A Bastille Day Love Letter To France

It’s Bastille Day weekend, which is always a bit of a challenge for a Francophilic American conservative like me. I love France and want to celebrate her, but the Revolution? No thanks. I usually end up saying a prayer for the Vendée, and then relax into the pleasures of all things French.

It’s easy to do. For me, France has been a magical place since early childhood living in rural south Louisiana. No, I did not grow up in Acadiana, among the French-descended Cajuns. My introduction to France came at the knees of my very old, twice-great aunts Lois and Hilda—the sisters of my great-grandmother—who as young women served as Red Cross nurses in Dijon, during the Great War. They were ancient in the 1970s, when I knew them as a small boy, and they regaled me with stories about the war, and traveling through France after the conflict ended. Hilda was on the Champs Élysées when the armistice was announced. An unknown Frenchman grabbed her and kissed her square on the lips, she told me. What kind of place was this? I wondered.

Years later, as a bored and restless high school student, I stumbled into Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his memoir about life in Paris in the 1920s, as a member of the Lost Generation. Writing, making love, drinking wine, spending time talking about art and literature in Parisian cafes: Could there be any better way to live? Not to my knowledge. I longed to see Paris.

My chance came in 1984, when my mother won a trip to Europe in a church raffle. She had no interest in going, but knew that I did, so she sent me. I ended up as the lone teenager on a bus full of white-haired Americans. I didn’t care—I was going to see Paris. On our way to the city, we stopped an hour outside to look at an old church. This was the cathedral of Chartres, about which I had never heard. Nothing in my small-town American youth had prepared me for something like that medieval house of worship. The awe of it!

I entered as a casual agnostic, and left wanting to know the God that had inspired men to build such a temple to His glory. The seed was planted at Chartres, and the hook set in my heart as I stood in the labyrinth contemplating the great Rose Window. Nine years later, the journey that began when I walked out of the Chartres cathedral that summer day ended at the altar of a cathedral in Washington, where I became a Catholic. Though I would later lose my Catholicism after a spiritual crisis, moving to Orthodox Christianity, I still cherish Chartres, and France, with giving me faith.

Many times have I returned to Paris, and to France, over the years, and expect to go back many more times before I leave this world. France is an anteroom to paradise. You can call me a hopeless romantic for saying so, and I won’t dispute it. It took reading something by the American essayist Adam Gopnik, who spent the 1990s living in the French capital, for me to understand the core of my passion for Paris. He wrote:

We are happy, above all, when we are absorbed, and we are absorbed when we are serious, and the secret of Paris, in the end, is that the idea of happiness it presents is always mingled, I do not always know how, with a feeling of seriousness. That sense of serious happiness, of pleasure allied to education … this tincture of seriousness infiltrates our happiness, giving it dignity. In Paris, Americans achieve absorption without obvious accomplishment, a lovely and un-American emotion.

This is precisely true. Back in 2012, I took my niece, then nineteen, to Paris for the first time, hoping to pass on the love of France I inherited from our intrepid ancestors Lois and Hilda. On our last night there, I took her to my favorite restaurant in all the world, a tiny oyster bar in Saint-Germain, Huîtrerie Régis, at 3 rue Montfaucon. I introduced her to the world’s most delicious raw oysters, which are so delicious that the first time I tasted them, I texted my wife that it felt like I had been kissing the breasts of Poseidon’s favorite concubine (you may not wonder why she later divorced me).

As we dined, I endeavored to explain to my niece how to taste the oyster, to savor the sea in its brine, and to think of the life of the oystermen who cultivated this delicacy, and the concept of terroir, and indeed beyond that, the principle of sacramentality, through which the material world mediates divine grace to us hungry and sinful mortals, and …

“Uncle Rod,” she said, leveling her eyes at me. “You’re full of sh*t.”

Elle avait raison, peut-être. But you know, I wasn’t wrong either. Some conversations you just can’t have with an Anglo-Saxon, at least those not named Roger Scruton. The idea that the pleasure of food can occasion “serious happiness,” and that one can speak philosophically about aesthetics and morality while eating briny raw oysters and drinking flinty Chablis—well, it’s un-American, because even if we aren’t especially pious, we regard pleasure with suspicion.

I stand with the French, in favor of serious pleasure, and non, je ne regrette rien. Once, walking alone on an autumn day across the Luxembourg Gardens, I puzzled over why I felt more at home in this foreign city where I don’t speak the language well, than I do in my own hometown. My family there has never understood it; old Hilda and old Lois would have.

In The Table Comes First, a book he wrote about food in France, Gopnik observed:

Many people who love Paris love it because the first time they came they ate something better than they had ever eaten before, and kept coming back to eat it again.

This too is true. Whenever I’m in Paris, I make four stops, religiously: to pray at the remains of the tomb of St. Geneviève, to eat oysters at Régis, to buy tea at Mariage Frères, and to sweep through La Grande Épicerie on the rue de Bac to buy confiture from the kitchen Alsatian genius Christine Ferber. You will notice that the food pilgrimages outnumber the religious one, three to one.

At La Grande Épicerie last month, I mentioned to the older woman cashier that if I only have one free day in Paris, I choose to visit this temple of cuisine rather than art museums. She shrugged, and said, sexily and Frenchily, “They are different pleasures, monsieur.”

That they are, but what’s great about the French is that they take their culinary traditions as seriously as they take their artistic ones. The modern world is a throwaway culture, and we Americans are the kings and queens of disposable convenience. Without doubt the French love McDonalds, but I admire among them the reverence they have for tradition, and for craftsmanship and beauty, even in food. The professor of aesthetics Elaine Scarry says that beauty has a fertile quality, in that the encounter with it makes us want to reproduce it somehow. When I visit France, the encounter with beauty in its many facets, and the effort the French put into achieving and honoring aesthetic excellence, moves me, and inspires me, and makes me want to bring their savoir-faire and savoir-vivre into my American life. 

Poor France is suffering now, as we can all see. She is angry, she is afraid, and she does not have an easy way out of her travails. Perhaps in God’s spiritual economy, France needed to be humbled, to find her way back to her baptism. Americans like to look down on the French for being arrogant, and we’re not always wrong about that—but then again, the French have so much to be arrogant about! More kindly, I hope the French will remember how much they have given to humanity, and how much their culture is worth celebrating, and defending. A world without Chartres, without Mont Saint-Michel, without Pernand-Vergelesses, without Monet and Matisse, without the oysters of Brittany, the butter of Normandy, and the quenelles of Lyon, and without autumnal strolls through the Luxembourg Gardens, and a spring gallivant up the Boulevard Saint-Germain—I could go on and on—would be a world of acute poverty.

Many people don’t know that, but I do, and it’s why even though I could do without Robespierre and the Bonaparte who followed, I will always love France and pray for her. And why not? She is the Great-Great Aunt who has given me many of the things I cherish most. Call me plein de merde if you like, but as long as my hobbit-like belly is full of French oysters, I can endure anything.