond the buses, the French riot police were lined up and wait-ing, in helmets and shields. There wasn't any violence then, and there hasn't been too much since, but around that time it began to seem that the French were trying on, if only for a moment, long-discarded revolutionary roles, albeit in a slightly unreal set-ting: strikers taking buses to the revolution, students relearning the lore of the heaved cobblestone.

The strike had begun, on Friday, November 24, as a one-day job action, led by the railroad workers. The Juppe government was still in a state of self-congratulatory, mildly Gingrichian de-light over the austerity measures that it had announced to reform the expensive social security system of the French state. The cheminots, as the railroad workers are called, hated this idea, be-cause a lot of money is put directly into their pension fund by the government, an outright subsidy, which makes the railroad work-ers less employees of a profit-seeking enterprise than subsidized functionaries of a state cultural treasure, like members of the Comedie Francaise. (Although the train system loses money, it is one of the glories of France.) Perhaps the government doubted whether the cheminots could command much sympathy since their specific grievance seemed absurdly small (many of them would no longer be able to retire at fifty at full pay) and since the

unions have receded as drastically in France in the past fifteen years as they have in America, maybe more so. One in every ten French workers still belongs to a union, but most of the unionized workers are ensconced for life in the public sector or in subsi-dized state-run enterprises. What the unions have lost in num-bers though, they have gained in freedom to maneuver and in symbolic force. They are no longer the vanguard of the revolution. Now they are the shock troops of the bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile a strike by university students, which had begun outside Paris, came to town too. The students wanted smaller classes and more money, and the government didn't foresee any possible sharing of interests between them and the cheminots;

what's more, it didn't see how a student strike could claim cen-ter stage in a country that has suffered consistently from 10 per-cent unemployment. Yet the government underestimated the extraordinary hold that the word student has on the French imag-ination, a little like the hold the word farmer has on Americans. In fact the phrase student movement has in France much the same magic that the phrase family farm has in America, conjur-ing up an idealized past, even for people who never took part in a student movement or lived on a family farm. For a week the students and the cheminots took turns working over the Chirac-Juppe government, like a veteran tag-team wrestling pair going against a couple of beardless innocents. They did such a good job that more groups began to jump into the ring. First, the Metro workers went out, and then the postal workers, and then the em-ployees of France Telecom. No one knows who may go next.

Though the strike has developed a quasi-revolutionary momentum, it doesn't have anything like a quasi-revolutionary ide-ology; the slogan of the government functionaries at the heart of the strike is, essentially, "Status quo forever." The tone is entirely middle class; it suggests a vast petit bourgeois ghost dance, trying to summon up, by its fervor and intensity, a certainty that the future will be like the trentes glorieuses, the glorious thirty years

of French prosperity that ended in the late seventies. That is why even French people who don't belong to unions support the strike; a poll taken a week into the strike showed that just over 60 percent of them were sympathetic to it.

A few days after the demonstration, I went back to the rotisseur to see how the turkey was getting along on its way into town. "It does not look good," he said. "The strike prevents him from moving."

"Was he planning to take the TGV?" I asked.

Although workers and students are striking throughout France, the strike is chiefly a Parisian event. That doesn't make it any less national, since France is a completely centralized country. To achieve in America the effect that the strikers have achieved here, it would be necessary to shut down simultaneously the New York subway, the Washington post office, and the Santa Monica Freeway. These weeks have been unusually cold, and that has made the troubles of the strike more difficult. The strike has even produced an iconography of endurance: lots of pictures of bicyclists and Rollerbladers and sailors, carrying on. But in fact the iconography is a little misleading. More typical sights are the endless bouchons, or traffic jams, which have made a twenty-minute trip from the Etoile to the place de Clichy last four hours. On the great boulevards and avenues there is a constant press of cars and people, marches one day and solid, immovable traffic jams the next. But if you walk only a couple of blocks away in any direction, the city looks especially beautiful, and you can have it to yourself. Despite the strike, all the Christmas decorations are up, shiny red and gold ribbon and green garlands draped like bunting around the display windows of the boutiques. Since al-most everyone is busy not getting anywhere in a car, you can be all alone with the gleaming glass storefronts and the Christmas garlands and the sight of your own breath.

The motorcyclists have solved the traffic problem by giving up

the streets and simply driving on the sidewalks. As you stroll along the boulevard, you suddenly discover a Harley-Davidson bearing down on you at high speed from among the plane trees. The motorcyclists, who would rather run over a few pedestrians than give up their Hogs, are more truly Parisian than the wan in-line skaters, since the French attitude toward any crisis is not to soldier through it but just to pretend that it isn't happening. (It was in Paris, after all, that Picasso and Sartre sat in a cafe for four years pretending that the Germans weren't there.)

A deeper and more dramatic version of this national habit of pretending that things haven't happened is what has shaped the strike. What the French strikers want to ignore, at least accord-ing to their critics, are the economic facts of the end of the twen-tieth century: "global capital," the "modern service-based economy," the "tough new competitive conditions of the twenty-first century," all of which, the critics say, can be dealt with only by a more "flexible" labor market. When are these people going to grow up and face reality? seems to be the exasperated ques-tion that others in Europe are asking. What the French feel is that for the past half century they have done pretty well by not facing reality-or, anyway, by facing it for one moment and then turning their backs on it for another, in a kind of endless inspired whirl through history. France is a uniquely lovely and supple place to live, and there is a reasonable suspicion here that the British and the Americans and the Germans are trying to hustle the French into what is called a liberal paradise, but what no one here is quite convinced is so paradisiacal. Among the nonunionized, petit bourgeois strike sympathizers, in particular, there is an intransigent and rather admirable level of temperamental resis-tance to the notion of "reforming" France to suit the global econ-omy. Even Bernard Thibault, the secretary-general of the chemmots' union, said not long ago that he was willing to negoti-ate but that his bottom line was "Citizens must never be trans-ported like merchandise."

In France, of course, not even the merchandise is transported

like merchandise. When the turkey arrived at last, a week after the strike began, I got an excited call inviting me to come see it, and when I arrived, the rotisseur, showing it off, pointed out to me how different it was from any bird in an American supermar-ket. It wasn't frozen, pumped full of cooking oil, or raised in a shed. The bird was supposed to have composed what amounted to a suicide note. "I was raised like a savage, in the forest of the Landes," the turkey's last will and testament began. "I fed on pure corn, wandered in the open air, and slept at night alone in the trees. ..."

We talked about the strike-the rotisseur seemed to have the same ambivalent sympathies as most other Frenchmen-and I sensed then that he believed that somehow the cheminots' strike would help him keep out the frozen turkeys, and the supermar-kets they sit in, and the big chains that own the supermarkets. This belief may be as false as the belief that a ghost dance could raise the dead and bring back the buffalo, but it is no less fer-vently held.

The only things that have been working perfectly during the strike are what I suppose have to be called the instruments of global capitalism. The worldwide courier services are still pick-ing up packages and sending them out overnight across the ocean, faxes buzz and communicate, and the one worker who seemed to make it nonchalantly through the streets to our house was the cable TV installer, who hooked us up so that we could watch the strike on CNN. It's that anxious-making globalized economy that the strikers are responding to, however incoher-ently.

Everyone here likes to compare what is going on now with what went on in '68. The real point may be that while that was, in retrospect, essentially a cultural revolution in the guise of a political one, '95 seems, so far, to be a political revolution in the

THE WINTER CIRCUS, CRISTMAS JOURNAL 1

It is the weather reports on CNN that will scare you most. They must come from a studio in Atlanta, like most things on the cable network, but they tell about the European weather, and only the European weather, and they treat Europe as if it were, for CNN's purposes, one solid block of air with dirt down be-neath, one continuous area of high- and low-pressure systems bumping into one another over a happy common land, just like the Instate area, or "here in the Southland," or "up in the heart of the North country," or any of the other cheerful areas into which American television stations divide the country.

The job of the European weatherman (or -woman) seems to be pretty low on the CNN totem pole. They keep changing. One day it is a blow-dried midwesterner; the next a corn-fed, nicely Jane Pauleyish woman; the next a portly black guy. Each one points in turn to the big map of Europe, with the swirling satel-lite photo superimposed, and then, with the limitless cheeriness

of an American announcer, calls out the temperature and tomor-row's forecast for every site of the more intolerable tragedies of the twentieth century.

"If you're headed to Warsaw tonight, you may just want to pack that extra sweater, but if business is pulling you over on that quick trip to St. Petersburg"-quick, impish, professional wink- "you'd better make sure that you've got the overcoat. Looking at snow there all night long.

"We're looking at sunny weather throughout Italy, from Rome right up to Venice. Looks like another mild night in France, though of course there'll be snow in the mountains around Savoy. In the Basque country, some really chilly temperatures. Nice ski-ing, though. More mild weather in Prague and Budapest, though looking up at Vienna . . ." All the old capitals of Old Europe, the sites of the ghettoes and the massacres and the opera houses, the border with Spain where they turned the refugees away and Walter Benjamin died in despair, all treated in the spirit, with the same sound, that I can recall from every night in my childhood in West Philadelphia, when "Dr." Somebody or other-a "certi-fied meteorologist"-gave the weather for the tristate area and threw in the highs and lows in Atlantic City "for all of you head-ing for the shore."

We have won as large a victory as any country has ever won- no empire has ever stood in so much power, cultural, political, economic, military-and all we can do is smile and say that you might want to pack a sweater for the imperial parade.

When the cable television man came to hook us up on the first morning of the general strike, you could hear the demonstrators out on the boulevard, singing and marching. But the bland emis-sary from the age of global information worked on, stringing the wire and hooking up the decoder boxes. He finally handed us three different remotes and then ran through the thirty-odd

channels like a priest reciting the catechism. "Here is CNN, news in America. Here is MTV. Here is French MTV," the cable man explained. "Here is Euronews, in English. Here is Euro-sport." A 49ers-Dolphins game was in progress. There it was, truly, the same familiar ribbon of information and entertainment that girdles the world now-literally (really, truly literally) encir-cling the atmosphere, electric rain. All you have to do is hold out a hand to catch it.

Luke, at least, has found a home, shelter from the electronic rain and global weather. He lives in the Luxembourg Gardens. We go there nearly every day, even in the chill November days among the fallen leaves. The design of the gardens is nearly per-fect for a small child. There is a playground; there is a puppet theater, where he is too small to go yet, but outside the puppet theater there is a woman selling balloons, and every morning he points to his wrist and says his all-purpose word, bu-bel, which means balloon, ball, whatever it is meant to mean. But then, when we get to the gardens and the po-faced woman goes to tie the balloon to his wrist, he leaps back with fear and demands to have it taken off again. Approach and avoidance with older women.

He rides the carousel, the fallen leaves piled neatly all around it, and though bent-up it is a beauty. The animals are chipped, the paint is peeling, the giraffe and elephant are missing hooves and tusks, and the carousel is musicless and graceless. The older children ride the outside horses. A God-only-knows-how-old carousel motor complains and heaves and wheezes and finally picks up enough momentum to turn the platform around, while the carousel attendant hands a baton to each of the older chil-dren riding the outside horses. Then he unhooks a pear-shaped wooden egg from the roof of his little station, at the edge of the turning platform, and slips little metal rings with leather tags at-tached into the eggs. As the children race around, the little rings drop one after another into the egg and dangle from its base, the

small leather tags acting as a kind of target, a sighting mecha-nism so that the children can see the rings. The older children try to catch the rings with the sticks.

It looks tricky; it looks hard. The kids have to hold the weather-beaten sticks up just so; there's just one angle, one way to do it. As the carousel picks up speed, it gets going whirring fast and the hand-eye, or rather hand-eye-painted horse, coor-dination you need looks terrifyingly accomplished. To make things even harder, if two children are mounted one right behind the other, and the first child lances the ring, it means that the next ring, slipping down, only arrives at the base of the wooden egg as the next child arrives, making it just about impossible to aim. If the first child just knocks the ring, on the other hand, the ring starts trembling widely enough to make a good grab impos-sible. It is a tough game, and what makes it odder is that there is no reward for doing well at it. I have read about this game all my life: going for the Big Brass Ring! It's an American metaphor. But here there are little tin rings, and no reward for getting them ex-cept the satisfaction of having done it. You don't even get to keep the tin rings for a moment of triumph-Look, Mama!-to show the cluttered stick, rings on it like plums on the branch of a plum tree. The keeper takes back the batons before the carousel has even stopped.

It is hard for me to imagine Luke ever doing this: sitting up there, skewering his rings. For the moment, for a long moment, we sit together in the little chariots and just spin. He keeps his eyes locked on the big kids with the sticks, who come under the heading of Everything He Desires: a stick, a task, a seat on the outside horse. (For me, the sticks and rings game on the carousel looks more like a symbolic pageant. A Writer's Life: hard job, done intently, for no reason. Cioran used to walk in these gardens. I wonder if he watched this.) The reward for the Parisian children is, perhaps, the simple continuity, the reality that the spinning will never get a prize, but that it will also never stop.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

On nice days, when we don't have time to go all the way to the gardens, Luke and I go to the musical horse outside the Oiseau de Paradis ("Bird of Paradise"), a toy store on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and he solemnly rides up and down on it while it plays "Camptown Races." On rainy days, we go to Deyrolle on the rue du Bac. It is an extraordinary place. It is on the second floor-almost all of the second story-of one of the old hotels particuliers. It is, I suppose, a taxidermists' supply house and a supplier too of education charts. But it is also one of the great surrealist sites of Paris. Downstairs, at street level, there is the old-fashioned kind of come-hither wraparound window en-trance, so that you enter a deep-set door between two vitrines, an architecture that must have been familiar once in Paris-it was the architecture of every South Street shoe store in my childhood-though it is fairly rare now. (Mostly the windows are one sheet of plate glass, with a kind of false front showing the goods and the store behind.) But here you walk past a "seasonal" window, filled with taxidermized animals and bare minimum decor: artificial fallen leaves for autumn, cotton ball "snow" for winter, a few silk flowers for spring. Sometimes the animals in-side the windows change too-an ancient, yellowing polar bear right now represents the Spirit of Christmas-but mostly it is the same bunch all year: a fox, a raccoon, a moose. (The polar bear must have been brought down on the same expedition that is celebrated in the window of a lead soldier store on the rue des Ciseaux, which shows an otherwise unrecorded late-nineteenth-century French expedition to the North Pole, with the tricolor hanging over an igloo and reindeer entrecote in a chef's sauteuse.)

When you open the door at Deyrolle, there is a moose on your

4 1

left and then an odd display case straight ahead, with snake em-bryos in little jars of formaldehyde. If you go up the stairs-and Luke will only go up the stairs clutching tightly to my chest-you will find at the top an entire bestiary waiting patiently for your ar-rival not in casements or vitrines but just standing on all fours on the floor around the casements and vitrines, looking bored and social, like writers at a New York book party They just stand there. There are several lions, genuinely terrifying in their direct address. They have been taxidermized-reanimated is the cor-rect term-not to look fierce but just to look bored-these are French lions, after all-which of course makes them look more fierce.

And then a baby elephant and a jaguar and a gorilla, all just there, with all the other natural things-skeletons and skulls and case upon case of butterflies and beetles-all around. The walls are painted a fading blue-green; the cases are all wood and glass. The main showroom is a two-story space, with a balcony up above. They keep the ordinary farm animals, sheep and goats, up there, looking down on the stars, like the extras in Les Enfants du Paradis.

There are also-and this is the weirdest touch-lots of do-mestic animals, family pets, Siamese and Scotties and cockers, who stand there on the floor too, among the lions and jaguars, looking furtive, forlorn, a little lost. Mme. Orlovska, the owner, who has become a friend, explains that they are unclaimed taxi-dermed pets from the old Deyrolle regime. Apparently year after year people would come in, weeping and clutching the cold bod-ies of Fido and Minochette, the house pets, and beg to have them taxidermized, restored, revivified. The taxidermists would go to laborious work, and then, two or three months later, when the pet was at last stuffed into its immortality, the owner, con-soled with a new living (though mortal) pet, would have forgot-ten all about it. No answer to calls or bills or what she calls "cornrnands of conscience." So the unwanted permanent pets-

who were perhaps, as pets always are, mere courtesans of affec-tion, feigning a feeling for food-get replaced, as courtesans will, and find themselves at the feet of the lions and elephants.

The big game are themselves souvenirs of a hotter time in Deyrolle's history, when hunters would have their African catches mounted and leave an extra lion or a leftover gnu to the house, as a sort of tip, like gamblers in Monte Carlo in the same period giving a chip or two to the croupier. The house makes its money now, Madame explains, mostly selling bugs and butterflies to decorators. "We can't find any large game anymore," she com-plains. "The laws are so absurdly tight. If a lion dies in a circus, we cannot touch it. If an elephant falls over in a zoo, we cannot reanimate it. Is it better for a thing of beauty to die and molder away than to be made a work of art?" (The government is wor-ried, as governments will be, I suppose, that if fallen elephants are turned into merchandise, however lovely, then sooner or later elephants will not just be falling. Elephants will be nudged.)

Luke is as frightened (and fascinated) by the small game as he is by the large; he clings to me tightly throughout-and then every day demands to be taken back. I think he feels about it the same way that I feel about the Baudrillard seminar I am attending at the Beaubourg. It's scary, but you learn something.

I've attended this public seminar, given by Baudrillard and friends at the Beaubourg. Jean Baudrillard is, or anyway was, the terror of West Broadway back in the eighties. He was the inven-tor of the theory of "the simulacra," among much else, and fa-mously insisted that "reality" had disappeared and that all that was left in its place was a world of media images and simulated events. ("The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" was his famous slo-gan, meaning that it was a pure television production.) Before the seminar I imagined Baudrillard as tall and spectral and high-

domed as Barthes had been. He turns out to be a stocky, friendly little guy in his fifties, with a leather jacket and a weather-beaten complexion.

The seminar consists of a three- or four-man panel: an econo-mist; a sociologist; Leo Scher, the all-around thinker. Each gives a presentation, and then Baudrillard comments. The other day, for instance, the economist was giving a lecture on exponentiality "Exponentiality is fatality," he announced grimly, and went on to point out what every first-year biology student is told, that the "ex-ponential" proliferation of biological life-each codfish has a mil-lion codfish children; each codfish child has a million of its own children-means that the codfish, or slime mold or antelope or, for that matter, French intellectuals, would cover the world in ten or so generations, unless there were something-several somethings-there to check them.

(The girl in front of me scribbled in her book, in French, of course, "Exponentiality is Fatality")

"Therefore," said the economist, "I propose that there must exist in the biological sphere a principle, which I will call the Regulon"-he wrote the word in capitals on the blackboard- "which prevents this from happening. I call this principle the Regulon."

No one protested, or pointed out that, as I think is the case, Darwin (among many others) had solved this problem awhile ago without recourse to the Regulon. (Predators eat most of the cod-fish; the rest just die. Life is hard; the Regulon is called life, or death.) Baudrillard nodded gravely at the end of the exposition. But yours underlines the point I am making," he added, almost plaintively He paused and then pronounced: "There is no Regu-lon in the Semiosphere." (And she wrote it down and under-scored it: "There is no Regulon in the Semiosphere.")

There Is No Regulon in the Semiosphere. There is no way of stopping media signs from proliferating, no natural barrier to the endless flow and reproduction of electronic information, no way

of keeping the CNN weatherman out of your sky. There is nothing to eat them. There Is No Regulon in the Semiosphere is a wildly abstract way of saying that there is no "natural predator" to stop the proliferation of movies and television; they do over-whelm the world, and with it reality. It is hard to see how you save the carousel and the musical horse in a world of video games, not because the carousel and musical horse are less attractive to children than the Game Boy, but because the carousel and the musical horse are single things in one fixed place and the video games are everywhere, no Regulon to eat them up.

When I lived here with my family, in the early seventies, there was nothing I liked more than walking up the boulevard Beau-marchais to the Cirque d'Hiver, the Winter Circus. It is a wooden octagon, visible from the boulevard, but set well back, on a little street of its own. A frieze, a kind of parody of the Pan-athenaic procession, runs around its roof: clowns and jugglers and acrobats in bas-relief. Inside, it has a hushed, intimate quality;

the hard wooden bleachers are pitched very high. I don't recall that I ever actually went inside when I was a kid-I was too busy with movies-it just seemed like the right place to walk to. But now we've been to a winter circus at the Winter Circus. The Cirque du Soleil, from back home in Montreal, put on its slightly New Age show, and we took Luke and sat in the top rows. They brought the lights down when the circus began, as though it were a play, which struck me as an odd thing. I always think of circuses sharing the light of their spectators. What happened to the summer circus? I used to think that the circuses must have toured all summer and then came into winter retreat on the rue Amelot. But now I suspect that there was a summer circus once too, but they closed it. The Circus. Regulon got it, I guess.

It was a good circus, though a little long on New Age, New Vaudeville, and Zen acrobats and a little short, absent in fact, on

the lions and bears I had promised Luke. (We have a standing joke about lions in Paris; as I push his poussette, I announce that I am terrified that there may be lions in this quarter of Paris- "and I'm so scared of lions"-and he roars, lustily.) At the end, though, the troupe took its final bow and threw those little glow-ing green bracelets up into the audience as a favor. A few came up as high as we were. The French fathers, soccer players to a man, snatched at them from the wrist as they flew up, like men slapping futilely at mosquitoes. I stood up and with years of in-competent Central Park softball under my belt, I pounded the right fist into the left and pulled one in like a pop-up. Then I handed it to Luke. The other fathers in the row looked at me with pure hate. I shrugged and have never felt so obnoxious, so proud, so imperial, so American.

