DREAMING IN FRENCH . . .

This is the fourth of four "feuilletons" that I wrote for The Milton Times.  (This one appeared on August 15th.)

Usually, my wife and I believe that we’re being spied on by the cartoonist who draws the syndicated comic strip “Arlo and Janis.”  Everything from Janis’s multitasking on her cellphone to Arlo’s approval of his wife’s sleepwear and his attentiveness to his cat seems to have been lifted straight from our domestic life.  Some days we wonder whether the strip has pirated our identities or whether we are actually stealing from the cartoonist’s script.

This past March and April, though, we were sure that the creator of another syndicated comic strip, “Stone Soup,” had her spy cam trained on us.

In fact, that spy cam followed us to Paris where, just like the couple in that strip, Joan and Wally, we were looking for a brief release from our wonderfully ordinary suburban life.  We wanted to step out of the comfortably familiar and slip into something more . . . romantic.  But also something more adventurous.  With the college tuitions for our three daughters pretty much behind us, we were ready to embark on the midlife version of their study abroad programs in a foreign language in a foreign land.  By some lucky alignment of the planets, we were able to put on hold our life in Milton and environs and live for two full months like Parisians.

My wife’s life as a Parisian involved taking French language classes every morning.  Mine involved the all-American fantasy of trying to imitate Ernest Hemingway, who described looking out over the roofs of Paris and thinking: “All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know.”  Bon chance!

Living like Parisians also meant that we bought oven-hot baguettes (as often as three times a day) at our neighborhood boulangerie, we shopped for farm-fresh produce and newly-butchered meat at our local twice-weekly outdoor market, we sat in cafés sipping espressos and watching all the beautiful people go by, and we enjoyed dining and red-wining no earlier than 8 o’clock each evening—very civilized.

But in some ways our life was as touristy as Joan and Wally’s.  We visited museums and churches.  We took long walks along the Seine.  Time even slowed down the way it does in a comic strip.  (The characters in “Stone Soup” have aged only two years in the two decades that the strip has existed.)  After all, we had no pressing responsibilities.  I thought about buying a clarinet and learning to play “La Vie en Rose” for coins on the Metro.  Some days our Parisian life seemed no more “real” than those comic strip characters who appeared to be imitating us step by step.

But what made it “real” was the adventure—well, the challenge—of getting through every day in a language in which neither of us was fluent.  Rising to that challenge made us feel more vital and more energetic than we had for years.  We actually felt younger.  Whether reading street signs or ordering “Le Carnivore” in a crêperie, we had to be constantly alert, engaged, tuned in.  Very early in our stay, my wife managed to explain to a cordonnier that she needed a boot heel repaired.  Eventually—bizarre!—we began to dream in French.

But even the best dreams end with a wakeup call, and despite our total immersion in our adopted city, we knew after two months that we were still strangers in a strange land.  We were foreigners.  We had funny accents, limited vocabulary, and mangled grammar.  Most days we were humbled by our linguistic inadequacy.

But we were never humiliated, and one lasting souvenir—the French word for memory—we brought home with us relates to our attempt to realize the American dream of assimilation and acceptance while living in Paris.  Parisians are legendary for their abruptness, their rudeness, their indifference.  We found them patient, good-humored, and friendly, the way everyone should be to strangers and foreigners in their midst.  They helped us to live our dream.

AU PETIT FER À CHEVAL . . .

This is the third of four “feuilletons” that I wrote for The Milton Times.  (This one appeared on May 23rd under the headline “Finding ‘Your Place’ in Paris, the City of Lights.”)

Recently, I’ve been thinking about an essay written by inveterate and intrepid globetrotter Pico Iyer.  First published on the salon.com website in 2000, “Why We Travel” lives up to its title, as Iyer offers a variety of reasons why we pack our bags and head off to far corners of the earth.  Some of us, he suggests, travel to feel humbled—to acknowledge, and thus to broaden, the narrowness of our personal knowledge of the world.  Some of us travel to feel ennobled—to leave some impression of ourselves behind in a foreign place.  One of my favorite reasons that he gives is really quite whimsical: “we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

What Iyer means is that travel allows us to step out of our familiar lives, to step away from the daily patterns and habits that define us and confine us: even if we can’t fully reinvent ourselves, he hints, perhaps we can at least re-imagine ourselves.  And perhaps some element of that re-imagining will endure beyond the time of travel.  There is more than a whiff of reality behind that old song popular at the end of World War I: “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm? (After They’ve Seen Paree).”

