France With My Father: A journey Through Memory, Art, Time, and Family

By Janine S. Volkmar

: When her 86-year-old father called to invite her on a three-week trip to France, Janine was thrilled. They traveled around France, eating wonderful food and drinking good wine, visiting haunts of the painter Paul C̩zanne, and researching their family history. Janine۪s grandparents were born in France, and exploring their heritage united the father and daughter. Full of descriptions of French cuisine, art, the landscape, and culture, France with My Father is a loving appreciation of the often-maligned French people who were kindness personified to the white-haired father and his daughter. The two of them drove from Paris to Provence and, in spite of often getting lost, found their way to a closer relationship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel & Daniel Publishers
• Release date: Sep 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781564747778

Janine S. Volkmar

Janine S. Volkmar is a freelance editor and writer with a special interest in French art and culture. A native Californian and librarian, she has lived a life of literature and words. She lives in a fishing village in Northern California where she is currently working on a mystery novel set in nineteenth-century France.

Book preview

France with My Father

A journey through memory,

art, time, and family

~

Janine S. Volkmar

2013

FITHIAN PRESS

MCKINLEYVILLE, CALIFORNIA

Copyright © 2013 by Janine S. Volkmar

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-56474-777-8

The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to the publisher’s first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes. All other use of those designs without the publisher’s permission is prohibited.

Published by Fithian Press

A division of Daniel and Daniel, Publishers, Inc.

Post Office Box 2790

McKinleyville, CA 95519

www.danielpublishing.com

Distributed by SCB Distributors [phone]

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Volkmar, Janine S., (date)

 France with my father : a journey through memory,

art, time and family / by Janine S. Volkmar.

pages cm

 ISBN [first printed edition] 978-1-56474-550-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Volkmar, Janine S., (date)—Travel—France.

2. France—Description and travel. 3. Art—France—History.

4. Fathers and daughters. I. Title.

DC29.3.V65 2013

944—dc23

2013010541

Contents

Prologue: Paris, 1877

Preface: Northern California, 2007

1. Maman and the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire

2. Crème Brûlée

3. A Silhouette

4. Marché Aux Puces or The Quest for Salt Spoons

5. Les Deux Magots

6. Harpignies and the Road to Rouen

7. Giverny

8. The Stones of Arles

9. Les Baux-de-Provence

10. Aix: Pas de Cézannes

11. Roussillon

12. The Books of Banon

13. Avignon

14. On the Top of Avignon

15. Auxerre or Mais Òu Sont les Bidets d’Antan?

16. Barbizon

17. Montigny-sur-Loing

18. Driving in French

19. Leaving France

Entr’acte

20. Churches

21. Our Family Tree Grapevine

22. Saint-Emilion

23. French Fashion

24. Brantôme

25. Remembering the Wars of France

26. Grotte du Pech Merle

27. Albi

28. Carcassonne

29. French Television

30. Toulouse in the Rain

31. Angels

32. Pâté

33. Only Connect

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Photos

About the Author

Prologue: Paris, 1877

Charles Volkmar, an American painter living in France, boarded a crowded horse-drawn omnibus on the streets of Paris. He climbed to the top deck because he was carrying paintings to enter in the annual Paris Salon, and the top of the double-decker omnibus was the only place they’d fit.

At the next stop, a wild-eyed man in paint-spattered clothes struggled up the narrow stairs of the omnibus, clutching two canvases to his chest. He sat down next to Volkmar and they talked about life, their work, and their hopes of being accepted at the Salon. As they neared the stop for the Salon, the wild-eyed man introduced himself, My name is Paul Cézanne.

Several weeks later, they met again in front of the Salon.

Were you accepted? Volkmar asked his new acquaintance.

No, not by these imbeciles, Cézanne answered. And you?

Volkmar admitted that he’d had two pieces accepted, landscapes painted in Montigny-sur-Loing. I just hope they don’t hang them so high up that no one can see them, he said. I’ve heard that most American artists are skyed.

Cézanne clapped his shoulder and smiled. It was as if the Provençal sun had traveled north to Paris. That’s wonderful, my friend. I’m happy for you. Congratulations.

Volkmar thanked him, then asked quickly, But what will you do?

Don’t worry about me, Cézanne said. A group of us are putting on an alternate show. Just a few friends. Renoir, Monet, Sisley, Degas, Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot. It’s at Number Six, rue le Peletier. You should come see it.

I will, I will, Volkmar said, shaking Cézanne’s hand.

Oh, one thing, Cézanne added. Don’t bring your wife. The idiot critics have been warning pregnant women of the dangers of looking at our degenerate paintings. It’s nonsense, of course, but you wouldn’t want her to be embarrassed by a policeman trying to prevent her from entering the building.

Volkmar laughed. How did you know about…? Oh, that’s right, I told you that day we rode the omnibus. We’re hoping for a boy.

