Paris in Love (34 page)

Parisian life is small and quiet. I pack the children off to school and then think greedily about how many hours I have before
they come home. I have come to the conclusion that silence and time are the most precious commodities.

We wandered through the Hôtel Drouot auction house yesterday, and I fell in love with a fainting couch labeled
“Duchesse à Oreilles, Époque Régence,”
upholstered in a brocaded cream adorned with nodding heads of rosy flowers. I instantly envisioned whole cascades of my heroines gracefully swooning onto this couch.

Parisians stand to the side of an opening train door, waiting for passengers to exit, rather than elbowing their way on. They form neat lines at the grocery store. I seem to be the only jaywalker in the city. But let one of them behind a steering wheel … everything changes. Held up in traffic for more than thirty seconds, a Parisian goes berserk and honks until the surrounding buildings shake.

I stood for a while in the freezing cold yesterday and watched an old man play his barrel organ. His huge orange cat slept on top of the instrument, wrapped in a small sheepskin. Tourists kept giving him euros to take a picture, which struck me as so odd. I tried to imagine the slide show back home. “And here is Doris, standing next to the old Frenchman playing an organ.”

High up, somewhere in the milky sky, the snow clings together before it pinwheels gently down in little clumps. Thousands of
cotton bolls were trying to seed themselves on rue du Conservatoire.

Anna spent last evening rearranging her room. She’s divided her shelves into “books with girls in them,” “books in which bad stuff happens” (mostly fairy tales), and “books for every day” (Junie B. and Enid Blyton). I took a look at my bookshelves. I have “books with happy endings” and “books telling me how to be happy.”

We spent the afternoon at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, a quirky, wonderful science museum in the 3rd arrondissement, housing everything from Regency carriages to an early Apple computer. There’s an automaton doll admired by Marie Antoinette (it can play eight tunes!) and the very first satellite, which broadcast to the world Neil Armstrong’s steps on the moon. Luca was most fascinated—if slightly freaked out—by the objects such as the iPod that we use now but that have already found a place in the museum.

All my life I’ve heard of Foucault’s pendulum, but I didn’t know what it was until we saw an original version at the Musée des Arts et Métiers. The pendulum sweeps over a table, and as the earth turns on its axis, tilting the table ever so imperceptibly, the pendulum swings toward a new position, finally knocking over a small metal block. We watched … and watched … When the block clattered on its side, I felt, for just a second, as if the earth lurched below our feet.

Mariage Frères, a
maison de thé
that opened in 1854, will leave you happily wiggling with caffeine. They keep their teas in huge canisters marked with fascinating names. I bought Thé des Poètes Solitaires for my father (a solitary poet), and for myself, Earl Grey French Blue in tea bags. The tea of solitary poets was measured out on big brass scales, and the tea bags turned out to be made of thin muslin.

I took Alessandro to the Musée Nissim de Camondo today. I have decided that my favorite portrait in the collection is Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun’s
Bacchante
in the large study. Her body is glowing, curvy, nude but for a swath of leopard skin across her lap. Moïse placed another nude woman over his bed, which is snugly tucked in its own alcove. Given his love of paintings of nudes and his membership in a club for epicures, Moïse seems to have been a sensual man—which makes it all the more sad that his wife ran off with an Italian horse trainer. Alessandro insists that because the horse trainer was a
baron
, his nationality and occupation were irrelevant.

Alessandro and I watched the informational video about the history of the de Camondo family and the museum, and I disgraced myself by crying, though surrounded by rows of stoic French people. After Moïse’s wife absconded with the baron, he seems to have raised their young children with the flair of a modern stay-at-home dad. But after his only son, Second Lieutenant Nissim de Camondo, was killed in the First World War, he became a
recluse; he died in 1935, having donated his house to his adopted country to serve as a public museum. When World War II hit, his only daughter, Béatrice, could not believe that she and her children could be in danger; after all, her father had left his house to the nation, and her brother had given his life defending France. Yet Béatrice; her husband, Léon; and their two children, Fanny and Bertrand, were all sent to Auschwitz. None of them returned. Moïse’s fabulous collections, the silver platters commissioned by Empress Catherine II of Russia, the furniture covered with gold leaf, could not buy him the most important possession of all: the safety of his children. Writing this, I have changed my mind. There was no disgrace in my tears.