in the thralls of a phantom . . .

"I was alive and had never lived.

" . . .

"Like a house with no foundations, unable to resist the first tremor of an earthquake, my existence had tumbled all around me in ruins.

"I saw suddenly that there was nothing left for me here.

"No refuge.

"No place to hide."

excerpt from Susan Kay's Phantom (p. 384)

For almost two decades now, I have been in the thralls of a phantom . . .

I had meant to immerse myself in the on-Broadway version of this story of love both impossible and lost but, alas, time has passed this opportunity by . . .


Kelsey at l'Opera



But, once upon

an August morning

not so very long ago,

I too ascended the

grand escalier of his

legendary home,

made myself at home

in box ?,

and posed for this photo . . .





L'Opera de Paris at last. . .

return to Crespières, part 3

So out of sequence this story is . . . perhaps because the past must have its space and time and voice before the gate to the present and, perhaps, the future opens . . .

Some of this return to Crespières was about recreating, about reenacting, about posing, as Yvonne had done, for the camera's eye. 

Mama has told me often how her grandmother's home was in the village and the gardens on the outskirts of town.  Yvonne's wedding day family photo was taken in front of a huge stone building--a barn of sorts but one so sturdy that it might last forever.  In our search for a castle--the one in whose gardens flowers once spelled   Gisèle (and so my mother was named)--we came across a massive stone structure.  Not quite the same doorway structure but, in the almost ninety

intervening years, might this too have been altered?

My favorite will be Yvonne in her garden at her home on Rue du Grand Trou (numéro 8), my posing in her honor where she once posed (I was there that day but too young to hold on to the memory) that I might have this caughtonfilm memory of her decades later.

 

return to Crespières, part 2 . . .

Ever since memory (at least in my adult life) when life crowds in on me, a voice inside echoes I want to go home!  And, ever since memory (at least in my adult life), I ask the voice inside and where is home?  I may go to my grave with that question still unanswered . . . and maybe find that answer, at last, on that other side . . .

But, every now and again this side of heaven, I sense what it must mean to be going . . . home?

August 4, 2010, was such a day.  There was the sign welcoming us to Crespières . . .  L’Eglise St. Martin with its familiar steeple, its locked door. . . The mairie with the marble plaque honoring its children, my great-grandfather among them . . .  The road—rue Moncel—beckoning me . . . home?

I walked ahead of the others.  Looking for redemption maybe?  Redemption is such a personal event, if it comes at all.

Many years ago—December 28, 1986 to be exact—I had walked this same road, this same quest for finding that elusive sense of home I so believe existed here. I had come to this moment and place in time so filled with hope, expecting . . . je ne sais quoi? . . . to be embraced as a long-lost child of that community? To recognize  . . . home?  I wasn’t.  I didn’t.

Something as trivial as struggling to explain, at the charcuterie, how my husband wanted our sandwich meat sliced . . . The young man behind the counter—how much he reminded me of my own brother—unable to contain his amusement at my broken attempt to communicate in his language . . .  I think the culinary outcome was other than what I had tried to communicate.  I think that what mattered most, though, was the breaking of my fragile spirit in that place, that moment in time. 

I stood across the street—rue du Grand Trou—that December afternoon, wondering which of two houses was the one of my not-quite-memory.  I had forgotten to bring the address.  I did not dare to ask . . .  Did not dare even to ask if my great-uncle Georges still lived in that village, if I might stop by to visit. 

At Orly, that New Year’s Day, I found his address in a telephone directory, wrote it down, wrote to him on my return.  This was his reply.

Nous aurions eu l’honneur de faire votre connaissance . . .

We would have been honored to meet you . . .

Nous esperons que votre voyage ce renouvellera . . .

We hope that this will make you want to return . . .

I did not understand the signature on the letter at that time: E. G. Ollivon.  My mother said his first name was Georges . . . and she did write to him after reading this letter . . .  It was only after visiting his grave this August—where he rests with his wife, Emilie—that I understood . . .

Georges was so very right.  I had no choice but to return . . .  home?

