Go Fish is a game I can play. A different tournament will forever stand between me and French nationality. That is the sport essential to French life: I pontificate, therefore I am. Between Passy and St.-Germain, a royalist taxi driver worked himself into a fever one night over Chirac’s misdeeds and the pressing need to reinstall the Bourbon heir (rather than the Orléans pretender) to the throne of France. His diatribe, and his reliquary of a taxi, may be the last thing our children forget about the year abroad.
Some mysteries of our new life went unsolved. Is there anything the French can’t advertise with cleavage? How is it possible that 21st-century Paris could still boast Turkish toilets? Why does the milk not need to be refrigerated? Why does the shampoo not lather? Certain things were best left unexplained, like the gaggle of short-skirted teenagers who congregated across the street from the apartment, rain or shine. “Have you ever wondered when those girls go to school?” asked the eight-year-old. Fortunately, she never noticed that those prodigies spent their day getting in and out of cars with out-of-town plates, cars which reliably delivered them back to the corner an hour later. At least they dressed respectably, as opposed to their sisters (and faux sisters) a block deeper into the Bois de Boulogne. There were two jogging itineraries: my Fellini-esque own, and the less scenic route, which I took when running with the children.
In the end, though, the pleasures exceeded the familiar physical glories and culinary delights. One lives better in Europe, not only on account of the cheeses and the three-hour lunches and the enforced weekend. One does so thanks to SOS Couscous, whose delivery men ladle dinner from dented metal casseroles; on account of pediatricians who pay house calls and orthodontists who take appointments until 9 p.m.; because the playgrounds are vastly superior, free as they are from liability issues. There is good coffee and steak frites even at the hockey rink, where the adults are blessedly oblivious to the game. And the parent of a school-age child saves countless hours: There are no bake sales, no safety patrol, no home games. The last thing any French school administration cares to encounter in its hallways is a parent. We came nearly to take for granted those built-in privileges of a socialist country: When making travel arrangements, when buying shoes, when visiting a museum, we were entitled to a discount as a card-carrying “famille nombreuse.” (Woe to any famille nombreuse that attempts a dinner in a good French restaurant, however. At least until the two-year-old orders oysters.)
As it happened, we had something else in common with Franklin. While I waited to pick the children up from school one fall afternoon, my Parisian sister-in-law called to report that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. I assumed she meant that a crazy student pilot had done so until I got home and turned on the television. From that moment on Americans in Paris were few on the ground. As she had been in the l8th century, America was naked and vulnerable again. “Nous sommes tous Américains,” blared the headlines, and any cabdriver who heard a whisper of English was happy not only to ask where we were from—for once New York was the proper answer, rather than California—but to offer sympathy and thanks for l945. For the worst reasons imaginable, we enjoyed a taste of the fervor for the New World that Franklin had so effectively cultivated in the Old. A friend who was treated to a rare viewing of original Proust papers asked afterward why he had been so lucky. “Consider it repayment for June 6,” he was told, just after the 50th anniversary of D-Day. Say the words “Benjamin Franklin” and you elicit a smile from a Frenchman. On days when I wasn’t smiling, I made a point of coming home via the Place du Trocadéro, over which a bronze Franklin presides. Sometimes I felt closer to him there than I did in the archives. That is the blessed thing about France: The history is always close to the surface. I suppose it was why we went.
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