Or perhaps it will quicken us just for the moment.  In his book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton describes a phenomenon that I think most travelers experience at some point.  The personal example that he gives is set in Amsterdam: “In one street lined with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there.”  He then goes on to imagine in wonderfully specific detail the lasting contentment he could find behind that alluring door.

My own most recent example is set in Le Marais, a hip district of Paris with streets lined by cafés, brasseries, boulangeries, and boutiques.  De Botton also writes about how simply seeing signs in another language begins the process of transformation that travel enacts on us: the “exoticism” of signage “offers the first conclusive evidence of my having arrived elsewhere.”  When I saw the name over a small bar on the rue Vieille du Temple, I was drawn in as if by a magnet: AU PETIT FER À CHEVAL translates literally as “the little iron of a horse” . . . but somehow I knew that it really meant THE LITTLE HORSESHOE.  Sometimes translation seems as magical as alchemy!

And it was perfectly named.  The epitome of “a hole in a wall,” Au Petit Fer à Cheval amounted to a small horseshoe-shaped bar with a half-dozen stools snuggled against it and a pair of low café tables, each with four chairs, squeezed up against the long windows on either side of the doorway.  Outside, four more tables crowded the sidewalk underneath the awning.  The moment we stepped inside, I felt that we had crossed some sort of psychic border.  My wife ordered a pastis—a refreshing anise-flavored liqueur.  I ordered a Leffe, a Belgian beer.

Pico Iyer explains what crossing geographic and cultural borders can do to us: “Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love.  We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation.”  Inside Au Petit Fer à Cheval an old clock jutted out from the wall.  Perched at the horseshoe-shaped bar, I took a sip of my Leffe.  Time stood still.

FOU DE LA TOUR EIFFEL . . .

I am posting here the second of four pieces that I wrote “freelance” for The Milton Times.  (This piece appeared in the newspaper on May 16th under the headline “The Eiffel Tower: C’est Magnifique!”)

Waiting in the taxi line at Charles de Gaulle Airport, my wife and I rehearsed the directions to our rental apartment in Paris that we would need to give to our driver: Numéro cinq, rue de José Maria de Heredia, le septième arrondissement.  Very easy.  Très facile.  Well, fortunately we had an iPhone 5 with a GPS, as our driver turned out to be Chinese, with French almost as unseasoned as ours.  He had no English whatsoever.

Yet, the first successful conversation in French that I engaged in after we landed was with that driver.  It was very simple and completely one-sided, but it worked.  It involved me asking: “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”  (What’s that?)  We were in the heart of Paris, less than five minutes from our apartment.  I was pointing at the Eiffel Tower.  The driver looked at me in the mirror like I was crazy—and then he realized I was kidding him, and he laughed and so did I.  My wife rolled her eyes.

I thought of that “conversation” every day for two months when I stepped out the front door of our apartment building and glanced to my right and every evening when I returned via the Metro and, rounding our corner, looked straight at the Eiffel Tower.  Could I ever get used to seeing such an iconic edifice on a daily basis, multiple times each day?  I hoped not.

In his essay “The Loss of the Creature,” well-known American novelist Walker Percy describes the difficulty of ever seeing someplace universally familiar in a unique or original way.  He explains how “picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders” and even the familiar name of the familiar site create a “package” that prevents the individual from experiencing a “sovereign discovery”: how can you ever just stumble upon THE EIFFEL TOWER or THE GRAND CANYON (one of Percy’s examples) or THE SISTINE CHAPEL?  How can you avoid feeling the anxiety that your experience might not be “measuring up” to the expectations created by the packaging that probably put that site on your travel itinerary in the first place?

Percy offers several stratagems or hypothetical scenarios that would allow the traveler to have the “sovereignty” of a discoverer—that is, to have a uniquely personal experience.  Some of them are practical: for instance, you could go off the beaten track.  Some of them are extreme—even apocalyptic: yes, you would see everything anew in the wake of a natural disaster! 

