A Hazy Shade of Winter

Might-have-been's become never-to-be's;
Possibilities unforeseen
Bloom and fade.
The growth of an idea, a question, a phoneme.
Sound waves bounce images black and white,
Growth truncated by blight.
Count to sleep under the surgeon's knife,
Wake up to emptiness.

Lie weak and weary.
Drink soursop tea,
Creole sensibilities,
Radiance, resonance and revenants.
Natal day shared with Poe.

Six paperwhite bulbs,
Winter forcing in Deco glass.
Holly tree outside the window.

Roman shades, color of creme brulee.
Lustre of raw silk,
Baby's sigh and rumble of passing train.
Prismatic water droplets shatter
Mosaic tile of celadon and bleached bone,
Shifting patterns of light.

Headscarves and the French Secular State

Recently Andy and Kame both blogged about this issue, haven't checked Merde in France yet, but I'm sure he has an opinion as well. The topic is hardly recent. I remember in the late eighties, Mitterand's wife was in the news a bit for supporting the rights of Muslim girls to wear headscarves in the French public schools.

The issue of outlawing religious references in children's clothing does seem very exotic to Americans. In Atlanta, some of the public schools (sorry all you English people, but the logical association of the word public is "freely available to the general public"--it doesn't make sense to use that term for exclusive private schools) have gone to mandatory uniforms. This has to do with some studies showing a correlation between mandatory uniforms and children's academic performance. I don't remember reading too much there, but I think the reasoning went that the clothing lent a "professional" association to the idea of school. You remove clothes as a major distraction and way of children establishing their identity and you reinforce some minimum standards. American parents are more concerned about having little Brianna not adopt the baby Britney pre-teen slut look or preventing ittle Johnny from wearing his jeans hip hop style, floating around his knees.

Why do the French care? It's a good question, and one on which I can only give an outsider's perspective. I can only imagine this goes back to France's long history of having Roman Catholicism as the state religion and the corresponding abuses that accompany that level of power and influence, so that following the French Revolution there was a very strong secular backlash. I remember reading that at some time in the post-Revolution period, it was requested that taxpayers list their religious affiliation on their tax returns so that they could be assessed a tax for the upkeep of their religious institution, and that it was the state who paid the salary of the Catholic priest, the Protestant pastor or the rabbi. This is more involvement than I would have imagined a secular state would want to have in religion, albeit the strategy was probably about control. There is a balance. I also remember in the Mitterand years that some of the religious schools in France were receiving state subsidies. They were upset when the government started intervening and telling them what they could teach. Yet, at the same time, they were taking the government money, so it was only a question of time before that sort of conflict arose.

I was surprised to hear my husband say that in France, the state schools are considered to be the best and that it is the private schools, which are often seen as a refuge for people who couldn't hack it in the competitive public school system--or for those whose parents have strong feelings about their children receiving a religious education. I don't think I could say the same for quality of American public schools, or at least the secondary schools in the city or state where I live. On a national level, one also reads that American children tend be among the lowest scoring in standardized tests compared to the rest of the world; certainly the political agendas of the Democratic and Republican parties pay lip service to concerns about the qualilty of public education in this country.

Thus, the general quality of French public schools is, I think, an important issue. While it would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds for children to have access to free, excellent public schooling, that is simply not the case in many places, certainly not in many parts of America. Ideally, free excellent quality public education would be a right, but in the real world it appears to be more of a priviledge. In France, one could argue that the quality of the public school system is very much the result of a centralized social and political agenda enacted by a government strongly entrenched in a secular tradition.

Are children in school to express their individuality? If they are in private school and that's what their parents are specifically paying for, yes. However, I'm not sure this is the case for public school, which we all pay for, but which must strive for standards that are acceptable to the majority. I've only seen his show once or twice but I'm sure some conservative American pundit like Bill O'Reilly would be pretty ambivalent here. If it was about little Maggie being prevented from wearing a discreet (read not the Madonna fashion statement) cross to public school, he and the religious right would be in an uproar. However, I can see him being sympathetic to the issue of uniforms in public schools and the policing of some minimum standards in attire.

