Paris, Books, and Heritage . . .

I wrote this post months and months ago, then added the photos several weeks ago. Still, I’ve held onto it, hesitating to click on the “Publish” button. It’s closer to me than most of my writing here, and I hope it will be the beginning of a series of posts that explore my marriage through mine and my husband’s many trips to Paris. I do hope you enjoy it. . . 

A sunny morning, wandering the Village St. Paul in Le Marais, Paris. We’d already explored l’Eglise St. Paul, following the instructions written in my Moleskine by a charming older woman, une vraie parisienne, a fewnights earlier. Sitting coude à coude at the tiny, bustling,red-check-tableclothed AuPied du Fouet, we’d struck up a conversation with her and her dining companion, and she’d insisted on some must-see’s, reaching for my notebook to write directions in a classic French hand. She was right. The church we’d by-passed on earlier visits to the area more than repaid the time it took to peek inside, where there was a Mass just ending. So we’d also obediently and gratefully paid attention to other ancient buildings whose history our vieille dame had summarized. Now, released from duty, we were following the dictates of eyes and stomachs. Clinking glasses, the aroma of garlic and butter and cheese and grilled meats were coaxing us to ignore windows displaying paintings and sculpture, wonderful ceramics, textile art, exquisite shoes, candy-coloured handbags, enticing scarves . . . The demands of the stomach were winning, until I was caught, seduced by a precisely wrought object in the window of a stationery store.

At first, the object looked vaguely architectural, although it wasvery small. Quickly, it resolved into a magical sculpture formed by the intricately pleated pages of a book. The livre itself appeared to be quite old, and its demure size lent it an inviting
intimacy — within the pleats, I glimpsed jewel colours promising hidden illustrations, alluring secrets.  We popped inside to enquire about theprice and pick up a business card. Est-ce que vous avez une petite carte? has become my default
method of fending off sales tactics with some dignity, along with my trusty il faut que je réfléchisse and it seems to work well. This time, I sincerely wanted to be able to get back to the shop after taking some time to test my impulse to buy.  And two days later, the day we were booked on the afternoon Eurostar out of Paris, we trekked back to the Marais to bag my treasure.  Despite the packing difficulties, despite the not-inconsiderable price tag, I wanted this little book sculpture.

The store itself, Melodies Graphiques (10, rue du Pont Louis Philippe, 4e) is a cornucopia of marvels for those who love all the various accoutrements of writing: distinctive pens, papers in myriad textures, colours, weights, sophisticated and beautiful cards. And the owner was charming, keeping the conversation en français with no apparent impatience, allowing me to compare the two book-sculptures and to take my time choosing between them. We chatted a bit about the artist and about the books she sources to fold into her artworks — children’s catechisms or missals, preferably no later than early 1900s vintage. I finally decided on the piece that had originally caught my eye, secretly eager to pry it apart and view the coloured illustration.  The owner wrapped it in a box for us, Paul trying not to frown at the notion of adding yet another item to those which wouldn’t fit into
our wheeled carry-ons, and we headed back to our St. Germain apartment to collect our gear before heading to the Gare du Nord.

On the train, looking up from my reading periodically to watch the French countryside retreat for another year, anticipating the concert we’d listen to at St. Martin’s-in-the-Field the next evening in London, my mixed feelings about leaving Paris yet again were shaped by my pleasure at taking home something tangible, this small piece of art. Sitting on a stand in the dining area of our big open kitchen, it would bring that Old World Marais neighbourhood into our West Coast open marine environment. The two couldn’t be more different, right down to the smells — there, sophisticated perfumes, wafting kitchen aromas meld with the less pleasant exhaust fumes and sewer notes of any big city; here, the vegetative notes of the surrounding woods are sharpened by the iodine-and-salt of the ocean, the seaweed drying on the beach above the tide mark — the only distasteful olfactory notes would be the occasional fish carcass washed up on the shore.

But while my new purchase would bring the Paris difference into our daily life, it would also provide a link with my personal history, right here in Canada, a long family history in the New World, yes, but again linking back to France, the ancestral home of my maternal grandparents, my grandmother especially. Indeed, I believe the sculpture’s pleated pages attracted me because they evoked — even before I knew their precise origins — a memory, a recognition, of one of my most treasured possessions, my grandmother’s catechism book.  Similarly sized for a small child’s hands, my grandma’sbook boasts that it is Illustré de 32 gravures. While these thirty-two illustrations must have been more entertaining in a century still opening to the audio-visual transformation of the mind’s eye, the little book appears quite uncompromisingly dull today. It’s impossible to imagine a contemporary seven-year old spending more than a moment considering it.  But that’s about the age grandma would have been when she carefully inscribed her name – Hélène Langevin — inside its front cover, sometime in the first handful of years of the 20th century.