We have found Luke a baby-sitter, or I suppose I have to say a nanny. Her name is Nisha Shaw, she comes from Sri Lanka, has long hair in a beautiful braid and beautiful lilting English, and she is the wife of the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy's chauffeur. She is lovely and loving, and she sings all day to Luke in a high-pitched soprano, singing songs that seem just out of focus. "Blowin' in the Wind" and a song called "Softly Sings the Donkey/As he goes to hay/If you don't come with him/He will go away." Softly sings the donkey-the theme tune of the American liberal abroad. We have already, in a few weeks, become a strange island of Sri Lankan, Icelandic-Canadian, West Philadelphian, Franco-American civi-lization within a bigger culture. I imagine these are songs that she's heard over the radio and in school, songs that are part of her own little monoculture, just as we have made up ours.

Every morning as Luke and I wait for Nisha to arrive before I go to work in my office, we look out from the kitchen into the courtyard. Every morning, just at eight-fifteen, a hand emerges, holding at its end a tablecloth or a sheet or something that it

shakes out. She is known as the Shaky Lady, the Aurora, or Dawn Goddess, of our home. We made up a song in her honor- Oh, Shaky Lady/Oh, Shaky Lady, be good to me"-and she seems to shake with such authority, such intensity.

The odd thing in making a big move is the knowledge that your life will be composed of hundreds of small things that you will ar-rive at only by trial and error, and that for all the strikes and sem-inars you attend, the real flavor of life will be determined, shaped, by these things. The Semiosphere comes at you in little bursts. Where will your hair be cut? What kind of coffee will you buy, and where? We have been searching for the right mocha, every-where we go: at La Vieille France, a pastry store on the rue de Buci; at Hediard, on the place de la Madeleine; at Whittard, an English coffee importer that has a counter in the Conran on the rue du Bac. Our old Dean & DeLuca blend is gone now, and we must find a new one. The Shaky Lady will preside over some kind of coffee, but even she cannot know quite which one, not just yet.

We have been trying to furnish our place-we had minimal fur-niture in the New York loft, really, chairs and rugs and rattraps- and on Sundays we go up to the Marche aux Puces, the flea market, which remains a wonder, though the only fleas in it all have Platinum American Express cards. (It isn't cheap.) The Metro ride up to the porte de Clignancourt is a joy, though, just for the names of the stations in northern Paris: Chateau Rouge, Chateau d'Eau-what -was the Red Castle? what was the Water Tower?-Poissonniers, Gare du Nord, with its lovely, thirties, Gabinish overtones. We come up, back home, at Odeon, under the statue of Danton, and a single limb of a chestnut tree hangs over the Metro stairs. It's dark already at five o'clock, the limb sil-houetted against the moonlit sky while the crowd presses against you on the stairs. What an old place France is, the attic bursting

with old caned chairs and zinc bars and peeling dressers and var-nished settees. The feeling is totally different from an antiques fair in America; this is the attic of a civilization.

Today we stop at Le Biron for lunch; the restaurants up at the flea market-Le Biron, Le Voltaire-are among the few real bistros left, in the sense of simple places with some culinary pre-tension that maintain an air of joie de vivre. The poor madame is terribly overworked, and we feel for her, but lunch, simple chicken, takes an hour and a half. The tarte tatin is very good, though. After lunch, on this freezing cold day, faint light raking through the stalls, Luke and I stop at the little bar with a Django-style swing band: two gypsy guitarists with ancient electrics with f-holes, joined by a good-looking blonde with an alto sax. There's a couple smoking endless Gauloises next to us. I ordered, with a thrilling automatic feeling, a cafe-calva and a grenadine for Luke. They played the old American songs-"All of Me," "There Will Never Be Another You"-some Jobim too, really swinging it. Martha was off shopping at Vernaison for a plain old table. A per-fect half hour.

Martha insisted on taking a cab home, declaring it too cold to get on the Metro. The cabbie, observing Luke, began a dis-quisition on children. Only children-we explained in French that he won't be, or we hoped he wouldn't be-are, he explained, the cause of the high modern divorce rate: The boy arrives, and the man feels jealous; there is another man in his wife's life (well, another being), and this leads to jealousy, a lover; and the whole cycle over again. (Why a second child would cure this ...) This is why women must have three children and stay home. "The school instructs," he explained, "but the family educates." I couldn't decide whether to give him a large or small tip.

It is odd to think that for so long people came to Paris mostly for the sex. "City of the naughty spree," Auden wrote disdain-

fully in the twenties, "La Vie Parisienne, Les Folies-Bergere, Mademoiselle Fifi, bedroom mirrors and bidets, lingerie and adultery." These days the city's reputation for naughtiness has pretty much diminished away to nothing. Now the dirty movies get made in Amsterdam; the dirty drawings get sent in from Tokyo; and Oriental and even German towns, of all places, are the places you go for sexual experiment. (Even the bidets are gone from Paris, mostly converted into bizarre plug-in electric toilets, which roar as they chew up human waste, in a frenzy of sanitary appetite, and then send it out, chastened, down the or-dinary water pipes.)

Things have become so run-down, or cleaned up, sexually here that France has even reached the point where it is running a bimbo deficit and has to import its sex objects. Just last week Sharon Stone was flown in to Paris to be made a Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture, M. Philippe Douste-Blazy. The award struck many Parisians as ridiculous, but it was, in its crude way, a logical part of a consistent cultural policy. Despite their reputation, the French are not really cul-tural chauvinists at all. They remain chauvinists about their judgment, a different thing; increasingly their judgment is their culture. They want to be free to continue to reinvent American culture in their own image, finding art forms where back home we saw only hackwork and actresses where we saw only bimbos. (The award to Sharon Stone was for "her services to world cul-ture.") They don't mind if the Americans make the movies so long as they get to pass out the medals. Pinning a decoration on Sharon Stone is the perfect way of looking down your nose at U.S. cultural imperialism while simultaneously fondling its chest.

The one exception to the erotic milding of Paris are the lingerie ads, which still fill the boulevards and billboards. The ads-

particularly the ones for Aubade-are sharply, unsettlingly erotic, to a male viewer, and differ from their American counterparts in not seeming particularly modern. Women are, as we would say, reduced to body parts; the Aubade ads isolate breasts or thighs or legs as relentlessly as a prep chef at KFC, each part dressed up in a somewhat rococo bit of underwear, lace and thong, in sculpted-lit black and white, very Hurrell, with a mocking "rule" underneath it-i.e., "Rule Twenty-four: Feign Indiffer-ence."

There is something stimulating but old-fashioned about these posters (which, for a week or two at a time, are every-where, on every bus stop, on every bus). They are coquettish, a word I had never associated with a feeling before. For all the complaints about a new puritanism, the truth is that feminism in America has, by restoring an edge of unpredictability and dan-ger to the way women behave and the way men react to that be-havior, added to the total of tension on which desire depends. The edgy, complicated, reverse-spin coding of New York life- this skintight dress is not a come-on but its opposite, a declara-tion of independence meant not for you but for me-is unknown here. Here, the intellectuals wear black, and the models wear Alaia.

The other evening, for instance, we went to a dinner party where the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy appeared with his wife, the amazing-looking Arielle Dombasle (who wore a bathing suit in one of those philosophical-erotic-talky French films, from the time when philosophical-erotic-talky French films were the delight of the Upper West Side). She wore a skintight lame dress. We saw her a week or so later and she was wearing another cling-ing lame dress, as though out of obligation to her own image, her own invention. Desir in Paris is surreptitious but not ironic; everyone has affairs, but no one has reverse-spin coding. In New York the woman in the clinging dress is probably a professor at Hunter, while the girl in all black with no makeup reading the

French papers may be Sharon Stone. You could tell by the medal, I suppose.

Mostly, we shop at BHV, the department store on the rue de Rivoli, which has become our home, our Luxembourg Gardens. BHV-the Bazar de 1'Hotel de Ville, the City Hall Bazaar-is al-ways called by its initials (bay-aish-vay), and it is an old store, one of the great nineteenth-century department stores on the Right Bank that are the children of the Galeries Lafayette. As I say, it is on the rue de Rivoli; in fact that famous Robert Doisneau photograph of the two lovers kissing is set on the rue de Rivoli just outside BHV. This is doubly ironic: first, because the narrow strip of the rue de Rivoli in front of BHV is about the last place in the world that you would want to share a passionate kiss-it would be a bit like kissing at the entrance to the BMT near Macy's-and of course, it explains why they did it anyway. They are not sundered lovers but a young couple who have man-aged to buy an electric oven and emerged alive. Anyone who has spent time at BHV knows that they are kissing not from an onset of passion but from gratitude at having gotten out again.

BHV, in its current form, seems to have been invented by a Frenchman who visited an E. J. Korvette's in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, sometime in the early 1960s and, maddened with love, decided to reproduce it down to the least detail. There's the same smell of popcorn, the same cheery help, the same discount appliances stretching as far as the eye can see. It is the Parisian tradition that the landlord does not supply appliances. They must all be bought, and you take them with you when you leave. We had a whole run of things to buy, none of which, as lifelong Manhattan renters, we had ever had to buy before: a refrigerator, an oven, a stove. We had, oddly enough, once bought a wonder-

ful French dishwasher, a Miele, silent as a Greek oracle, to add to our old loft. But we couldn't use even this since most of the old appliances run on American 110 volts, and France uses 220 volts. You either have to get the insides of the machine changed or else buy something new.

We became hypnotized, bewitched by the curious selling rhythms of BHV: a mixture of confidence, arrogance, and an American-style straightforwardness, with the odd difference that here the customer is always, entirely wrong. We bought a toaster, which promptly shorted out the first time we used it. We brought it back. "What did you toast in it?" the return man asked, haughty for all that he was wearing a regulation oversize checked vest, the uniform of BHV. "Raisin brioche," we answered hon-estly. He looked shocked, disgusted, appalled, though not sur-prised. "What do you expect if you put bread with raisins in it?" he asked. But he let us have a new one anyway.

The week before Christmas I had to go out to buy Christmas tree lights at the Bon Marche, the Left Bank department store. Ours didn't work, for reasons I don't understand, since a lot of the electric lamps we brought with us do work. Apparently some American lights shine in Paris, and some don't, don't ask why. (Henry James wrote whole novels on this theme, after all.) In-stead of coming in strands that you can wrap around the tree, though, the French Christmas tree lights come in guirlandes- garlands-closed circles of lights without beginnings or endings. A thin cord with a plug at the end shoots out from the middle of the garland. (They cost a fortune too: twenty-five dollars for as many lights as you can get on Canal Street for five.) These gar-lands are packed into the box just the way strands are-light by light in little cardboard notches in a horizontal row-so it's only when you take them out of the box that you realize that what you've got is a ring, not a rope.

This means that the only way to get the Christmas lights on the Christmas tree is to lasso it. You have to get up on a ladder, hold the lights out as a loop, and then, pitching forward a bit, throw the entire garland right over the top of the tree, rodeo style. This is harder to do than it sounds and even more danger-ous than it looks. I suppose you could pick up the tree and shimmy the lights on from down below, like a pair of calecons, but this would require someone to pick up the tree so you could do it. I can't really see the advantages of having a garland over a string. A string is easier to use-you just start at the bottom and wrap it right around the tree, merrily ascending-and this seems to me not cultural prejudice but a practical fact. (But then all cultural prejudices seem like practical facts to the prejudiced.) Still, the garlands are all there is. Martha kept sending me back to buy more.

Even then it wasn't finished. I had had the pointed inspiration of buying blue lights for the Christmas tree this year, whereas in New York we always had white ones. Since we had moved, changed cultures, I couldn't think of a better marker, a clearer declaration of difference and a new beginning, than having blue lights on the tree instead of white ones. But when I brought them home and did my Roy Rogers bit again and we turned them on and then turned off the lights in the living room, no one liked the look of them. The blue lights looked, well, blue. I doggedly, painstakingly packed them back into the box, took them back to the Bon Marche, and tried to exchange them for white lights.

The trouble now was that the new white lights I got were white lights that were all twinkling ones. I saw the word clignotant on the box, and I knew that it meant blinking, but somehow I didn't associate the word blinking with the concept "These lights blink off and on." It was the same thing with the garlands, come to think of it. It said guirlande right on the box, and I knew perfectly well what guirlande meant; but I am not yet able to make the

transposition from what things say to what they mean. I saw the word guirlande on the box, but I didn't quite believe it. In New York I believe everything I read, even if it appears in the New York Post. In France I am always prepared to give words the benefit of a poetic doubt. I see the word guirlande and shrug and think that maybe garland is just the French seasonal Christmas light-specific idiom for a string. The box says, "They blink," and I think they don't.

I found this out of course only after I had already put the lights on the tree, plugged them in, and watched them blinking. I liked the effect OK, but Martha was having none of it. She thought it looked horrible-sequiny and vulgar were her words- so back I went to Bon Marche on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, for the third time, to buy a garland of unblinking white lights. This time the saleswoman gave me a really hard time. It was bad enough not knowing what color you want, but not even knowing if you wanted shimmer or a solid glow? I got them home at last and felt unreasonably proud of the garland of lights: a closed circle, desire and fulfillment meeting in a neat French ring, and just shining.

For all the talk about globalization, the unification of the world through technology, etc., the truth is that only information is being globalized (and then only for people who speak En-glish). There is a Regulon in the Semiosphere. It is called a plug. The necessities of life-plugs and voltages and battery types and ... -are more compartmentalized, more provincialized, more exhaustingly different now from country to country from what they were a century or even two centuries ago. A chamber pot, after all, was always a chamber pot in whatever country you happened to be sitting; a pen was a pen since a feather was a feather. But to plug in your computer now takes a range of plugs and adapters-three prongs and two prongs and two small

prongs with a big prong and three tiny prongs in a row-that look like sexual aids for jaded courtesans in de Sade. We are unified by our machines and divided up by the outlets we use to brancher them.

Fish, too. Fish and plugs are the two great differences, the two things that are never quite alike from country to country. Fish are sort of alike but maddeningly not exactly alike. You have to learn the translations. A bar is sort of but not quite a sea bass, a rouget like a red snapper but actually smaller and more dapper-weirdly snappier. A turbot is not a flounder. Even French oysters, the most delicious in the world, have a salty, sea brine, bracing taste, not better than plump, sweet American oys-ters, but different-far more different from the difference, real though it is, between French lamb and American, or a French chicken and a good American one.

Globalization stops short at the baseboard and the coastline, wherever the electricity and the seafood come charging in. The reason for the differences are plain enough. You can't farm line-caught fish, and the variety of plugs is the consequence of the basic difference in the European decision to have 220-volt out-lets where we have only 110. This means that the Europeans worry more about shocks. They add a third plug to ground the charge, the baseboard equivalent of a social safety net. Each one does it a little differently. The French have light, dapper, rounded three-prong plugs with two little cylindrical probes and a third, thicker one; the British have three immensely heavy prongs;

and the Italians, I recall, have an odd, all-in-line arrangement. All of them feature that third grounding element to keep the shocks from passing from the surging current directly into the room and the people who live there. Only America remains ungrounded.

To make the transition from country to country, plug to plug, you also need to know more than anyone can-well, anyway, more than I do-about what things have motors and which

don't. (Motors aren't adaptable, even with adapters. You have to get converters for them that turn out to be big, heavy black poxes-odd, in this day of the streamlined and transistorized- that do something or other to the current.)

I plugged in my Stylewriter Mac printer the third day here to print something out, and as it began to print, it also immediately began to smoke. Disconcerting plumes of flame shot from it, as though it were being executed in Florida. Horrible sight, partic-ularly as it kept on printing even as it destructed, another symbol of the writer's life. So I had to buy a new one, whose software is all in French. I am learning French computerese: brancher, imprimer, annuler ... Even the common language of the bank ma-chine is odd. We got our bank cards from our new bank, but whereas in New York you have to punch out your code-ours was Luke's birthday-here you are assigned your code by the bank, with no appeals. You are 3431, you are 1676, that is it.

There is a separate language of appliance design in France, which we are learning as we wander, pushing the poussette in and out of the rows on the second floor of the BHV. Things are smaller, but they are also much quieter and more streamlined. In the kitchen, when you branche them, they hum, discreetly, im-patiently. They all are slim, white, molded, with the buttons and lights neatly small, rectangular, and inset into the white plastic. The hulking, growling American appliances we had at home, with their freezers on top and their sunset brown faces, all were solid, vast and seemed to imply survivalism. You could go cruis-ing in them. The French appliances, with their blinking lights and set-back press buttons on the front, imply sociability and connection.

It is as if all American appliances dreamed of being cars while all French appliances dreamed of being telephones. The French freezer is, in a French refrigerator, always on the bottom rather than the top and is composed of drawers and secret compart-ments, like an old writing desk; you are supposed to fill it with

culinary billets-doux, little extras, like petits pois, instead of with the next week's dinner, as you do in an American freezer.

Parisians love telephones, all kinds of telephones. They don't use them the way that Americans use telephones, but they just love them, the way that Americans love cars. (This is partly be-cause telephones are newly arriving; when we lived here in the early seventies, a year went by, and we still didn't have a phone.) The cellular phone, which back in New York still seemed to me to be mostly in the hands of real estate agents and salespeople- those who were, in a sense, on call, biddable-is here in every-one's hands. You walk down the boulevard, and everyone is talking, a phone clutched to the ear. What you never see, though, is someone walking down the street with a Walkman on, as everyone does in New York. (I miss my walks with my Walkman, in fact, probably more than any other single thing about life here so far: the music, the isolation, the sense of life as a sound track, the pure release of it. Nobody here wants to shut the city out. They are talkers, not silent listeners.)

They don't have answering machines either, or at least don't rely on them to do all the work of protection and sorting and screening that New Yorkers do. If you call people, and they're home, they answer; they have the same law-abiding approach to these calls that Americans have to parking. You park where you're supposed to park, whereas people in Paris will park any-where. It is not so much that the phone transformed France and the car transformed America as that both fitted right in, as I sup-pose technologies must, with what people had wanted all along. Not new desires made by new machines but new machines matching the same old needs. The phone replaced the system of pneumatic messages-the pneus-that used to race around Paris, and there is something pneu about them even now: French telephone conversations tend to be sharp, pointy, rather than expansive.

There is an odd, seemingly purposeful looking-glass quality to

a lot of the things we have to buy. The Braun coffeemaker with a thermos that we had in New York is available here, but oddly only in black, whereas the one in New York was available only in

white.

Luke loves BHV for the music. All day long it plays excited, taped Christmas shopping announcements, backed with appro-priate tunes. Some of the tunes we recognize-it plays the Looney Tunes theme, for instance-and some seem vaguely familiar but are hard to name, so we give our own names to them: "The Love Theme from BHV," "BHV's Victory at Sea," and the "BHV Christmas Anthem." His ears undimmed by fifteen years of the IRT, he can hear them all even over the din of appliance shop-ping, and when he notices a favorite, he rises from his stroller, a cobra in mittens, and sways solemnly back and forth.

About five days before Christmas, BHV was decked out for the holidays, though, with the strikes shutting down transporta-tion, there was hardly a soul in sight. Twenty years ago there was no Christmas in Paris. Oh, there was a holiday, of course, and even the gaunt, Gaullist figure of Pere Noel, an ascetic and intellectualized version of Santa. But the great American depart-ment store potlatch was unknown. All that's changed beyond recognition now. That central ritual of bountiful capitalism, the department store Christmas, is in late but absurdly full bloom here, and with an American flavor so pronounced that it hardly seems American anymore, just part of an international style. The dome of Printemps, on the boulevard Haussmann, for instance, is this year decorated with stylized Stars and Stripes and life-size figures of Jimmy Dean and Marilyn and dark and Bogie and even Babe Ruth. Now at BHV there are artificial evergreens, and tree decoration departments, and a Santa-get your picture with the old guy-and boughs of evergreen hung everywhere, and ar-tificial snow, even though it never snows in Paris at all. On this afternoon, the "BHV Christmas Anthem" began to rise from every loudspeaker on every floor. Only now, as Luke swayed in

his stroller, I could hear it clearly for the first time, loud and ring-ing through the almost empty store, and I understood at last why it had sounded so oddly familiar. It was the theme from Enter-tainment Tonight. Maybe there is no Regulon in the Semiosphere after all.

Distant Errors

The Rules of the Sport

Late last year the French government assembled a committee to choose a name for the vast new stadium that's being built in a Paris suburb. The committee included an actor, an "artiste," some functionaries, and even a few athletes. It took a long time deliberating over its choice. Names were submitted: Some peo-ple liked the idea of naming the stadium after Verlaine or Saint-Exupery, and lots of others liked the idea of calling it Le Stade Platini, after Michel Platini, the great French soccer player. At last, in December, the committee announced that it had come to a decision, and the government decided to broadcast the verdict on television. The scene was a little like the end of the Simpson trial: the worried-looking jurors filing to their seats, the pause as the envelope was handed to the minister of youth and sports, the minister clearing his throat to read the decision to the nation. The stadium that would represent France to the world, he an-nounced, would be called (long, dramatic pause) Le Stade de

France. The French Stadium. "Banal and beautiful at the same time," one journalist wrote. "Obvious and seductive. Timeless and unalterable."

It wasn't hard to detect, beneath the sturdy, patriotic surface of the new name, an undercurrent of ironic, derisory minimal-ism. The French are prepared to be formally enthusiastic about American-style stadiums and American-style sports, but they are not going to get carried away by it all. This realization first came home to me when I joined a pioneer health club on the Left Bank and spent four months unsuccessfully trying to get some exercise there.

