By a happy quirk, we found an apartment in Franklin’s old neighborhood, less hilly today than it was in the 1770s. There were other modern-day advantages as well. No fewer than six boulangeries stand along the mile that separated Franklin’s home from that of John Adams. Franklin had to make that walk on an empty stomach, something I never did. There was, after all, pressing pain au chocolat research to be done. We lived 15 minutes from Versailles, an expedition that took Franklin two dusty hours by carriage. When we bicycled in the Bois de Boulogne, we crossed the lawn where Franklin followed the first manned balloon as it rose into the sky in l783, something he did with considerable anxiety. We were two very different Americans in Paris, but I delighted in the overlay of our lives. It did what a foreign adventure is supposed to do—it made the mundane thrilling. Along the route Franklin traveled twice every week, to the home of the woman he hoped to seduce (as opposed to the one he wanted to marry), was the lovely Congolese tailor who lengthened our son’s pants before the start of the school year. Picking up the dry cleaning qualifies as less of a chore when you are doing so on ground you know Ben Franklin and John Adams have trodden before you. And I could always justify shopping at the pricey ice cream shop on the Rue Bois-le-Vent. It seemed nearly obligatory to do so, given that the shop stands where the back door to Franklin’s home once had. Moreover, it seemed dangerous not to, as the shop hours were erratic, a universal signal of artistic integrity but a guarantee of greatness in France.
To France America sent as her first emissary a man who confessed he was wholly indifferent to food. (And one who was ignorant about it in the extreme: It was his conviction that there was no butter in French sauces.) Franklin ate well but pined for a good Indian pudding, a piece of salt pork, Newton Pippin apples, walnuts. We had an easier time fending off homesickness. Never has our family eaten as many H&H bagels as we did in Paris; they can be had, frozen, at a little store on the Rue de Grenelle, conveniently on my way home from the diplomatic archives. And so breakfast became an odd binational affair—bagels with Kiri, the French spreadable that most closely resembles Philadelphia Cream Cheese. One thing that immediately fell off our radar was Chinese food, much though the cravings for sesame noodles and pork dumplings continued. Just as the word teamwork is missing from the French language, so are the concepts “family style” and “for the table.” To attempt a Sichuan or Hunan meal without sharing is to defeat the purpose of the exercise. Inevitably one is left to covet one’s neighbor’s plate.
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