But the real-life scenario that I found most effective with the Eiffel Tower was simply to allow it to stand there in its own light at every different hour of the day.  I jogged past it in the morning.  I stood on the Champs de Mars at midnight with my wife, watching its flashing lights ignite the sky like a Fourth of July sparkler.  I walked between its arching legs on my way to someplace else.  I caught glimpses of it from side streets and between buildings.  I even took on the assignment of photographing it from a variety of random angles for a friend’s daughter’s school project.  I never saw it as a postcard, and I never saw it the same way twice.

Of course, I was afforded those multiple perspectives by virtue of living in its shadow (almost literally) every day for two months.  But Walker Percy seems not to take into account how even what we take for granted can still catch us off guard the way that the Eiffel Tower did the very first time I saw it.  That was six years ago.  Arriving in Paris late at night, exhausted after a long flight, I was utterly stunned to see its illuminated grandeur through the windshield of an airport shuttle bus.  I shouted at the driver: “THE EIFFEL TOWER!”  He looked at me like I was crazy.

JE LIT MAIGRET À PARIS

As I mentioned several postings ago, one of my “goals” during our time in Paris was to live up to Ernest Hemingway’s writerly example.  When he moved to Paris in December of 1921, he paid the bills as a correspondent for The Toronto Star.  So I decided to work a variation on that by doing some freelance writing.  Below is a piece that was published in The Milton Times on April 25th over the headline “Katie Conboy and Thomas O’Grady Enjoy Immersion in French Culture.”  (My original headline was “Reading Maigret à Paris.”)

Today, thirty-five years after my last French class in college, I am trying to read a novel in French.  C’est difficile!  Très difficile.

The novel I’ve chosen is by legendary and prolific author Georges Simenon.  Like most of his books (almost two hundred of them), it’s un roman policier: a police procedural.  And like most of his books, it features the savvy police detective Inspector Jules Maigret.  I bought my copy of Maigret se fâche (Maigret Gets Angry) for 2 euros at Le Marché du Livre Ancien et d’Occasion, an open-air used book fair that operates every Saturday and Sunday in a park in Paris’s 15th arrondissement: I didn’t want to make a major investment in a book I might never get through.

But I’m determined to do my best.  On our flight over on Air France, I was reading a Maigret in translation—The Hotel Majestic.  Our flight attendant, a young Parisian, complimented me on my taste and mentioned that Simenon’s writing style is much-loved by the general reader in Paris: it is literate but not too “literary.”  I thought: C’est bon!

So why did I get hung up on the very first page of the novel?  Well, the first sentence is more than sixty words long.  But even the first phrase required a dictionary: “Mme Maigret, qui écossait des petits pois dans une ombre chaude . . .”  It’s about Maigret’s wife shelling green peas in the hot shade--but I had never had prior occasion to learn the verb écosser (to shell) or to know that green peas are called petits pois.  Live and learn!

But why live and learn?  The answer is fairly simple.  Our three daughters went through the French Immersion Program in the Milton Public Schools and all went on to major in French in college.  They’ve also done study abroad programs in Senegal, Morocco, and Cameroon, each of them a Francophone country.  My wife and I were jealous!  So when we got the opportunity to spend two months in Paris, we resolved to make the most of it.

For her part, my wife is taking French language classes daily at Alliance Français, adding vocabulary and grammar to the perfect pronunciation she developed over the past year practicing with Rosetta Stone.  (By the time we left for Paris, she could say Le vélo est blanc—the bicycle is white—like a native!)  I’m trusting that some of the rust will fall off my many years of studying French . . . many years ago.  Reading a Maigret novel is one of the ways I’m trying to help that happen.

But it’s slow going.  The first page took me close to an hour to decode.  The book has 144 pages.  So far I’ve figured out that Maigret is retired.  I’m sure that the action will pick up before long and that the Inspector will find himself deep in a tangled case that will test his skills of deduction.  I hope that I’m able to stick with the novel long enough to figure out the case with him.

Since arriving in Paris, I’ve discovered that romans policiers are among the most popular forms of fiction in the bookstores.  One of the windows into another culture is the national “reading list.”  So I’ve also picked up a copy, in translation, of another popular police procedural, Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas, the nom-de-plume for historian and archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau.  Just to add some literary density to my reading, I’ve also started The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq.