Where are the people protesting for the right to religious expression in French public school coming from, specifically as it concerns Muslim headscarves? First, let's factor out those with no religious feelings about the issue at all who are simply protesting for the sake of protesting (ironically, the religious protestors are aligning themselves with a popular, secular French cultural trend there). Second, I cannot exactly know the feelings of the true protestors. Growing up, I never really knew how to interpret the practice of women wearing headscarves or sort of loose coats to go out, in certain Islamic countries. With an American girl's sensibility, it seemed oppressive, but I lacked reference points outside my own culture to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon. This confusion would have been heightened by the fact that both countries I chiefly read about, growing up in the US in the eighties, represented politicized Islam--Saudi Arabia and Iran.

It wasn't until I read the Iranian writer and literary critic, Azar Nafisi's book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" that I gained a sense of how a woman who grew up in a secular culture in an Islamic country (pre-Revolutionary Iran) would approach the same theme. Her take is that Islamic women who cover their hair and wearing loose-fitting long clothing do so as a personal expression of religious piety. When Islamic states require that women adopt this style of clothing and remove the element of personal choice in that decision, she feels they render the gesture meaningless. Well that I could understand better, or at least I could sympathize with choices people might make on an individual level. Admittedly, the sort of paternalistic sensibility conveyed by a phrase like "men have the eyes of wolves" doesn't really strike a chord with me or maybe I wouldn't peg the susceptibility to visual stimulation as a uniquely masculine trait and, at any rate, people will always find something to fixate on. After all, hadn't my English Lit friends and I had a good laugh about who was capable of finding the more "racy" parts of Spenser's Fairie Queene and I remember an older Spanish gentleman commenting on some earlier part of the last century, when women did dress more modestly: "ah, the rapture of an ankle!" The issue only becomes problematic when a gesture originally meant to reflect individual modesty or piety becomes viewed as a politicized statement.

If I were to go to Saudi Arabia, I would consider it normal to comply with their laws as regards women's clothing. If I were Saudi, the fact that Saudi Arabia is not exactly a democratic government is another issue, although some evidence suggests that if it were more democratic, the resulting government might be even more fundamentalist. So I'm not sure that would do anything to free up the dress code. At any rate, it's not my government or my culture, and I would be respectful of their laws if I were there. Correspondingly, the French government ban on religious expression in public schools is not a law that I would necessarily have supported were I French. However, I can understand where this law is coming from and that is something I can respect. Like it or not, public education is not about honoring the individual preferences of every single citizen, but about promoting the ideals of the state that supports it. In France, that is about the strong commitment to secularism in public institutions.

Michael Moore and Titles

At the end of my previous Reading Michael Moore post, it occured to me that the subject I was interested in pursuing further was not Michael Moore's work itself, which is thought-provoking and conveys messages that I believe are important, but rather peripheral aspects of his style or simple snapshots of what he covered in Bowling for Columbine and Stupid White Men

I find the title Stupid White Men as well as chapter titles like "Kill Whitey" completely gratuitous. As a, let's face it, not-so-stupid white man, Moore probably figures he can get away with it, granted they have a provocative ring. Maybe the titles are not meant to be taken literally, but I still find it pandering for attention at the expense of intellectual honesty. As a pale woman, I'm a member of the wrong color category, but the right sex, according to Moore. If he were going to be scientific about his moralizing, he should do so in a case where every category had the same opportunity to take part in the destructive activities he mentions. Are women morally superior or do most of them simply lack the opportunities or the energy to start wars, oppress people and destroy the environment? I once worked with a man who found Barbara Bush's comment that "one in seven Americans is governed by a Bush" (back when George W. was still governor of Texas) highly disturbing. He found it infuriating that everyone naturally assumed she radiated goodness simply because she was an old woman wearing pearls. Virginia Woolf looked at the issue of gender from the reverse perspective, wondering why it was that women hadn't authored more important works of literature in her essay "A Room of One's Own." She attributes this to the fact that women tend to be the ones principally responsible for raising children (not to mention bearing them), coupled with the fact that women were historically denied education, knowledge of the world and access to publication. She feels that a guaranteed private income and a room of one's own are the necessary first conditions for women to write.

