Ricqles

My family, immediate and far-flung, all of it, sisters and brothers, parents, uncles known and unknown, all of them saw the light of their first day in Normandie.

Except me. Born, exceptionally, in Paris.

Ancestral roots did not impress me much growing up. If anything, I was distinctively not Normand. The yearly trip to gravesites in the early November dread failed to generate enthusiasm for the province’s charms. A singular exception was a journey to the seaside. Like Antoine Doinel a few years before me, I ran and ran until I caught up with the receding edge of the prodigious North Sea tides.

Still, I waved no flag. No one there does, in any case, unlike the fervor with which Old Glory is summoned to distill patriotism of the commercial persuasion. Locals notice license plates and my mom’s car would draw attention until the regional community recognized her and understood that the 75 was an accident of circumstances.

The safety of my family’s ample attachment did not mitigate my own allegiance. I was no 27 or 14 and I would not let pass an opportunity to voice my loyalty to the capital.

The weather is as capricious this December morning as I have pictured it, but I do not care. My sister Anic and husband Alain, last seen in Montréal, picked me up in Paris and we sped as expeditiously as the tired Skoda would push us toward the village of my youth.

I’m headed home. Well, almost.

Cormeilles is a village, really a village, a hamlet of 1,191 souls, close to noted destinations, but the seaside resort of Deauville it is not, the Honfleur harbor it has not, the Lisieux cathedral it can’t claim. A speck on the map in the Eure department in the Calonne Valley.

In other words it is nothing much.

The very low hills are crisscrossed by narrow country roads and walking paths that cut through wheat fields, farms and apple orchards. It belongs to the greater Pays d’Auge region, a designation that will resonate with fine food aficionados. Its famed Camembert, Livarot and Pont l’Evêque cheeses hail from local cows and nowhere else. As beneficiaries of the “appellation controlée” status, these goodies can only emanate from this terroir. Ditto for apple alcohols like cider (sparkling apple juice ain’t it) and the potent (65- to 72-proof) calvados.

The rain is a respectable constant. If Cormeilles has any claim to fame it is for the XIth century Sainte-Croix Church. From a hillside roost, its steep and austere slate steeple keeps an eye on other slate roofs and colombage homes. Most peculiar is the slanted nave, the only such occasion in Europe, a caretaker told me.
On the way to La Chapelle-Bayvel, we stopped in front of the house where my grandmother lived. I never met my maternal grandfather who died a year before I was born. Everyone agrees that he was a difficult man, disinclined to appreciate the company of children. But everyone also concurs that he would have spared me his wrath simply because we share a birth date.

I remember this house not for its colombages, or wood-frame and infill construction, but for the mothballs my grandmother favored. It was chilly in there, during the dark winter nights. Everything creaked.
When I would get bored, I’d practice driving my mom’s car on the country road, which I read dates back to the good ol’ Roman days. My first recollection behind the wheel goes back to a swift journey to Normandy with my brother Bernard driving and me, age 14, sitting on his laps and seemingly steering. When we arrived he pointed to the Alfa Romeo speedometer and its needle, stuck past 220 kph. I have never been able to surpass this and my own record is 197 sustained kph in Germany and 188 kph in Utah before the engine halted.
Only 216 people live in La Chapelle-Bayvel but it has its own church and cemetery. And little else. I found my grandparents’ gravesite and reflected on the link that unites me with them, with this country, and how living on the other side of the world once weakened the tie.
We ate lunch (hare and cider for me) in the dining room of L’Auberge du Président, named after a visit by René Coty, the president of France from 1954 to 1959. Coty was the second and last president of the Fourth Republic. His last prime minister would become the first president of the new Fifth (and current constitutional government) Republic , Charles de Gaulle.
Capitalizing on the convergence of her desire to be held and that of the president’s need to hold cute children, my sister Anic landed in Coty’s arms for a brief publicity stint. The president did not have far to go as the family – minus yours truly – lived across the street from his hotel.
We finished the afternoon attempting to fix a recalcitrant flat tire. Under a downpour, of course, as those things have trouble adapting to warm days. Try as we might, the rusted bolts would not budge. One of us would hold the umbrella while the other wrangled with the tire iron, to little effect. I sought refuge from the rain and chill inside a laundromat. Overheated air and fogged up windows created a magical moment to cozy up to someone who was actually there to do her laundry. She came from Pont-Audemer, 17 kms away, a considerable distance to wash clothes for Europeans while an insignificant ones to Americans. I remembered a wash house along the banks of the Calonne River but did not suggest she go do her laundry out of doors.