Obviously, my wife and I are not alone as Miltonians with a Francophone interest.  Lots of our neighbors have picked up the same bug from their children.  When we signed up our girls for French Immersion almost two decades ago, we imagined that we were giving them a gift to last a lifetime.  We were right.  Even if I get bogged down in the French of Maigret se fâche, I will still feel that we are now the ones enjoying that gift.  And I will continue to read Simenon’s Maigret novels in translation.

LES AVENTURES DE KATIE ET JANE . . .

At Les Editeurs

Tom has finally gone back to fill in some of the gaps in our Parisian narrative, and it’s a good thing he did, because I have been way too busy to write!  And why?  Because je marchais dans Paris avec Jane!  Yes, my best buddy decided to make the trip to Paris, and we managed to pack her six days full of adventures large and small.

She arrived on my last day of the intensive French class, so Tom went out to Charles de Gaulle airport to meet her plane and travel back on the Metro with her.  When they got off at our local Ségur stop, Jane got her first taste of what has been our daily experience for two months: rounding the corner and having the Eiffel Tower directly in front of us! 

Le Tour Eiffel

And the Tower became part of our daily ritual—each morning (except one, when we needed to get an early start at the Musée d’Orsay) we went for a run (or a fast walk) down the road to the Place des Invalides, waved to Napoleon in his grave, ran back towards École Militaire and then on to the Champs de Mars.  We would run down one side of the Champs, around the Eiffel Tower, back up the other side, and then home—about two and a half miles in all.  What a way to start the day!

All that running meant that Jane and I upped the ante for how many steps we covered each day—and we averaged over ten miles a day!  In fact, Jane bought 10 single-fare Metro tickets and used only 8 because we just walked everywhere.  That way, we were able to see the beauty of ordinary Paris and to take in major monuments just because we walked by them on the way to something else.

"Mona Lisa" men have named her . . .

We tried to do just one or two major things each day.  Tom and I had loved the Chagall exhibit, and Jane is also a big Chagall fan, so she and I spent part of one day at the Musée du Luxembourg for that powerful exhibit. We also passed several very leisurely hours another day in the permanent collections of the d’Orsay—Tom and I had visited there too, but you could never get tired of that museum. 

I had saved one other museum for Jane’s visit: the Musée Nissim de Camondo.  Moïse de Camondo was a wealthy banker who built a mansion on the Parc Monceau to house his extraordinary collection of 18^th century decorative arts.  His son Nissim was killed in WWI, and Moïse named the house after him and willed it to the state of France when he died in the 1930s.  His daughter and her family lived in Paris, but they were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and died there in 1945.  The family line completely disappeared.  But the museum tells their compelling story and remains one of the finest collections of decorative arts anywhere.

We went up to the Camondo museum on Sunday afternoon, after our run and a glorious morning walk through the Luxembourg gardens.  We headed first to the Pantheon, where we could gaze upon all the “great men of France” and eat some crêpes in their shadows on the rue Soufflot.  We met our Irish friend Eavan there, and Jane was so sweet to talk at length with her about the different kinds of psychology she might be interested in exploring.  Eavan actually said, “Is everyone from Boston as nice as all of ye?”  Eavan then joined us for the afternoon at the Camondo, and we all agreed later that night that our legs were on strike from all the walking!

Casting shadows on the Pont de l'Archevêché

La Crêperie near the Pantheon is one of our favorite places for Sunday bunch, and we tried to take Jane out to eat at several other spots we have come to enjoy dining in here.  On her first day, I marched her across the entire city (the Alliance Française, Boulevard St. Germain, Place de la Concorde, Place du Louvre, Notre Dame)—I obviously wanted to be sure she knew she was in Paris!  But we also took her out to Les Editeurs, a restaurant/café in the Carrefour de l’Odeon that we have been to a few times now.  We had a wonderful dinner there and then got Jane back to the apartment for a good night’s sleep. 