Recently, some have speculated that I may have authored this blog. The idea that I have the time for such activity and that they may, by extension, have been conversing with me through this person is highly entertaining--a testament to the fertility of some imaginations and the degree to which certain people do not really know me. While it is true that the shop around the corner I work for has its preoccupations with taking over the world, there's a distinct possibility that the conventional tactics for pursuing that goal are quite time-consuming enough and there's little left over in a day in the life of yours truly to subvert the "authenticity" of blogsphere.

At fourteen months, the twins are now "fully operational" death stars. Their current interest is stress testing the Playstation and GameCube. The GameCube proved a better time investment. Pirate was crouched over the cube swatting at every possible inch of the surface until he came upon the eject button by hazard. "Ah so..." At this point Blondie leans over and observes. It's a little unquieting, like watching the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. If coming home from work to the twins was not exhausting enough, there's the four year old and her playdate who have needs as well, specifically sandwiches. Of course, they don't want the same kind and while I'm attuned to (and don't tolerate much in the way of) my daughter's culinary quirks, I come up short when it comes to the playdate. "There is mayonaise on my cheese sandwich! I don't eat mayonaise." I laboriously scrape off the mayonaise, but it's not good enough. "Fix me a new sandwich." The week-day babysitter wryly observes "You should have just told him it was a new sandwich," but it's too late and she's not helping either so I fix a new mayonaise-free sandwich...only to notice fifteen minutes later that it hasn't been touched. When I ask the child about this, he answers "Oh, I don't like that kind of cheese."

Reading Michael Moore

Over the Christmas holiday, I read his book Stupid White Men. Wanting to profit from a rare moment of child-free time, I found it lying around my in-laws' house. My first introduction to Michael Moore was his his acceptance speech at the Oscars. This was the first time I'd heard about "Bowling for Columbine" and long before I got around to renting it at Blockbuster. At the time, I was not impressed with Moore's antics. Granted, there's a high probability that documentary film makers get far less opportunity to express their opinions before large audiences, than say Rob Lowe, but I still felt his performance was a little over the top.

Some context here: I was definitely not watching the Oscars in anticipation of the best movie, best actor, best actress nomination. No, I was not in the mood to be distracted by the best documentary speech. I was eagerly awaiting my own little personal orgy of bad taste: the E "Entertainment" Television Oscar sideshow featuring Joan Rivers, well actually Joan Rivers, her gay male sidekick and her daughter, Melissa. For the unitiated, Joan Rivers is a sort of harpy caricature, bringing to mind memories of the meanest girl from your high school, fifty years and many face-lifts later. Kudos to Joan for being on the forefront of political correctness, the gay guy can definitely hold his own. He looks like he could bring a tear to some red carpet habitue's eyes based on some imprudently chosen accessory. After all, why should men be excluded from getting in touch with their inner harridan? The only one who doesn't fit in is Joan's daughter, Melissa. As horrid as Joan is, after years of banishing the rich and famous to fashion hell, she has definitely earned her place. Melissa has not. She evokes a cackling hyena, the sort that subsists on the carrion felled by more worthy predators.

Well, before I could get to the smackdown moment of the Joan Rivers Oscars fashion vetting: Joan vs. Cher--Cher in some outfit that is little more than a calculated visual affront, and wouldn't be a shame if there was nobody to affront, and Joan who'd be out of a job if we all had good taste, so they really form a symbiotic pair and then there's me, who would love to be attending the Oscars amid all the pomp and circumstance and all the beautiful people, but I'm sitting on my ass in Atlanta, and the probability of me ever going to the Oscars is close to nil, so I'm waiting for Joan Rivers...and Michael Moore has to come along with his speech about phony elections, phony presidents and phony wars. Not that I disagreed with him, but he did kill the mood. Hey, could somebody bring my entertainment back, 'cause I'm not in the mood to think depressing thoughts or deep thoughts at all for that matter. And then, just who does Michael Moore think he is anyway?