"An American gym?" Parisians asked when I said that I was looking for someplace to work out, and at first I didn't know what to say. What would a French gym be like? Someone suggested that my wife and I join the Health Club at the Ritz; that was about as French as a gym could get. This sounded like a nice, glamorous thing to do, so we went for a trial visit. I ran out of the locker room and dived into the pool. White legs were dangling all around me-crowded to the edges, as though their owners were clinging to the sides of the pool in fear-and only after I rose to the surface did I see that the owners were all hanging from the edge of the pool, eating tea sandwiches off silver platters. Finally, after we'd done a lot of asking around, someone suggested a newly opening "New York-style" gym, which I'll call the Regi-ment Rouge. One afternoon Martha and I walked over to see what it was like and found it down at the end of a long, winding street. The gym was wedged into the bottom two floors of an institutional-looking Haussmann-era building. We went in and found ourselves surrounded by the virtuous sounds of Activity- sawing and hammering and other plaster dust-producing noises. The bruit seemed to be rising from a cavernlike area in the base-ment. At the top of a grand opera-style staircase that led to the basement were three or four fabulously chic young women in red tracksuits-the Regiment Rouge!-that still managed to be

fairly form-clinging. The women all had ravishing long hair and lightly applied makeup. When we told them that we wanted to abonner-subscribe-one of them whisked us off to her office and gave us the full spiel on the Regiment Rouge. It was going to bring the rigorous, uncompromising spirit of the New York health club to Paris: its discipline, its toughness, its regimental quality. They were just in the middle of having the work done- one could hear this downstairs-and it would all be finished by the end of the month. The locker rooms, the appareils Nau-tilus, the stationary bicycles with electronic displays, the steam baths, the massage tables-everything would be not just a l'americaine but tres New Yorkais. Best of all, she went on, they had organized a special "high-intensity" program in which, for the annual sum of about two thousand francs (four hundred dol-lars), you could make an inexorable New York-style commitment to your physique and visit the gym as often as once a week.

It was obvious that the once-a-week deal was the winner-the closer, in Mamet language-and that though she had a million arguments ready for people who thought that when it came to forme, once a week might be going overboard, she had nothing at all ready for people who thought once a week might not be forme enough. We asked her if we could possibly come more often than that, and she cautiously asked us what we meant by "often." Well, three, perhaps four times a week, we said. It was not un-known, we added quickly, apologetically, for New Yorkers to visit a gym on an impulse, almost daily. Some New Yorkers, for that matter, arranged to go to their health club every morning before work. She echoed this cautiously too: They rise from their beds and exercise vigorously before breakfast? Yes, we said weakly. That must be a wearing regimen, she commented politely.

She paused, and then she said, wonderingly, "Ah, you mean you wish to abonner for an infinite number of visits?" After much fooling around with numbers and hurried, hushed conferences with other members of the regiment, she arrived at a price for an

infinity of forme. The difference between once a week and infin-ity, by the way, turned out to be surprisingly small, improvised prices being one of the unpredictable pleasures of Paris life. She opened dossiers for both of us; you can't do anything in France without having a dossier opened on your behalf.

A week later I dug out my old gym bag, cranked up my Walk-man, and set off for the Regiment Rouge. When I arrived, the young women in the red tracksuits were still standing there. They looked more ravishing than ever. I picked out our consul-tant from the group and told her I was ready to get en forme. "Alas, the work continues," she announced. I peered down. The renovation seemed to have stopped just where it had been when I saw it before. "The vestiaires and the appareils will now be in-stalled next month," she said. "However, we are having classes all week long, on an emergency basis, and the Regiment Rouge wishes to make you an award for your patience." Then she gave me a bag of chocolate truffles. (There is a health food store on the rue du Bac that displays in its window its own brand of chocolates and its own marque of champagne. Tout Biologique! a sign alongside them proclaims virtuously.) I ate one.

A week after that we got a phone call from our consultant. She proudly announced that things were ready at last, and there would be a crepe party in honor of the opening. "We will have apricot jam and creme de marrons," she explained. We went to the crepe party. Everyone-would-be members and the girls in the red tracksuits-walked around eating stuffed crepes and ad-miring the pristine, shiny, untouched Nautilus machines and ex-ercise bikes and free weights.

A few days later I went back again to try to use the gym, but on my way into the regimen room I was stopped by another of the girls in red tracksuits. Before one could start work on the ma-chines, she explained, it was necessary that one have a ren-dezvous with a professeur. When I arrived the next day for my rendezvous, the professeur-another girl in a red tracksuit-was

waiting for me in the little office. She had my dossier out, and she was reviewing it seriously.

"Aren't we going to demonstrate the system of the machines?" I asked.

"Ah, that is for the future. This is the oral part of the ren-dezvous, where we review your body and its desires," she said. If I blushed, she certainly didn't. She made a lot of notes and then snapped my dossier shut and said that soon, she hoped, we could begin.

While all this was going on, I tried to tell Parisians about it, and I could see that they couldn't see what, exactly, I thought was strange. The absence of the whole rhetoric and cult of sports and exercise is the single greatest difference between daily life in France and daily life in America. Its true that French women's magazines are as deeply preoccupied with body image and ap-pearance as American ones. Rut they are confident that all prob-lems can be solved by lotions. The number of French ointments guaranteed to eliminate fat from the female body seems limit-less, and no pharmacy window is complete without a startlingly erotic ad for the Fesse-Uplift-an electrical buttock stimulator, guaranteed to eliminate fat by a steady stream of "small, not unpleasing shocks administered to the area," the ad says. Votre Beaute, the Self of France, recently had a special issue on losing weight. There were articles on electrical stimulation, on nutri-tion (raw carrots will help you lose weight; cooked carrots won't), on antiobesity pills, and on something called passive exercise. There was also, of course, a long article on reducing lotions. Fi-nally, buried in the back, among the lonely-hearts ads, was a sin-gle, vaguely illicit-looking page of workout diagrams. If all else fails.

Among men, an enthusiasm for sport simply segregates you in a separate universe: You are a sportsman or you are not. The idea

of sports as a lingua franca meant to pick up the slack in male conversations is completely alien here. The awkwardnesses that in America can be bridged by a hearty "See the Knicks last night?" exist here, but nobody bridges them by talking about sports. Sport is a hobby and has clinging to it any hobby's slightly disreputable air of pathos. Also, sport is an immigrant preoccu-pation: Whereas in America it acts as a common church, here it is still low church. There is a daily sports paper here, titled L'Equipe, but it is meant for enthusiasts; Le Monde devotes one or two pages to the subject, and Liberation only a few pages more. Paris has one good soccer team (whereas London alone has six), but you could walk the length and breadth of Saint-Germain and not see a single bit of evidence-not a sign in a window, a pennant in a bar, or a sweater on a supporter-that it exists. France has some terrific footballers, but they play mostly in England and Italy. The nearest thing to a Magic-Michael showdown in France is the affrontements of the French-born players David Ginola and Eric Cantona, but those take place across the Channel, in the North of England, where Ginola plays for Newcastle and Cantona for Manchester United. Still, Ginola and Cantona are regularly dunned by L'Equipe to declare their love of country. "But la France I think of all the time! Not only when I play Manchester! She is in my head and in my heart!" Gi-nola declared recently. It sounded a little forced to me, but ap-parently L'Equipe was satisfied. Legend has it that among Frenchmen sex and food are supposed to take the place of sports ("Did you perhaps see the petite blonde with the immense balcon, mon vieux?"), but in fact they don't. What the French do to bridge the uneasy competitive silences that seem to be the price of a Y chromosome is talk about government and particularly about the incompetence of government ministers; which minis-ter has outdone the others in self-important pomposity is viewed as a competitive event. Though the subject is different, the tone is almost exactly the same as that of American sports talk. "Did

you see Leotard on the eight o'clock last night?" one Parisian man might ask another. (The news is on at eight here.) Then they both shake their heads woefully, with that half smile, half smirk that New York men reserve for Mets relief pitchers: beyond pathetic.

If talking about the bureaucracy takes the place of talking about sports, getting involved with the bureaucracy takes the place of exercise. Every French man and woman is engaged in a constant entanglement with one ministry or another, and I have come to realize that these entanglements are what take the place of going to a gym where people actually work out. Three or four days a week you're given something to do that is time-consuming, takes you out of yourself, is mildly painful, forces you into close proximity with strangers, and ends, usually, with a surprising rush of exhilaration: "Hey, I did it." Every French min-istry is, like a Nautilus machine, thoughtfully designed to pro-vide maximum possible resistance to your efforts, only to give way just at the moment of total mental failure. Parisians emerge from the government buildings on the Ile de la Cite feeling just the way New Yorkers do after a good workout: aching and ex-hausted but on top of the world.

A few days after my oral interview I went back to the Regiment Rouge, and this time I actually got on one of the stationary bicy-cles and rode it for twenty-four minutes. I was in full New York regalia (sweatpants, headband, Walkman) and did it in good New York form (Stones blasting in my headphones, crying out, "One minute!" when there was a minute left to go). By now there were other people at the gym, though the man on the bicycle next to me was going at a speed barely fast enough to sustain life, while the woman beside him, who was on a treadmill, was walk-ing at the right speed for window-shopping on the boulevard Saint-Germain on an especially sunny day when your heart is

filled with love and your pockets are filled with money; it was as though she had set the machine at "Saunter."

I got down from my bike perspiring right through my T-shirt- the first person on the Left Bank, I thought proudly, to break a sweat at a gym. I walked back to the desk. "A towel, please," I panted (in French, of course). The girl in the red tracksuit at the desk gave me a long, steady, opaque look. I thought that maybe I had got the word for towel wrong (I hadn't, though), and after I asked again and got the same look in return, I thought it wise to try to describe its function. My description sounded like a defi-nition from Dr. Johnson's dictionary: that thing which is used in the process of removing water from the surfaces of your body in the moments after its immersion. "Ah," she said. "Of course. A towel. We have none yet." She looked off into the middle dis-tance. "This," she said at last, "is envisaged." I looked at her dumbly, pleadingly, the reality dawning on me. Then I walked all the way home, moist as a chocolate mousse.

A couple of days later I went for what I thought would be my last visit to the Prefecture de Police to get my carte de sejour, a process that had involved a four-ministry workout stretching over three months. The functionary seemed ready to give it to me-she was actually holding it out across the desk-but then she suddenly took one last look at the dossier the prefecture had on me and noticed something that she had somehow missed be-fore.

"Alors, monsieur," she said, "you have not yet had a physical examination to make sure that you are in sufficiently good health to remain in France."

I didn't know what to say. "I belong to a gym," I said at last, and I showed her my card from the regiment.

"Well," she said, "this will be useful for your dossier." I couldn't argue with that.

The Chill

It was a very cold winter here, and it felt even colder. "It's the dampness," every shivering Parisian explained. But really it was something else. A visitor who has walked bareheaded and oblivi-ous through twenty arctic Canadian winters found that, out for a walk in Paris with the temperature in the high thirties, he was pulling a woolen hat over his ears and huddling in doorways and stopping in cafes to drink hot wine and then quickly heading home.

What has made it seem so cold is the French gift for social dramatization: A cold day is a cold day, and everyone conspires to give it presence. Looking cold is also a way of making it plain that you are feeling miserable, a way to dramatize the "economic hor-ror" that has overtaken Paris. In the chill a series of smaller social pageants have been played out, including a hostage taking, a craze for a strange book on economics, a growing conviction that the way out of the crisis is for everyone to stop working, a cam-

paign against immigrants that led to mass civil disobedience by intellectuals, and visits by two foreigners bringing messages of deliverance.

The hostage taking at the Credit Foncier de France, a semi-public, or state-supported, mortgage lender, was the first and the most improbable of the economic dramas. The Credit Foncier was practically bankrupt, and the government decided to fob off parts of it on anybody who wanted bits of a failing bank. Its em-ployees then decided that the best way to persuade the govern-ment to reconsider this plan was to go to the top and kidnap the president, a M. Jerome Meyssonier. Not only did M. Meyssonier stay on as a hostage, but he supposedly made it the only condi-tion of his imprisonment that no photographer be allowed to take a picture of him sleeping on a cot in his office. The employees agreed, and even decided to keep the bank open for business while the boss was being held incommunicado. Then they too decided to sleep in the building, presumably as an act of solidar-ity with the boss they had just imprisoned.

Hostage taking of this kind has become more or less routine here, kidnapping the boss being to the French economic crisis what firing the employees was to the American one. Over the past few years a number of French bosses, including some at Moet et Chandon, have been held hostage. There's actually a nice word for telling the patron to go to his room and stay there: He is merely being "sequestered," which, as euphemisms go, seems a fair trade for the Anglo-Saxon downsizing.

The hostage takings, naturally, are almost entirely symbolic: If M. Meyssonier had really wanted to leave, he could have left. The melodrama of the "sequestration" was nonetheless mistaken by some foreign observers for the real thing. It's easy to exagger-ate the scale of the French crisis; the French do it themselves. The secondary, or symbolic, point of an action is often as clear as the primary, or practical, reality, and sometimes a lot clearer. At Christmastime in 1995 many journalists were enthralled by the

masses of ordinary people who were out on the streets every day in the tens of thousands, symbolically showing their solidarity with striking Metro drivers. It was easy to miss the real point, which is that what everybody was doing on the streets was walk-ing to work.

One economic problem is especially acute here: Unemploy-ment-or chomage, as it's called-has hovered around 12 per-cent for the last two years. Most of the other problems, the ones that create the sense of crisis, are anticipatory. They grow out of the fear that the right-wing government's tentative attempts at reform will eventually corral France into an "Anglo-Saxon" econ-omy, where an unleashed free market will make everybody do awful jobs for no money, forever. No one is reassured by the stri-dently triumphal tones of American free-marketers. After a re-cent trip to New York one French journalist remarked that leafing through a copy of Forbes or Fortune is like reading the op-erating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship.

These days one popular solution to the economic crisis is for everyone to stop working. The movement to lower the universal retirement age to fifty-five is the closest thing to a mass eco-nomic uprising that the country has seen; without the support of even the labor unions, to say nothing of the bemused parties of left or right, it is sweeping the country. It started last November, when striking truck drivers blockaded highways and ports to se-cure their right to retire at fifty-five. The government, faced with a choice between calling out the army and giving in, gave in. There was a general feeling that social justice had been done:

Truck drivers work long hours, away from their families, and let-ting them stop for good at fifty-five seemed fair.

Several weeks later people started to realize that after all, the truck drivers' lot wasn't that much harder than everybody else's, and the idea of universal retirement at fifty-five really took flight. In January one of the public transportation unions decided to de-mand universal retirement at fifty-five, and despite the opposi-

tion of the respectable left, by mid-February a poll revealed that almost 70 percent of the population was in favor of stopping work at fifty-five.

The folie for fifty-five can be seen as a nice populist rebound on an idea first put forward by employers. For years businesses had been able to draw on a public fund (the Fonds National pour 1'Emploi) in order to encourage workers to take early retirement. At the same time, the idea of reducing the length of the work-week has been debated; many people, for instance, had pro-posed moving to a four-day week, so that a few young workers might be shoehorned in on Fridays. In the minds of many work-ing people, though, the debate about a shorter workweek got mixed up with the truck drivers'retirement coup, and the two to-gether produced a sweeping, simple, plausible-sounding solution to the crise: Since the unemployed would benefit if everyone worked a little bit less, wouldn't they benefit even more if every-one stopped working a lot sooner?

The national craze for early retirement may be an employees' twist on an employers' gimmick, but its roots are cultural. Re-tirement isn't scary here. In America one unmentioned aspect of the Social Security debate is the feeling people have that to stop working is, in a sense, to stop living. It is the vestibule of death. In France there is no equivalent anxiety-and there are no great Florida-style gulags for the elderly. One of the striking things about Paris is that it is filled with old people who actually look old: bent, fitted out with canes, but dining and lunching and tak-ing the air and walking their small, indifferent dogs along with everybody else. The humiliations visited on old people in Amer-ica-dressed up like six-year-olds, in shorts and T-shirts and sneakers, imploding with rage-aren't common here. The ro-mance of retirement is strong. The right-wing daily Figaro, for in-stance, though editorially opposed to the move for very early

retirement, ran a series of pieces about the "young retired"- people still in their forties or fifties who have managed to stop working. The series described people who at last have time to "reflect"; it was written in exactly the same admiring spirit that an American daily might use for a series about old people who are as busy as all get-out.

For Parisians the pleasure of quitting isn't far to seek. Many of them come from the country-or, at least, feel attached to a par-ticular village-so the idea of returning has a certain appeal. They are not being sent to Florida; they are just going home. Peo-ple who remain here in town find that life becomes interesting when they stop working. Everyone who attends French public lectures knows that the most visible, and most audible, element in the crowd is the phalanx of the retired. Sometimes they present a bit of a problem, since they tend to be contentious, and when the subject comes within their purview-if it's the Third Republic, say, or the Second World War-they feel free to speak up and correct the lecturer.

Not long ago somebody referred to the debate on Social Security in America as being distorted by "black helicopter" thinking. In France there is something that might be called "white heli-copter" thinking. The American populist belief is that there is a secret multinational agency ready to swoop down from the skies and make everybody work for the government; the French pop-ulist belief is that there is a secret government agency that may yet swoop down from the skies and give everybody a larger pension.

L'Horreur Economique, the extreme manifesto of white heli-copter thought, is the most successful book of the last several publishing seasons. A treatise by the novelist and essayist Viviane Forrester, it has sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in six months, and in November it won the Prix Medicis, which

is a little like a French Pulitzer Prize. Forrester is a minor bellettrist whose earlier work included popular studies of Virginia Woolf and van Gogh. Not surprisingly, in L'Horreur Economique she has produced a work of political economy with all the economics, and most of the politics, left out. Unburdened by pie charts, statistics, or much else in the way of argument or evidence, the book is written in a tone of steady, murmuring apocalyptic dissent, with an occasional perky nod to a familiar neoliberal argument. The total effect is of a collaboration between Robert Reich and Rimbaud. Barely into the first chap-ter the author flatly announces that the logic of globalization will lead to an Auschwitz of the unemployed. "From exploitation to exclusion, from exclusion to elimination," she writes. "Is it such an unlikely scenario?"

The reader eventually comes to the realization that Forrester is not arguing against the free market, or even against globaliza-tion, but against the original sin of commerce-against buying and selling and hiring and firing and getting and spending. Her book is a pure expression of the old French romance of a radical alternative, with the ancient Catholic prejudices against usury, simony, and the rest translated into a curious kind of dinner party nihilism. Of course, the trouble with reviving the romance of the radical alternative is that the only radical alternative remaining is the extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen, who isn't romantic at all.

Laurent Joffrin, the editor of the left-wing daily Liberation, likes to say that Forrester's book is a "symptom." "The fears are ir-rational, psychological, but they are real," he says. He himself is a kind of neo-Keynesian, and like many other sensible people here, he thinks that for all the hysteria, the economic crise is not really very deep and could be soothed by a little deficit spending. But the Keynesian medicine is forbidden by the rules of the Maastricht Treaty, which is to lead to European economic union and which, for the sake of German confidence, prohibits new deficit spending.

In any case, there's something emotionally unsatisfying about the Keynesian message. It is like going to the doctor in the cer-tainty that you're dying of tuberculosis, only to be told that your trouble is that your shoes are too tight. In America, and even more so in England, the triumphant free market has a rhetoric, and even a kind of poetry, of its own, visible in the Economist and the Spectator and the Telegraph: witty, trumpet-sharp, exuberant, hardhearted. In France there is a knack of small shopkeeping and a high rhetoric of the state, but there will never be a high rhetoric of shopkeeping.

By the end of February a new social movement was sweeping the papers and the streets. This one came from the left, in reaction to a new bill that attempted to appease Le Pen supporters by jumping up and down on illegal immigrants. The most obnoxious aspect of the Debre bill-named after the interior minister- was a requirement that people who had foreign guests in their homes inform the police when the foreigners left. This provision was so reminiscent of the Vichy laws, which made denounc-ing Jews a social obligation, that the entire French intellectual class launched a series of petitions against it. Famous artists and directors announced (theatrically, and as a dare-you-to-do-something-about-it principle, rather than as actual fact) that they were lodging illegal immigrants. The petitions flooded the newspapers and were signed by groups: directors, actors, philoso-phers, and even dentists. A massive demonstration was held, drawing as few as thirty thousand people (the government counting the marchers) or as many as a hundred thousand (the marchers counting themselves).

The provision was immediately withdrawn, but everyone agreed it was depressing that the government had been swayed by Le Pen's absurd notion that France's economic problems have to do with the presence of immigrants, legal or illegal. Many people, including numerous petition signers, also thought there was

a depressing element of coercive self-congratulation about the marchers. The protest reached its climax when protesters, got up as deportees, arrived at the Gare de 1'Est to reenact the deporta-tions of the forties. This struck even many sympathetic watchers as being in mauvais gout.

On a recent Saturday, at the first children's concert of the season at the beautiful new Cite de la Musique, the union of part-time artists, which had been threatening to strike over their pension predicament, decided instead to educate the audience. Before a Rameau pastorale began, a representative of the union ha-rangued the five-year-olds for fifteen minutes on the role of itin-erant workers in the arts, and about the modalities of their contributions to the national pension fund, and how the govern-ment was imperiling their retirement. The five-year-olds listened respectfully and then gave him a big hand.

In the midst of the economic gloom Bill Gates came to France. Not since Wilbur Wright, back in 1908, has an Ameri-can arrived in France quite so imbued with the mystique of American inventiveness, industry, and technological hocus-pocus. Bill Gates came here with a masterpiece, the Leonardo Codex, and it has gone on display in the Musee du Luxembourg, but his visit seems unlikely to produce a masterpiece, as Wilbur Wright's did. Wright became the subject of one of the great por-traits by the boy genius Jacques-Henri Lartigue, the Mozart of photography, which summed up the early-twentieth-century French view of American technological wizardry; grave, digni-fied, pure. Bill Gates doesn't have the bone structure, and any-way, the French cult of Gates is strangely indeterminate. He is described, variously, as the father of the Internet and the creator of popular computing-as anything except what he is, which is the head of a gigantic corporation. He is a symbol divorced from his invention, an aviator without an airplane.

