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.
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.
On the other hand, Thanksgiving in Paris was a dead ringer for Thanksgiving at home, save for the much-missed butternut squash, and the fact that everything tasted better. I don’t know whom we have to thank—I fear it may be Hallmark—but Parisian butchers have come a long way since the first time I ordered a “grosse dinde” in November, nearly 20 years ago. “Oh, is it for your American rite?” asked the butcher, with a squint of the eye generally reserved for Jewish-Masonic conspiracies. Now those grosses dindes come with a side order of miniature American flags. In New York we are Pilgrims, but in Paris we are Americans.
We had one great advantage over Franklin: We spoke French. Franklin rarely acknowledged that minor handicap, although he did refer to contracts that had been signed in his first year, when misapprehension was the order of the day. Even a bilingual family came in for its share of surprises, however. There was the hockey coach who chain-smoked on the ice. (There were also the unforgiving stares to be endured in the métro when traveling with an eight-year-old in full hockey equipment, especially as that child was a girl.) School recess may well have taken place in the magnificent Parc Monceau, but one did not a) set foot on the grass, b) throw a ball, c) throw anything resembling a ball. In turn, the flying scarves, the chestnuts, the bottle caps were confiscated. The school week is cleverly configured to keep mothers from working (home for lunch; half-day Wednesday; four-hour birthday parties). The academic calendar is configured to keep teachers from having to work more than three weeks straight.
Some of the frustrations were maddeningly familiar. The problem is less one of language than of the sterling example set—and the expectations harbored—by North American efficiency. It is almost impossible to shake the Anglo-Saxon concern that you are holding up the line, a qualm that does not exist in France, where it is one’s privilege and responsibility to do so. Quite simply, ours is a service economy. France’s is not. A café waiter is meant to do his job, but that job is most decidedly not to guarantee the satisfaction of his customer. Rather it is the customer’s job to admire the professionalism of the waiter, the expertise with which he can flick a baguette crumb into oblivion, his unerring capacity to make change. Stocking the larder is a full-time job, more so even than in Franklin’s day, when the fruit seller and the pâtissier and the laitier delivered their goods to the door. (Judging from his household accounts, Franklin had a hearty and prescient taste for apple pie.) Early on the ten-year-old delivered up the paradox of Parisian life: In that city, one accomplishes precisely half of what one sets out that morning to accomplish. Which means that if one heads out with only one thing to do, one has a problem.
France is a country hidebound by regulations; the national sport consists of gracefully subverting them. The trick is not to follow the rules, but to avoid getting caught breaking them. It is Casablanca on a grand scale. One adapts quickly but sometimes ambivalently, especially since this is not necessarily the lesson one cares to impart to one’s American children. 2002 was an election year in France, which meant several things. It meant there was a strike of some kind pretty much every minute; one might call the Louvre to confirm that the children’s weekend class was in session, only to hike across town to discover that, indeed, class was not canceled, but that the building was locked tight. (The opposite might also be true. The post office was open, but the employees on strike.) The library staff might well be in place—except those who delivered titles from shelves L through S. Under the highly regulated exterior all is chaos: The order at a piano recital is whoever wants to go first. The TV news starts at a set time—and continues until the news is finished, a signal triumph of content over form. There may be a hockey bus to convey the team to Meudon, or there may not. (Naturally this non-truth requires three phone calls to establish.) There is no such thing as a Gallic work ethic, and in an election year there is no constituency that is too dignified, or too disenfranchised, to strike. In the course of the year, the emergency-room doctors, the gendarmerie, the teachers, the unemployed, all walked out on strike. Everything is predicated on the crucial except, and exceptionellement quickly became our favorite word in the French language. The exception of the day became a staple of our dinner conversation.
Election year brought with it lessons apart from the political ones. As every Frenchman knows, all driving violations are promptly pardoned by the incoming Président de la République. It is his gift to the people of France; it is the -modern-day version of royal prerogative; it is the tradition every candidate must vow to uphold. Which means that for the months leading up to any presidential election, all speed and traffic laws are de facto suspended. (Road fatalities rise accordingly.) Essentially what this means is that any piece of Parisian surface—sidewalk, driveway, bus stop—suddenly qualifies as a parking space. Quickly we went native; our children seemed ambivalent about what they termed our “rural parking.” What kind of lesson, they asked, were we imparting? The lesson we were imparting was, should our children ever settle in France, they had better get with the program, or they will be circling the block eternally.
And then there is that staple of French life: the specious argument. After a full day’s drive to the country, fully wilted, we inquire in a restaurant at 5 p.m. if there might be anything on hand to eat. No, is the answer. Not even an ice cream? Well yes, of course, comes the reply. We got very good at playing Go Fish. Also at heading off the brand of logistical display we had encountered years earlier on an Air France flight, when we attempted to settle the firstborn in the airline’s bassinet. He did not fit. The bassinet was for children under two. Ergo, reasoned the indignant stewardess, the child was not under the age of two. (As his passport duly attested, he was nine months old. Under other circumstances, my outsize American children have elicited plaudits, of the kind a Great Dane wins in a city of poodles. “Ça, Madame,” offered a well-dressed gentleman in the Jardin du Ranelagh one day, pointing to a different nine-month-old, “Ça, Madame, c’est un bébé.”)
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.