The obsession took hold in New York, which posed a problem: What I wanted to write about next was Ben Franklin’s 18th-century adventure in France. On some level, I knew from the start that the only way to research that book was to move our family, for some period of time, to Paris. And from the start—even as friends enviously asked if we would do so—I dreaded the prospect. Generally Paris is not considered a hardship posting, save to someone who values efficiency, candor, and Sichuan takeout. Nor was this to be a larky, light-hearted school year abroad. Paris means Angélina’s chocolat chaud and the Tuileries at dusk and the Rodin Museum and Pierre Hermé, but it is also a city, I had come to learn, of phone repairmen, plumbers, and dentists, the vast majority of them French. With age, the dislocations tend to announce themselves less as bracing, extra-carbonated mental states than as crippling tornadoes of small details.
In part I suppose I dreaded what can only be termed my own devolution. Whereas at home I am organized, competent, and semiarticulate, I am in France awkward and incapable. I can be deaf to nuance; some frequencies elude me entirely. Franklin was very clear about the fact that a man sacrifices half his intelligence in a foreign language, but he had plenty of intelligence to spare. (He moaned especially that his humor fell flat on the page, as indeed it did.) Even without a language barrier, I knew myself to be handicapped. At any moment I am likely to revert to my Anglo-Saxon habits, to forget not to lay a finger on the greengrocer’s tomatoes, not to reach for my boulangerie change before it is counted, not to order my sandwich before my café crème. (My husband falls in a different category. A Frenchman raised on foreign soil, he passes for a native until confronted with a cheese tray, at which juncture his passport is nearly revoked. He once left a Normandy innkeeper dumbstruck by asking, in unaccented French, what precisely un potage jardinier consisted of. Imagine a native New Englander inquiring after a definition of clam chowder.) There was one other deterrent, too, one that the biographer Richard Holmes has identified: “Writers of course are always slightly ashamed at not being at their desks, especially in Paris, where they might be out—having a good time, mon dieu.”
We figured that the one-year-old wouldn’t object to the plan but assumed that some finessing might be in order for the eight- and ten-year-olds. Which may explain why we broke the news at the Café de Flore a semester beforehand, over cafés liégeois and éclairs au chocolat, the blackmailing parent’s best friends. The eight-year-old was an immediate convert. The ten-year-old succumbed neither to the sugar rush nor to the pandering. He made it clear that he would not be decamping to Paris until France fielded a major-league baseball team. And it was he who—on the August day we headed off to JFK with our 15 suitcases—planted himself on the steaming sidewalk and refused to budge. It was also he who planted himself on the sidewalk and refused to budge a year later, when we headed to Charles de Gaulle with more bags than any of us bothered to count. They were at least fewer than the 126 with which Franklin headed home, baggage that included three Angora cats, a printing press, a sampling of mineral waters, and a variety of saplings.
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