In a country where there's no love lost when it comes to authenticity, the Oscars represent the triumph of the gaudy and the fake--America's annual coronation ritual for its disposable royalty. "I'd like to thank the Academy" smack, smack, air kiss, air kiss. They get to reign for some time and then, when we and the tabloids are bored with them, off with their heads. The closest we get to political nobility is the Kennedys, with the family fortune rooted in historical crime, the drug-addicted third generation, the murdering cousins, secretaries drowned under suspicious circumstances, teenage babysitter seductions--they've exhibited some staying power. Personally, I think the British royal family could use an infusion of fresh blood, then they wouldn't have to be buggering valets (the real reason Dubya's life could have been in danger--they obviously look for other qualifications when hiring help over there). Prince William seems promising, they could find him some nice red-blooded American girl, somebody like Paris Hilton, for example. She's been table dancing since age twelve, starred in a porn video before she was twenty. For all those who claim that money is all you need to make it in America, I beg to differ. Clearly 28 million dollars is not enough. You haven't made it in this country until you're making the rounds of the Internet in the altogether.

And then there's Michael Moore with his documentary about guns and gun-related deaths in America. He doesn't really answer the question of how if other countries have violent pasts and their kids like the same violent movies, video games and music that ours do, and we're not the only ones with guns (apparently gun ownership is rather high in Canada too), why is it that our country is unequaled in its gun-related deaths? I think his in-your-face style, while successful at getting people's attention in that one documentary and in the one book I read, also undermines his message to some degree. His negativity can be a little overwhelming and when he does propose solutions they are rather facile, so at the end you might say "What the hell, we're fucked, so what's the use anyway?" What is refreshing about Moore is that he is far less partisan than most social critics and he actually has some personal connection to the phenomena he writes about.

To be continued.

Tales of the Nursery

It is an irrefutable law of nature that all three of one's children will wait until their father is out of town on a two week business trip to collectively fall ill. However, Nature does occasionally have a sense of humor.

I was getting ready to bathe one of the twins, we'll call him Pirate, when the phone rang today. The adorable little angel recently bipedal, destruction machine escaped and re-appeared a minute or two later (don't ask) with his sister's gossamer angel wings on his back. There was Pirate, with his tousled brown hair, mischievious grin, flashing eyes, fat little bare-naked baby arms and thighs...waddling around with a pair of wings on his back. Quite the woodland sprite from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' he looked very Puck-ish indeed.

Later in the morning, Pirate was napping (they seem to be switching off lately) and I was sitting down, holding the somewhat sleeping, thus angelic, other twin. We'll call him Blondie. He was pressed against me, with his feverish baby warmth, the gentle rise and fall of his chest with every breath, his moist cheek and the tendrils of corn silk baby hair against my skin. The babysitter was playing the Fiona Apple song "Fast As You Can."

I may be soft in your palm but I'll soon grow
Hungry for a fight , and I will not let you win

My pretty mouth will frame the phrases that will
Disprove your faith in man
So if you catch me trying to find my way into your
Heart from under your skin
-Fast as you can, baby scratch me out, free yourself
Fast as you can

Strange lullaby for a baby boy. He did not seem to notice or mind.

Then I read to my four-year old daughter. She's a true devotee of the "Get them while they're young" marketing empire aka Disney. If you had a girl, it might be hard to escape the impact of the Disney Princess franchise. I have to say the messaging has its uses, especially in the deportment department "Would a princess pick her nose in the middle of the family portrait for her cousin's baptism?" Although, if you want the really useful parental propaganda, the unadulterated German folk tales are your best bet there..."Know what happens to little boys and girls who nag? They get taken into the forest by their parents and abandoned."

Back to the princesses, my daughter has a book devoted to the folklore purchasing opportunities associated with each member of the Royal Harem: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Belle (Beauty from 'Beauty and the Beast'), Ariel (the Little Mermaid) and Jasmine (Aladdin's girlfriend). I'm sure Tina Fey would commend their efforts in the diversity department. They've branched out, they really have. They added a few more brunettes, then there's Ariel, the feisty red-head, and Jasmine, the Arabian princess. That's not what was bothering me, it was the sugar-coated, cutesy, cloying nature of the princesses and the stories. Something was missing.

Then it came to me. Where was the realism, where were the Princesses of Monaco? I bet that would make for some entertaining bedtime reading. "Now boys and girls, here we come to the part where Princess Stephanie interviews the royal bodyguards...," fast forward a few years down the road "And then Princess Stephanie had a couple of different children with different princes. Well, actually they weren't really princes and she didn't marry them. You see, you don't actually have to get married to have children. And you don't have to get married if you just want to play with boys. But then, Princess Stephanie got tired of those men and decided she wanted a married man. Only he wasn't married to her. He was married to another woman. She decided she wanted him anyway. She ran off and lived with him at his circus. She took her children with her and they learned to be circus performers. Doesn't that sound like fun boys and girls?"