Nonetheless he is presumed to know something. "What France needs is its own Bill Gates," the governor of the Bank of France announced. Gates's message to the French, which is es-sentially that buying Windows will lead to mass happiness, was symbolically linked with that of another celebrated recent visitor, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Habermas is the last of Europe's "master thinkers," and he gave a series of lectures at the College de France. His books and lectures have been the subject of reports in Le Monde and L'Express and on the televi-sion news. It seems that Habermas has replaced his old theory of the state, which was that there is no natural basis for it outside of a bunch of human conventions, with a new theory, which is that the natural basis for the state is the human habit of arguing about whether or not it has one. The argument is somewhat opaque, but it has produced a nice catchphrase, "social commu-nication." That, rather than the social contract, is to be the basis of the new society, and a hope now faintly glimmers that be-tween Habermas and Gates-between the German philosopher who tells you that you need only connect and the American busi-nessman who will sell you the software to let you do it-a new, comprehensive social theory is around the corner.

Some people just get fed up waiting. After five days in mostly happy captivity at Credit Foncier, Jerome Meyssonier decided that he'd had enough. "Ca sufit," the president announced to his employees, and that afternoon he went home. Curiously, he had become, in the interim, a kind of hero to the very people who were keeping him locked up. "Meyssonier is with us!" the em-ployees of the Credit Foncier cried as their boss emerged into the light. (Later in the week they added to that slogan an even better one: "The semipublic will never surrender!") On television Meyssonier was seen smiling weakly. He looked worn out and about ready to quit, but then perhaps this should not be a sur-prise. M. Meyssonier is fifty-five.

A Tale of Two Cafes

I have been brooding a lot lately on what I have come to think of as the Two-Cafe Problem. The form is borrowed from the old Three-Body Problem, which perplexed mathematicians late into the nineteenth century, and which, as I vaguely understand it, in-volved calculating the weird swerves and dodges that three plan-ets worked on each other when the force of gravity was working on them all. My problem looks simpler, because all it involves is the interaction of a couple of places in Paris where you can eat omelets and drink coffee. It's still pretty tricky, though, because what fills in for gravity is the force of fashion-arbitrary, or arbi-trary-seeming, taste-which in Paris is powerful enough to turn planets from their orbits and make every apple fall upward.

I began to brood not long ago, on a beautiful Saturday in October, when I arranged to meet my friend Nicole Wisniak at the Cafe de Flore, on the boulevard Saint-Germain, for lunch. Nicole is the editor, publisher, advertising account manager, and art director of the magazine Egoiste and is a woman of such orig-

inal chic that in her presence I feel even more ingenuous and American than I usually do, as though pinned to the back of my jacket were a particularly embarrassing American license plate: "Pennsylvania: The Keystone State" or "Explore Minnesota: 10,000 Lakes."

When we got to the Flore and looked around, upstairs and down, we couldn't find an empty table-that kind of Saturday- so we went outside and thought about where to go. I looked, a little longingly, at Les Deux Magots, just down the street, on the place Saint-Germain-des-Pres. The two cafes are separated only by the tiny, narrow rue Saint-Benoit. I turned to Nicole. "Why don't we just go in there?" I said.

A smile, one of slight squeamishness mixed with incapacity, passed across Nicole's face. "I don't know," she said, at a loss for the usual epigrammatic summary of the situation. "We used to go there, I think . . . twenty years ago. . . ." Her voice trailed off, and again she got a funny smile on her face. She couldn't say why, but she knew that it was impossible.

A taboo as real as any that Malinowski studied among the Trobriand Islanders kept us out, though why it existed and how it kept its spell I had no idea. Still, one of the things you learn if you live as a curious observer (or as an observed curiosity) on the fringes of the fashionable world in Paris is that the Flore remains the most fashionable place in Paris, while the Deux Magots was long ago abandoned by people who think of themselves as be-longing to the world, to ce pays-ci-this country here, as the in-habitants of Versailles called their little fashionable island. Somehow, at some point, in a past that was right around the cor-ner but-to Nicole, at least-was irretrievable, something had happened to make the Cafe de Flore the most fashionable place in Paris and the Deux Magots the least.

In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of

the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation. So, for instance, if your clothes dryer breaks down and you want to get the people from BHV-the strange Sears, Roebuck of Paris-to come fix it, you will be told, first, that only one man knows how it works and he cannot be found (explanation in terms of the gifts of the romanticized indi-vidual); next, that it cannot be fixed for a week because of a store policy (explanation in terms of ideological necessity); and, finally, that you are perfectly right to find all this exasperating, but nothing can be done, because it is in the nature of things for a dryer to break down, dryers are like that (futility of explanation itself). "They are sensitive machines; they are ill suited to the task; no one has ever made one successfully," the store bureau-crat in charge of service says, sighing. "C'est normal." And what works small works big too. The same sequence that explains the broken dryer also governs the explanations of the French Revo-lution that have been offered by the major French historians. "Voltaire did all this!" was de La Villette's explanation (only one workman); an inevitable fight between the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats, the Marxists said (store policy); until, finally, Foucault announced that there is nothing really worth explaining in the coming of the Reign of Terror, since everything in Western culture, seen properly, is a reign of terror (all dryers are like that).

"It's a good question," a friend who has been a figure in the French media since the forties, and who eats lunch at the Flore every day, told me when I quizzed him about why, and when, ex-actly, and how the Flore had outstripped the Deux Magots. We were sitting, as it happened, at the Flore, eating good, wildly overpriced omelets. The downstairs room was as pleasantly red and melancholy as it always is, with its square, rather than round, tables, which give the impression that all the tables are corner tables.

In the week or so since my first inquiry I had been doing some reading. The Deux Magots and the Flore had, I knew, existed be-

side each other for more than a century. The Flore had long had a white marquee with green lettering, the Deux Magots a green marquee with gilt lettering. The interior of the Flore had always been decorated in red leather-what the French call moleskin- and the Deux Magots in brown. But I had only just learned that like so many timeless things in Paris, they got timeless right after the horror of the Franco-Prussian War. Although there had al-ways been a church at Saint-Germain, the topography of the place Saint-Germain-the square itself-dates back only to the 1870s.

The Deux Magots is the modest inheritor of a silk lingerie store of that name that stood on the spot for decades, until the 1860s, when the growth of the big department stores across the river drove it out of business. The owners eventually rented out the space to a cafe liquoriste, which kept the name and started serving coffee. No one knows exactly when the two famous stat-ues of Chinese mandarins-the Deux Magots-were installed; Anatole France, in his memoirs, written at the turn of the cen-tury, speaks of a big picture of three magots that used to hang in the lingerie store. The Flore, on the other hand, has no prehis-tory; founded in 1870, it was always a cafe and was called the Flore because of a statue of the goddess Flora that used to stand outside. Then, in 1880, Leonard Lipp, an Alsatian who had fled the German occupation of his province, opened a brasserie across the street, and the basic topography of the new square was in place.

For many years the Deux Magots was the more famous and fashionable of the two cafes. It was there that Oscar Wilde went to drink after he left England; he died about five blocks away. And it was there that Joyce went to drink Swiss white wine, with everybody except Hemingway, with whom he drank dry sherry, because Hemingway wasn't everybody. (That's how Hemingway tells it, anyway.) The presence of so much history ought to be un-manning or even just embarrassing. In Paris it isn't, not because the past is so hallowed but because it doesn't seem to be there.

The unsentimental efficiency of French commonplace civiliza-tion, of which the French cafe is the highest embodiment, is so brisk that it disarms nostalgia. History keeps wiping the table off and asking you, a little impatiently, what you'll have now.

Not until the 1940s-I had learned a lot of this in the course of reading Olivier Todd's excellent new biography of Camus, one of the big books here this year-did the triangle of the two cafes and the Brasserie Lipp at Saint-Germain-des-Pres become leg-endary. This was when the group of resistants came into being, and a culture to go with them-when Camus and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as the cliche has it, brooded in one corner of the Deux Magots while Juliette Greco sang sad songs in another. The odd thing is that the cliche is almost entirely true. It was at the Deux Magots, for instance, that Sartre saw his famous philo-sophical garcon, of whom he wrote, "His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a lit-tle too eagerly, his eyes express an interest too solicitous for the order of the customer." (I still get waiters like that.)

Yet fifty years after the classic period, one cafe is more fash-ionable than ever and the other is not fashionable at all. You might not see this at once. At the Flore the fashionable people are spread out among the tables rather than concentrated in one spot or area; they occupy the place clandestinely, following the law of Inverse Natural Appeal. The terrasse of the Flore, even on a sunny and perfect day (especially on a sunny and perfect day), is off limits; the inner room, with its red moleskin banquettes, is acceptable; but by far the most OK place to sit is upstairs (I was sitting there now, with my friend), and the banquettes are made of an ugly tan leatherette. (The law of Inverse Natural Appeal is at work: The outlawed terrasse is, as it happens, an extraordi-narily pleasant place to sit; the inner room is a very pleasant place to sit; and the upstairs room is reminiscent of the cocktail lounge of a Howard Johnson's.)

The sounds of the higher French conversation, with its lovely murmur of certainties and, rising from the banquettes, the fa-vorite words of fashionable French people, resonated all around. Perversite, which means "perversity" but is used as a word of praise, suggests something-a book, a dish, a politician-that is aristocratic. C'est normal, which means something like "No problem" and can also refer to any political or literary situation, is different from the American phrase in that its emphasis is not on a difficulty surmounted or evaded but on the return to a fa-miliar, homeostatic atmosphere of comfort: Something that hap-pens may seem unusual (say, the revelation that a former defense minister might have been an East Bloc agent) but, properly un-derstood, is not shocking at all; it's normal, even if a little de-plorable. And from table after table, like the sound of a tolling bell, rises the connective donc, which just means "so" or "there-fore," but, when used in literary and worldly conversation, and rung with sufficient force, means "It must therefore follow as the night the day" and always sounds to me as conclusive as Gideon's trumpet.

"But it all has to do with the character of two men, Boubal and Cazes," my friend said. Paul Boubal was the owner of the Flore from 1939 to 1983-he died five years later-and Roger Cazes was the owner not of the Deux Magots but of the Brasserie Lipp, across the street. "That is to say, both Gazes and Boubal were from the Auvergne-they were countrymen-and though each thought the other was running a sneaky business, each respected the other and frequented the other's place. This produced, in the fifties, a natural compact, a kind of family feeling between the two places. I mean family feeling in the real sense-of depen-dence and suspicion and resentment. The owner of the Deux Magots was a much more timid fellow. He was left out of the compact." So the real force working was that of the Lipp; it was the third planet, perturbing the orbits of the two others.

There it was, the explanation in terms of the romantic indi-

vidual in almost perfect form, along with the bonus of a touch of terroir, the French affection for a bit of native land. Then some-one suggested that I speak to the essayist and editor Jean-Paul Enthoven, who is the author of the season's most winning col-lection of literary essays, Les Enfants de Satume. Enthoven, I was told, would be sure to have an explanation; he could explain any-thing Parisian.

"Here is my hypothesis," he announced when I reached him on the phone at his office, at the publishing house of Grasset. "You must go back to the twenties and thirties, when the Flore became identified with the extreme right and the Deux Magots, by default, with the left. Charles Maurras, the founder of Action Francaise, used the Flore as his home base." Maurras was si-multaneously one of the most important stylists in French litera-ture-a member of the French Academy, and a crucial influence on T. S. Eliot, among other modernists-and a right-wing anti-Semite. "Before it was anyone else's place, it was Maurras's. His most famous polemic was even named after the cafe: 'Au Signe de Flore.' Maurras was a malevolent force, in that everything he touched was simultaneously disgraced and hallowed."

Enthoven went on to say, "This meant that by the time of the occupation, when Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir came to Saint-Germain and began their resistance, they had to avoid the Flore like a plague, since it had been contaminated by Maurras. But then the tourists began to crowd into the Deux Magots in order to look at Sartre and de Beauvoir. The place became over-crowded, and eventually the intellectuals noticed the emptiness of the Flore next door. By then Maurras was gone, the occupa-tion had passed, and confronted with a choice between the pol-lution of Maurras and the pollution of tourism, the intellectuals chose to remake the emptiness rather than abide with the many. So they went across the street and have never returned." He stopped for a second, as if readying himself for an aphorism, and then said, "The Deux Magots was sacralized by Sartre, desacral-

ized by the tourists, and then left vacant by history." Eighteen-seventy, 1940, I thought. Like so many lovely things in Paris, the two cafes were given shape by the first German invasion and then in one way or another were deformed by the second.

It was left to another, more dour friend to supply the futility-of-explanation explanation, over coffee at a lesser, more despair-ing cafe-neither fashionable nor unfashionable, just a place where you go to talk. "There is nothing to explain here," he said. "The explanation is a simple, Saussurean one." He was referring, I realized after a moment, to the father of modern linguistics, who was the first to point out that signs get their meanings not by being like the things they stand for but by being different from other signs: A sign for black means black because it isn't like the sign for white.

"The fashionable exists only in relation to something that is not that way," he went on. "The relationship between the modishness of the Flore and the unmodishness of the Deux Magots isn't just possibly arbitrary. It's necessarily arbitrary. If you place any two things side by side, one will become fashionable and the other will not. It's a necessity determined by the entire idea of fashion. A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it's in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose ab-solutely. That's the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful-they are goddesses-and yet a man must choose. And what was the chooser's name? Paris. C'est normal."

DISTANT ERRORS,
CHRISTMAS JOURNAL 2

My fax machine, which was made by the French state, always blames someone else when things go wrong. It is a Galeo 5000 model, and it is made by France Telecom and is therefore an of-ficial, or French government, product; even its name carries with it the nice implication that 4,999 other models were attempted before perfection was at last achieved by the French fax machine ministry.

You even have to go to a government telephone outlet to buy a new ribbon for it. It's a plain paper fax (you have the same ex-pression in French, papier ordinaire, ordinary paper) with all the usual features. It's really very nicely designed-much better de-signed than its American equivalents, with that streamlined, in-telligent Philippe Starck look that the French seem magically able to give to everything they make. It's reasonably efficient too-perhaps a little overtricky in loading in the sheets and un-duly inclined to bourrage de papier, paper jams-but still . . .

It has a little glowing window on its face where it affiches, or posts, the events and troubles of its day, its operating life. The window flashes, for instance, a shocked, offended Pas d'iden-tite!-no identity!-when the fax machine at the other end doesn't "identify itself," which for some reason or another most American machines don't seem to.

But the favorite, all-purpose affiche of my fax machine is erreur distante-distant error-which it affiches all the time, no matter where the error actually originates, far away or right in its own backyard. Whether the error comes from a fax machine in Lille or Los Angeles, it says that it is a distant error. When the machine itself has run out of paper, it is still a distant error. When I have forgotten to clean the ribbon heads, an error has nonetheless taken place, at a distance. Jams and overflows, missed connections, and faulty plugs: all are erreurs distantes. When it really is a distant error, it is still just another distant error. This is the French fax machine's way of getting through life. The error is distant; the problem lies someplace else; there is always somebody else to blame for your malfunctions.

French intellectuals and public people, I have on certain oc-casions come to the mordant, exasperated, and gloomy conclu-sion, share the same belief, affiche the same accusatory message, banding together and flashing erreur distante, whenever they run out of paper or ink or arguments. This morning, for instance, I saw the economist Emmanuel Todd being interviewed about his book on the economic "stagnation" of industrialized economies. He blandly announced that the U.S. economy was just as stag-nant as France's, in fact was worse because its "cultural level" (by which he meant the level of education) was so much more de-praved. Also, the United States manufactured less than it once had. Economic stagnation was the problem of all the industrial-ized economies, France was simply sharing in it, and the United States was really to blame. His debating opponent, an intelligent economist named Cohen-very poorly dressed in a brightly col-

ored blazer and bad tortoiseshell glasses-tried to explain that this wasn't so, that the fall in manufacturing was in fact a sign of the renovation of the American economy, and that whatever its flaws in equality, the growth in America was real, that the one thing you couldn't call the American economy was stagnant. Todd, who looked terrific, hardly bothered to argue with him; he just made the same assertions again: The American economy is stagnant. He just affiched, like my fax machine erreur distante, and the host, terrified, nodded.

A while ago I was on a panel broadcast for France-Culture, the radio station, at the Sciences Po, the great political science school, along with Philippe Sollers and other French worthies, and we talked about the influence of American culture on France. Everyone took it for granted that the American domi-nance in culture was a distant error or, rather, a distant con-spiracy organized by the CIA and the Disney corporation. (I was there, the sole American on the panel, to be condescended to as the representative of both Michael Eisner and William Colby, with mouse ears on my head and a listening device pre-sumably implanted inside them.) The cliches get trotted out- that Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists got put over by the CIA, etc.-with a complacent certitude, and it was taken for granted that the relative decline of the prestige of French writing and painting has nothing to do with the actual decline of the quality of French writing and painting. (And yet when we got down to particulars, much of these preju-dices vanished: Sellers and I actually had a reasonable debate about Roth and Updike. No American Sellers would have been able to name two French novelists, much less debate their value.)

What was maddening was not the anti-Americanism, which is understandable and even, in its Asterix-style resistance to Amer-ican domination, admirable. What is maddening is the bland certainty, the lack of vigilant curiosity, the incapacity for critical

self-reflection, the readiness to affiche erreur distante and wait for somebody else to change the paper.

A wise man, an old emigre artist, when I told him, gaily, that we were going to move to Paris, said soberly, even darkly: "Ah. So you have at last decided not to forgo the essential Jewish experi-ence of emigration and expatriation." I thought it was a joke, a highly complicated, ironic joke, but still a joke, since what could be less traumatic, in the old-fashioned emigre's sense, less Cioran and Benjamin and Celan, than moving to Paris with a baby? But of course, what he said was true, or contained a truth. The reality is that after a year here everything about moving to Paris has been wonderful, and everything about emigrating to France difficult. An immigrant is an immigrant, poor fellow: Pity him! The errors arrive, and they tell me I brought them with me.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped. Martha, the other day, spent the morning watching Luke open and shut the little gates that lead into the interior gar-dens at the Palais Royal. He would open the gate, she explained, walk through, watch it shut, and then walk back through again, with the rows of violet flowers in the background. She felt, she said, as if she had died and gone to heaven-but with the strange feeling that dying and going to heaven mean parting, leaving, and missing the people you left behind on earth. No wonder ghosts at seances are so blandly encouraging; they miss you, but they are busy watching someone else.

There is the feeling of being apart and the feeling of being a universe apart-the immigrant's strange knowledge that the lan-guage and lore that carry on in your own living space are so un-like the ones right outside. (This is particularly true of our odd Canadian-American-Jewish-Sri Lankan-Franco-American menage, with the two-year-old at its center.) There is also the odd

knowledge, at once comforting and scary, that whatever is going on outside, you are without a predisposed opinion on it, that you have had a kind of operation, removing your instant reflexive sides-taking instinct. When French politicians debate, I think, well, everybody has a point. After a year the feeling that every-thing was amusing, though, bombs and strikes an act in the Winter Circus, does begin to fade, to seem less amusing in itself. When Le Canard Enchatne, the satiric paper, comes out on Wednesday mornings, I buy it and generally enjoy, am even beginning to understand, most of the jokes and digs; what was largely incomprehensible to me at first is now self-evident: who is being mocked for what and why.

But I don't actually care about who is being mocked. I am simply pleased to register that what I am reading is mockery. And the slightly amused, removed feeling always breaks down as you realize that you really don't want to be so lofty and Olympian- or rather, that being lofty and Olympian carries within it, by tra-dition and precedent, the habit of wishing you could be down there in the plain, taking sides. Even the gods, actually looking down from Olympus in amusement, kept hurtling down to get laid or slug somebody.

After a first winter in Paris, when the lure of the chimney and cigar smell holds you in thrall, you become accustomed to them, and then all you notice is the dark. From November to April, hardly a single day when you see the sun. The light itself is beau-tiful, violet and gray, but it always looks as if it were planning to snow, and then it never does.

We had the seasonal pleasure of buying a (by Canadian stan-dards, insanely overpriced) Christmas tree. We bought it from a Greek tree-and-plant dealer on the Ile de la Cite. It's a nice tree, a big fir, green and lush, but, at our insistence, without that crazy wooden cross that the French insist on nailing to the bottoms of

their Christmas trees, so that you can't give them water. Ours is open, with a fresh cut, and sits in its watery pedestal, a red-and-open tripod, which we brought all the way over from Farm and Garden nursery down on Franklin Street in TriBeCa.

The logic (or fantasy) of the wooden cross on the bottoms of the trunks of the French Christmas trees, as the bemused dealer explained it to me, is that it "seals" off the tree's trunk and keeps the sap inside, keeps it from drying out. The opposed American logic, our logic, of course (or is it our fantasy too?), is that an open cut will keep a dead and derooted tree "fresh" for as long as you need it, for as long as you give it water and the season lasts.

Or is the cut cross, after all, really a kind of covert, symbolic, half-hidden reminder on the part of a once entirely Catholic country of the cross-that-is-to-come, of the knowledge that even Christmas trees can't be resurrected without a miracle? Ameri-cans persuade themselves that a dead tree is still fresh if you keep pouring water on it; here there is a small guilty stirring of Catholic conscience that says, "It's dead, you know, the way everything will be. You can seal it up, but you can't keep it going. Only a miracle will bring it back to life."

