Half a Lifetime in Paris, and Counting

By Alice Evleth

Alice Evleth's memoir vignettes are snippets of life. But the 55 vignettes brought together in this book add up to far more than a collection of snippets. They add up to a memoir of half a lifetime in Paris, and counting.

Born in 1935, Alice Evleth moved permanently with her husband Earl and then-14-year-old daughter Peggy to Paris from California in 1974 when Earl snagged a job in France. It gives nothing in this book away to tell you that Alice, unwilling to live as "the trailing spouse," developed her own career in France as a historian specialized in the lives and fate of Jewish doctors during the Second World War. It spoils nothing to tell you that for years she and Earl visited an American incarcerated in a French prison on drug charges. And that for years they were frighteningly stalked by an anonymous man on the internet. Nor that Alice likes a good croissant, is fascinated by the sight of a flower growing in the crack of a sidewalk, loves dachshunds, and goes beachcombing on the Greek Island of Aegina every year. It gives nothing away to tell you that Earl died in 2013 and that the irony of being asked to dress a body that would be cremated did not escape her. By then, Alice had been living in Paris for half her life.

She still lives in the heart of the city, surrounded by the charms of the 6th arrondissement, with the Luxembourg Garden as her neighborhood park. But don't look for the clichés of Paris in Alice Evleth's collection of memoir vignettes, for what sets her work apart is the restrained precision with which she writes about personal incidents and events, whether mundane, unexpected, upsetting or heartbreaking, as she examines half a lifetime in Paris, and counting.

Unlike most other American memoirs involving life abroad, this book doesn't seek to impress readers with the author's love for or discovery of a foreign place, in this case Paris. Instead, this book sets out to truly reveal a personal, singular life lived there. Paris is not Alice's foreign place; it is her home.

This book will appeal to anyone who has lived abroad, whether in Paris or elsewhere, or has ever wondered what it's like to live abroad. Paris-lovers will discover a new way of looking at the City of Light. And anyone interest in writing their memoirs will appreciate the cumulative power of this collection of memoir vignettes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9782958202408

Book preview

PROLOGUE

1 WHAT GOT INTO US

I don’t know what got into me, said my husband Earl once we settled in Paris that first time in 1965. I quit a well-paid job with IBM in San Jose, California, to take a one-year post-doctoral fellowship in Paris, France, when I had a wife, a 5-year-old daughter, and a dog to support. I didn’t speak a word of French. I just wanted to do it.

I was bored to death with my suburban housewife lifestyle that seemed to focus so much on laundry, so I didn’t ask what had gotten into Earl because it had gotten into me, too. I simply prepared for our year in France by enrolling at a nearby college for a refresher course to bolster my two years of high school French.

We arrived in Paris in late November. The hotel near the Gare de l’Est where we had reserved a room had changed management since we’d made the reservation and had never heard of us. Fortunately, they had a room available for the three of us plus Otto the dog. We went for meals at a café around the corner. The waiters were delighted that Peggy was not a fussy eater and ate all her lamb or chicken and vegetables without complaint. She was delighted that they gave her extra cookies for dessert.

Still, the quarters were cramped, and hotel living was expensive. And in the first weeks we had unexpected money troubles. Earl’s fellowship payments did not start until the end of December. We had some savings but had counted on a check from the couple in California who bought our car. The check bounced. A money order for $50 arrived from Earl’s parents with a note: Use this to buy whatever your hearts desire. Our hearts desired food.

Our days were spent looking for a furnished apartment to rent. We went to an English-speaking rental agency. They showed us a two-bedroom place on the Rue de Rochechouart in the 9th district or arrondissement. The apartment was gloomy but it was an easy commute to the lab in the 19th arrondissement where Earl would be doing his post-doctoral studies. We told the agency we wanted it. A few days later, they told us that the owner had decided not to rent it after all. But the agency had found another place for us, on the Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, in the 5th arrondissement. Although it was farther from Earl’s lab, the apartment was bright and sunny, the area was nice, and we needed to get ourselves settled soon. This deal also fell through.

By now we were desperate. Let’s go to a French agency, suggested Earl.

The fact that Earl did not speak a word of French had seemed unimportant when he got his fellowship since he was a scientist and all his colleagues spoke English. Now, French was crucial. You will talk to the people at the agency, Earl announced to me.

Terrified, I stammered out our requirements: a furnished apartment with two bedrooms, anywhere in Paris, to rent until the end of August.

The French agency found an apartment for us, on the Rue Eugène-Carrière, in the 18th arrondissement. The owner was a school principal, who, being housed by the school, rented out her own apartment during the academic year. This year, she had had trouble finding a tenant; here it was, the tail end of November, and she had no one. She was more than willing to rent her apartment with living room, separate dining room, spacious kitchen and two bedrooms, for a mere 1000 francs per month, the equivalent at the time of $200. We moved in immediately.

At that point, our luck turned a corner. The people in California who had given us the bad check made good on it, so in addition to paying for rent and food, we had plenty of money for a Christmas tree and gifts. At the beginning of the year, Earl’s fellowship started paying, and we celebrated by taking a trip to Saint Malo, on the Brittany coast. As a child, my parents and I had spent happy summers in a Southern California beach colony called St. Malo. I would spend even happier times with Earl and Peggy and Otto in the real St. Malo, in France. Because Earl had no rigid schedule for his research time in the lab, we used every school vacation period to explore France. That year, in addition to Brittany, we also took Peggy to Menton, on the French Riviera, and the châteaux of the Loire Valley, which Peggy especially enjoyed because they reminded her of the fairy tales she loved to have me read to her.