To be continued . . .

la cimetière a Crespières—le 28 décembre 1986

Searching for other old photos this afternoon and stumbled across these three, taken on my first visit to that cemetery, my first opportunity to visit my grandparents’ final resting place . . . 

So much has changed over time.  No need then for the grave rubbings, not that we yet knew to do that to preserve engravings worn away by time, the elements . . .  Victorine’s name is clear.  Yvonne’s tombstone still radiant—with the hyacinths we remembered to purchase at a local floriste, with the shells brought from South Carolina beaches to share with my grandmother who had once walked another Carolina’s beaches with me, who had gifted me with shells from her side of the Atlantic . . .



Those who know me well know why these flowers, why this shell . . .



I had one very special shell and two very special flowers with me when we visited Yvonne’s grave this August . . . discovered them days later, tucked safely away where they remain still . . .  Too caught up in the emotions of this visit, so very different from the last, that I did not remember their presence. 

Perhaps I was not meant to remember . . .

the Fourteenth Nome . . .

If the ancient Egyptians ruled our world today, Paris would be their Fourteenth Nome and, given my French heritage, I might be in some serious trouble at the moment—the moment being about 40% into Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid.

In my defense . . . who was it, really, who wrote her first “term paper” ever on Carter’s discovery of King Tutankhamen’s burial place, a discovery he made just two years before her mother was born in a village in France?  Who was it really, who waited in line one icy January morning, her youngest child in a stroller, to see the first ever American exhibit of Tut’s Tomb artifacts at the Smithsonian?  OK, so maybe she never made a point to visit l’Obelisque—aka Cleopatra’s Needle, the Obelisk of Luxor—during any time-over-a-lifetime in Paris . . .  And, yes, maybe she did make one of those pilgrimages during the demon days of late December, when she might have discovered a way into and, hopefully, out of the Duat . . .  But she meant well, she’s one of the innocents, she didn’t know about the magic . . .

. . . or the history.  Maybe it is more that . . . Place de La Concorde was, after all, home to the guillotine where so many lost their lives in the days of the Revolution . . .  When she was two, she played in the gardens at Versailles, where Marie Antoinette and her mother once played . . .  Why dwell on the ends of eras—of France with its King and Queen who lost their royal heads, both symbolic and real . . . of Egypt whose royal lineage expired with the legendary bite of an asp, ancient symbol of power over life and death . . . ?

OK, on her bucket list it is.! See Cleopatra’s Needle.  Not the ghosts of the guillotine and its victims (is taking the life of another ever justified?), not those troubled spirits.  Not Cleopatra’s ba . . . should it walk there.  But if there is indeed a portal to the underworld, doors that open to the untrained and the innocents on the demon days of December, she thinks she just might be able to find it, eternal believer in allthingspossible that she is . . .

In the meantime, she has uncovered digital and therefore indisputable (?) proof that, through the magic of her camera’s eye, she did indeed connect, from her top-of-the-Eiffel-Tower vantage point, with l’Obelisque on a not-so-long-ago balmy August afternoon . . .  

what we learned about grave rubbings, teamwork, and faith . . .

If my granddaddy-from-across-the-wide-Atlantic could forgive my throwing his hat out his second-story windows when I was two, hopefully he’ll be smiling from his vantage point in the afterworld at my at times somewhat-irreverent story here of our pilgrimage to his final resting place, that also of his parents . . .

And hopefully my genealogist daughter—on this side of heaven so I’ll be hearing or reading what she thinks—will forgive me too.

It’s hard being the resident expert.  Kimberly should know!  And she was our genealogist guru as we went cemetery-traipsing throughout France in August.  Our thoughts that day were about the flowers we had forgotten to bring as tributes to those gone before us.  We were not prepared to meet our ancestors’ more basic needs or to take away with us proof, beyond that which our cameras could capture, of their final imprints on this earth.

The cemetery was not as I had remembered.  The dense hedges that shrouded the feet of my grandparents and great-grandparents were absent from my mental sketches of our other visit to their graves more than twenty years ago. I feared that time had erased even these in perpetuity tombs, that the communal ossuary might have been their fate.