Naturally none of the Christmas tree garlands I bought last year works this year. Though Martha packed them away neatly when we took the tree down, they have managed to work themselves into hideous tangles, the way Christmas lights always do. If the continued existence of the Christmas tree light garlands, even though they're obviously impractical compared with strings, is proof of the strength of cultural difference, their ability to get themselves tangled is just as strong proof of cultural universality. The strands did it in New York, the garlands do it here, and there is no explaining how they do. The permanent cultural differ-ences are language, the rituals of eating, and the habits of edu-cation; the permanent cultural universals are love of children

and the capacity of Christmas lights left in a box in a closet to get themselves hopelessly tangled in knots.

The American Christmas came to Paris while I was away in New York; Halloween came this year for the first time, right while we were watching, right under our noses. Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin couldn't have been more shocked, more pleased than we were to see Halloween rising before us like a specter, an inflate raft. The shops were suddenly filled with pumpkins and rubber masks and witches and ghost costumes and bags of candy. Apparently the American Halloween has been sneaking up bit by bit for a little while, but everyone agrees that this year the whole thing has really happened, and for the most obvious of reasons: It is a way for small shopkeepers to sell stuff before Christmas comes. Le Monde, sensing this brisk commercial mo-tive, published a piece about the coming of Halloween, pre-dictably indignant.

The essentially creepy, necrophile nature of the holiday, invis-ible to Americans, was harder to hide from the French. Our friends Marie and Edouard, whose two children, Thomas and Alexandra, live across the courtyard, were dubious: The children dress up as the dead and the horrific and then demand sweets at the price of vandalism? The pleasure is located where exactly? Our friend Cassie says that her French mother-in-law, seeing the grandchildren dressed up as skeletons, let out a genuine shriek of distaste.

Of course, it is incumbent on Americans to reassure, gently, that it is not really a holiday of the dead at all, that like all Amer-ican holidays, it is a ritual of materialism, or, to put it another way, of greed, a rite designed to teach our children that every-thing, even death, ends with candy. It is just fun. Fun is the magic American word (Our motto "Let's have fun!" is met by the French motto "Let's be amused.") Though Halloween arrived

and caused parties and sales, the tradition of trick-or-treating has not really caught on here, and so Martha and several other moth-ers decided to have a Halloween party in her friend Cassie's apartment, where the mothers hid behind doors, so that the chil-dren could knock and get their candy. It was trick-or-treating made into an indoor sport. The French children in the party, she tells me, just didn't get it. What was the point, the French chil-dren, disconsolate as ghosts and skeletons and witches, seemed to wonder, waiting behind their doors, to be all dressed up, with nowhere to go?

Luke has mounted up onto the horses on the carousel this year, al-though he needs to be tied on, like a parcel. To my delight, though not really to my surprise, I discovered this year that the carousel has been turning in the same manner, offering the same game, and drawing the same bemused, fascinated attention of foreigners for at least seventy-five years. I found a passage in the travel writing of Joseph Roth, the German novelist, who visited the Luxembourg Gardens in 1925 and wrote about the "maneges de chevaux de bois pour enfants." He describes the rings and sticks, exactly as they are today: "The owner of the merry-go-round holds in his hand, at the end of a stick, little rings lightly hung and easy to detach. All the children on the horses and in the tiny cars are armed with wands. So that when they pass before the rings, they try to unhook them, which is to say slip them onto their wand. Whoever gets the most gets a prize. They learn quick action, the value of the instant, ac-celerated reflexes, and the trick of adjusting ones eye." "The value of the instant..." Doubtless Cartier-Bresson and the rest of the decisive moment" photographers rode on such horses, caught their rings, learned there's only one right moment in which to do it.

Roth admired the game endlessly, because it seemed so un-German, such a free and charming way to educate, without the military brutality of Teutonic schools. The funny thing is that

there are now no more prizes-the same game, same carousel, but no more prizes. Nothing left to teach. You get the ring for the pleasure of having taken it. I wonder which child when won the last prize.

The differences are tiny and real. Cultures don't really encode things. They include things, and leave things out. There is, for instance, the exasperation of lunch. Lunch, as it exists in New York, doesn't exist here. Either lunch is a three-course meal- i.e., dinner, complete with two bottles of wine-or else it is to be had only at a brasserie, where the same menu-croque mon-sieur, omelet, salad Nicoise-is presented almost without any variation at all, as though the menu had been decreed by the state. A tuna sandwich, a bran muffin, a bowl of black bean soup-black bean soup! Yankee bean! Chicken vegetable! It is soup, beautiful soup, that I miss more than anything, not French soup, all pureed and homogenized, but American soup, with bits and things, beans and corn and even letters, in it. This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch. So on Sundays I have developed the habit of making soup for the week, from the good things we buy in the marche biologique on the boulevard Raspail. Soup and custard on Sunday nights, our salute to the land of the free.

My favorite bit of evidence of the French habit of pervasive, per-manent abstraction lies in the difficulties of telling people about fact checking. (I use the English word usually; there doesn't seem to be a simple French equivalent.) "Thank you so much for your help," I will say after interviewing a man of letters or politi-cian. "I'm going to write this up, and you'll probably be hearing

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from what we call une fact checker in a couple of weeks." (I make it feminine since the fact checker usually is.)

"What do you mean, une fact checker?"

"Oh, it's someone to make sure that I've got all the facts right, reported them correctly"

Annoyed: "No, no, I've told you everything I know."

I, soothing: "Oh, I know you have."

Suspicious: "You mean your editor double-checks?"

"No, no, it's just a way of making sure that we haven't made a mistake in facts."

More wary and curious: "This is a way of maintaining an ide-ological line?"

"No, no-well, in a sense I suppose . . ." (For positivism, of which New Yorker fact checking is the last redoubt, is an ideo-logical line; I've lived long enough in France to see that move coming. . . .)

"But really," I go on, "it's just to make sure that your dates and what we have you quoted as saying are accurate. Just to be sure."

Dubious look; there is More Here Than Meets the Eye. On occasion I even get a helpful, warning call from the subject after the fact checker has called. "You know, someone, another re-porter called me from the magazine. They were checking up on you." ("No, no, really checking on you," I want to say, offended, but don't-and then think he's right: They are checking up on me too; never thought of it that way, though.) There is a certainty in France that what assumes the guise of transparent positivism, fact checking," is in fact a complicated plot of one kind or an-other, a way of enforcing ideological coherence. That there might really be facts worth checking is an obvious and annoying absurdity; it would be naive to think otherwise.

I was baffled and exasperated by this until it occurred to me that you would get exactly the same incomprehension and suspi-cion if you told American intellectuals and politicians, postinter-view, that a theory checker would be calling them. "It's been a

pleasure speaking to you," you'd say to Al Gore or Mayor Giuliani. "And I'm going to write this up; probably in a couple of weeks a theory checker will be in touch with you."

Alarmed, suspicious: "A what?"

"You know, a theory checker. Just someone to make sure that all your premises agree with your conclusions, that there aren't any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream-that kind of thing."

"What do you mean?" the American would say, alarmed. "Of course they do, I don't need to talk to a theory checker."

"Oh, no, you don't need to. It's for your protection, really. They just want to make sure that the theory hangs together. . . ."

The American subject would be exactly as startled and an-noyed at the idea of being investigated by a theory checker as the French are by being harassed by a fact checker, since this process would claim some special status, some "privileged" place for theory. A theory checker? What an absurd waste of time, since it's apparent (to us Americans) that people don't speak in theories, that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the no-tion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of theoretical con-stancy is an absurd denial of what conversation is.

Well, replace fact (and factual) for theory in that last sentence, and you have the common French view of fact checking. People don't speak in straight facts; the facts they employ to enforce their truths change, flexibly and with varying emphasis, as the conversation changes, and the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of pure factual consistency is an absurd denial of what conversation is. Not, of course, that the French intellectual doesn't use and respect facts, up to a useful point, any more than even the last remaining American positivist doesn't use and re-spect theory, up to a point. It's simply the fetishizing of one term in the game of conversation that strikes the French funny. Con-

versation is an organic, improvised web of fact and theory, and to pick out one bit of it for microscopic overexamination is typically American overearnest comedy.

"Does this bus go across the river?" the man from Chicago de-mands of the Parisian bus driver, who looks blank. "I said, this bus goes across the river, or doesn't it?" I myself have been in this position, of course, more times than once, in Venice and in Tuscany, but (I choose to believe, at least) I try to make up for it with the necessary abasing looks of ignorance and sorrow and multi-tudes of thank-yous and head ducks, as the Japanese do here. The American in Paris just demands, querulously-"Now, you remember that pastry I showed you in the window. Now, I want that one"-in English, and expects the world to answer.

Sometimes the French response is muttered and comic. "Hey, does this bus go across the river?" the woman from California says, mounting onto the steps of the 63. "I wouldn't come to your country and not speak in your language," the driver says, in French. A sensitive listener would detect some frost in the man-ner, but the American woman doesn't: "No-I asked you, does this bus go across the river?" Or, worse, Americans ordering in English at French menus, specifying precisely, exigently, what they want in a language the waiters don't speak.

For it turns out that there is a Regulon in the Semiosphere stronger even than the plug, more agile than the fish. It's lan-guage. Language really does prevent signs or cultures from going universal. For all the endless articles in the papers and maga-zines about the force of globalization and international standard-ization, language divides and confuses people as effectively now as it ever has. It stops the fatal "exponentiality" of culture in the real world as surely as starvation stops it in the jungle. It divides absolutely, and what is really international, truly global, is, in this way, very small.

The real "crisis" in France in fact is not economic (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) or even cultural (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) but linguistic. French has diminished as an international language, and this will not end. When people talk about globalization, what they're really saying is that an En-glish-speaking imperium now stretches from Adelaide to Van-couver, and that anyone who is at home in one bit of it is likely to feel at home in the other bits. You can join this global community by speaking English yourself, but that's about all. The space be-tween the average Frenchman (or Italian or German) and the av-erage American is just as great as it's ever been, because language remains in place, and it remains hard. Even after two years of speaking French all the time, I feel it. We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Yet there is a kind of authority associated with the American presence right now that is both awe-inspiring and absurd. At the Bastille Day fireworks, for instance, over on the champ-de-Mars, there is always a nice big picnic feeling, but no one pays minimal respect to the notion that people ought not to stand up in front of other people when other people are trying to watch fireworks. As happens so often in France, it is a designated bacchanal, like the playground in the Luxembourg Gardens. At the Bastille Day on the champ-de-Mars this July, in the midst of the anarchy- over on the fringes, of course, there were flies, gendarmes, busy arresting the vendors of those glow-in-the-dark necklaces; now, there was a real crime-a single American woman rose to bring order to the multitudes. She was the kind of big-boned East Coast woman you see running a progressive day camp, or work-ing as the phys ed instructor at Dalton or Brearley, high-flown but (as she would be the first to tell you) down-to-earth. She just started ordering people around: Sit down, you down there (all this in English, of course), now make room so the little kids can

see etc. And people, at least the few hundred in earshot, actu-ally did it. They obeyed, for a little while anyway.

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are sim-ple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spo-ken English loudly enough.

It is, still, amazing to see how vast a screen the differences of language can be-not an opaque but a kind of translucent one. You sort of see through it, but not quite. There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston), is engaged to an American, whom we never see but who's called Hal-like Falstaff's prince, like a good high Englishman. That English H, though, was completely inaudible to the French translator who did the subtitles, and so throughout the film the absent lover is referred to in the subtitles as Al-Al like a stage-hand, Al like my grandfather. If you have the habit of print ad-diction, so that you are listening and reading at the same time, this guy Al keeps forcing his way into the movie. "But what shall I say to Hal-that I have never loved him?" Patricia says to Fred. Down below it says, "Et Al-qu'est-ce que je vais lui dire?"

My other favorite subtitle was in some contemporary comedy that we went to see-we see about a movie every six months, where once I saw three a day-in which there was a reference to American talk shows. "And what do you want me to do: go on Oprah, Geraldo, or Sally Jessy?" the character asked. The trans-lator did fine with Oprah and Geraldo but could make nothing of the last, so Sally with her glasses became a non-non sequitur question. "Oprah, Geraldo-et sale est Jesse?" the subtitle read- Oprah, Geraldo-and Jesse is dirty?" This network of distant er-

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rors obviously occludes itself in front of us all the time, every day, and mostly we don't know it.

There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a counter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Telecom who won't give you the fax ribbons that are there on the counter in front of her because she can't find them on the computer inventory; the chair restorer who looks at your beautiful Thonet rocker and then announces, sniffily, that it isn't worth his time; the woman who sells you a poster and then announces that she has no idea where you might go to frame it; the bus driver who won't let an exhausted preg-nant woman off the front door of the bus (you're supposed to exit from the rear) from sheer bloody-mindedness. It affects Martha much less than me, leading me to suspect that it is essentially a masculine problem. My trouble is that I think like a Frenchman: I transform every encounter into a competition in status and get enraged when I lose it. As Cioran said, it's hard for me to live in a country where everyone is as irascible as I am.

At the same time, I find myself often reduced to an immigrant helplessness. We went to BHV, for instance, earlier this year to frame our Paris to the Moon engraving. I have had it up in my study, an icon to write under. There's a nice do-it-yourself fram-ing shop up there, and lacking a framer to go to, we thought we just ought to, well, do it ourselves. Back in New York we knew a framer who did our frames, and I prided myself, within limits, on having learned a thing or two about what made the right edge for the right picture. We began to sort around with simple white mats and black wooden frames. As we were doing it, a lady came up to us: a Frenchwoman in her seventies, with pearls and a strong jaw and silver hair. She had a couple of handsome flower prints that she was framing for herself. "No, no, children," she said. "You are doing that quite incorrectly. This, you see," she

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said, "is a nineteenth-century print. It needs a nineteenth-century mat, a nineteenth-century frame." She took the white-and-black frame away from us-put them right back-and chose a cream mat and a fake, "antiqued" gold frame. "There," she said. "That is the French nineteenth century," she said, and took the frame and the print and the mat all up to the counter for us. We looked at each other sheepishly and went ahead and bought them. I used to know something about art, or thought I did, I muttered to myself, all the way home. The print actually looks pretty nice in its gold frame. When I remember the moment now, I remember my utter helplessness and how she smelled of a wonderful tea-rose perfume.

The other side of French official arrogance is French improvised and elaborate courtesy. The men from the department store Bon Marche, the deliverymen, called last night, to deliver the wicker kitchen organizer. "We have to be there early, because it's a small street. Six-thirty."

"It's a little too early for us," I said. "Let's make it later." "Ah, no. Its impossible. Six-thirty or nothing." "All right," and I hung up the phone, silently cursing French arrogance and the lack of any kind of service ethic.

Then, the next morning, at six forty-six, I was just awakened by the sound of the gentlest possible knocking on the front door-so butterfly quiet that at first I imagined that it must have been Luke Auden stirring in bed. But then there it was again, quiet but insistent. I got up, put on my robe, got to the front door, and stared out the spyglass. There were two work-men in the hallway, leaning over gently, knocking with their knuckles, as lightly as ghosts. I slipped the door open and got not a smile, but a look of acknowledgment, and they brought the kitchen organizer in with balletlike light-footedness. Thank you," I said, "the baby is sleeping." They nodded. We

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know. I signed the invoice, and they were gone, and I went back to sleep.

And then there is the chair. It started by accident one rainy Mon-day, after we had been to the Musee d'Orsay, and I had failed to get Luke much interested in my old favorites, Monets and Manets. I still find going to the Musee d'Orsay an infuriating, maddening experience. (Apparently, despite my superficial es-says at amused blandness, I realize, reading this, that I'm a real pepperpot, a hothead. Billy Martin in France.) That vast, hand-some railroad station so horribly done over in Wiener Werkstatte fashion by Gae Aulenti; the stupid, unquestioned dominance of the worst pompier art of the nineteenth century in the main hall as though saying, here are our real treasures. And the greater pain that only the pompier official art could look any good in such a vast and frigid space. I no longer find the taste for nineteenth-century French academic art, which can be amusing if seen small on a slide screen, the least bit likable. It is horrible, de-pressing beyond words, the revenge of official culture on life and youth, on reality itself. I swear to God I would take a razor to The Romans of the Decadence without a moment's hesitation.

And then having to take the escalator up all the way to the far upper floors-a garret, in museum terms, in order to see the great pictures, every one of which looked incomparably better in the old Jeu de Paume. It is a calculated, venom-filled insult on the part of French official culture against French civilization, re-venge on the part of the academy and administration against everyone who escaped them. French official culture, having the upper hand, simply banishes French civilization to the garret, sends it to its room. What one feels, in that awful place, is vio-lent indignation-and then an ever-increased sense of wonder that Manet and Degas and Monet, faced with the same stupidi-ties of those same academic provocations in their own lifetimes,

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responded not with rage but with precision and grace and con-templative exactitude.

Paris is marked by a permanent battle between French civi-lization, which is the accumulated intelligence and wit of French life, and French official culture, which is the expression of the functionary system in all its pomposity and abstraction. Perhaps by French civilization I mean the small shops; by French official culture I mean the big buildings. There is hardly a day when you are not wild with gratitude for something that happens in the small shops: the way that Mme. Glardon, at the pastry shop on the rue Bonaparte, carefully wraps Luke Auden's chocolate eclair in a little paper pyramid, a ribbon at its apex, knowing perfectly well, all the while, that the paper pyramid and ribbon will endure just long enough for the small boy to rip it open to get to the eclair. And hardly a day when you are not wild with dismay at something that has been begun in the big buildings, some abstraction launched on the world in smug and empty confidence.

In any case, I couldn't, as it happened, get Luke much stirred by Manet or Monet (not that he was stirred by the Couture either, I'm glad to say), but searching for something that would stir him, I came across the handsome side chapel devoted to Daumier's portrait busts. They are caricatures of the political men of the mid-nineteenth century. Luke loved them. I held him up, and he stared at their faces behind the Plexiglas boxes and imitated each one. We guessed at the character of each one: who's mean, who's nice, who's conceited. The scary thing is that the faces are exactly the faces of French politicians today: Philippe Seguin, with his raccoon-circled eyes; Le Pen, with his obscene, smiling jowliness; Bruno Megret with his ratlike ordinariness. You could find the men of the left; too: Jospin's fatuous cheerfulness- they're all there.

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After the success of the Daumiers, I thought of going to the park, as a release, or back to Deyrolle, for the umpteenth time, but it was raining hard, and we needed something new. "Do you want a soda?" I said, and we went over to the Courier de Lyons, the nearest thing our haut neighborhood has to a workingman's cafe. After he had a grenadine, and I a grand creme, and we had shared a tarte Normande, I noticed that there was a pinball ma-chine-a flipper, as it is called in French. So I dragged a chair over, so that he could stand up on it and work the left flipper, and took control of the right flipper myself. It was an "NBA all-star" pinball machine, a true old-fashioned, pre-Atari, steel ball pin-ball, but with extra ramps and lights that let you shoot the ball up into hoops, get extra points, make model players jump up and down. (Luke, of course, had never seen a basketball game.) We started playing, and he loved it: the ping of the hard metal balls, the compressed springiness of the release, the fat thwack of the bumpers, above all the bounce of the flipper, hitting the ball back up, keeping it in play, making it go. We played three times, rushed home, and he told his momma about it. "It goes . . ." he said, and at a loss for words, he just raced his eyes, back and forth, rolled them back and forth crazily-that's how it goes.

Since then we go once a week to play pinball, always prefaced by a trip first to the Musee d'Orsay to look at the funny faces (while Daddy seethes at the nineteenth-century academicians and the small boy counts the minutes to the Courier de Lyons.) The funny thing is that the cafe changes the pinball machine every month or so, and it is always, always, an American machine with an American theme. Each machine has an automated bonus, something weird that happens if you get enough points, and there is something rapt and lovely, in this day of virtual everything, about the clockwork nightingale mechanicalness of the pinball machines, about the persistence of their metallic gears and simple slot-and-track devices. So far we have been through major-league baseball, Star Wars (Hans Solo gets

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blasted into that carbon sheet), Jurassic Park (an egg glows and opens, and a baby dinosaur appears), Gopher Golf (a kind of par-ody golf, with little chipmunks that jump up, bucktoothed), and, our favorite, Monster Bash (Dracula comes out of his coffin, on a little metal track; Frankenstein, to the accompaniment of suit-ably stormy music-the lights on the machine actually first go off, a lovely touch-sits up). All the instructions on the machines are in English, of course, as are all the details. ("I love these ma-chines, compared to video games," another aficionado at the cafe said to me once, sincerely, as we scored big and watched Drac-ula creaking out on his mechanical track. "They are, well, so real.")

We go once a week, always get the same grenadine-coffee-pie combo, leave a ten-franc tip; I am sure that it is illegal for a three-year-old to play pinball, and I am paying protection. After a month or so, though, I noticed something odd. When we began to play, I would always discreetly drag a cafe chair over from the table and put it alongside the machine for him to stand on. But after we had done this five or six times, over five or six weeks, I noticed that someone had quietly tucked that small cafe chair under the left flipper, for Luke to stand on. The chair, the little bistro chair, was pushed under the pinball machine, on the left, or Lukeish, side. There was no talk, no explanation; no one men-tioned it, or pointed it out. No, it was a quiet, almost a grudging courtesy, offered to a short client who came regularly to take his pleasure there. Nothing has changed in our relation to that cafe: No one shakes our hands or offers us a false genial smile; we pay for our coffee and grenadine as we always have; we leave the tip we have always left. But that chair is always there.