Jardin de Luxembourg

A few days later we were shopping in the Marais, and after we met Tom for a drink at Les Philosophes in the rue Vielle du Temple, we discovered a new spot for dinner: Au Bouquet St. Paul.  It’s always fun to try new places.  Jane and I also found the crêperie Le Molière on the rue de Buci for lunch one day as well.  Obviously, we ate out a few times, but we cooked at home several days as well.  I wanted Jane to have the experience of our local market, and we went there on her second day.  We picked up lots of goodies to eat during our daily “happy hours” and we also got the supplies for a few nice dinners here at home. 

Every day we made a trip to the local boulangerie for bread—and sometimes for a sweet for breakfast or a snack.  Le Moulin de la Vierge was founded in 1356, and the bread still comes out of a wood-fired oven.  If I didn’t already know that I spent a lot of time there, Jane’s visit would have reminded me: sometimes she simply announced “Boulangerie!” because she liked to say the word!

“Boulangerie!”

Obviously, daily runs, museums, and eating played large for us in Jane’s time in Paris, but we also just enjoyed many of the sights and monuments of the city; I already mentioned some of them, but I’ll add: Montmartre and Sacre Coeur, the Place de Vosges (in the Marais), the Hôtel de Ville, and shopping in Saint-Germain des Pres.  One day, when Jane and I were walking behind Notre Dame to cross to the Île Saint-Louis, she saw a sign that said “Deportation Memorial.”  We walked through the gate and found an amazing memorial to those tens of thousands of victims, primarily Jews, deported by the French (in cooperation with the Germans) between 1942 and 1945.  Only 3% ever returned.  Jane and I found this so powerful that I took Tom there after we got Jane on the train to the airport for her return trip.

Mostly, it was just wonderful to share our daily life with Jane: our walks, our efforts in French, our visits to places of cultural significance and our time simply visiting with each other in cafés and around our dinner table were reminders of how much Jane is part of our life!  For me, she is une amie très chère, and her visit was a time to treasure!

LA TERRE DES MORTS . . .

In March of 2012 we visited the grave of rock ’n’ roll icon Buddy Holly in Lubbock, Texas.  In April of 2012 we visited the grave of iconoclastic jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker just outside Kansas City.  Last summer I spent a happy hour or so touring UMass Boston students around Glasnevin Cemetery, visiting the graves of James Joyce’s parents, Charles Stewart Parnell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Maud Gonne MacBride, Michael Collins, Brendan Behan . . .

Anyone detecting a pattern yet?

Oscar Wilde's grave

It was thus inevitable that we would spend some quality time in cemeteries in Paris.  There are two that are sites of essential pilgrimage.  The first one we visited was Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, the largest burial ground within the city limits of Paris.  We particularly wanted to pay our respects to Oscar Wilde, who died in Paris in 1900.  Obviously we were not the first to have that impulse.  Wilde was initially buried in a different cemetery on the outskirts of Paris but was reinterred in 1909, and now lies beneath a striking tombstone carved from a twenty-ton block of stone by celebrated sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein.  A nude male “flying demon-angel,” as Epstein described it, the stone was initially deemed indecent by French authorities for its anatomical correctness: they went so far as to cover it with a tarpaulin.  Over the past century it has been vandalized, and in recent years it has been defaced by admirers of Wilde leaving lipsticked kiss marks on its surface.  In 2011, officials at the cemetery constructed a glass case around the gravesite: now the glass is smeared with kisses.  No doubt, the lines from Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” cut as an epitaph into the back of his tombstone, prophesy the nature of some of those who pause at his final resting place:

And alien tears will fill for him

Pity’s long-broken urn,

For his mourners will be outcast men,

And outcasts always mourn.

Jim Morrison's grave

In death, just as in life, peace has not come easily for Oscar Wilde.  But at least he has lots of distinguished company in Père-Lachaise: legendary lovers Abélard and Héloïse, beloved chanteuse Édith Piaf and jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, novelist Marcel Proust and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, American authors Richard Wright and Gertrude Stein, Polish composer Frédéric Chopin and Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani . . . and of course Jim Morrison, iconic singer of the American rock band The Doors.  Morrison’s gravesite may be the only rival to Wilde’s as a place of essential pilgrimage for the hundreds of thousands of visitors that Père-Lachaise draws annually.