My memories, marked on the Google Earth map I carried, were time-warped . . .

We found them.

A days’-dead bird was Grandmaman Yvonne’s only tribute.  We had brought her fruit from her garden, gathered snail shells from the cemetery paths, pulled garlands of morning glories . . . We were there that day, just not in our own name but to honor Yvonne in her only daughter’s name, in the name of my mother who could not bring herself to make this painful journey back in time and memory. 

In one corner of the cemetery, as in many of the cemeteries we visited, there was water.  Albrecht, my son-in-law, offered his shirt as a scrubbing rag.  We scoured the black marble until it shone, offered Yvonne our small tokens and our gratitude, gratitude for her long-ago letting-go of her only child. Three of us there that August day—Kelsey, Kimberly, and I--walk this earth because of her selfless gift . . .

Finding the other grave--the vault where Granddaddy René and his parents, Victorine and Ernest, sleep—was not as easy.  Like so many in that cemetery, a lichen-streaked granite slab, only faint etchings remaining of the names of those interred beneath . . .

in perpetuity . . .

Ernest Theodore Ollivon gave his life for his country in the opening days of World War I.  His name is the first on the plaque at the mairie, the plaque memorializing the thirty children of Crespières mort pour la France (and the one disparu) so that their homeland might remain free.

 

The metal plaque marking his grave

has withstood the ravages of time, as has, to my utter amazement, the ceramic photograph of my grandfather, the last family member entombed in that family vault.  But not so the names and dates engraved in stone . . .  Did Victorine sleep there too?  So I believed but I had never known . . .

A grave rubbing would tell us.  Kimberly knew how, of course—this was her trade, her expertise.  But we were in another world, in a borrowed car, out of our element and unprepared.  I had a notepad, lined blue paper, pages to spare . . .  Lead in the pencils I always carried . . .  Slow going . . . until . . . Albrecht remembered . . . was it from long-ago Scouts learning he said?  Leaves—green, green leaves and this was August—might work.

And they did!

What those that come after us will see in these photos, I believe, is not so much the names of the dead but the hands of the living . . .

return to Crespières . . .

Of all the stories, this is the one that most merits the telling.  Like the nesting Russian dolls gazing solemnly over the shelf above me as I write, this is a story within a story within a story . . . stretching from time before memory to the memories preserved on these virtual pages for the generations not yet born.

I'm beginning, not with the heartwarming stories of this one-day return visit in the first days of August 2010, but with the story of a day, perhaps also in the first days of August, when I was two . . .  and with the story of another day, this one in the closing days of the year I was thirty-nine . . .

Three days of a lifetime . . . precious beyond description . . .

Day 1:  ? août 1949

8 Rue du Grand Trou 

In those days, I was a blue-eyed blond, 37 inches tall, an only child, and, according to my mother, spoiled rotten by the time we made our return voyage home.   I was also, by that time, more fluent in my second language (French) than in my first (English).  I was two. Two-year-olds are sponges for language, soaking up the words that surround them.  According to the stamps in my passport, I had spent more than four months immersed in all things French by the time we left for home.

All the signatures in my passport are my father’s.  He was American . . . my mother, his French citizen “war bride.”  They met at a dance in a castle on her twentieth birthday, but that’s a story for another time.  My mother was taking me to her homeland, where I would meet my French relatives for the first and, except for my grandmother who came to visit us eleven summers later, the last time.

If it weren’t for my passport, the few precious family photos, and my mother’s stories, I would have no stories to tell of this experience.  My earliest memory is from the Christmas after we returned.  But this trip changed my life, if only as a seemingly elusive quest to recapture the memories I was too young to hold on to when I was two.  Just last month, I spent ten glorious days in France, my third trip in a lifetime, this one with my oldest child, oldest grandchild, and son-in-law.  And on one of those glorious days, I was able to enter at last the garden where that long-ago family photo was taken and to pick fruit from trees my grandfather had planted there and to speak a little French mixed with English to the workers and the new owner I met there. 

Again, another story for another time.

Day 2: 28 Decembre 1986

8 rue de Grand Trou

    When I was five, I was their daughter and granddaughter.