Papon's Paper Trail

Bordeaux is the town where France goes to give up. It was where the French government retreated from Paris under fire from the Prussians in 1870, and again from the kaisers armies in 1914, and where, in June 1940, the French government fled in the face of the German advance and soon afterward met not just the fact of defeat but the utter depth of France's demoralization. A. J. Liebling wrote of those days that "there was a climate of death in Bordeaux, heavy and unhealthy like the smell of tuberoses." He recalled the wealthy men in the famous restaurants like the Chapon Fin, "heavy-jowled, waxy-faced, wearing an odd expres-sion of relief from fear." Though the bad peace was ruled from the spa town of Vichy, Bordeaux is the place that gave the sur-render its strange, bitter, bourgeois character: a nation retreating from cosmopolitan Paris back to la France profonde.

Bordeaux has always been a trench coat-and-train station, 1940s kind of town, and despite the mediocre, concrete modern

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architecture it shares with nearly all French provincial capitals, it remains one. The Chapon Fin is still in business, but it is not deathlike-merely nervous and overwrought, in the way of French provincial restaurants since the capitalists trimmed down and the only market left was German tourists.

In the spring of 1998, Bordeaux was invaded again, this time by battalions of lawyers, broadcasters, historians, and journalists, who had come to attend or participate in the trial of Maurice Papon-the former secretary-general of the Gironde, of which Bordeaux is the capital-for complicity in crimes against hu-manity fifty-five years ago, during the occupation. The Papon trial was the central, binding event of the past year in France, a kind of O.J. trial, without television or a glove. It was the longest, the most discouraging, the most moving, at times the most ridiculous, and certainly the most fraught trial in postwar French history.

On the last day of the trial, Wednesday, April 1, the invasion of the media became an occupation; what seemed like every Eu-ropean journalist resident in France, and a lot of Americans too, descended on the little square outside the Palais de Justice. The convenience of having La Concorde, a stage-set grand cafe right across from the Palais (doors open to the spring weather, bottles of good wine lined up on the wall), gave the end of the trial a strangely hilarious, high-hearted, yet self-subduing party spirit- a combination of Swifty Lazar's Oscar party and the Nuremberg trials.

Despite the mob, the national allegiance of every journalist was instantly recognizable. French journalists wear handsomely tailored jackets and share with English rock guitarists the secret of eternal hair: It piles up. Americans, rumpled and exhausted before the day begins, seem to be still longing for Vietnam. Even walking up and down the steps of the palais, they looked as though they were ducking into the backwash of a helicopter rotor, weighed down by invisible dog tags. What really depressed

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them was the knowledge that their stories about the proces Papon would sneak into the paper only "between blow jobs," as one said bitterly. The British alone were exhilarated, bouncing around in bad suits. They all speak French, they all knew they would be on the front page, and secretly they knew too that their readers would not be completely unhappy with a story whose basic point was that all foreigners were like that.

The great Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld waited outside the courthouse too. He is in his sixties, spreading at the middle, and was dressed in a black jacket and cloth cap. "If Papon is found guilty, then the appareil of the state will be held responsible," he was saying to another journalist. "The French people will be say-ing that there is a limit, you must act on your conscience, even if you are a man motivated not by hatred but by procedures." Be-hind him, members of his group, the Association of Sons and Daughters of the Deported Jews of France, were reading out the names of Jewish children whom Papon was charged with having sent to their deaths.

A few moments later three British journalists rushed into La Concorde, having just heard the accused man's last speech. Like all of Papon's interventions during the trial, this one was sonorous, unremorseful, and full of literary and artistic refer-ence. As soon as he finished, the three judges and nine jurors had gone to deliberate 764 questions of guilt or innocence, with a tray of sandwiches to see them through the night. The three Brits now sat down and ordered wine and roast chicken, and one began reading his translation of the speech as the others ate: "He said that it was a double scandal, something about Camus in here. Oh, yes, his wife's favorite writer was Camus." The reporter looked down at his notes and deciphered. "They killed his wife ... I think." Papon's wife of sixty-six years had died, at the age of eighty-eight, the week before the trial was to end. " 'In their desperate . . . desperate search,' I think you'd put it, 'for a crime, they have killed her with . . . petite esprits.' What would

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you say? Small guns? Small steps? Little blows? Little blows. De Gaulle gave her a Legion d'Honneur."

" 'With his own hands,' " one of the other journalists added, consulting his notes.

"Oh, yes. God, yes. 'With his own hands.'Then there was . . . Oh, yes. Here's when he turned to the prosecutor: 'Sir, you will go down in history-but through the servants' entrance!'" The reporter looked up, his eyes amused. "Well, that's not bad. Now something here about the absence of Germans. Oh, yes:

'Throughout the stages of this strange and surreal trial, there has been a notable absence of Germans.'A Notable Absence of Ger-mans-sounds like a Michael Frayn play. Then something odd about Abraham sacrificing Isaac in Rembrandt, a ray of light? Staying his hand. Anyone get that?"

Everything came to a halt as a crowd of journalists who had gathered around the table tried to call to mind the light of an early Rembrandt, struggling to keep up with the tight web of cul-tural allusion spun by a French war criminal.

"Well, anyway," the British reporter resumed, "he called it the most beautiful light in painting. I still don't get it. He's compar-ing himself to the Jewish child about to be killed? Well, it's a point of view. Anyway, he stayed the hand. So that's it. Camus, his wife, no Germans, servants' entrance, bit about the light, Rembrandt, and then the sandwiches were sent in," he con-cluded decisively.

"Anyone see what kind of sandwiches?" an American reporter asked anxiously The Brits laughed. But a little later the man from the L.A. Times said that he had seen the sandwiches go in, and he was confident that they were ham.

***

When the French government in Bordeaux surrendered, in 1940, it was replaced by the right-wing Vichy government under the direction of Marechal Petain, the great French hero of the

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First World War. The Vichy regime passed anti-Jewish laws that summer, before the Germans even demanded them. Two years later, at the Nazis' demand, Vichy began deporting Jews, includ-ing children, from all over the country. Although "only" 25 per-cent of the Jews in France were sent to death camps, this is, as the historian Robert Paxton has pointed out, a derisive figure: Jews in France were the most assimilated in Europe. If there had not been riches and dossiers in place at the prefecture, the Ger-mans would have had a hard time finding Jews to kill.

No one disputes that from 1942 to 1944 Maurice Papon, the secretary-general of the department of the Gironde, signed doc-uments recording the arrest, assembly, and deportation of more than 1,500 Jews, including 220 children. The rafles took place between July 1942 and May 1944. The documents show that the deportees, some French, some refugees from the East, were to be sent to the transit camp of Drancy, outside Paris. Then they were to go to a destination inconnue. The unknown destination was Auschwitz.

Papon's history after the war is also public knowledge. By the end of 1943 Papon had begun to cooperate quietly with the re-sistance, and even sheltered an important Jewish resistant. Then, at the liberation, he delivered the prefecture to the resistance and, despite the complaints of a few locals, began a spectacular rise in the postwar French bureaucracy as an haut fonctionnaire. In the late fifties he became the head of the prefecture of police in Paris and, in the seventies, budget minister in the government of Giscard d'Estaing. (The division between hauts fonctionnaires and politicians in France is fluid; there were five hauts fonction-naires in the cabinet that signed the armistice with the Germans. Today, 41 percent of the members of the National Assembly are civil servants on leave.)

Then, in 1981, Michel Slitinsky, a Bordeaux Jew who had es-caped the deportations, met a historian named Michel Berges, who had been doing work on the role of the local wine negotiants during the war. Berges had stumbled on some interesting docu-

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ments recording what the prefecture under Papon had been doing at the same time. Slitinsky eventually helped deliver the documents to the satiric newspaper Le Canard Enchaine. Later, two more Bordelais, Maurice-David Matisson and Rene Jacob, made formal accusations against Papon. (A Frenchman can bring a charge against another Frenchman to the attention of a magistrate, who may then investigate it.) President Mitterrand did everything he could to delay the trial. French justice is under the control, or anyway the influence, of the president; Mitter-rand must have felt that opening old Vichy cases was not in any-one's interest, especially his. It was only in 1995 that a formal indictment was handed down. Last October, Papon was brought from his house outside Paris to Bordeaux to stand trial.

The trial began in October and was expected to end in De-cember, but it went on until the poisson d'avril-April Fools' Day. The cast of characters in the courtroom, as the trial was reported in manic detail in the Paris papers, seemed noisy and fantastic. French courtroom decorum allows far more time than would be acceptable in an American or British court for free questioning, speechifying, digressive material, and moral instruction directed by whoever is in the mood to give it toward whoever he thinks deserves to get it. This lent the event an interestingly literary air. There was the lawyer for the accused, Jean-Marc Varaut, the au-thor of grandiloquent books on famous trials: one on Oscar Wilde, one on Jesus. There was a stream of historians: Berges, now bizarrely on the side of the defense; the universally admired American Robert Paxton, the greatest of Vichy historians; and Henri Amouroux, "of the Institute," the most well-known histo-rian to appear for the defense.

There was Serge Klarsfeld, whose son Arno was one of the leading civil prosecutors in the trial. (In a French courtroom, four or five separate prosecution teams-some civil, some from the government-can all argue the same case, each in its own way.) Arno drove the other prosecutors crazy. At the last minute he pleaded for a lesser penalty for Papon than perpetuite, the life

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sentence, demanded by the parquet, the prosecuting govern-ment authorities. And during the trial he led a move to have the presiding judge barred, on the ground that a relative of his had been among the deportees. (This may have been a preemptive strike, to keep the defense from raising the same point.) Then, after the motion failed, he took it on himself to disassociate Papon from other, worse war criminals, like Paul Touvier and Klaus Barbie, whom his parents had also helped bring to justice, announcing that, unlike them, Papon had merely signed papers. Since the whole point of the trial was to establish that signing papers was itself a crime, the other prosecutors understandably developed an even more intense dislike of Arno. Arno became the event of the trial. Out of the black robe and white kerchief that French lawyers still wear, making them look like perpetual Daumier drawings, he could often be seen in jeans, with his shirt hanging out. He is handsome, but in a modelish way, with too much hair and too open a collar. For a while before the start of the trial, he lived with the model Carla Bruni and had been pho-tographed in Paris Match with her on a romantic vacation in Venice. Most days he arrived at the Palais on Rollerblades. Even in America this would have been controversial. In France it was regarded as just short of mooning the judges.

Above all, there was Papon himself, pompous and aging and erect and unrepentant. For the first time in a French war crimes trial, there was a figure of sufficient Mephistophelian stature to excite a moralist. Papon may have been evil, but he was certainly not banal. According to the rules of French trials, he was allowed not just to speak but to pontificate, and from the courtroom came daily dispatches recording, in the sonorous, Gaullist tones of the high estate, his views on the trial and the witnesses brought against him. "This testimony is moving in both its nature and the dignity with which it was given," he said of one witness. Or again, "I cannot help but express my emotion in the face of this sober, painful account. It brings back heart-wrenching memories."

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The trial failed to clarify its subject, for reasons that were partly complicated and French, partly universal and human. The universal and human reason was that Papon was an old man being tried as an accomplice to murder. Complicity is hard to prove in any courtroom, and old men make bad culprits. Papon was sick-too sick, the doctors said, to be held in prison during the trial-and his wife was even sicker; after he went home for her funeral, there were those who thought that he might not come back. Whenever it seemed that the accusers had assured the necessity of his conviction, Papon stumbled, or fell sick, or a confused memory intervened, and one was reminded that here was a very old and decrepit functionary. Whenever one wanted to leave the verdict to the historians, one was reminded by some piece of heartbreaking evidence-a few words about a wife, a mother-that here in person was the instrument by which the French state casually delivered children to their murderers. We will have justice, said the ghosts. I will soon be one of you, said the guilty man. The trial went on for six months-too short a time to try Vichy, someone said, and too long a time to try Papon.

There is an idea, beloved of American editorialists, that the Vichy regime itself was on trial in Bordeaux and that France was finally "confronting its repressed past." This is a myth. The French have been obsessed with the details of Vichy for at least twenty-five years. Almost every bookstore keeps a shelf of books devoted to these four years of France's thousand-year history. Frenchmen of the left and of the right long ago accepted that Vichy was made possible by the German army but followed homegrown right-wing ideology, and was broadly popular.

What was on trial in Bordeaux was not Vichy but something more: I'etat, the state itself, through the acts of one of its most successful representatives. The French war crimes trials of re-cent years, from Barbie the Gestapo man to Touvier the militia-man to Papon the fonctionnaire, have been moving closer to the heart of the French identity. The idea of l'etat, the state, and its representatives, the hauts fonctionnaires, has a significance in

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France that is incomprehensible to Americans, for whom it means, at best, the post office. L'Etat suggests far more than the mere sum of the civil service. It has the authority that the Con-stitution has in America, that the monarchy until recently had in Britain. (Serge July, of the newspaper Liberation, has even re-ferred to "the religion of the fonction publique.") The state is the one guarantor of permanence in a country where neither the left nor the right can quite accept the legitimacy of the other side.

In France the state intervenes between the nation, the repos-itory of racial memory, beloved of the right, and the republic, repository of universal rights, beloved of the left. Its presence lets them coexist: The state keeps the nation from becoming too national, and the republic from becoming too republican. In France the state suggests the official, disinterested tradition of service; it means the functioning and unity of the country; it means what works. When one of the lawyers at the trial, trying to give an interview in English, was prompted with the term civil servant as a translation for what Papon had been, he repeated it and then visibly gagged, as though he'd swallowed a bad oyster;

the idea of associating the word servant with the social role he was describing was just too weird.

The cult of the state makes France run. Yet every cult comes at a price. The price of constitution worship, as in America, is to make every personal question a legal question-so that every pat on every bottom, every swig on a bottle, and every pull on every cigarette seem likely to have, eventually, a law and a prosecutor of their own. The price of state worship, as in France, is that real things and events get displaced into a parallel paper universe;

the state is possible only because everything has been neatly re-moved from life and put in a filing cabinet.

The abstraction extends into every corner of French life. The girl at the France Telecom store who is asked for a new fax rib-bon finds it, places it on the counter beside her-and then spends fifteen minutes searching through her computer files, her

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inventory, for some evidence that such ribbons do in fact exist. The ribbon on the counter is an empirical accident; what counts is what is in the system. The reality is the list; the reality is the document. This French habit of abstraction, unlike, say, the Ger-man habit of blind obedience, is difficult to criticize, because it is linked to so many admirable things. It is linked to the French sift for generalization, for intelligent living, for the grand manner, the classical style. It not only makes the trains run on time but makes them run on time to places one would like to visit. But it was this national habit of abstraction, with its blindness to par-ticulars, that was, in a way on trial.

The irony was that a French courtroom attended by the French political classes was the last place to defeat, or even to test, the compulsive habit of abstraction. The language of French lawyering, like the language of the institute and the acad-emy, is an etatiste language. Inside and outside a French court-room, abstractions pile on abstractions, and by the end you are so distracted that you are unable to face plain facts: children in a cattle car being delivered to a death camp. It was not just that you could not see the trees for the forest. It was that you could not see the forest because it was covered by a map.

So the documents involving deportations that bear Papon's signature might have been official orders authorizing actions, but-crucial difference-they might have been official memo-randums, recording for the benefit of the regional prefect, Mau-rice Sabatier, who was Papon's boss, actions already taken, a type of document that belongs in a different filing cabinet. Berges, the historian who found the documents, was persuaded to testify that this was in fact the case. Papon was, in his own words, a mere telephoniste-a receptionist, taking messages and creating memorandums. Then what to make of Sabatier's delegating to him, among other things, responsibility for Jewish affairs? Ah, but-understandable, though lamentable, confusion-this De-partment of Jewish Affairs was a recording bureau, not to be con-

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fused with the governmental Department of Jewish Affairs, which organized the deportations and the convoys. Papon was responsible for Jewish affairs only in a secondary sense. Anyway, he did whatever he could to protect Jews; look at the memos in which he struggles to see to it that Jewish children are sent to their parents! But those children were being sent to parents who were already dead and were therefore being sent to their own deaths. Where on paper can that be shown to have been under-stood? Within the paper universe of the prefecture, the unortho-dox act of attaching children's files to their parents' was an act of respect for families, whatever the sad distortion in the world out-side. And Papon actually insisted that the cattle cars, wagons a bestiaux, be replaced with passenger cars. But if he was capable of ordering the change of cars then . . . No, here again you are confusing the technical decisions of the prefecture with the pol-icy directives of Paris-or, in this case, of Paris and Vichy. In any case, Maitre Varaut, Papon's lawyer, demanded, seizing on the prosecutors' uncertainty about how hard to press their case, how could one talk about degrees of guilt in a crime against human-ity? Either one was implicit in mass murder or one was not. Any other claim was illogical. One could not be 60 percent guilty, or 30 percent guilty The paper chain proved guilt or it did not.

Only the victims seemed quite real. Marcel Stourdze, a de-portee who traveled back and forth from Paris to Bordeaux every day, in order not to miss a day, testified, "When I went back to Auschwitz after the liberation, I saw that in an enormous vat they had saved all the hair. I thought that I saw the hair of my wife. Today all that hair has become white. But at the time it still bore the color of those we had loved."

***

One of the shocks the trial offered involved the events not of 1942 but of 1961. At that time, when Papon was the head of the Paris police, the city and federal police had taken part in a mas-

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sacre in which approximately two hundred Algerian demonstra-tors died. It was toward the end of the Algerian War, and Algeri-ans in Paris, sympathetic to Algerian nationalism, broke a curfew and marched to the center of the city. There had been Paris po-licemen killed in the preceding month, and as the march pressed on, a kind of murderous free-for-all began. Many of the demon-strators, bound hand and foot, were drowned in the Seine. (The details of this atrocity, which took place in the center of Paris, re-main murky and obscure.) A partial glimpse of the records of the crime appeared only last fall, in the newspaper Liberation.

This was regarded as good news for the defense-it showed that Papon had nothing particular against Jews-but it was also seen as an attempt by the left to equate the mistakes of the Gaullist regime during the Algerian civil war with the crimes of Vichy. What came to fill the gap of real issues was, inevitably, contemporary politics. The first people to feel the sting of the Papon trial were the Gaullists, and Philippe Sequin, the leader of the remaining Gaullist party, was the first political leader to de-nounce the trial. De Gaulle himself, Seguin felt, had come under attack. Papon, after all, had been allowed to continue in the fonction publique and had been regularly promoted by Gaullist politicians,

The right discovered a response in an 850-page book called Le Livre Noir du Communisme, the Black Book of Communism, which appeared last November, shortly after the Papon trial had begun. It is an encyclopedia of Communist atrocities around the world, from 1917 to the present, all scrupulously recorded and presented, with a tally of a hundred million deaths. The Black Book became the subject of a polemic, focused indirectly, as everyone understood, on the proces Papon. Were the crimes of the Communists really comparable to the crimes of the Nazis? And if they were, didn't that make the entire apparatus of inter-national communism, including, of course, the French Commu-nist party and its intellectuals-slavishly Stalinist for so

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long-"complicit" in another way too? Were the fiches in the prefecture the only ones that mattered or could acts in that other paper universe, of poems and manifestos, be complicit in mur-der too?

After the jury retired, the journalists waited for the verdict at La Concorde. The wine was good, a generic Merlot, and every table was taken. Nine o'clock became ten, the clouds of smoke thick-ened, and the gaiety rose as, one by one, filing deadlines for the next day's paper passed. Twelve o'clock and the French journal-ists are off the hook; three o'clock and the Brits are off! Only the Americans are going to have to file late tonight, no matter what. But then, around three-thirty, the big news comes in. The Paula Jones case has been dismissed; whatever anyone files is now set for page 2. Mildly annoying to the newspapermen, this news is disaster for the independent television crews. "I can hear them now," one cameraman says moodily, deep in his cups. " 'Ship it, ship it.' " ("Ship it" meaning "Don't even try to put it on the satel-lite" is the TV equivalent of "We'll call you.")

The owners of La Concorde had learned, over the months of the trial, that American journalists cannot be outdone in their pitiless pursuit of truth and blank restaurant receipts. To cries of "Fiche, fiche, fiche," the waiters slap one down with every order. A gloomy Dutch newspaperman at one table is telling stories about how often he has broken big stories, but in Dutch. "No one knows. No one cares," he says. "Cheesus could come back tomorrow, but if he comes to me, they'll know it only in Amster-dam."

The British journalists, deadlines gone, drink whiskey and begin to reminisce about other, kinder war crimes trials, where you didn't have to stay up all night for the verdict. "Take the Bar-bie trial," one says. "Everyone knew what the verdict would be, but the jury waited until just after midnight to announce it; that

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way they got an extra day's pay, six hundred francs. We all went out and got drunk with the jury and the lawyers, and then we filed and were all on the boat train home and back in London in time for dinner. Now, that was a trial for crimes against human-ity that wasn't a crime against humanity."

The Klarsfelds wander in and out, waiting for the verdict like everyone else. They have been cast as wreckers, loose cannons, pursuing some odd, private agenda. Seeing them together, cer-tainly, one finds the connection between stolid, impassive father and mercurial son hard to grasp. Daniel Schneidermann, a tele-vision journalist who has written a book about the trial, argues that the horror of their family history-Serge's father was a de-portee who died in Auschwitz-has left an "emptiness" inside Arno, the emptiness of a world that, since the Holocaust, has been abandoned by God. It is probably true that Arno's aggres-sive gestures-the Rollerblades, the jeans, the rude interjections in court-are meant to show a certain distaste for the whole pompous system, for the parallel paper universe in all its dignity. But it is also possible that metaphysics aside, the Klarsfelds just have a shrewder take on the possibilities of the trial than their more sophisticated confreres. They understand that only an "in-termediary" penalty, only some finding of guilt for Papon clearly distinguished from the great guilt of the real killers, will seem plausible to a Bordeaux jury. They are struggling to articulate, in the rhetoric of the courtroom, that there are gradations of guilt, styles of complicity, even in the Holocaust. To treat Papon as though he were equivalent to SS killers, like Barbie, is, in a sense, to draw a line again around the killings, with pure evil on one side and innocence, by implication, safely on the other.

