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.

Où est elle, la Mort? in the Catacombs of Paris . . .

The Catacombs of Paris was not on my list of places to visit during our ten-day whirlwind excursion, but, as families do, we each put in our wishlist of experiences and endeavored to accomplish them all.

I'm glad I went . . . but agree with the caveat that this is not a pilgrimage for the faint of heart or spirit . . .

I knew that I would see the mortal remains of thousands of Parisians whose bones had been ceremoniously removed, during the 18th and 19th centuries, from church cemeteries and laid to rest in the Empire of the Dead in the tunnels below Paris.  I understood that, given the nature of medical science in that era, these reburials were deemed essential to the prevention of epidemics, the preservation of human life. Indeed, the artistry with which these bones were arranged is itself testimonial to the reverence with which they, and the souls they represented, were treated.

What I was not prepared for was those long ago voices, long-dead poets and philosophers, speaking to me of death . . .

Where is Death? Always future or past. She is hardly present when, already, she is no longer here.

How often have we heard the admonition to live our lives as though each day is our last here on earth?  In the Catacombs of Paris, we are reminded in the language of the ancient Romans and the Catholic faith and in the language of the Parisians entombed there.

The two-mile visitor's walk (of the 200-300 subterranean miles tranversed by these tunnels) is not entirely the domain of the Empire of the Dead.  The catacombs were originally stone quarries. 

Artifacts from that era include the artesian well at left and the sculpture at right, created by M. Dure, a quarry inspector, in the image of the French Port-Mahon fortress where he had once been imprisoned (early 1700's Minorca?).

If you want to know more about the Catacombs of Paris, Heather Munro's special to the Star Tribune, published in October 2009, makes excellent reading!

Kelsey and the Lion of Belfort

Kelsey and the lion . . .

Metro station:
Place de Denfer-Rochereau and entrance to the Catacombs of Paris

When Kelsey, my lion-haired granddaughter, posed for her dad's photos here (August 3, 2010), little did we know of this lion's story.

He's a replica, actually.  The original Lion of Belfort is perched in the mountains of eastern France, near the borders of Germany and Switzerland--a tribute to the citizens of Belfort who, during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) staged a 100-day resistance under the leadership of Colonel Denfert-Rochereau.  The city, unlike neighboring Alsace and Lorraine, remained in French hands once the war was over.

Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, an Alsatian best known for designing the Statue of Liberty, sculpted both the original Lion of Belfort and its replica.  The Parisian lion was placed atop his pedestal just in time for France's first celebration of Bastille Day--July 14, 1880.  Both lions face east, guarding France from invaders from the east . . .

The square--Place Denfert-Rochereau--was named so, after his death, for the colonel who saved Belfort from Prussian occupation.  Its original name was Place d'Enfer, or Place of Hell, perhaps a reference to the Catacombs of Paris whose entrance is also located there?

Also nearby is Montparnasse Cemetery where Frederic Auguste Bartholdi rests.  I can't believe that, among all the photographs from our brief visit there, there is no picture of Bartholdi's impressive tomb.  Yet one more incentive for us to return to Paris . . .