Congratulations, again, Cézanne said. I’m happy for you. He turned and walked down the street, striding like a man used to country roads.

They never met again.

Preface: Northern California, 2007

It’s Wednesday night, the end of my favorite day of the week. I’m coming home from my writers’ group. These are the people who have been my cheerleaders, tough editors, and nursemaids through two mysteries. Riding the bus home after our weekly meeting, I’m happy and tired and full of ideas for rewrites.

I open up the local weekly and read an article about two women artists who have just spent a month painting in Paris. I know these women and respect their work. My first reaction is to be happy for them. My second reaction has all the charm of a whining, runny-nosed five-year-old.

I want to go to Paris. I haven’t been to Paris since 1967. I never get to go anywhere.

It’s a good thing that the other bus riders are all wearing headphones, listening to their iPods or CD’s. They can’t hear my muttering and whining that continues, with variations, all the way home.

The next day my father calls from Southern California. I have a proposition for you, he says.

Sure, I say, thinking that he probably wants me to come down and do some more sorting and organizing, something I did after my stepmother died. At that time my father was downsizing for his move to Lake Arrowhead. Not only did he have lots of stuff that my stepmother had bought on television shopping channels, but he also had a basement filled with my grandmother’s things. It is always easier to sort someone else’s hoard—there’s less emotional baggage. We worked hard for several weeks—this pile for my father, these piles for my siblings, this pile for me, this pile for charity—and tossed the rest into his old wooden trailer to take to the dump.

So I assume it will just be more of the same. I’m astonished when my father asks, the day after my whining, Would you like to go to France for three weeks?

Talk about wishing for what you want. The New Age gurus could take lessons from me. One day later!

Would I? You bet. I begin to make lists in my mind.

~

I haven’t been to France for almost forty years, but I’ve just spent the last seven writing two historical mysteries set in Paris and in Provence. They take place in 1887 and, trust me, I’ve read just about every book on nineteenth-century daily life in France, from a history of pet ownership to a sociological treatise on unwed mothers and everything in between. The book on pets yielded the tidbit that Parisian dandies walked lobsters on leashes on the boulevards because the lobsters were slower than dogs, thus giving more people the opportunity to admire the dandies’ outfits. The treatise on unwed mothers gave details on children’s orphanages with revolving doors. This made it possible for mothers to deposit their babies without being seen. I often read an entire book just to find one small fact that I could use in my mysteries.

I’ve mapped out the movements of my characters through the neighborhoods of Paris, describing actual streets and landmarks. My hero, an amateur detective in both books, is the painter Paul Cézanne. A mix of imagined and real characters surround him, including Vincent Van Gogh, Alfred Sisley, Pierre Renoir, Julien Tanguy, Suzanne Valadon, and the dwarf Achille Emperaire.

Sometimes I feel that I live in France. I often dream of my characters and the landscape they move in. The opportunity to spend three weeks in that landscape will be the trip of a lifetime.

To research the background of my books, I have used the memoirs of American artists who traveled to study in Paris in the late 1800s. They described the details of finding a studio to rent, signing up at an atelier for instruction, the antics of their fellow students, and hearing the cries of street vendors.

I moved on to the art history tomes of which there are many. Lois Fink’s definitive study, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons, listed all the American artists who were accepted into the salons. There was Charles Volkmar’s list, complete with his address each year he entered.

Charles Volkmar had paintings, drawings, etchings, and faience accepted into five of the annual Paris Salons. And he was accepted in the same years when my beloved Cézanne not only was suffering rejection after rejection, but was mocked and vilified in the popular press for the works he submitted.

My two fields of research had come together.

~

For years, I had collected references to Volkmar pottery. Charles and his son, Leon, my father’s father, were well known in the American Art Pottery movement and are mentioned in many books on the subject. One book even has a series of photographs of Leon Volkmar throwing a vase on his potter’s wheel. But other than a few stories about Charles Volkmar’s time in Paris (most notably the story that his fellow artists offered him $100 if he named his son, born in Paris in 1879, Leon Gambetta Volkmar after the controversial French statesman, an act rather like naming one’s child John Che Guevara Smith today), I knew very little about the Volkmar time in France.

I renewed my research efforts, in the San Francisco library and at the Library of Congress, finding information about Charles and his teacher, Henri Harpignies.

So when my father calls, I’m ready. We’ll fly to Paris, he says, and then rent a car. We’ll drive first to Normandy and then work our way south to Provence. As soon as I hang up the phone, I start dragging out my notebooks, taking out pages, and assembling a travel folder. We will be retracing both Cézanne’s and Charles Volkmar’s footsteps.

And, it turns out, we will retrace my father’s footsteps as well. Our hotel in Paris, on the Quai Voltaire, is the very same hotel where he stayed with his parents when he was eight years old.

The coincidences will continue as we travel throughout France.