Among the people and the talk and the stories, one bald, hard-looking man in his seventies, drinking his cognac and cof-fee, never leaves his table. "Who is he?" a newcomer asks.

Nobody knows," one of the women from the wire services an-swers. "He's been here every day since the trial began. He has-

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sled some of the women, but then he gave it up." She lowers her voice. "A lot of us think he may be the man from the FN." The FN, the neo-Fascist National Front, is the phantom of Vichy that everyone wishes would go to sleep.

At four-thirty in the morning it was announced that the ver-dict would arrive at eight. A lot of the American reporters went back to their hotel rooms, opened their windows to let in the French spring air, and turned on CNN to watch the news about the Paula Jones dismissal. It was hard, one reporter commented afterward, not to think about the extravagant good fortune of a country that had trials like that to worry about. Another, watch-ing James Carville and Susan Carpenter-McMillan on Lorry King, said that he found it hard, particularly after months of try-ing to decode French verbal combat, to remember which was which: Did the two Americans on TV actually hate each other, despite the smileyness and forced good humor? Or was the ha-tred the pretense, and the reality the professional prizefighter's camaraderie? He had, he said, been away from America too long to remember.

By eight everyone was back at La Concorde. Serge Klarsfeld was waiting too. Someone asked one of the Brits, who had been there all night, if anyone had any instincts about what was to happen.

"None," he said.

"No one was persuaded?"

"No one was sober," he replied.

Shortly after nine a middle-aged woman rushed into the cafe. She was stout and squarely built and was bent over as she ran. She had both palms held out straight in front of her, fingers spread. It was a strange, lamenting posture, like that of a Greek mourning figure.

She ran over to Klarsfeld. He nodded and wept briefly, and they held each other. Ten! The spread fingers meant that Papon had been given ten years. "And everyone against us," Klarsfeld

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muttered. It was a victory for him and for Arno; the jury had found Papon guilty of complicity in crimes against humanity but not of mass murder.

Outside, the children of the deportees came to meet Klars-feld, clasping one another and kissing cheeks. They were stout and old and plain; evil may sometimes be banal, but virtue, to its credit, always is.

In front of the courthouse the argument had already begun. "It isn't enough of a penalty!" someone cried. "You go serve ten years," Klarsfeld said, pushing him gently The stout lady kept saying, "It was double or nothing, the parquet"-the government prosecutors-"wanted double or nothing." She said "double or nothing" in English. Klarsfeld said, "He was not Touvier, and he was not Barbie. The ultimate responsables were the Nazis. After you have looked a real Nazi in the eye, you know the difference with Papon." For the most part, the civil parties and the reporters who had been with them for six months were disappointed. "Ten years! Ten years is what you give a housebreaker," one exhausted French journalist said.

Somehow, back in Paris, the verdict seemed more tolerable. Paradoxically the trial had concentrated so exclusively on Papon's role in Bordeaux in the forties that it had redrawn his picture, making him once again a mere prefect. In reality, he had not been one more face among the fonctionnaires but one of the highest, one of the great men of state, a cabinet minister. But this was a Paris reality, not a Bordeaux one, and it was only back in Paris, where the ministerial Papon could be recalled, that the scale of the achievement in Bordeaux registered. A great man of state, protected by the state, had been pursued for crimes by pitifully ordinary people-and despite that, he had at last been held responsible. It wasn't the victory over abstraction that Camus had died dreaming of. But this time nobody gave up.

In a way, the jury in the Palais de Justice had even, over sand-wiches, used their imaginations to make some necessary retro-

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spective law, and they had done it well. By saying that Papon didn't know where the trains were going, and also saying that he was guilty of crimes against humanity, they were making the right and courageous point. To deliver a child to the secret police is as large a crime against humanity as you ever need to find, no mat-ter where you think he is going or what kind of car he is going to travel in. The men with stamps and filing cabinets now couldn't plead procedure any more than soldiers could plead orders; the appareil of the state would have to understand that their fiches represented people, whether they were Jews or Algerian demon-strators or refugees yet to come. The parallel paper universe now had a window.

***

I had explained to Luke, over the course of the trial, what was going on and why I was away: A bad man had long ago done wicked things to little children, and now he would be put in jail for it. When I came home, he asked if they had put the bad man in jail, and I said, well, yes, they had. "And when the bad man got put in jail, did all the children come out?" he asked.

Of course, they hadn't even really put the bad man in jail. Papon remained free for almost another two years in various ap-peals-unusually so for a convicted man in France-and then, on the eve of his incarceration, fled to Switzerland. It seemed clear from the circumstances of his flight that he had some kind of internal help from the French functionary state. But he was found, quickly, within days, and brought back to France and locked up at last. In his flight he had taken the alias of La Rochefoucauld, the great French skeptic, a man of culture to the end.

Trouble at the Tower

Paris in July is pretty much left to the tourists and the people who look after them, while everyone else goes south, or west, or, in any case, away. An incident at the Eiffel Tower-which left a tourist sore, the tower closed tight for a couple of days, and an el-evator operator out of a job for a while-told you everything you needed to know about what happens when you leave the tourist and his handlers alone to sort things out. What happened, if you missed it, was that a lady tourist got on the "up" elevator of the tower with a ticket for the second platform and then decided to get off at the first platform (because she felt dizzy or because she didn't, or just because she was exercising her fundamental right to get on and off an elevator whenever she felt like it). She was kept from getting off the elevator by a French elevator operator (who either gently dissuaded her or handled her a bit roughly, or else launched into a Joe Pesci-in-a-Scorsese-film attack). The woman (an American? No, a Brit! Finally the French papers set-

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tled on calling her an Anglo-Saxon) was, it turned out, a suc-cessful writer with a profound sense of indignation and a lawyer. She complained, and the company that runs the tower-it's a private business-had the elevator guy fired. But then the rest of the tower employees went out on strike in solidarity, closing down the tower and leaving a lot of indignant American and British tourists on the ground, furious at being denied their chance to be manhandled by the elevator operators.

The incident produced a certain panicky, just discernible ex-change of meaningful glances for the rest of the week between the tourists and the touristed. ("So that's what they want-our lives!" "So that's what they want-our jobs!") Naturally, sympa-thy in France gathered quickly around the wronged operator and his striking friends, while sympathy on the Anglo-American side gathered around the roughed-up lady. This distribution of sym-pathy wasn't merely tribal, though. The Eiffel Tower Incident of the Summer of '97 illustrates a temperamental and even intel-lectual difference between the two cultures. Most Americans draw their identities from the things they buy, while the French draw theirs from the jobs they do. What we think of as "French rudeness," and what they think of as "American arrogance," arise from this difference. But she was just trying to have a good time, we think. But he was only doing his job, they think. For us, an el-evator operator is only a tourist's way of getting to the top of the Eiffel Tower. For the French, a tourist is only an elevator opera-tors opportunity to practice his metier in a suitably impressive setting.

The metaphysics of consumerism are much studied, of course, since it seems to be the century's winning ism. (Ameri-cans have shown that whole art forms can be made through cre-ative browsing.) Producerism, its surprisingly hardy French counterpart, is much less well diagnosed. The Eiffel Tower itself is a prime example of pure producerism, of metier mania: a thing built by an engineer as a self-sufficient work, whose only func-

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tion is to stand there and be admired for having been engineered. The French ideal of a world in which everyone has a metier but no customers to trouble him is more practical than it might seem. It has been achieved, for instance, by the diplomats inside the quai d'Orsay, who create foreign policy of enormous subtlety and refinement which has absolutely no effect on anyone out-side the building. It has also been achieved by IRCAM, the modern music institute, which sponsors contemporary com-posers who write music that so far no one has ever heard. (When the waiter at the cafe finally deigns to shake your hand, it does not mean that you are now a valued client. It means that you are now an honorary waiter.)

The elevator operator dreams of going to the top of the tower alone in his elevator, while the Anglo-Saxon tourist, in her heart of hearts (and he knows this; it's what terrifies him most), dreams of an automatic elevator. When the two ideals-of ab-solute professionalism unfettered by customers and of absolute tourism unaffected by locals-collide, trouble happens, pain is caused. Americans long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World. The French dream of a place where every-one can practice his metier in self-enclosed perfection, with the people to be served only on sufferance, as extras, to be knocked down the moment they act up. This place, come to think of it, is called Paris in July

Couture Shock

I suppose you could say that my introduction to the rites and spells of Parisian haute couture occurred early on a Sunday morning, at the Valentino show, when the ladies in the front row suddenly, and pretty much in unison, folded their programs over and began to fan themselves ferociously with the gold and brown paper. The Valentino show was being held at nine-thirty in the morning for reasons of protocol so complicated that they resem-bled one of those nineteenth-century diplomatic negotiations, like the Schleswig-Holstein question, comprehensible to only three people in Europe. The cream of the fashion press had turned up anyway, although Anna Wintour and Suzy Menkes and the rest had the pained, aren't-you-a-clever-boy-to-wake-me-up-this-early smiles otherwise seen only on parents of two-year-olds. The music had begun, Stella Tennant had come out (head angled, shoulders thrown back, hips a little forward, rolling the works) in ivory wool and silk chevron trousers with two patch

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pockets, an ivory blouse with matching lace, and a beige cash-mere shawl bordered in lace, looking game despite the hour and all that lace. Then the ladies in the front row, the rich clients, began to fan. They fanned hard, expertly-my God, it's hot in here-just the way veteran de-fle watchers always do. And this was odd, because it was freezing cold inside the Salon Opera at the Grand Hotel: the coldest July in Paris anyone could recall;

cassoulet and topcoat weather. But the ladies fanned as they al-ways do, in the gasping heat of July at the collections.

I turned to a friend sitting next to me, a French television journalist, and directed at her my version of the French shrug-and-frown that means, Why on earth? She, in turn, made the French 0 with her mouth that means. Please, my friend, discard this elaborate pretense of naivete. Then she shrugged too. "They are at the collections. It is July. They fan," she said. She thought for a moment. "It is a reflex. We watch, therefore we fan. No. I fan, therefore I am." Then she looked around the salon and made the encompassing shrug-and-pout-and-flex-your-hands-from-the-wrist French gesture that in the context meant that the ap-parent absurdity of the act of fanning yourself in the cold is no more absurd than the whole enterprise of traveling to Paris to look at clothes that you will never wear, displayed on models to whom you bear no resemblance, in order to help a designer get people who will never attend shows like this someday to buy a perfume or a scarf that will give them the consoling illusion that they have a vague association with the kind of people who do at-tend shows like this-even though the people who attend shows like this are the kind who fan themselves against July heat that happens not to exist. It is these formulations-packed tight with contradictions that spiral around, turn in on themselves, bite their own tails, and eventually come out dressed in taffeta and lace tulle-that give haute couture its charm, or, anyway, help it cast its spell.

Participating in the haute couture is more like entering a

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yacht in the America's Cup than it is like opening a Seventh Av-enue showroom: The collections are overseen by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, which demands, among other things, that its members maintain a working atelier in Paris, and put on a show each season of no fewer than fifty cos-tumes each. Belonging is an expensive, exacting business, and every year one more house just drops out. This season there were sixteen shows-about a thousand outfits, from Stella's silky pants to the wedding dress at Saint Laurent. First an event and then a theme dominated the five days of the shows. The event was the separation of Gianfranco Ferre as head designer from the House of Dior, which was significant because it threw a major house into a "crisis," and the theme was the crisis of haute couture. Of course, haute couture is always in crisis, like Cyprus or the New York theater. But by now the crisis has become al-most existential; not even a hit will help. Even very, very rich women don't buy bespoke clothes in Paris anymore, and the widely understood, though never openly articulated, justification for losing money in couture for the past twenty years or so-the loss leader justification-no longer works. By now, most fashion-able people feel, the average woman who buys, say, a box of Pierre Cardin handkerchiefs is probably buying them less be-cause of the glamorous association of Pierre Cardin haute cou-ture than because of the glamorous association of Pierre Cardin socks and Pierre Cardin sunglasses. (As a consequence, Pierre Cardin, who seems to have figured this out, doesn't even show his haute couture line in the defiles.)

Fashionable people have two contradictory theories to explain the persistence of couture despite its troubles-theories usually mentioned in succession and often in the same sentence. The first-a kind of Tang and Teflon explanation, which is promoted by the chambre-is that haute couture is the R&D wing of the fashion business, an investment in its future, since the "tech-niques" and "styles" that the designers wheel out today will

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somehow affect the kind of clothes that people wear tomorrow. (Veteran explainers offering this view can make it sound as though the defiles were taking place in a particle accelerator.) The other, contradictory explanation is that haute couture is the living memory of French fashion, where vanishing standards of workmanship, craftsmanship, and imagination are kept alive as a necessary act of filial piety. When you point out that both these explanations can't be true at the same time, you generally get in response a kind of Paris Zen. "Ah, you are right. Both things can-not be true at once. That is the point of haute couture," one fash-ion prince explained to me. Then he walked off seraphically.

The haute couture remains a rite. There are the photographers, who push to get inside, and who form, on their bleachers, a little island of happy heterosexual lust amid two seas of becalmed aestheticism. They're the only free men at the collections; they whoop, whistle, and call out to the models anything they feel like calling out to the models. ("They could come out dressed in paper bags for all I care," one photographer said that morning as he looked over the Valentino program. "Well, plastic bags any-way") Then there are the models themselves, who can undress and dress again so quickly that when the show is over, they climb out of the last evening dress and are on the street, wearing jeans and T-shirts and Prada knapsacks, getting a taxi before the ap-plause has stopped. And there are the fashionable people, lining up in order not to be allowed in. (The shows never start on time, or near it, but everybody comes to the security desk and waves the invitation anyway.)

It's the clothes, of course, that differ from show to show. At Valentino the collection soon settles into a look-clothes in col-ors that the regular guy might describe as "sort of brown," al-though a fashionable person might call them chestnut, chocolate, beige, coffee, and bronze. The sequence of styles is fixed. Day

wear comes first, then what are still called, touchingly, cocktail dresses, and then evening wear. Usually a wedding dress comes last, but Valentino replaced it with a long red chiffon sheath. As the models come out, almost everyone in the room begins one task of translation or another. The press has the simple job of translating the descriptions of the clothes, which are written in fashionese, into ordinary language. Valentino's program was rela-tively taciturn compared to most. Lacroix, for example, later in the week showed a " 'cold dawn' shot razimir spiral sheath dress with 'apricot' and 'melon' kick pleat"). Still, even Valentino's "Mordore silk laminated ottoman pinstriped pantsuit, gold lace polo T-shirt, black cashmere shawl bordered in gold lace" became, in the mar-gin of one journalist's program, "beige slacks." The garment indus-try people are looking for something-a range of colors, a shape, a new line-that they can translate from cashmere and laminated ottoman into cottons and synthetics and sell. They sketch shapes, which to the unpracticed eye all look more or less the same. A tight bodice with a big skirt represents evening wear; a short, tight jacket with big pleated flowing pants stands in for day wear. The few unattached, noncommercial, nonbuying spectators in the room are waiting for what they call a couture moment-a moment, the newcomer is assured, that is roughly equivalent to the moment in opera when the clouds of shlock lift and something crazily artificial becomes transporting.

Only the top fashion editors-at whom all the expense is in a way directed-cannot sketch or make notes, for fear of seeming rude. They leave that to their underlings and try to look inter-ested and amused as each costume passes by. A haute couture defile is an oddly heart-lifting occasion, inflected with hope. The fashion editors are hoping that one of the models' dresses will give them a point, a theme, something to write about. The fash-ion merchants are hoping that one of the models' dresses, suit-ably adapted, will make them a fortune. The aficionados are hoping that one of the models' dresses will supply a couture mo-

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ment. The photographers are hoping that one of the models' dresses will fall off. The press scribbles. The photographers hoot. The ladies fan.

Most of the collections are shown either in the ballroom of the Hotel Intercontinental, which is long and narrow and mock grand siecle, or, like the Valentino show, in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel, which is high and circular and Second Empire. On Sunday afternoon, though, every fashionable person has to find a taxi or get a lift all the way out to the periphery of Paris, where John Galliano is showing his fall collection for Givenchy at the Stade Francais-the old French indoor sports arena. What no one at Givenchy has considered, though, is that holding the show in a stadium means holding the waiting period before the show outside the stadium-in the open air, where few fashion-able people are inclined to spend a lot of the day and, as it hap-pens on this Sunday, in a steady Paris drizzle too.

Things get ugly fast. "It is insupportable!" one distinguished-looking dowager is crying as the rain pelts her perfectly con-structed face. "I have been a Givenchy client for decades, and now I am being made to stand outside, exposed to the wind, naked to the rain!"

"In the rain! In the rain!" the lady next to her cries out, and she goes on, "I too have been a client for a period of time." She re-sists saying "decades," despite its obvious pathetic force; she is a little younger than the first lady. "The thing is insupportable."

"No! It is worse! It is a scandal!" the first lady cries, defini-tively. Insupportable is a bitter word in French, but scandal is a fighting one. Even the Givenchy guards at the chain-link gate, in their double-breasted jackets, are beginning to get uneasy. When the crowd gathered outside the Bastille, the trouble began after some old lady said the thing was a scandal.

At this point the fashion editor Andre Leon Talley comes up, pushing people aside on his way to the ritual "No, you see, I've

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been invited. What! You mean these people have too?" moment. Andre Leon Talley is a big guy, and for a second or two it seems likely that the guards are going to let him in. This makes the dowagers, standing behind me, plain crazy, and they charge, blind to the consequences. We are storming the Givenchy gates when the guards just give way: They open the gate and let every-one walk across the lawn toward the stadium. We file in, feeling vindicated, and take our seats. At least thirty more minutes pass before anything happens.

The Givenchy show, appropriately, takes as its subject the ever-popular fashion themes of decapitation and mass murder. Inside the stadium Galliano has constructed a Fragonard-like forest of feathery trees and dark ferns. Then, instead of sending the models one by one down a runway, he sends them out in groups, to wan-der around the artificial forest. The setting is meant to recall eigh-teenth-century French aristocratic life, and the dresses what became of it. The dress worn by Ines de la Fressange, for instance, is frankly described as an "ivory lace Empire Trench with blood pre-guillotine velvet sash."All the girls are meant to look as if they were on their way to the tumbrels, and in fact the Revolutionary-era Empire dresses, with their long, columnar lines and soft, cling-ing bodices, in beaded ivories and reds and champagnes and olives and emeralds, are quite unreal in their loveliness. They are by far the most memorable "pure" design of the week and, toned down and deblooded, the obvious tip to become this autumn's look.

Haute couture, everyone says, no longer has much to do with what normal women normally wear. The besetting sin of haute couture, though, is not unreality but corniness: not that it looks like things no women would actually wear but that it looks ex-actly like what your aunt Ida always wears "for best"-that shiny black thing, say, covered with sequins and accompanied by a lit-tle shoulder-hugging jacket.

This is a thought that occurs on Monday afternoon, at the Un-

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garo show-a collection of pantsuits and long dresses so stan-dard and uneventful that it gives you a lot of time to think. There is a reason, you realize, that even women who could afford to do not wear what the models in Ungaro are wearing: dresses of floor-length flowing lace. The reason is that fancy clothes look fancy, and fanciness now looks primitive. So many of the clothes, in their elaborately ostentatious materials, just seem regressive, overrich, brutally obvious. In feeling, they date back to a time when a complicated display of expensive materials was meant to be crushing evidence of wealth. Now wealth, wanting to crush, likes subtler evidence; that's why more wealthy women buy Brice Marden squares than haute couture evening clothes.

Ungaro, though, has intelligently taken his show off the run-way too and put it on the floor-in principle, so that you can see the detail work on the clothes, but with the side effect that you can also see a lot of the models inside them. None of the big-name girls are here-not Linda or Naomi or Claudia-but it is the B, or nonname, models who are the most thrilling to look at. This is partly because the name models are phoning it in; Linda Evangelista, at the Givenchy show, had exactly the smug "I don't have to do this for a living anymore" look that Shecky Greene and Buddy Hackett used to have when they "dropped in" on Merv Griffin. The B list models, on the other hand, work: They throw out their hips, they flirt with their eyes, and when the pho-tographers call out to them to smolder, they smolder. A great deal of time is spent-by regular guys anyway-explaining to them-selves why the haute couture models are not really as desperately beautiful as you might think when they are even more beautiful than you can imagine. The trick-or, to put it another way, the consolation-is that their beauty has become so familiar that it is not so much a commodity as a commonplace. Looking at Kate Moss modeling Givenchy, you don't think, There's a heartbreakingly beautiful girl. Instead you just think, There's Kate Moss. The projected fantasy bangs up not against her inaccessibility

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but, paradoxically, against her familiarity. She offers not a limit-less horizon of love and elegance and great clothes but the real-ity of a known life. (You would have to avoid talking about Johnny Depp. You would have to tell her how thin she looks, or, rather- for it is the New Kate-how zaftig.)

But they are perfect! A twelve-year-old American boy who was visiting Paris that week had come equipped with his skateboard, and, to his shock, discovered in Paris not a skateboard hell but a paradise of broad, flat avenues and, at the place du Trocadero, vast, flat concrete plazas. "How do you find Paris?" he was asked.

His eyes went round and reverent.

"Smooth," he said.

I find the models smooth too.

One new girl in particular is so perfectly beautiful that she seems a composite of various imaginary smoothnesses. I later learn that her name is Honor Fraser, that she is English, and that she is being tipped by the fancy as the Next Great Model; she will be Miss England in next year's Pirelli calendar. I feel like a novice horseplayer who has just picked the Kentucky Derby winner.