Merde in France

I discovered this link courtesy of my uncle--"Live from the Belly of the Beast, Les Entrailles de la Bete," an American blogger with the perspective of "more than 20 years behind enemy lines."

...A very impressive mastery of the French vernacular. I wonder if he picked it up doing a DEA with people from Normale Superieure? I definitely missed out on my education. For instance who know the correct translation of bureaucrappers was "les bureaucrottes" or, that to the French, Dubya is "Doubelyou."

With posts such as

The French read 1.7 books a year (including rugbymen calendars) Les franchouilles lisent 1,7 livres par an (calendriers de rugbymen y compris)

What the French are reading. The following excerpts are from Y.B.'s novel 'Allah Superstar' which was on the French best seller list after its publication in August of this year.

'I wouldn't say that 9-11 was a good thing, no. First off it was badly filmed and on top of that we'll probably learn that the Jews did it ...'

'... we should understand the young Muslims that express themselves by doing rodeos with stolen airplanes, even if they should avoid parking them in the building itself, that's true, but at the same time it's not easy to park a Boeing in Manhattan in September.'

It's no wonder that he so's popular over there. Half the fun is reading comments like this one from Laurent, from Navire.

'Sa mauvaise foi est si enorme et systematique, son talent a manier la vulgarite et l'insulte orduriere est si manifeste, qu'il en devient au second degre une lecture tout a fait rejouissante.'

'His lack of sincerety is so enormous and systematic, his talent for vulgarity and slander so great, that if not taken at face value he provides a truly pleasurable read.'

I love this guy. A valuable addition to my daily reading repertory.

Through a Glass Darkly

A Southern Gothic Tribute to Angela Carter

Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each of whom, through her projects a baleful posthumous exhistence; she counts out the Tarot cards, carelessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into the country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.
The Lady of the House of Love, Angela Carter

The house did have ten or eleven foot ceilings, but could not have been called dark. It was an American house. Naturally it was built of yellow brick. I was nine the year we moved in with my maternal grandparents. Of the two of them, only grandfather was half-American. His father's people were from Atlanta. His father went off to Paris on some sort of European tour, from which he brought back a French bride on the eve of the First World War. Although surprised by the hasty marriage to a foreigner, his Irish-American parents aparently were consoled by the dual attributes of her being Catholic and not-English. I knew her well, as she lived into her mid-nineties and spent the last part of her life in the garage apartment behind their house. She told of no sooner arriving in Atlanta than being taken under the wing of her new kinfolk by marriage, some Aunt who immediately insisted that she go to a tea dance at the Driving Club. There, this Miss Pittypatt-type Aunt paraded her around as "My niece, the Countess." All this was quite embarassing to my great-grandmother. In France, women do not inherit titles, the question of why there are today titles at all, being yet another issue. Had she kept her maiden name it would have died with her, as it were she was quite happy to be called by her husband's name. In the grander scheme of things, the Catholic and non-English bond did not make the marriage make, or rather did not make up for the fact that great-grandfather was an alcoholic and gambler and prone to abandoning his young wife and son to go off on periodic benders. She never spoke ill of him, nor did she did she ever ask for money. One day she simply left the Georgian Terrace hotel where they lived, and returned to France to raise her son in her mother's apartment in Paris.

Great Grandmother saw her brother and cousins go off to fight the First World War with great pomp and circumstance. How they must have looked, the regiments marching out from Paris, beautiful young boys clothed in the ideology of the previous century. They marched right from La Belle Epoque to the War to End All Wars, from the Nineteenth century to the warm embrace the Twentieth century reserved for their generation in the trenches of France. Was great-uncle really in the cavalry back when it was horses and not the air cav that my uncle, my mother's brother, must have known in the Vietnam war? The first world war showcased the advent of military aeroplanes. Supposedly great-uncle's regiment charged off to meet those aeroplanes on horseback, swords in the air. How Don Quixote-esque. The family had a weakness for lost causes.

