French Stereotypes and Ours

I don't think I had ever heard of the movie Quai des Orfèvres, nor its director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, except insofar as I had him mixed up with his homonymous counterpart. Never, that is, until last night when it popped up out of Mrs. Buce's well-manicured Netflix queue--an easy match for, in some ways better than, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity which we took in just a few days ago. Like DI, it's a piece of unadorned story-telling: no tricks, no gimmicks, just a linear power drive from start to finish. Film buffs apparently give it high marks for the camera work; I'm not hip enough to take that in on first viewing, but it sure was a pleasure to watch.

For an American viewer, at least, it's a triumph of  ambience: you get the sense that you're tucked into a fully slice of Parisian life, so vivid that you make it part of your (necessarily stereotypical?) picture of what France must have been like, at least in its time.  On a quick look, you are tempted to bracket it with the Maigret mysteries of George Simenon.  There are some huge gaps in the comparison but it is not entirely wrong.  They both give you a world that is sordid and mean at first look, yet peopled with an array of memorable characters who seem driven by an unspoken compact to maintain a certain kind of an order, and mostly endowed with an impressive knack for muddling through.  These people have been here, as Proust might say, since Geneviève de Brabant; minor nuisances in the way of murder and betrayal are not going to derail them now.

So for an American viewer, a consoling confirmation of all preconceptions. Yet here is the odd part: forget about its international cachet, evidently the film is a favorite in France, as well.   This strikes me as odd: whatever the French view of themselves, you'd hardly expect it to comport with the view of the untutored foreigners: especially those who are so misguided as to suppose that they actually know something about France.   Or, I guess, the possibility is that the French have foisted it all on a credulous international multitude while they stay home giggling into their fromage?

We Owe a Debt to Lafayette

Or is it "we owe a day to Lafayea"?

Just noticed that the third verse includes a resounding denunciation of Sharia Law:

Quoi ! ces cohortes étrangères
Feraient la loi dans nos foyers !

That is:

What! These foreign cohorts!
They would make laws in our courts!

Whatever.  Anyway, enjoy the rest of your Bastille Day. 

Le Canard en Conserve

The great gourmand Waverly Root surely had more and better meals than most of us.  He lived on, mostly in Europe, to a sleek and well-fed 79.  In The Food of France, he compares notes on French food with "the American naval wife I meet in Ville-franche-sur-Mer on the day after Thanksgiving."

I asked if her if she had eaten turkey. She said no, that her family had settle for duck. Duck, I remarked, was a noble dish, but I had been brought up to associate Thanksgiving with turkey and felt cheated if I did not get it. She agreed, but explained she had been so later in ordering that only duck remained among the canned goods of the ships stores. I think I was shocked at this.

"Canned duck?" I echoed. "You mean that you ate canned duck for Thanksgiving? Why, the market at Nice is full of fresh duck--and chicken, goose, guinea hen, turkey--anything you want!"

"Oh, none of us buy anything here!" she told me. "None of the Navy wives do. We wouldn't dare! Why even as it is, we all have dysentery!"

"What do you attribute it to?" I asked.

"You know," she confided, "it's the strangest thing! We just can't think of anything we've eaten that didn't come off the ship."

That would have been aabout 1958, I think it is fair to say that attitudes have softened somewhat since.

Off Again

Pardon if this is a repeat but I do love the story about Clarence from the Cincinnati Rotary Club who won the raffle and got to go to Paris.  

--Well, how was it?
--Oh, it was wonderful, the bright lights, the music...
--And did you go to Montmartre?
--Heh, yes I did.
--And see the dancing girls?
--Yep.
--With the itty bitty short skirts? And the net stockings?
--You betcha.
--And take one back to your room?
--Yes, I have to say, yes.
--And what happened then?
--Well from then on, it was a hell of a lot like Cincinnati.

Shorter version: we're in Paris this morning, though not in Montmartre.   Foggy and a bit clammy. So, a hell of  lot like Palookaville.

They Only Think They're English

...a British aristocracy that, however attached to economic foundations unknown to its French counterpart, was only the more disposed to employ its riches in the enjoyment of a noble leisure housed in Palladian castles, embellished with Italian paintings, refreshed by parks inspired by the landscapes of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, and entertained by gallant  manners that, without too openly competing with the elegant libertinage whose secret belonged to Catholic France, were ardently practiced intra muros; and there was no destination more favored by English aristocracy in the eighteenth century, in the intervals of peace between the two realms, than Paris or the fair provinces of France, to which this nobility escaped for long sojourns wherever possible.

 Mark Fumaroli on the 18th-Century English country gentlemen  in When the World Spoke French 36 (NYRB 2011).  Fumaroli likes the saucy bits: a page later he remarks on how "Samuel Pepys' Diary bears witness to the extraordinary mixture, in the London of Charles II, of a puritanical repugnance in principle to the debauchery of French and Catholic origin and a greedy appetite for whatever crumbs could be snatched from the revels."

More on Noses Pressed Against the Glass

Following up on my crack about social stratification at American Airlines, Michael Gilleland recalls Proust:

And at night they did not dine in the hotel, where, hidden springs of electricity flooding the great dining-room with light, it became as it were an immense and wonderful aquarium against whose wall of glass the working population of Balbec, the fishermen and also the tradesmen’s families, clustering invisibly in the outer darkness, pressed their faces to watch, gently floating upon the golden eddies within, the luxurious life of its occupants, a thing as extraordinary to the poor as the life of strange fishes or molluscs (an important social question, this: whether the wall of glass will always protect the wonderful creatures at their feasting, whether the obscure folk who watch them hungrily out of the night will not break in some day to gather them from their aquarium and devour them).

--Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

(tr. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

Wonderful.  I'm a big WABG fan, although I don't remember ever seeing this before; maybe I pinched my own idea from here without knowing it,.

The issue does inspire some general thoughts about the French and "face," though. Think of the once and future Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the French horror at the notorious "perp walk" (which in hindsight certainly does look like a pretty damn fool idea).  Think of all those Simenon mysteries that turn on family secrets buried for a generation or more behind a proud facade.

Or think of Marcella Hazan (I think it is she) on the difference between French and Italian cooking.  The French go for display, and some very good cooking does indeed come in some very pompous and flamboyant packages.  Italian cooking his home style, which is to say there is almost an inverse relationship between pretension and quality: the fancier the restaurant, the worse the food.  Not much point in pressing your window against the glass there.

De Gaulle Needed a Better Agent

Reorganizing some bookshelves, I ran across my copy of Janet Flanner's Paris Journal 1944-1965--Flanner, the longtime New Yorker correspondent who probably had more to do with shaping the vision my generation had of France than anyone including Ernest Heminway and Gertrude Stein.  Well, maybe Edith Piaf. And this guy, the subject of her letter for November 9, 1954:

There was difficulty at first in finding a French publisher for General Charles de Gaulle's "Mémoires de Guerre," (of which the opening volume has just appeared) owing to the astronomical price the General demanded for the manuscripts and for various rights.  There was also a feeling in publishing circles that the memoirs might not sell, because he had lost popularity through his retirement fom politics, because his R.P.F. party is splintered, and so on.  The highest--and, it now turns out, the luckiest---bidder was the firm of Plon, which is said to have paid him, for only this first volume ...

 ...an advance.  An advance of  how much?  Aw, come on, take a guess.  Or see infra.  Anyway:

The first regular edition of the first volume, "L'Appel" ("The Call to Arms"), has sold like lightning.  And the limited and numbered de-luxe Holland-paper edition, at twenty-five thousand francs (or more than seventy dollars) a copy, as well as all other numbered editions on alfa or pure-linen paper, priced at from twenty-one hundred to forty-five hundred francs a copy and reserved for "Les Anciens de la France Libre," and for "Les Membres de Touts les Associations Combattantes et Résistantes de la Guerre 1939-45," were heavily over-subscribed a month before publication.

Id., at 352.  Plon's successful offer of an advance for the rights: 21 million francs, about $57,000.  Hell, these days you can pay that much for a publisher's lunch at Per Se. You trying to remember how much Bill Clinton got?  Look here. Here's a a rundown of the evolution of the memoir business in the US.  Here's an interesting rundown of political-memoir prices in the UK.

BTW look at the exchange rate: about 357 to the dollar.  The French lopped off two zeroes in 1960.

on alfa o

French Jews and Assimilation

It’s become conventional wisdom to tut-tut about how foolish the French have been, to let all those Muslims into the country and then leave them parked, as it were, until they decide to make trouble. Writing in the 1927, Joseph Roth offers another take on the issue. As a “wandering Jew,” after Vienna and Berlin, he found Paris a paradise:

Eastern Jews are allowed to live as they please in Paris. They may send their children to Jewish schools or French. The Paris-born children of Eastern Jews may acquire French citizenship. France needs inhabitants. It seems to be positively its duty to be underpopulated and forever to stand in need of new inhabitants, and to make foreigners into Frenchmen. In that lies both its strength and its weakness.

Admittedly there is anti-Semitism in France, even outside royalist circles. But it is not one hundred proof. Eastern Jews, accustomed to a far stronger, cruder, more brutal anti-Semitism, are perfectly happy with the French version.

And why not? They enjoy religious, cultural, and national rights. They are allowed to speak Yiddish as loudly and as much as they like. They are even allowed to speak bad French without incurring hostility.

—Joseph Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise 147 (2005)

But there is a complication:

The consequence of such leniency is that they learn French, and that their children no longer speak Yiddish.

x—Id.

Oh really? Now, that is one part of the program that didn’t seem to carry

Remembering Salvatore

Yesterday I linked (via Michael Froomkin) to this wonderful story about the long-forgotten time when France thought it a cool idea to merge with the United Kingdom. It prrompted my memory of another such episode, almost equally bizarre. Does anyone remember Salvatore Giuliano, the the bandit king of Sicily (as I suspect some newspaper called him) who spread a bit of hope and a fair amount of misery around Sicily just after World War II? He’s a case study of what Eric Hobsbarm anatomized in his superb contextualized study, Bandits (although Giuliano does not appear in the index).

Giuliano seems to fit the classic bandit model pretty well—decentralized peasant population, exploitative and inefficient government, superstition, bitterness, apocalyptic dreams. I first learned about him from Eleanor Clark’s Rome and a Villa, one of the more successful entries in the crowded field of Italian travel books. There is also apparently a movie (here is an enthusiastic review), although I never saw it.

Anyway, among Giuliano’s many wild ideas was the notion that Sicily should merge with the United States. He wrote a friendly letter to Harry Truman (sovereign to sovereign?) exploring the possibility. I don't remember that he got an answer ("President Truman has read your letter with great interest...") It takes a bit of imagination to remember back to the time when people in other countries wanted to join up wholesale with the Anglo-American world—instead, I guess, of just doing it retail, as has become the pattern.

Soon enough, Giuliano came to be a nuisance to what passed for a government in rural Sicily—the Mafia—and they squashed him like a bug. And no, he is not the grandfather of the Mayor of New York—“o” (singular) instead of “i” plural.