I marveled at Cormeilles’ collection of baker, butcher, grocer, filling station, florist, bookshop, bar, pharmacy and other shops that make life possible. I marveled because in most of the U.S., the notion of a self-sustained village has been obliterated. Small towns resemble ghost towns. Residents have to schlep miles to do any sort of shopping and it will not be at an individual store but in something with the word mart in it, or some other contraption.

Left to fight it out against businesses thousands of times larger, these local shops would fold, too. Europe is filled with villages like Cormeilles, and the continent is filled with a desire to preserve them. I am grateful that they remain. When we imagine saving a few dollars by patronizing corporate chain stores, we lose far more in the vitality of our cities, to say nothing of quality.
My sister prepared a rabbit with carrots for dinner, its flavor milder than my noontime hare. It was accompanied with cider and chased with several calvas from Alain’s collection, with some noncommercial brandies quite a bit stronger than the official threshold. Calvados (say calva and you’ll fool everyone into thinking you’ve been drinking the stuff forever)is an eau-de-vie customarily served with coffee after a meal. As a teenager, my mom would let me dunk a cube of sugar in her calva, kick starting my enjoyment of wine, beer and spirit. (I particularly love doctors who ask: “Do you drink alcohol?” a query that always results in: “Naturally.”) Cormeilles boasts its own provider of goodies at the Busnel distillery.

Alain and Anic live in Reviers, a small burg north of Caen and seconds from Gold Beach and Juno Beach, where British and Canadian forces landed, respectively, in June 1944. American regiments deployed at Omaha Beach and Utah Beach, immediately to the west.

The Battle of Normandy established the first beachhead that would free Europe from the Nazi grip.

Nearly 100,000 service men and women are buried in 27 cemeteries in the region. With 9,387 dead the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial cannot claim, tragically, to be the largest. Less well known are the five resting grounds for German soldiers. The largest at La Cambe holds more than twice as many graves as the American cemetery in Saint Laurent-sur-Mer. Altogether, enemy losses account for three fifths of the total.

A short train ride and I was back in Paris for a family lunch. One hour 47 minutes for 234 kms – about 80 mph – and that is not the high-speed train!
My other sister Josiane and her friend Daniel joined brother Bruno, wife Béatrice (pictured), my mother and I for lunch. Bruno then dropped me off at La Maison Rouge, a museum with an exhibit on Russian political art that did not excite me much. While I examined the installations, he drove back to his new flat on the other side of the city, just steps from the Arc de Triomphe. We met at the front door, even as I had journeyed by subway across the city after my museum visit. Strike two for public transit.
My mother still lives in the tiny apartment where I grew up. Each morning, she walks next door to Le Royal Babylone for coffee, croissant and conversation with the Italian owner who gave me an apron so I don’t make more of a mess than necessary when I cook – mille grazie! She chats it up with other local residents and workers from the many government offices and embassies.

I set out to take a few pictures of my neighborhood, the landmarks of my youth if you will. Some happen to be monuments known throughout the world.

My high school, Lycée Victor Duruy, is only a block away. That proximity never allowed me much flexibility to miss school during transit strikes. The Saint François-Xavier metro station is named after the Italian renaissance church. Its construction started 100 years before my birth. Historians agree that the two facts are not related. Inside, it is more grandiose that I remember it.
The Invalides, built under orders of Louis XIV for the care of soldiers in 1670, is at the end of the Avenue de Breteuil. I played soccer on this grass many times, trying to stay one step ahead of the cops. At the time, walking on the grass, of all things, was not permitted. A few years before my young behind would rest on it after those soccer games, François Truffaut filmed the last scene of “Baisers Volés (Stolen Kisses)” on a park bench. The camera frames a medium shot and it’s only when it pulls out that the street scene comes into view. When I saw the movie, many years later in San Francisco, it jolted me. That’s my bench!