So this will be a journey through memory, family, art, and time.

1. Maman and the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire

You are just like your French grandmother. Whenever my sisters or my mother wanted to needle me, they would make this pronouncement.

Even as a young child, I’d look my tormentor in the eye and say, Thank you.

I adored my father’s mother, although I was a bit frightened of her. Though only an inch shy of five feet tall, she was a formidable presence. Exquisitely groomed and dressed in an unlikely combination of colors that said chic, she had an opinion on every­thing.

I remember being so happy when I had grown an inch taller than she was. Look, Maman, I said. (We always called her Maman, never Grandmère.) I’m taller than you. I was eight years old and had shot up that year, causing my frugal mother to let down the hems of my dresses and sew rick-rack over the old hem mark.

My grandmother looked me up and down. There was a long silence. Yes, you are taller, she conceded. You see, I am like a small bottle of expensive perfume. You are more the size of a bottle of toilet water.

Toilet water! Water out of a toilet? Who would put water from a toilet in a bottle? Seeing my face, Maman hastened to explain.

Toilet water and cologne come in bigger bottles but cost less. Perfume comes in small bottles because it is concentrated, lasts longer, and costs more. Go look on your mother’s dressing table—you’ll see. I wasn’t talking about water from the bathroom, she added, her eyes twinkling.

I got over my hurt quickly and went to look. Sure enough, there was a bottle labeled toilet water. It was bigger than the other perfume bottles and had a pretty shape. I read the label, Here’s My Heart—Eau de Toilette. I looked around to see if I was alone (rare in a household with five children), carefully opened the bottle, and sniffed. I smelled flowers and grasses, a wet morning in spring. Glancing around again, I put my finger to the top of the bottle and tilted it. A drop came out. I touched my finger behind my ear as I had seen my mother do, closed the bottle, and ran back to the living room.

You were right, I said to Maman. It’s nothing to do with the bathroom. But I’m still taller than you.

She smiled and all her wrinkles made crinkles around her eyes. And you always will be, she said.

I knew I was her favorite.

And I knew my mother didn’t like her.

But I knew so little about Maman’s early life.

In the years since, I’ve pieced together her story from stray remarks she made, from my father’s stories, and from looking at old photographs. Several years ago, when I cleaned out the crawl space under my father’s house, I found a sealed box of what appeared to be every postcard she ever bought or received during her entire life. One congratulated her on the birth of my father in 1921. Another one had familiar handwriting on it—mine!—sent to her in 1967. Lots of postcards had messages in French, many from her sister. I wish I could sit with ­Maman and have her tell me the story of each one. She’s been dead since 1984 but I think of her often. Sometimes I think I hear her voice.

Here’s what I do know about Maman.

Henriette Roigneau was born in 1894. She had one sister, Marcelle, and when their mother died they were treated badly by their new stepmother. Henriette was very bright. Once, after reading a newspaper article about the new French fad of hypnotism, she hypnotized the family’s maid. Unfortunately she was not able to get the maid to come out of a trance. Hours later, when the poor woman awoke on her own, Henriette’s father made her promise never to hypnotize anyone again.

Henriette came to the United States to study for a Ph.D. in biology at Columbia University. She caught the last passenger ship, La Touraine, to leave France in 1918.

In New York, she taught French to army officers who were headed to the trenches of World War I. I don’t know how she met a tall and handsome artist, Leon Volkmar, in New York. They may have had a rapport since Leon was born in Paris. They married and had two boys. My father, Pierre, was born in 1921, and his brother, Jehan, was born in 1923.

When the boys were eight and six years old, the family traveled to France. It was a trip of artistic exploration for Leon, a homecoming for Henriette, and a great adventure for the boys. They stayed in a small hotel in Paris, on the Quai Voltaire.

Paris, May 2007

The Hôtel du Quai-Voltaire sits across the Seine from the Louvre. It was an ancient abbey before being renovated and opened as a hotel in the nineteenth century. Many famous people stopped there, including Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Jan Sibelius, and Richard Wagner. Cézanne didn’t stay there, but his mentor—the painter Camille Pissarro—did. My father remembered staying there as a boy and was thrilled when his brother, Jehan, mentioned that he had been there recently. After a few minutes on the Internet, my father and I had reservations for three days.

My first night in Paris passed like a dream.

In the middle of the night, I heard the echo of a mournful saxophone coming from the river. I got up and went to the window. When I pulled open the casements, an ornate iron railing kept me from falling three floors to the street. There was no screen between me and the Paris night—just cool air and the sound of jazz. I looked towards the nearest bridge over the Seine and caught a glint of metal. The saxophonist must be sheltering under the bridge, I thought. Red taillights flashed as cars passed. The trees across the river swayed in time to the music.

I want to stay here forever, I said out loud, even though there was no one to hear.

The room was slightly shabby, with opulent damask drapes