What a pleasure to visit a country where every meal is an event! I refer, of course, to France, the land of esthetic eating and drinking. It tempts me to feel envious of the older people I observed in that country where nourishment has long been a fine art.
Among such elders are Georges and Liliane Hue, a long-married couple who live along the banks of the Eure River in a town in Normandy called Pont-de-l’Arche. After striking up conversation with Georges about his house, framed by a brilliant display of roses, and the experience of World War II, I saw his wife returning from the bakery with a fresh baguette in hand. If only we Americans could experience the daily pleasures of such bread!
The Hues seem happy in their retirement years, finding special pleasure in their grandson and the peace and quiet of their river site. They showed themselves warmly receptive to this brash stranger and his family members. As citizens of Normandy, they remember with appreciation the role of Americans who came to liberate their country in 1944.
Almost everywhere you go in France, memorials to the dead of two horrific world wars attract your attention. In Paris, my eyes fixed on a tablet marking the death of a 28-year-old freedom fighter, Georges Loiseleur, who was killed on August 19, 1944 , the day I was peacefully celebrating my 16th birthday.
And in every village and town, one sees stone tablets mounted in churches, commemorating those killed in the two great wars. In one of them, under the heading 1915, the list began: Irenέe Bisson, Cέsar Ambroise, Henri Ambroise. Even after all these years, the pity of all those young sons of their families and country lost in such a foolish enterprise still strikes my heart.
These evidences of loss help one sympathize with France recently leading the “coalition of the unwilling” in the face of a new war. I feel myself an honorary member of that coalition myself, an affiliation strengthened by the encounter with these memorials so widespread in the land of our traditional ally.
Other elders caught my attention. I stopped to talk with Madame Alleaume, an 80-year-old resident of the charming port of Honfleur. She lives next to the hotel where we stayed. She and I chatted one evening about our lives. Her only complaint was her knee, still troubling her after recent surgery. Like many elders everywhere, she put this trouble in perspective and smiled as she talked.
In a Paris park, my wife and I chatted with a woman who had come there to meet her sister-in-law for lunch. This woman, whose name we did not get, recalled with pleasure spending a year in Washington D.C. in the 1950s. Like just about everybody encountered on this visit, she feels appreciative of us Americans, though some of them strongly disapprove of policies pursued by our federal government. For instance, the van driver who took us back to Charles De Gaulle airport was eloquent in his denunciation of the George W. Bush and the people around him.
Speaking of De Gaulle, while in France I read a biography titled “The Last Great Frenchman.” Of course, the dramatic moments leading to the liberation of Paris fixed my attention as I recalled reading about them when I was a teenager. By force of character and sometimes sheer orneriness, the General moved boldly in the midst of turmoil and seized the dominant position as head of state.
As always in biographies, I also took note of the subject’s final years and the appraisal given the man by the writer Charles Williams. “The essence of Charles de Gaulle remains clear,” Williams writes. “Colombey, his home, of a very affectionate, emotional and private man; France was the home of a very cold, ruthless and proud public man. The contradiction between the two sides of his character has yet to be resolved.”
I also read the gripping popular history “Is Paris Burning?” This book recounts events first threatening, and then averting, the destruction of this fabled city. This saga retains its power as you read about the German commandant, von Choltitz, in his back-and-forth struggle not to carry out Hitler’s orders to blow up the 45 bridges across the Seine and the great buildings that contribute so much to Paris’ beauty. Though we never discover exactly the commander’s motivation, he seems to have lost confidence in Hitler’s wisdom and perhaps doubted his sanity.
Back to eating and drinking, I will not forget sitting along the Seine in sight of Notre Dame Cathedral and the Sainte Chapelle while eating a simple yet altogether delicious open-air lunch. A salade mixte and a small pichet of vin rouge followed by a petit cafέ were the only items I ordered. But this combination proved scrumptious.
What more could a rapidly aging man like me possibly need to advance his continuing pursuit of happiness?
Richard Griffin