The apartment we were renting had an added dividend that none of us could have foreseen: the building’s concierge liked Americans. He had fought in World War I, had been gassed, and spent the many months of his recovery in a hospital with an American in the next bed who had also been gassed. They became friends and the friendship was still going on. The concierge was delighted that I could help him with the letters in English to and from his American friend.

Peggy, who was five, longed to go to school, to learn to read and write. She had been disappointed by her California kindergarten. All they do is play, she complained to me. I had no idea how to find a school. The concierge told me: There’s a neighborhood école maternelle (kindergarten) just a few blocks away. Why don’t you ask them?

In my feeble French, I did so. Yes, I was told, the school would accept Peggy, and she could start right after the Christmas holidays. They had one teacher who spoke a bit of English. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I sent Peggy off to this foreign school cold turkey. At first you won’t understand a word the other children are saying to you, I told her, but you’ll learn. Peggy came home at the end of the first day with a piece of paper on which she had written her name in cursive writing. She was hooked. And she did learn the language. By the end of the year people who did not know us were amazed to find out that she was not French.

Earl was delighted with his scientific research experience in France. He fit in perfectly and was able to do the kind of research he wanted to do, not the research he was told to do. Everyone in the lab spoke English, so his lack of French wasn’t a hindrance, while I assumed the sink-or-swim task of dealing with our day-to-day issues in French.

I studied to improve my French while Peggy was at school. I could not afford the Alliance Française, so I devised my own study program. I had a French grammar that had belonged to my mother. I wrote out all the exercises, checking my copy against the answers in the back. I wrote out verb tenses until they were hard wired. For spoken French, I followed some more advice from the concierge: we rented a TV set. We watched the news, and because most of the major stories covered were the same as in the English-language newspaper, the International Herald Tribune, we learned how to make out the meaning of what was being told.

I also read books in French to build vocabulary. Earl had bought a book by a French historian, Robert Aron, Les Grands Dossiers de l’Histoire contemporaine, which contained a number of chapters about World War II. Finding the French too hard, he cast it aside. I picked it up and read it, then read more books on that period, and still more.

Earl made a friend in the lab, Philémon, of Greek origin, naturalized French and married to a Frenchwoman, Micheline. Philémon spoke excellent English. They invited us over for dinner, and soon, Micheline and I also became friends.

Before long, Earl was very much at home in his laboratory. Peggy fit into her school perfectly. And I understood exactly what had gotten into us.

HOME

2 MY DREAM APARTMENT

In 1977, within three years of our arrival, with Earl’s job going well, he and I could see ourselves staying in France indefinitely. Peggy couldn’t. She was preparing to go to college in California and told us that she wanted to live permanently in the United States.

We were tired of our furnished rental apartment. I missed my own things still in storage in the US. So we sold our house in California to be able to buy our own Paris apartment. The house in California had been my dream house. It had a large living room with pegged oak floors and a big used brick fireplace. From the sliding glass doors of the living room, there was a view of the whole Santa Clara Valley. There was a wood-paneled kitchen whose dining area had a live oak right outside the window. The master bedroom had a view of tree-covered hills. When looking for an apartment in Paris, I could not help thinking about that house. I wanted a Paris equivalent. I dreamed of something with a view of the Seine, or Paris rooftops, or a garden with trees.

Using the open house ads in the newspaper Le Figaro, we started our search. One of the very first places we saw, in the Passy section of the 16th arrondissement, looked promising. It had four main rooms, a living room, dining room and two bedrooms overlooking a garden with a big chestnut tree. There was adequate storage space, it was light and bright, and the price was within our means. However, an ominous tilt to the floor in the bedrooms put us off. We decided to look a little more.

We soon regretted that decision because we then saw some terrible places. An apartment in the Marais advertised central heating. The only source of heat, a 19th century cast iron stove, stood in the center of the living room.

An apartment in the 17th arrondissement advertised three rooms. During the visit we counted them. The ad mentioned three rooms, but there are only two.

It’s a former three-room apartment, the real estate agent replied.

The worst was an apartment facing the Seine. The living room and dining room had a breathtaking view of the river, but the two bedrooms and the kitchen overlooked an airshaft. It’s not an airshaft, I said. It’s a courtyard filled with garbage.

Earl joked: I know why they’re selling. The last owner committed suicide in one of those back bedrooms.

Then came a true dream place. It was in the 7th arrondissement, on the 6th floor with an elevator, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a modern kitchen, a beamed ceiling living room and a large terrace with plants. But the price was much too high.

I was discouraged. It’s hopeless, I told my closest French friend Micheline.

The apartment across the hall from mine is for sale, she told me. The current owners are psychologists and they want a six-room apartment so they can have their practice in one half and their home in the other. They asked me if I wanted to sell my apartment. When I said no, they told me they would have to sell theirs. Would you be interested in it?

It wouldn’t hurt to look at it, I replied.

Earl and I went to look at the apartment. It was a mirror image of Micheline’s apartment, with a large living room/dining room and two bedrooms, a master bedroom on the street side and a smaller bedroom facing the rear courtyard. The price was 305,000