France via Books

    A few months ago I wrote, for this blog, about the months I lived in France when I was a sophomore in college. (See post on October 15, 2020.) Because that sent me on a whole nostalgic spin, for today's post I'm reprinting an essay from my book An Explosion of Stars, about my life in Aix. I hope you enjoy it.

     One day while I was teaching at Rogue Community College, I went to a book sale in the library. There I found a dozen little paperback books in French that made me catch my breath. These were the same Classique Larousse editions I had used as a student in Aix-en-Provence in 1964. Their bright purple covers, each with its white square for the title and author's name, were swathed in a smoke of nostalgia. I picked up Jean-Jacques Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloise and opened it. Like a genie kept in a bottle for thirty years and now set free, the life I had once lived swirled around me.

    As I turned the pages I heard the Mistral rustling through the sycamore trees along the Cours Mirabeau. I heard the water of the big fountain at the end of the Cours, spilling from tier to tier, and, at the outdoor cafés lining the sidewalks, a subdued chatter accented by tiny espresso cups settling into saucers. I turned a page and saw myself sitting in one of those sidewalk cafés with my French Algerian boyfriend, Paul, and his pieds noirs friends. I turned a page and was in Cézanne's studio, gazing over his easel at Mt. St. Victoire; I turned another page and was sorrowfully telling Mme. Herbeau that Vanderbilt University was moving me to another house—Mme. Sévin's—because they objected to my having to bathe at the communal baths down the street.

    When I lifted the book to my nose, I smelled, in the old paper, the musty stink of socks from the ground floor of the movie theater in Aix and saw myself in the balcony watching Un Homme et une Femme, Jules et Jim, and the American westerns my French friends loved. The smell of the book was close and warm, like the sun at Les Calancs on the Mediterranean, where I sunned on white-sand beaches in my first bikini; like the hot yeasty smell sifting through open windows of cellar bakeries as I walked to early classes; like the steaming cup of café au lait Mme. Sévin gave me every morning for breakfast. The smell had something of a bare wooden floor in it, too, the old-house smell of my room at Mme. Sévin's, where I studied at a tiny plank table and where Gunilla, my Swedish roommate, would lull us both to sleep in our narrow beds by speaking Swedish, the most beautiful language in the world, she said.

    As I touched the slick, brittle paper, I was not turning pages but walking down a Provençal road, reaching up to pick cherries dangling from overhanging branches, the sky so blue above the cherries and the wall over which they hung so white (and I so young), that I thought, suddenly, "Even if I were in prison, no one could take this happiness from me."

    I turned a page and read, "J'ai longtemps hésité a te faire cette confidence," but the words were mere sounds, the unintelligible flow of indistinguishable words of my first days in France. Then I turned the page again, and they flowed into the music of a beautiful language I once lived with and made my own.

    I bought La Nouvelle Héloise. I didn't want it to read but because it is a genie's bottle. To unstop the bottle and let the treasures tumble out, all I have to do is pick up the book and turn its pages.