Picasso memorial to Apollinaire

Now let me go off on a tangent.  As I mentioned, one of Wilde’s afterlife neighbors is poet Guillaume Apollinaire.  About a decade after Wilde’s death, he emerged as a force of nature in the Parisian literary and artistic scene until his early death in 1918.  Apparently he lived above Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint Germain (we had a bite to eat there a few weeks ago); he is commemorated nearby by a sculpture dedicated to his memory by his close friend Picasso.  The sculpture actually represents the head of Picasso’s lover Dora Marr—not of Apollinaire; coincidentally, it is located in a garden next to Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the church where Oscar Wilde’s funeral was held (Wilde had converted to Catholicism on his deathbed).  Anyway, I had a special interest in visiting Apollinaire’s grave, as one of my first literary exercises after we arrived in Paris was a translation of one of his poems, “‘Le Tzigane”‘ (The Gypsy).  I had read two published translations of the poem, neither of which seemed to work quite right with the facing-page original.  So I decided to try my own hand at translating it:

LA TZIGANE

after Apollinaire

The gypsy foresaw

our two lives

crossed by darkness.

We bid her adieu, then

from that pit

bright Hope emerged:

love, clumsy

as a trained bear,

danced upright

at our command,

though the bluebird

shed its feathers

and beggars forswore

their Hail Marys.

We knew full well

that we were damned.

Still, into the street love

pulled us, hand in hand:

all this the gypsy foretold.

Samuel Beckett's grave

Sartre and de Beauvoir's grave

Now let me come back from that tangent and describe the second cemetery we visited—Cimetière du Montparnasse.  We were most interested in seeing the graves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (still unmarried but still together) and of Samuel Beckett (still together with his wife, with whom he had a very strained relationship—and thus probably still as miserable in death as he was in life).  We found both grave sites quite easily . . .  But two days later I felt the need to return to Montparnasse and immerse myself more deeply (as it were) in its grounds.  So I put together a list of a dozen more names I wanted to track down . . . and spent a fine two hours walking back and forth in the land of the dead.  Among the luminaries I visited were French littérateurs Guy de Maupassant, Charles Baudelaire, Marguerite Duras and Joseph Kessel, American essayist Susan Sontag, and celebrated photographers Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia) and George Brassaï (born Gyula Halász in Hungary).  Clearly, many of these figures still have admirers and visitors, as a number of the gravestones were covered with tokens of remembrance: handwritten notes, flowers, Metro tickets, coins, pebbles . . .

A cemetery may not be the most obvious sites to visit in a city like Paris so rich in art, architecture, and more conspicuous manifestations of “history.”  For us, though, Cimetière du Père-Lachaise and Cimetière du Montparnasse were fascinating places to spend a few hours.

Abélard and Héloïse's grave

Apollinaire's grave

Marguerite Duras' grave

Maupassant's grave

À FLANDERS FIELDS et À VIMY RIDGE . . .

My turn!  Well, Katie has been telling me for a while that it’s my turn to contribute a post to this blog.  My excuse has been that I’ve been trying my best to live up to the writerly model of Ernest Hemingway, who described looking out over the roofs of Paris and thinking: “All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know.”  Those two sentences have been my morning mantra ever since we arrived in Paris—and they’ve worked quite well for my non-blog writing!  But maybe I can apply them now to revisit some of the highlights and sidelights that Katie didn’t engage with in her recent posts.

Let me start with that visit to the American Hospital and that photo of me (of few blog posts back) lying ignominiously on a gurney while waiting for the Cipro prescription that was all I really wanted!  Well, I got the prescription—along with a bill for 475€!  But I also got to claim that I can locate myself in pretty good company.  For a long time, the American Hospital provided free treatment for Americans in Paris.  Thus it became a destination for a number of famous ex-pats: Zelda Fitzgerald had her appendix removed there, and Gertrude Stein died there.  My favorite story, though, involves Hemingway, who ended up there for stitches after, believing that he was pulling a toilet chain in his apartment, he actually pulled the chain for a skylight—which crashed down on him and opened a gash above his right eye!  (Good company, indeed . . .)

Menin Gate, Ieper, Belgium

But I digress.  I guess that one of the highlights that needs to be developed was our “field trip” to some World War I battle sites in northern France and southern Belgium.  I was “commissioned” to write a couple of pieces for my hometown newspaper, the Charlottetown Guardian, recognizing the anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9th and the general role of Canadian soldiers in “The Great War.”