When the shows were over, I spoke with her about what it is like to be on the runway, instead of watching what happens there. She turned out to be a poised student of her own craft. "I love modeling couture," she said, with a passionate eagerness. 'It's the only pure expression in fashion-the one part of the fashionable world where there are no commercial compromises at all. There's something terribly moving about being an element of it-being its vehicle. The purity and the exactitude that the designers devote to every tiny detail of your clothing and acces-sories, as though they were working from some image deep in their minds, which they're trying to approximate with you, the way people exhaust themselves in pursuit of an ideal-it's really very moving. It's quite extraordinary to be backstage, being made up for two hours, being transformed from who you are into this ideal of beauty that the designer keeps in the back of his mind.

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"I love couture modeling too, because you have such a pure feeling of control and power when you're out there. For a tiny pe-riod of time-three or four seconds-you have the chance to hold the entire room. This may seem like a strange comparison, but I'm fascinated by comedy, and I imagine that modeling cou-ture must feel very much like being a comedian; it's just you out there, having to win over an audience, with nothing except your-self and your attitude to do it. And then I, for one, find the clothes so lovely-those Valentino colors that aren't quite colors and yet register as though they were. I feel lucky to have been a part of it." I had never before come across someone who was ar-ticulate and knowing about her craft, was big enough to start at power forward, and looked great in a black velvet military coat with rhinestone buttons, black satin trousers, and a black silk top embroidered with black jet. (She had been wearing that, for Valentino, the first time I saw her.)

***

Tell about the pathetic collections. A certain number of the col-lections seem intended to be pathetic. Olivier Lapidus's is my specimen pathetic collection. The house is full, and the B list girls do the modeling, and Olivier, who is the son of the designer Ted, looks like a very nice guy. But it is held at the Carrousel du Louvre, a place designed specially to hold collections-it is big and well lit and clean-which means, naturally, that absolutely nobody wants to show there. Olivier Lapidus comes onstage to point out that his collection is a mixture of past, present, and fu-ture and includes the first solar-paneled jacket ever made. He shows it off. You can control the solar panels, turning the heat up or down, and it also has a built-in plug that could brancher you right into the Internet, the first haute couture garment equipped to go on-line. The poor model has to take the plug out of the pocket and show it to the audience. Then you hear the theme from Star Trek. Nobody knows which way to look.

***

Tuesday night is Christian Lacroix. The show is held in the ball-room of the Grand Hotel, and it is by far the most intently at-tended defile I have seen yet; even Mme. Chirac is here. Lacroix is of the moment. I associate his clothes with the tasteless things about the eighties, the Ivana Trump era-clothes to wear for the big settlement. Tonight, when the lights go down, Linda Evangelista comes out in the ugliest dress I have ever seen. Even the program's words can't disguise its ugliness: "silk-crepe dress stamped with a mauve-and-ochre-green 'reptile' design." I am settling in for a good long bath of contempt.

But then something happens. First, the music begins to take hold. In most of the collections the music is either generic "so-phisticated" soprano and synthesizer pop-the kind you associ-ate with the singer Sade-or classical chestnuts, like Albinoni and Mozart. Lacroix, though, has had someone (the program credits a Laurent Godard) with an uncanny eclectic ear arrange his music. We begin with the breathless, chimelike sounds of the Swedish group the Cardigans and switch to Joe Jackson and then, without missing a beat, land in a Bellini aria. Lacroix works through his day wear and moves into the cocktail dresses and then the evening wear. In the program he announces that he has been spending all his time lately "with Vermeer." He seems to have taken a wrong turn in the museum, for what you see is Goya: Goya's duchesses, in their mantillas and black satin dresses, but wildly remade, as though for a Balanchine ballet of the life of Goya. There are lots of satins and silks in dark colors- navy blue satin and vermilion satin and black chiffon. The layer-ing is ecclesiastical. For once, the program description actually describes the clothes: a long, lined black crepe sweater-dress tucked up over a crepe underskirt with a fuchsia faille bustle at the back, accented by a pistachio satin knot. The crepuscular colors mute the ostentation, so that it doesn't look like ostenta-

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tion at all but, rather, like art, like old painting. The music turns to the Beatles' baroque period: the string part from "Eleanor Rigby" and then a long cello and harp version of "For No One." The lovely sad yet modem tunes, the twilight, and the dresses themselves create, against all odds and probabilities, something touching, and even-Honor Fraser's word is right-moving. The dresses aren't really dresses at all; they are little buildings of crepe and silk and taffeta. The girls look out from them, like Spanish ladies looking out from a second-floor window. When a model named Victoria appears in a black satin corset with Eliza-bethan sleeves of tulle and worn over a deep lavender-blue skirt flecked with black lace-she looks like an actress dressed up as Viola for an impossibly beautiful production of Twelfth Night- the audience applauds, genuinely, not politely. When Karen Mulder comes out in a silver lace dress with an iced pearl bodice, I make exclamation points in my program.

It's all too much, and that's where the loveliness-the couture moment-begins. The clothes are extravagant and unreal, but they don't seem camp. They don't seem artificial or out of this world, just symbolic of a common human hope that the world could be something other than it is-younger and more musical and less exhausting and better lit. It proposes that the little mo-ments of seduction on which, when we look back, so much of our life depends could unfold as formally as they deserve to, and all dressed up. It is as if we were wishing that the rituals of sex, those moments of painful sizing up, which begin with the thought That's a nice dress, could pass by more consequentially, slowly-love walking down a runway instead of just meeting you outside the movie theater.

Couture is a romantic cartoon. It's a caricature of the roman-tic impulse, with a cartoon's exaggerations but a cartoon's energy and lighthearted poetry too. The thing you feel in a couture mo-ment isn't "What a wonderful dress" or, as you do with higher kinds of art, "What a good place the world is," but, more simply,

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"I'm in love." The point of haute couture may be any one of a hundred things, ninety-nine of them sordid or silly, but its sub-ject is women wearing clothes and all the emotion that rises from women wearing clothes. Offering romance in cartoon form, cou-ture helps preserve the habit of romance. The best moments at Lacroix or Givenchy, far from being giddy or empty, were famil-iar and held out the promise of the beginning of a whole familiar cycle. Soon the fantasies, translated, will become purchases- This Fall's Dresses-and these will become photographs, the kind you look at five years later (God, that dress is so mid-nineties!) to find that they have become a little piece of your time, a peg to hang a good memory on ("Remember that kind of satiny Lacroix knockoff thing you had? You looked great in that"). The sequence, one of the last romantic sequences we can count on, starts in these hotels; that they happen to be places where rich ladies cool themselves off in the cold seems a small price to pay to keep that emotion in circulation.

The emotion passes quickly, of course. In a minute Love walks back up the runway, changes into her jeans and T-shirt, and is on the phone to her agent. Still dazed by Lacroix, I stum-bled across one beauty outside the hotel with her cell phone clutched in her hand. I heard her mutter, firmly, "I know I said I'd do it, but I can't. It's only Tuesday, and already I've got taffeta coming out my ass."

***

Yves Saint Laurent, on Wednesday morning, is the last important collection, and the most "classic." Here, for once, is a really well-organized show, where everybody slips inside on time. Lacroix is the haunt of the new Gaullist French government establish-ment; Saint Laurent is still the favorite of the old Socialist aris-tocracy, and they all turn out. Jack Lang, the former culture minister, is here, looking as though he owned the place. (The So-cialists loved Saint Laurent because his clothes promised the

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pleasures of modernity without the sacrifices of modernism; that was the Mitterrand dream.) Saint Laurentjust shows Saint Laurent, beautiful clothes that he could have shown in 1980 or 1990 just as well. The music is standard opera arias. Everything gets a hand.

The big news for the photographers is that Claudia Schiffer has come to YSL, having been snubbed by Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, and she gets the first-desk position. Claudia, though, is not what you would call a team player. While the other models only occasionally respond to the photographers' pleas for more, Claudia stands at the end of the runway for what seems like ten minutes at a time, making love to every camera in sight. The other girls, held up at the head of the runway and waiting for her to get through, give her exactly the look you see on the face of an impatient commuter at the Holland Tunnel who is stuck in the exact change lane behind a woman who has entered it on a hunch.

Then the blond, Botticelli-faced Karen Mulder comes out in the costume that every photographer has been dreaming of for years: robe de soir courte de mousseline et satin noir-a sheer dark silk nightgown that, for one reason or another, provides an un-dergarment below but not above. Karen holds one fingertip pre-cisely in front of each breast, demurely, as she walks down the runway. The photographers go crazy. "Karen! Karen!" they moan. "Give us something." Karen smiles. Nothing doing. She walks right to the end of the runway-right into the heart of the pho-tographers' lair-smiling, keeping her fingertips in place, not em-barrassed but not giving anything away, either, and then she walks right back. The photographers groan, in disbelieving uni-son, as she disappears. You could have heard them out on the place Vendome. "There was a fortune in it for all of us," one of them says mournfully. I notice Claudia, on her way in, giving Karen a look. You have the feeling that Claudia would have dropped her hands, pulled off the gown, and jumped off the run-way to autograph the negatives.

The Cisis in French Cooking

Nine o'clock on a Friday morning, and David Angelot, the commis at the restaurant Arpege, on the rue de Varenne, has begun to braise tomatoes for dessert. The tomate confite farcie aux douze saveurs is one of the few dishes in the Michelin red guide whose place on the menu has to be clarified with a parenthesis (dessert), indicating that though it sounds like a veggie, it eats like a sweet. It is a specialty of the kitchen of the great chef Alain Passard, which a lot of people think is the best and most poetic in Paris, and probably all France; it requires a hair-raising amount of work by the commis, the kitchen cabin boy; and many people who care about French cooking believe that it is a kind of hopeful portent, a sign that the creative superiority of French cooking may yet be extended indefinitely. Normally a braised tomato becomes tomato sauce. ("The limitations of this insight," one of Passard's admirers has noted gravely, "describe the limitations of Italian cuisine.") To make a tomato get sweeter without falling apart not

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only is technically demanding but demonstrates, with a stub-born, sublime logic, an extremely abstract botanical point. Toma-toes are not vegetables; they are fruit.

For David, who may not see M. Passard all day long, they are work. David, who is eighteen and who studied cooking at a gov-ernment school just outside Lyons, cuts the tomatoes open (about fifty of them, from Morocco, in the winter), scoops them out, and makes a farce, a stuffing of finely chopped orange and lemon zest, sugar, ginger, mint, pistachios, star anise, cloves;

then he makes a big pot of vanilla-scented caramel and braises the stuffed tomatoes in it, beating the caramel around the toma-toes vigorously for forty-five minutes without actually touching them. The tomato is a fruit and can be treated like one, but it helps to beat a lot of caramel into its body, to underline the point.

While he works, he thinks about his girlfriend (who is also a cook, and with whom he lives in an apartment in north Paris), his future, and his desire to visit Japan someday. He works in a tiny basement room in the small, two-story space of the kitchen, and he shares that room with another, more experienced assistant, Guilhem, who spends his mornings making bread. (All the bread at Arpege is made by hand.) Guilhem, while he works, thinks of going back to Washington-he calls it D.C.-where he has been before, where there is a constant demand for good French food, and where he has an offer to work in a French bakery. If David's job at Arpege embodies one of the principles of high French cooking-the gift of making things far more original than anyone can imagine-Guilhem's embodies the opposite but comple-mentary principle: the necessity of making things much better than anybody needs. This morning he will make three kinds of bread: a sourdough raisin and nut loaf; trays of beautiful long white rolls; and a rough, round peasant bread. All the bread will be sliced and placed in baskets to be presented upstairs in the dining room, and then mostly pushed around absentmindedly on the plates of people who are looking at their menus and deciding

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what they really want to eat. This knowledge makes Guilhem a little bitter. He thinks about D.C.

In the main kitchen, a short flight up, Pascal Barbot, the sous-chef, is keeping things under control. The atmosphere there, with eleven serious short men in white uniforms going about in-tricate tasks in a cramped space, does not so much resemble the bridge of a nuclear submarine in an action movie as it does the bridge of a nuclear submarine in an action movie after it has been taken over by the Euroterrorists led by Alan Rickman: that kind of intensity, scared purposefulness, quickness, and heavy, whispered French. The kitchen is white and silver, with a few well-scrubbed copper pots hanging high up-not like the lac-quered copper you see in rusticated, beam-heavy restaurant in-teriors but dull and scrubbed and penny-colored. The richest colors in the kitchen are those of French produce, which is al-ways several glazes darker than American: The birds (chickens, pigeons, quail) are yellow and veined with deep violet, instead of the American white and rose. The assistant chefs start at nine o'clock and will remain at their stages until one o'clock the next morning. When the service begins, around twelve-thirty, they will experience an almost unendurable din, which, after a few days of work, they learn to break down into three or four distinct sounds: the thwonk of metal in water hitting the sides of a sink as a pot is washed by one of the Malinese plongeurs; the higher, harsh clank of one clean saucepan being placed on another; the surprisingly tinny, machine-gun rat-a-tat of a wire whisk in a cop-per pot; and the crashing, the-tent-just-fell-down-on-your-head sound of hot soiled pans being thrown down onto tile to be washed again. (In a good kitchen the pans are constantly being recycled by the plongeurs.)

The kitchen crew includes three Americans. They have worked mostly at California and New York restaurants of the kind that one of them describes as "grill and garnish joints." They are all converts to Passardism. There is never anything entirely new in

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cooking, but Passard's technique is not like anybody else's. In-stead of browning something over high heat in a saucepan and then roasting it in an oven, in the old French manner, or grilling it quickly over charcoal, in the new American one, Passard cooks his birds and joints sur la plaque: right on the stove, over extremely low heat in big braising pans, sometimes slow-cooking a baby gigot or a milk-fed pig in a pot for four or five hours on a bed of sweet onions and butter. "He's just sweating those babies," one of the Americans marvels under his breath, looking at the joints on the stoves. "Makes them cook themselves in their own fat. It's like he does everything but make them pluck their own feathers and jump into the pan. Fucking genius."

Downstairs, another of the Americans is slicing butter and teasing Guilhem about his D.C. plans. "Look at this butter," he says to himself. "That's not fucking Land o'Lakes." He turns to Guilhem. "Hey, forget about D.C.," he says. "It's cold. There are no women. Where you want to go is California. That's the promised land. Man, that's a place where you can cook and have a life."

Guilhem looks genuinely startled and turns to speak. "You can?" he says, softly at first, and then louder, calling out to the back of the American cook as he races up the stairs with the but-ter pats for the dining room. "You can?"

***

Most people who love Paris love it because the first time they came they ate something better than they had ever eaten before, and kept coming back to eat it again. My first night in Paris, twenty-five years ago, I ate dinner with my enormous family in a little corner brasserie somewhere down on the unfashionable fringes of the Sixteenth Arrondissement. We were on the cut-rate American academic version of the grand tour, and we had been in London for the previous two days, where we had eaten steamed hamburgers and fish-and-chips in which the batter

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seemed to be snubbing the fish inside it as if they had never been properly introduced. On that first night in Paris we arrived late on the train, checked into a cheap hotel, and went to eat (party of eight-no, party of nine, one of my sisters having brought along a boyfriend), without much hope, at the restaurant at the corner, called something like Le Bar-B-Que. The prix-fixe menu was fifteen francs, about three dollars then. I ordered a salad Nicoise, trout baked in foil, and a cassis sorbet. It was so much better than anything I had ever eaten that I nearly wept. (My mother, I am compelled at gunpoint to add, made food like that all the time too, but a mother's cooking is a current of life, not an episode of taste.) My feelings at Le Bar-B-Que were a bit like those of Stendhal, I think it was, the first time he went to a brothel: I knew that it could be done, but I didn't know there was a place on any corner where you could walk in, pay three dollars, and get it.

That first meal in Paris was for a long time one of the few completely reliable pleasures for an American in Europe. "It was the green beans," a hardened New Yorker recalled not long ago, remembering his first meal in Paris, back in the late forties. "The green beans were like nothing I had ever known," he went on. He sat suddenly bolt upright, his eyes alight with memory.

Now, though, for the first time in several hundred years, a lot of people who live in France are worried about French cooking, and so are a lot of people who don't. The French themselves are, or claim to be, worried mostly about the high end-the end that is crowded into the Passard kitchen-and the low end. The word crise in connection with cooking appeared in Le Monde about a year ago, with the news that a restaurant near Lyons, which had earned three Michelin stars, was about to close. Meanwhile, a number of worrying polls have suggested that the old pyramid of French food, in which the base of plain dishes shared by the population pointed upward to the higher reaches of the grande cuisine, is collapsing. Thirty-six percent of the French people

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polled in one survey thought that you make mayonnaise with whole eggs (you use only yolks), 17 percent thought that you put a travers de porc in a pot-au-feu (you use beef), and 7 percent be-lieved that Lucas Carton, the Paris restaurant that for a century has been one of the holiest of holies of haute cuisine, is a name for badly cooked meat. More ominously, fully 71 percent of Frenchmen named the banal steak-frites as their favorite plat; only people past sixty preferred a blanquette de veau, or a gigot d'agneau, or even a pot-au-feu, all real French cooking. (The French solution to this has been, inevitably, to create a National Council of Culinary Arts, connected to the Ministry of Culture.)

To an outsider, the real crise lies in the middle. That Paris first-night experience seems harder to come by. It is the unforced su-periority of the cooking in the ordinary corner bistro-the prix-frxe ordinaire-that seems to be passing. This is partly a trib-ute to the international power of French cooking and to the great catching up that has been going on in the rest of the world for the past quarter century. The new visitor, trying out the trout baked in foil on his first night in Paris, will probably be compar-ing it with the trout baked in foil back home at, oh, Le Lac de Feu, in Cleveland-or even back home at Chez Alfie, in Leeds, or Matilda Qui Danse, in Adelaide-and the trout back home may just be better: raised wild or caught on the line. Even the cassis sorbet may not be quite as good as the kind he makes at home with his Sorbet-o-matic.

The fear-first unspoken, then whispered, then cautiously enunciated, and now loudly insisted on by certain competitors- is that the muse of cooking has migrated across the ocean to a spot in Berkeley, with occasional trips to New York and, of all places, Great Britain. People in London will even tell you, flatly, that the cooking there now is the best in the world, and they will publish this thought as though it were a statement of fact and as though the steamed hamburger and the stiff fish had been made long ago in another country. Two of the best chefs in the London

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cooking renaissance said to a reporter not long ago that London, along with Sydney and San Francisco, is one of the capitals of good food and that the food in Paris-"heavy, lazy, lacking in imagination"-is now among the worst in the world.

All this makes a Francophile eating in Paris feel a little like a turn-of-the-century clergyman who has just read Robert Ingersoll: You try to keep the faith, but Doubts keep creeping in. Even the most ardent Paris lover, who once blessed himself at every dinner for having escaped Schrafft's, may now find himself-as he gazes down one more unvarying menu of boudin noir and saumon unilateral and entrecote bordelaise and poulet roti, eats one more bland and buttery dish-feeling a slight pang for that Cuban-Vietnamese-California grill on Amsterdam Avenue or wondering whether he might, just possibly, enjoy the New Sar-dinian Cooking, as featured that week on the cover of New York.

I would still rather eat in Paris than anywhere else in the world. The best places in Paris, like the Brasserie Balzar, on the rue des Ecoles, don't just feed you well; they make you happy in a way that no other city's restaurants can. (The Balzar is the place that plays Gallant to the more famous Brasserie Lipp's Goofus.) Even in a mediocre Paris restaurant, you are part of the richest commonplace civilization that has ever been created and that extends back visibly to the previous century. In Paris restau-rants can actually go into a kind of hibernation for years and awaken in a new generation: Laperouse, the famous swanky nineteenth-century spot, has, after a long stretch of being over-looked, just come back to life, and is a good place to eat again. Reading Olivier Todd's biography of Camus, you discover that the places where Camus went to dinner in the forties (Aux Charpentiers, Le Petit St. Benoit, Aux Assassins) are places where you can go to dinner tonight. Some of Liebling's joints are still in business too: the Beaux-Arts, the Pierre a la Place Gaillon, the Closerie des Lilas.

These continuities suggest that a strong allegiance to the past

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acts as a drag on the present. But, after several months of pains-taking, tie-staining research, I think that the real problem lies in the French genius for laying the intellectual foundation for a rev-olution that takes place somewhere else. With movies (Melies and the Lumiere brothers invented the form and then couldn't build the industry), with airplanes, and now even with cooking, France has again and again made the first breakthrough and then got stalled. All the elements of the new cooking, as it exists today in America and in London-the openness to new techniques, the suspicion of the overelaborate, the love of surprising juxtapo-sitions-were invented in Paris long before they emigrated to London and New York and Berkeley. But in France they never coalesced into something entirely new. The Enlightenment took place here, and the Revolution worked out better somewhere else.

***

The early seventies, when I was first in France, were, I realize now, a kind of Indian summer of French haute cuisine, the last exhalation of a tradition that had been in place for several hun-dred years. The atmosphere of French cooking was everywhere in Paris then: thick smells and posted purple mimeographed menus; the sounds of cutlery on tables and the jowly look of pro-fessional eaters emerging blinking into the light at four o'clock.

The standard, practical account of the superiority of French cooking was that it had been established in the sixteenth cen-tury, when Catherine de' Medici brought Italian cooks, then the best in the world, to Paris. It was not until after the French Rev-olution, though, when the breakup of the great aristocratic houses sent chefs out onto the street looking for someone to feed, that the style of French cooking went public. The most fa-mous and influential figure of this period-the first great chef in European history-was Antonin Careme, who worked, by turns, for Talleyrand, the future George IV, Czar Alexander I, and the