They’ll always have Paris

Claude DE MENEVAL is not the type I would expect to see on all fours:

a small, graying man, crisp of carriage, with an astonishing aquiline nose. And this is not a place that promises such informality -- a bourgeois salon with its large oil portrait of an austere ancestor, ancient bandoliers marking the walls with Xs, glass cabinet filled with such Empire relics as pieces of the royal china and a fan from Empress Eugenie.

“Le voila,” he called out ebulliently, lifting a lithograph from the bottom of an ornate chest so my mother and I could see. There, on horseback, was Napoleon III, reviewing his troops. And there, just behind him, was Monsieur de Meneval’s arriere- arriere grandpere, Napoleon’s private secretary and the man who earned the impressive “de” in the De Meneval family name.

I had never imagined, when I impulsively invited my mother to Paris for her 65th birthday, that we would end up here in Versailles, sipping tea and chatting with Claude and Monique de Meneval. I knew that my mother’s junior year in France had been one of the formative experiences of her life. But hadn’t she moved on, settling for a humble life in rural Hawaii, never returning to France, letting her ties loosen?

She had, in my view, not so much abandoned her taste for all things French as chosen to pass it on -- to me. She pulled me off the beach to read “Madeline and the Bad Hat” and “Eloise in Paris.” She bought me a small spiral-bound blank book, inscribing its brown cover with Mon Petit Cahier de Francais -- My Small French Notebook -- and listing words for me to memorize. Although our everyday diet consisted of tuna-noodle casserole and Hamburger Helper, occasionally she gave my brother and sister and me a taste of her Continental past by serving a cheese souffle or chocolate mousse. Once or twice she treated us to stories of the French Gypsy who had taught her to read palms -- and then proceeded to predict our futures.

Tales of Gypsies were eventually supplanted by tales of Baron Louis de Meneval, scion of the petite noblesse, and la Baronne, head of their formidable household in Paris’ 17th arrondissement. Long on pride and short on funds, the enchanting De Menevals had chosen the socially acceptable way to improve the family cash flow -- by taking in a Smith College student.

Now here I was in Versailles, connecting the dots. Before me were all the possessions -- inherited by the eldest son of Baron Louis and la Baronne -- that filled my mother’s descriptions. Here, too, was a relationship between Claude and my mother: the stiff rapport between a 23-year-old law student and a 21-year-old American girl was now reinventing itself as a warm friendship between a retired businessman-turned-Napoleon expert and a photo-toting granny from Hawaii. And here were the intersections between a family and a country, whose history Claude was proudly recounting. But, more than anything, here were my mother’s deep ties to France, which had remained largely a mystery to me.

The longing for such connections had sparked the idea of our trip. Then, midway through the planning stages, my father fell ill and was given less than a year to live. Though he and my mother had been divorced for 30 years, the news devastated both of us. We considered postponing, until a new urgency swept aside our misgivings. Go. Now. While there’s time. In the face of losing Dad, I yearned to draw closer to Mom. Planning the trip got me through some hard months.

There was lots of planning. With the help of the Internet and two Paris services, we selected a large studio apartment on the Ile de la Cite. An apartment would afford us corners of privacy and our own washing machine, and the kitchen would give us an excuse to load up on gourmet treats.

An apartment also let us experience Paris as residents. Being on Ile de la Cite meant waking to the 8 o’clock bells of Notre Dame, lunching in the lovely Place Dauphine and snagging ringside seats for the Saturday-night street theater.

Mom and I easily agreed on how to spend our days. We didn’t go to a single museum. We skipped the Eiffel Tower. We tuned in to the surprises of the quotidian rather than the predictability of tourist destinations. We decoded billboards and shop signs. We enjoyed the bump and bustle of Paris buses, where schoolchildren rubbed elbows with immigrant workers, and adolescents prattled on into cell phones. And we visited churches daily: In the eloquent quiet of St. Paul and St. Germain-des-Pres, we lighted candles for Dad.

Stories lurk in the shadows

Mom spent one morning on the Ile de la Cite scouring the map. Soon she was leading us across the Seine on a footbridge, around the tiny chapel of St.-Julien-le-Pauvre, and then straight to Rue de la Huchette, a narrow medieval alley. She stopped in front of a crude stone facade.