It was a very moving experience for both Katie and me but maybe especially for me, as I grew up commemorating Vimy Ridge in school on P.E.I. . . . without really knowing any details.  So we went in search of details. . . .  The way we got them—or got to them—was an adventure in itself and took up an entire Saturday.  First we took a train from Gare du Nord in Paris to the town of Arras—about a 50-minute trip.  Then—eventually—we managed to rent a car: that took forever to finalize—and the clock was ticking, as the rental office was not open on Sunday and the clerk informed us that we had to return the car by 5:00 instead of the usual time of 6:00. 

Menin Gate interior

Well, we hit the road . . . but not to Vimy.  First we headed to Belgium, specifically to Ieper (known as Ypres in France, as “Wipers” to Canadian and British soldiers).  There, as Katie mentioned in an earlier blog, we spent time at the Menin Gate, an impressive memorial to the 54,000+ British and Commonwealth soldiers who lie in unknown graves in the surrounding countryside of Flanders.  The names are engraved in the gate.  Because of our rental car timing, we were unable to be in Ieper for the playing of The Last Post by the Fire Brigade buglers, who have been performing this ritual at 8:00 each evening since 1928.

After Ieper we headed out to the nearby farming community of Boezinge, in search of the grave and the memorial for Irish poet Francis Ledwidge, who was killed by a German shrapnel attack in 1917.  We found his grave in Artillery Wood Cemetery.  His memorial is at the very spot where he died, a few hundred yards away.

Ledwidge grave

Artillery Wood Cemetery was one of countless (well, more than 900) similar small graveyards all over Belgium and northern France that mark where soldiers (mostly British) fell in battle.  The numbers involved are mind-boggling.  Driving past them, we felt the sadness and the loss of soldiers fighting and dying in foreign fields.  The experience gave very immediate resonance to the phrase “Lest we forget,” as well as to the poem “In Flanders Fields”: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row.”

Ledwidge Memorial

We would have liked to spend more time in Belgium . . . but we had to get back to France and to Vimy Ridge, the site of “arguably the most galvanizing moment in the history of Canada.”  At least that’s what I wrote in my piece for The Guardian.  I also wrote this: “Vimy Ridge became instantly etched in the collective Canadian imagination on April 9, 1917.  For the first time during The Great War—World War I—all four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force fought together, and within a matter of six hours they managed to rout most of the German Sixth Army from its long-held strategic position atop the natural escarpment rising like a fortress above the table-flat landscape of the countryside of northern France.  In the previous fifteen months, the French and the British armies had lost upwards of 150,000 troops attempting the same goal.  For their morning’s work, the Canadians suffered 11,000 casualties, almost 3600 of them fatal.”

Vimy Ridge Monument

Since 1936, that remarkable military accomplishment—along with its sacrifice of many lives—has been commemorated on the site of the battle.  The center of the commemoration is a massive monument—perhaps the most impressive monument we’ve ever seen—comprising two soaring limestone “pylons” mounted on a broad base of steps.  Both the base and the pylons incorporate large carved figures, the largest being of a statuesque woman representing Canada sorrowing over her lost sons; and on the walls of the monument are carved the names of 11,285 Canadian soldiers who, at the time of the monument’s unveiling, were lying unidentified in graves throughout northern France.

Vimy Ridge trench

The Canadian government operates a small interpretive centre on the site and provides free guided tours of the battlefield, including representative trenches and a section of the ingenious system of tunnels dug by Welsh coalminers that allowed the Canadians to move both troops and explosives literally under the feet of the Germans in preparation for the all-out assault.  In the tunnel we had a nice chat with one of the tour guides, who as it turns out hails from my hometown of Charlottetown, PEI.  We worked out that I was just a year or two ahead of her father in high school.  Smallish world . . .

The Flanders and Vimy excursion was our only trip outside of Paris in our whole two months in the city.  The richness of what we experienced makes us want to return for more exploring of the area and the history.  But that will be for another trip to this part of the world . . .

Vimy Ridge tunnel

Artillery Wood Cemetery