She saw her son march off to the Second World War. He needn't have done it. His mother's step-father, probably the only real father figure in his life, was Swiss and the head of the Paris office of a respected bank. They could have gone to Switzerland to cool their heels. He could've traded on the American citizenship of his biological father, gone to the States and avoided that war for a few years, but he didn't. Fatalists are they. His military experience was, as can be expected, not of long duration and he spent the majority of the war in a German prisoner of war camp. He eventually bought his freedom with some gold pieces his mother sent him in a jar of honey, how that got past the prison guards I have no idea. He made his way back through Germany, working odd jobs as a house painter until he made it to France and to his fiancee's property in the unoccupied zone. He was a delightful grandfather and, with a child's disingenuousness, I always loved for him to show me his German prisoner of war identity papers, which seemed very exotic.

He met grandmother before the war. She was Colombian, her family originally from Santa Fe de Bogota. Her father worked for the English company, Pearson, in Paris. He was quite a bit older than his wife. When he died, grandmother's mother was a relatively young widow with three small children. I never heard it said that grandmother was any beauty (I only knew her when she was old). She was rude as hell, would say the most outrageous things--so outrageous that she could only have gotten away with them had she some charm and wit, which they say she had. She must have had some desirable qualities for she counted among her suitors a future prime minister of France and she was engaged to a prince from a prominent French family. A prince, how ridiculously fairy-tailish that seems. The normal thing would have been for that engagement to have been motivated by social ambition, but it wasn't, at least not in the conventional sense. It was a competitive "fuck you" gesture, a response to the earlier marriage of her younger sister, the blonde beauty of the family. Well prince though he might have been, she decided that he didn't really meet her needs for a prince charming and showing up her younger sister really wasn't high enough payment for life with him. She broke off the engagement. As consolation she immersed herself in "good works," which is how she met great grandmother, the mother of her future husband. Great grandmother worked in the Red Cross, a job that proved very convenient for getting false papers to people during the German Occupation. Of course, La Resistance occupies its own role in French mythology, but in her case, I think the participation was actual. At any rate, she got a Legion d'Honneur medal for it.

After the war, they immigrated to Atlanta and bought the house where they raised six children, born in the course of five years (Catholicism and the twinning gene). They spoke English with very strong accents, his French, and hers more Spanish. Sharing a common sort of fatherless upbringing in Paris, they nevertheless represented two very different cultures and personalities. I think marriage provided them a respectable context with which to have arguments and argue they did, loudly, passionately and quite raucously. I can't remember so much of what she said, but he used to freely speculate that her people, who considered themselves una buena familia de Santa Fe de Bogota were about three generations removed from the banana tree. I think they loved each other very much.

Great grandmother moved into the garage house some time in the sixties and we lived with them for one year in nineteen eighty. What a marvelous house it was for a child to cavort in. The furniture all came from other centuries, classical lines of Louis XVI, curvy Louis XV and heavy dark baroque-looking Colombian stuff. There were gilded saints in the nooks and crannies and silver reliquaries, but they weren't morbid at all. Hadn't my irreverent mother and her siblings used to put ketchup on the saints' wounds and chicken bones in the reliquaries to shock visiting guests and relatives? They grew into wild children, coming of age in Atlanta in the sixties, of course some of them were still wild in the eighties too. In the eighties, when I was a child, I would run into adults who wistfully remembered parties at my grandparents' house in the sixties. They were European and had permissive attitudes about alcohol. Supposedly they started out rather strict and with the best of intentions, but by the time the fourth and fifth child entered adolescence, I think they just gave up.

Back to the house, any money either grandparent had through their families had long since disappeared through the excess and improvidenceof earlier generations. What last bit they had was spent on raising their own children. Long before the advent of their grandchildren, the house had settled into a genteel decay. There were silk brocade curtains, but they were beginning to be sun-bleached and a little frayed at the edges, there were worn patches in the carpet, vestigial servants bells when the servants were long since gone. This decay was somewhat precipitated by the extended occupation of a snarling dynasty of dachsunds--the house animus, there were generally about three of them at any one time. They mostly had German names like Fritzie and Ludwig. These very spoiled creatures patrolled around snarling and barking and generally relieving themselves on what nice patches there were left on the brocade curtains and oriental carpets. Oh, but it could still an enchanting place for children, we drank wine in our water at Sunday lunch and while we were told that children were to be seen and not heard, we were generally indulged--at any rate, the real lesson among so many boisterous French-Colombian-Irish American aunts and uncles was that you had better be really loud or say something clever and preferably insolent if you wanted to get anybody's attention in the first place. We all danced the can can to "tra-la-la-boom-di-ay" on New Year's Eve.