    When I was fifty-sic, an ornament with this photo adorned my Christmas tree.  A gift from my genealogist daughter…

    When I was five, Grandmaman Yvonne lived far across the vast Atlantic on Rue de Grand Trou in a village called Crespières. 

    When I was two, I spent one-day-of-a-lifetime there…then my great-grandmother Suzanne Victorine Morvan’s home…  When I was thirty-nine, on yet another one-day-of-a-lifetime, I stood in a narrow street named Rue de Grand Trou in the village of Crespières, looking up at lace-surtained windows, imagining memories that might have been…

    When I was five, Mommy enclosed pictures of us four—Daddy, Mommy, Evelyne, me—in her letters to Grandmaman Yvonne.  The paper was onionskin, I think…almost-see-though thin with fine-tipped blue-ink lines and lines and lines of writing in a language and script I was years away from reading.  Our photos were black and white, some with dates on the back, all with notes of love and description from Gisèle to her Petite Maman Cherie…

    When I was twenty-five, Mommy made for me an album of photos, dates and notes on their backs, that she had brought home across the vast Atlantic…

    When I was five, the French had won the French and Indian War.  They didn’t lose until I was seven…

Day 3: 3 août 2010

8 rue de Grand Trou

to be continued . . .

Yvonne and me. . .

                         Eyes

I have your name

             but never knew you,

          an ocean and language apart,

          Grandmaman-with-brown-eyes,

          Yvonne.

You were a writer too.

          Mama said

          My gift for words came from yours.

          But . . .

          In all your treasure-boxed letters

          to my childhood self--

          "Obey your parents!"

          "Do well in your studies!"

          "Be careful where you marry . . ."--

          I never heard

          your writer's voice.

I'm older now . . .

         And Mama--

          Gisele--

          storm-blue eyes mirrored

          in mine--

          says

          I remind her of you.

I wonder how . . .

Until

          green eyes

          my child

          Michelle

          sees me . . .

Looking at her

          through your

          long-ago

          photograph

          eyes.

                                                   25 July 2001

the iron lady . . . by night and by day

Too many photos to upload the conventional way so I learned how to create and embed a Picasa slideshow today :-)  Enjoy!!!!



I also found a YouTube video of the elevator ride, stopping at each of the three floors.  For Just the facts, ma'am! this site, though not recently updated, lists the basics about the tower and its designer.

Cimetière de Levallois-Perret

Not every Parisian of artistic fame is buried in the four cimetières where tourists throng.

Paying my respects at the tomb of Gustave Eiffel, even if just virtually, is on my to-do list this weekend.  After all, he not only designed the awe-inspiring thousand foot Parisian tower but he also engineered the internal structure supporting Bartholdi’s masterpiece, Liberty Enlightening the World! 

I found his grave, at Cimetière de Levallois-Perret.

One other Parisian of artistic fame is also buried there. (Theirs are the two “famous” graves on that cemetery’s roll call . . .)  My first connection to him is from the long-ago days of “vinyl” music.  I still have that collection, recordings themselves of original player piano rolls . . .  My favorite among them is Maurice Ravel playing Maurice Ravel . . .  My second connection is to a very special selection from that recording: “Pavane for a Dead Princess.”  I’m not sure I’ve ever known to whom that piece was dedicated . . . but my clarinetist middle child, Michelle, chose to learn and to play that infinitely sad, yet infinitely beautiful, selection in a competition years ago.  “Pavane” is, for her, what Galway’s version of Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” is for her sister, in my memory of those days in which our home was filled with their music-making . . .

Gustave and Maurice, you have blessed my life.  Resquiat in pace!

la dame de fer

Her timeline has a new entry this week on Wikipedia:

14 September 2010

Both the Eiffel Tower and Champ de Mars were evacuated following a bomb threat. And after a search of the area, no bomb was found. The tower and Champ de Mars were reopened the next day.

What was the caller thinking? 

