Toujours la France

I imagine I'll get dogpiled for saying so, but I deeply love France, and all things French. I'm completely unreasonable on the subject. You can trash France all you like, and I might even agree with you, but it won't make a fig of difference to me. I love the place. My friend Fred Gion and I spent a terrific evening in December of 2005 at La Table du Perigord, a little restaurant in the St-Germain neighborhood of Paris. Our meal was simple but sublime, and we spent almost four hours lingering over it, drinking wine and enjoying ... life. My love affair with France began when I was a little boy, not even old enough to read, and I listened to my elderly great-aunts tell tales of serving as Red Cross nurses in Dijon during the Great War. Aunt Hilda was seized by a Frenchman on the Champs-Elysees when the armistice was announced, and he kissed her madly. She pretended to be scandalized 60 years later. I thought it was amazing. Just think! The old ladies sat me on their leather couch in their cabin and showed me their photo album from France in the war, and I was in heaven.

When I was in high school, I discovered Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast," his supposedly non-fiction account of life in Paris in the 1920s, when he was a poor and unknown journalist. I. Could. Not. Get. Enough. Of course he lied, but they were fantastic lies, and I loved them. Since then, I've been to France a number of times, and I cannot get enough of the place. I learned, sort of, the French language, but of course it has faded from disuse. But I love to hear it spoken, I love to hear it come out of my mouth. I met a couple from Montreal when I was in Louisiana a few weeks back, and just speaking my rudimentary French with them was pure pleasure.

When I was dating Julie, I took her to Paris, and showed her the places I loved. It was all part of my elaborate courtship ritual: Paris helped me win my true love's heart. Not that you asked, but there is no finer feeling than to be young, completely and ridiculously in love, and in Paris in the springtime. The French are impossible, of course, but God love them, they know how to live. Back during the days leading up to the Iraq War, when idiots were pouring French wine down sewer drains (hey, I volunteered to make my gullet their sewer!), I wrote this defense of France on National Review Online. I think it holds up fairly well, especially because the French were wiser about the war than we were.

What prompts my reverie was reading over dinner tonight this story from the Times about the love letters of Ernest Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich, which are to be released. This passage struck me:

“I love you and I hold you tight and kiss you hard,” Hemingway ends one letter. In another he writes, “I can’t say how every time I ever put my arms around you I felt that I was home.” He begins another: “What do you really want to do for a life work? Break everybody’s heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I’d bring the nickel.”

And yet the timing was never right. As A. E. Hotchner writes in his book “Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir,” Hemingway once told him: “The thing about the Kraut and me is that we have been in love since 1934, when we first met on the Île de France, but we’ve never been to bed. Amazing but true. Victims of unsynchronized passion.”

On that first trip to Paris with the woman I'd dreamed of and prayed for and hoped existed somewhere in this world, undiscovered, we paused on a bridge linking the Ile St-Louis with the Right Bank, and I kissed her hard. And then we went to Berthillon and had Earl Grey tea ice cream. She loved me! Me! In Paris! The memory of that time is realer than real. That was 10 years ago this month. One decade and three children later, she's still the same woman I fell in love with, and Paris is still the city I fell in love with. It was the realization of a dream that I thought existed only in books. France is where dreams come true. My dreams, anyway. I can hardly wait until my children are old enough to take to Paris. I hope there will be a place for us at La Table du Perigord.