The preface that covers the first yellowed pages, tiny rips in the yellowed pages where someone turned too eagerly or impatiently, in frustration or boredom, that preface is written by the priest who explains his pedagogy, and it’s dated 14 Octobre 1874. The book proper opens with the title DIEU –and it outlines the words and expressions that the chapter will explain: Dieu, Bontés, Seigneur, Amis, Vie (God, bounty/gifts (from God), Lord (as in Our Lord), friends, life). The chapter begins comfortably, invitingly even, continuing a conversation that would have begun before my grandmother joined her siblings in this world. Growing up in a French-Canadian Catholic family whose central social focus would have been the local church, these opening words would have made immediate sense: On vous parle souvent du bon Dieu, mes petits amis, et l’on vous dit qui’il faut l’aimer de tout votre coeur (People often speak about the good God, my little friends, and tell you that you must love him with all your heart).

Leaving aside the content for now, what strikes me as I hold this little book reverently in my hands (my reverence directed as its age, the way it captures traces of my beloved grandma, rather than at its religious nature) is that my grandmother, even as a young child, could read it. By the time I knew her, the only hint of her French-speaking past was in the dinner-table command she would give as we sat down to eat: Servez-vous, mes enfants, she would say, and we’d begin to pass the roast beef, the mashed potatoes, the green jello and cottage cheese wonder, studded with walnuts, that had thankfully replaced the dreaded tomato aspic.  Only occasionally was there a flicker of an accent, more an inflection really, barely detectable. Indeed, even my mother had little more familiarity with Grandma’s French-speaking self than I did, although sometimes when her Aunts Blanche and Leah visited, the Langevin sisters must have sequestered themselves in the language that gave them privacy from their broods.

Some of Mom’s cousins, raised in Maillardville, a French-speaking community outside Vancouver, stayed francophone, and even today, I must have relatives — 3rd, 4th or 5th cousins, four times removed? — who maintained their language, but for us, it was all lost when Grandma was sent to school in rural Manitoba, sometime around 1904.  Precisely when or why she switched from the francophone education system that issued her little book (certainly an extension of the Catholic church) to English-only, I never thought to ask. Instead, I was shocked and saddened to hear her tell about being smacked for speaking French. If you’d known my grandmother, you’d find it as impossible as I did to imagine her, even as a child, behaving badly enough to deserve corporal
punishment. But to have it inflicted because of speaking her mother tongue? I know. Those were the days. . . . And the method was certainly effective. She learned quickly to conform, worked that accent right out of her English. And eventually, her youngest daughter, my mother, met and married an Englishman, straight off the boat from Yorkshire, and my linguistic future was determined.

Before she met and married my father, though, Mom had a shy girl’s romantic teenage notion of becoming a nun. In her late teens, leaving behind her family, settled years earlier on the West Coast, she headed back to Manitoba, this time to live in a convent boarding school in a tiny French-speaking community. Her shyness intensified by an overwhelming combination of
homesickness and limited ability to understand and speak the language surrounding her, she obviously renounced her supposed vocation. But where some might have renounced French along with the nunnery, my mother, at some point between then and having children, decided we should have more opportunity to learn French than she did. So by the time I was six or seven, she was borrowing French language-lesson records from the library to play for us.  One of the few television shows we watched regularly was the wonderful Canadian children’s show, Chez Hélène (now, sadly, long defunct) Occasionally, I’d hear my grandma
exchange a few phrases with her French-immigrant neighbours, and once I started attending our small local Catholic school, I’d sometimes hear the French-Canadian nuns slip back into their langue maternelle, and I’d understand why they had such a tough time with the “th” sound in ours.

In other words, I was fertile ground for the seeds of language, and as soon as we began having French lessons in Grade 6 and 7, I quickly acquired a vocabulary and a decent sense of grammar. Already an avid reader in English, I transferred that ability to French, although there were very few texts to practise on. High school offered a richer range, but it was hard not to be impatient with the way the language was parcelled out, the present tense this month, the passé composé the next. Still, at least in the all-girls tiny Catholic high school I attended for Grades 8, 9, and 10, the lack of an opposite sex freed us from the major embarrassments of learning a language and allowed us to indulge in the romance of, well, a Romance language. We took our Dictées seriously, but we also had fun writing and performing skits en français; once, even, on a school outing, a group of us pretended we were exchange students from France, confining our entire conversation to French, amplified with our version of the accompanying Gallic gestures, convinced that we fooled all who saw us.

The next stop on my French-language journey was not as enjoyable. The huge (2700 students) co-ed public school was filled with teens who had learned to hate a process that grilled and quizzed and bored and embarrassed them. The French teachers were martinets or, even worse, were vulnerable in their quirkiness. My proficiency became a social liability, and although there must
have been allies there somewhere, I was too new to the system to detect them. Still, I persevered, fascinated by the relationship I was seeing between English, French, and Latin, which I was also studying. And finally, at university, the reward I’d been seeking: a room filled with fellow language-lovers who’d done the reading and wanted to talk about it, were willing to risk embarrassment for the joy of exploring another world. Why then, having finally arrived here, did I leave so soon? Right on the verge of acquiring the fluency my grandmother, my ancestors, had once had, how could I turn away?