“My dear friend David brought me to the Caveau de la Huchette on my birthday in 1953,” Mom said, looking at the Greek restaurants now lining the street. “This was just an old alley then, with centuries of grime.” Pointing to pictures of dancers on a subterranean parquet, under stone arches, she continued: “Steep, turning steps descended to a cave-like room. Sidney Bechet played! A group of men all dressed in black turtlenecks -- they were called ‘apaches’ then -- arrived. One of them -- very handsome -- asked me to dance. At first I demurred, but David insisted I dance with him.

“By chance I was wearing a black cashmere turtleneck and a flared red skirt. He was very polite.... And he was the most wonderful dancer -- the smoothest.” I sensed in Mom’s voice the hint of something dark, forbidden, thrilling; later I learned about the underworld of the apaches and the rough tango they practiced.

“Afterward, in the mist from the river, David and I circled around a small Greco-Roman church,” she said. “We walked back across the city to the 17th, past bakers in basements -- one blew flour at us from a bellows. We crossed the Place de la Concorde, completely empty. I was carried part of the way because my feet hurt.”

And so I started to learn the secrets of my mother’s time in Paris, to become familiar with the subterranean corners of her history. And she, in turn, learned mine. My Paris is a place of unfamiliar longings suddenly made all too familiar. A place of romance witnessed from a distance -- kids kissing on a bridge -- and loves unrequited. A place you can desire but never possess.

Mom knew little about my having fallen in love in my early 20s with a French photographer. Jacky and I shared poetry, love letters and, briefly, a room in a sprawling house by the train tracks. One day, Jacky gently let me know that he intended to live alone. An artist needed solitude, he said, with no trace of grandiosity.

And now, 15 years later, Jacky invited us to an exhibition of his photographs. There, he said, we could meet Nam, the French Vietnamese woman for whom he had abandoned solitude, and their son, Ulys. Never was I so happy to have my mother’s company. I was struck by uncharacteristic shyness; she held my hand while I gazed at photos, she complimented Jacky on his son, and she made small talk with Nam. She did not directly address my whirl of emotions as we stepped out into the night.

“Would you like to stop by that wine bar you’ve been curious about?” she asked instead, with exquisite delicacy, placing her hand softly on my shoulder.

As Mom and I explored the mysteries of Paris together, we continued to refine our mother-daughter act. It started with the language we both love. Mom’s French is formal, correct. Mine is informal, current. With the artists and boutique owners in Village St. Paul, I chatted away as Mom listened intently. I could see their wheels turning, their scenarios spinning. The mother must be French -- trim figure, strong nose, elegant sweep of white hair. The daughter’s French is good, yes, but the unkempt curls, the running shoes, the earnest manner! Not French, no. Then I mashed a few pronouns, Mom answered a question, and their theories shattered around us like dropped Limoges.

Mom took the lead in tracking down the De Menevals. She pored over an old white pages, thinking that at least the children -- Claude, Francoise, Christian and Bebe -- might still be in Paris. She found a Claude de Meneval listed, but it was up to me to dial the number, identify myself and ask for Claude. The man who answered explained that Claude now lived in Poland.

“Perhaps you are looking for the father,” he added. “I believe he lives in Versailles.”

And so we ended up taking tea with Claude and Monique, in their house on the edge of Napoleon’s woods. After cookies, an exchange of gifts and the finding of the magnificent lithograph, Claude suggested a tour. The palace gardens, the Grand Trianon, Marie-Antoinette’s faux peasant village -- all were revealed to us by our private guide, who had filled his retirement by learning about this place. And Paris, the Paris my mother and I now shared, acquired one more face.

An opera fraught with meaning

On our last night in France, Mom and I treated ourselves to “Turandot” at the Opera Bastille. In Act III, we both wept quietly in our front-row balcony seats as the slave girl Liu expressed her “deep, secret, unconfessed love” and anticipated her untimely death. We wept for the loss of Liu, for the loss of my father, for the loss of youthful romance, for the loss of rekindled friendship, for our last moments together in Paris.

To console ourselves, we stopped at an outdoor cafe for a creme brulee, a last look at the crowd, a last chance to gaze at the lights on Notre Dame. There I realized I had lost an earring. It was half of a pair of lovely mabe pearls, traced in gold, given to me by my father on my recent birthday, the last I would spend with him. I was momentarily heartsick, then decided that an earring was the only thing I’d lost on this trip and I could live with that.

A few weeks later, back home in California, a small package arrived from my mother. It was a pair of pearls.