Hitler failed both to reach her summit (the French cut her cables) and to engineer her destruction (placed the order but did his General listen?).  Scheduled for dismantling in 1909, after her World’s Fair permit ran out of time, she’s still standing tall more than a century later.  Even the pen—mightier than the sword, right?—has left nary a scratch on her reputation.  Guy de Maupassant—one of my now-sleeping literary icons whose tomb I searched for in vain at Montparnasse (I wonder where Gustave Eiffel is buried?)—reportedly ate daily in one of her restaurants, saying this was the only place in Paris without a view of the monument he so disdained.  Alexandre Dumas (I’ve read his The Count of Monte Cristo in French and lived to tell about it) would have agreed with him . . . I don't!

I think my favorite Wikipedia tidbits (had heard most before but love this free exchange of mostly correct information) are the full glass ones. Like the first entry in her timeline there:

10 September 1889

Thomas Edison visited the tower. He signed the guestbook with the following message—

To M Eiffel the Engineer the brave builder of so gigantic and original specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu, Thomas Edison.

Or maybe the reminder about those awesome World War I Taxis of the Marne (her communication powers were tapped for that initiative).

In my own personal timeline will be forever etched these two dates:

August 2, 2010: the day I kept my promise to return to Paris and my first view of our dame de fer in her evening splendor . . .

August 6, 2010: the day I rode to her summit and gazed down at her city, wondering what that lovely green park at her feet was called, about its history. . .

Champs de Mars . . .  How could I not have known?

I know now J !

Montparnasse . . . walled fortress of the dead

France fortifies well her cities of the dead.  I was to learn, this summer, that the high-walled estates we came across--in the heart of Parisian neighborhood, on prime Brittany coastlands, wrapped around three sides of village churches, in the middle of centuries-old farmland--were indeed cimetières, medieval-village-like in their clusters of crumbling stone edifices, irregular layouts, cobblestoned or otherwise stony paths.  And almost always the flowers, florist-shop luxurious in the clement climate of August in northern France.  And museum-quality statuary, perpetual tributes to those who have travelled before us to our next world.

Our first cimetière was Montparnasse.  Turned away after our first toolongwaitingline experience at the catacombs, we decided to explore this nearby cemetery.  It almost eluded us, posing, as it did, as someone's high-walled estate.  We had hoped for maps of the cemetery itself, with names of the famous dead buried there and the locations of their final resting places.  But Montparnasse was in flux, restorations and relocations alike. No maps to guide the feet of the curious, save for this one . . .

"Génie du sommeil éternel" (The Spirit of Eternal Sleep) given to the city of Paris by Horace Daillion in 1902

The names listed there read like a litany of my French literature immersion at Duke so many years ago: Baudelaire, Maupassant, Sartre.  I was to search in vain for their tombs, bypassing in my literary-icon state of awe the names of those to whom I have a deeper connection.  Jean-Pierre Rampal, the French flautist who inspired James Galway who inspired my daughter Kimberly (who had the privilege of meeting him backstage when we attended one of his performances).  Frederic Auguste Bartholdi who designed the Liberty Enlightening theWorld, the statue that guards the Ellis Island wall where my mother's name is, much to her dismay, engraved for all posterity.

Cemeteries in Paris are relatively recent cities, a mere two centuries old, created by order of Napoleon I.  Their predecessors were emptied, their denizens entombed in the catacombs of Paris, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Montparnasse Cemetery lies to the south of the Paris of the early 19th century; Père Lachaise to the east; Montmartre to the north; Passy near the Champs-Elysees. 

One somber note on the nature of man this side of that other world . . . Kelsey, my granddaughter, was to learn at seventeen what her mother learned on her first visit abroad at seventeen . . . hold tight to what you value; someone is watching.  Albrecht replaced her camera, last seen on a cemetery bench,  before dinner that evening--all but her awesome airplane flight sunset and firstdayinParis photos.  And I learned that my stumbling command of the French language was much too elusive when asked to speak on demand (I remembered the word for camera long after we left the grounds).

Montparnasse was the first of many French cemeteries we explored over those ten days, some infinitely more memorable because our ancestors are sleeping  there . . .  but it still ranks high on my list of places to visit/revisit.  And return to this city of the dead I shall, someday . . . in time and space.