The Invalides still cares for retired veterans, but it is famous for the Musée de l’Armée and the military pantheon that houses the grave sites of several leaders. Napoleon’s ashes are buried there in a massive tomb, as is his son and two brothers. Rouget de Lisle, creator of the French national anthem La Marseillaise, lies there, too.
If you stand in front of it and wonder whether you have seen it before, perhaps in the Vatican, you will not miss, sticking its long neck out above it all to your left, the Eiffel Tower. Steps away from the grande dame of all monuments is the new Musée du quai Branly, courtesy of the cultural legacy of former President Jacques Chirac. Drawing on collections from two institutions, the museum focuses on indigenous art as integral part of the cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Architect Jean Nouvel designed a striking facility, modernist in concept and humanist in execution. The journey through the educational displays follows a circular pattern, with hints of New York’s Guggenheim. Nouvel also designed the splendid Institut du Monde Arabe.

Paris counts 141 museums, an astounding number. More than 31 million visitors pressed into the 25 most popular in 2006, a figure of impossible dimensions. With fortunate timing, I hit the hyper popular Courbet exhibit at the Grand Palais when there was no line to get in. The realist painter did not win friends when he depicted ordinary people on large canvasses. To give prominence to country folks in a period that favored neo-classical mythological ideals smacked of insolence. To accord them the scale reserved for religious or royal subjects labeled him a radical. His paintings carried a dignified mood in the renovated galleries of the Grand Palais. (The Courbet retrospective will travel to the Metropolitan Museum in 2008.) These peasants, this underclass were the “others” of the day. They were derided for their simple ways, blamed for their failure to assimilate into the burgeoning industrial revolution.

His self- portrait “The Desperate Man” shows an intense gaze, almost possessed. With palette knives, his fingers and with rags, Courbet brings the complexity of the human condition, unapologetic in its imperfections. The idyllic Venus does not grace his canvases. Instead, he paints provoking nudes whose subtext rankles our sensibilities. And if that does not unsettle us, he dares us to stare at his (well, not his own …) poster-sized vagina.

Art institutions sometimes cater to a rarefied cultural elite to the exclusion of anyone else. I was excited to see a high-school group engage a docent with meaningful questions. They were not art students, a teacher said. After taking in Courbet’s artistic struggles for acceptance, I imagine there is little risk they will grow up to be intolerant. And that will be good. It might alter some of the disappointing dynamics I witnessed in my own family.
The Sacré-Coeur peeks out over Paris

Street on the Ile de la Cité behind Notre Dame

The Pantheon and the River Seine

The Palace of Justice

The Pont Saint-Louis and the, uh, Ile Saint-Louis

Nicolas came down from Brussels for a meeting, an occasion to get together for profiteroles at Le Procope, a Latin Quarter restaurant founded in 1686 and that has seen illustrious guests after illustrious guests. Voltaire, Danton, Robespierre, Marat, Benjamin Franklin and others cozied up in the low-ceiling salons before I sat down with my (almost) Belgian buddy.

I met Nicolas on the streets of San Francisco when he, at the tender age of 13 or thereabout, and his mother seemed a little disoriented in Chinatown. Hearing them speak in French as I passed them on my way to a bank, I offered directions that must not have impressed much as I spotted them at the very same intersection on my way back 15 minutes later.

The friendship shared with his mother came to be replaced by his a few years later. He visited Santa Barbara with Natalie, his girlfriend, over the Christmas holidays. We took a trip to Palm Springs where we traded the palm trees of the Indian Canyons for the pine trees in the San Jacinto Mountains and sun for snow within a half hour. To avoid paying the supplement for additional guests at the Hyatt Monterey, Nicolas and Natalie pretended to be friends from nearby Salinas. Unfortunately, the hotel manager himself lived there, and they had trouble relating to his comments. The pair also came to Santa Fe.

During my last trip to France, I hopped on a train to Toulon where he and Natalie lived with their two kids. A diplomat, he now works in the European capital and regaled me with his very personal diplomatic suitcase stories.

Josiane and Daniel joined my mother (peeking in the second picture) and I for a last supper at Le Pied de Fouet, a tiny restaurant housed in an ever so narrow former stagecoach stop in my neighborhood. Packed close, other diners shared our space and those who wait for a table hover over your head. The corkscrew staircase to the upstairs diming room accommodates less than one person at a time. It creaks with benevolence when your weight, made fuller after a meal, presses down on the old wood. It’s organic, it’s rough, it’s the realism of Courbet seated at an honest table.

If you’re a regular, your napkin will wait for you in its ring. The bar is well stocked and the owner likely will buy you a drink. But he won’t offer a Ricqles because he can’t.

The mint soda of my youth has gone missing.