There was a Red Room, with the furniture and walls all done up in toile de Jouy and a real honest-to-goodness spinning wheel upstairs. The toys that had belonged to my mother and her siblings and grandfather were not particularly numerous, but far better than what passes for childrens' toys today--Madame Alexander dolls, a disturbing little monkey that clapped a pair of cymbals, clever little ivory dominoes in inlay casing from a store called the Blue Dwarf in Paris, grandfather's brightly painted lead soldiers. I always coveted those and wanted to have battles with them; my oldest male cousin got them and didn't let me play with them much. I must admit, though, in every other respect he was an exemplary older cousin--would always play hide and seek with the younger children and taught me to play Poker. While most children cheat at cards for their own benefit, he had the perversity to cheat to let me win the first time--a gallantry I appreciated not at all. I had been particularly obnoxious bragging
about my royal straight flush. With what shame I realized how ridiculous I had made myself, that he let me win. He laughed and I burned with the outrage of the most hardened criminal upon finding herself the victim of some petty chicanery. It was not an affront to property or to honesty; far worse, it was an affront to dignity.

There were French children's books from my grandfather's childhood. They were morality tales, though not morality in any Anglo Saxon sense of teaching children the value of "goodness." Goodness no, these were French children's books from some decades back. They preached the virtues, or more effectively, and much more fascinating, the horrible and creative punishments that awaited children who did not learn to conform to social expectations. One title, Les Gourmandises de Charlotte, the (Culinary) Excesses of Charlotte, told the story of a little girl who refused to eat anything but sweets. She shrinks and shrinks to a very small size and is kidnapped by a rat who forces her to be his servant and cook for him in his rat hole. She realizes the error of her ways, but overcompensates. She then becomes a very greedy little girl, turning very fat and obese. Finally, she learns moderation and to eat a normal diet, at which point she and her parents once again form a loving family unit.

Then there were the clothes that, surprisingly enough, I was allowed to play dress up with. The dresses belonged to some great-great grandmother. They came from dressmakers in Paris and another life--low cut ball gowns in ashes of rose silk broadcloth or gold damask, a royal blue velvet afternoon "for visiting and tea, Madame" jacket with lots of beading, accompanied by a royal blue taffeta skirt. My ancestor must have been very small-waisted and worn a corset to fit into those because they were even tight on a child's figure. I wasn't permitted to put on the good jewelry, there wasn't much of that left. After all, my grandmother did not marry the Prince, but I was allowed to look at a few good pieces and received a sort of early Colette education there--"Now dear, remember the good sapphires are dark in hue." I grew up not to care much for jewelry, doesn't reflect my lifestyle or practical nature. However, only now does the significance of that exquisitely useless bit of courtesan's knowledge strike
me...how to apply it? "Don't expect much from a man who offers you a pale sapphire. He's cheap and will short-change you?" Needless to say, gentlemen bearing sapphires never materialized, nor did I expect them to.

Ironically there was one instance, involving the world to which my husband belongs, a modern, scientific world, when this sort of background served me well. I accompanied him to a graduate conference at the University of Lund, in Sweden, where he was presenting some work on X-ray lasers. We were given a tour of their facilities. I was quite bored with x-ray lasers in general, but there was one point that piqued my curiosity about the thing-a-majiggys: they apparently use gems in them. Ah ha, something I could relate to. I asked a question about the color and hue of the gem in question, can't remember if it was a sapphire or ruby. Quite accidentally, it turned out to be a relevant question. We were, after all, talking about focusing rays of light and the hue of gems was significant there. People were impressed and I had the good sense to say nothing further. Grandmother would have been proud.

Dear me, I seem to have rambled along the passages of memory, puttering around the nooks and crannies of that house. I never got to the portraits. That was the subject on which I was meaning to write in the first place: the portraits of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, the French Revolution and how she came to drink the goblet of blood.

To be continued.