Paris by the Book(104)

The cat, of course, is the magician, who explains:

I changed myself so that I could stay around the house

and be with you—I’ll be as quiet as a mouse.

And keep it a secret—

A secret is something which nobody knows.

And with this, our story comes to a close. . . .



* * *



—

Once upon a time, whenever I saw myself in Robert’s words, the feeling was tactile, I was thin and delicate, some pressed form of me, a flattened leaf that fluttered and sometimes tore as the pages turned.

But now I find books so vast, too vast. Not just Robert’s, but all of them, all the ones about Paris, all the ones about everywhere. Reading, walking, chasing, longing, I’ve come to feel that Paris’s greatest gift is vertigo, the feeling we get when we discover that that which was so familiar or close is actually so far away. Which is not unlike what I feel whenever I set out in idle pursuit of a man and find a city instead. It’s a pursuit that, some mornings, I hope will go on forever, like a favorite book, like my life here. It’s only with mild surprise I find I don’t so much read anymore, but rather teeter, wonder, take flight, like Pascal, like Madeline, like Bemelmans, like Lamorisse, like my daughters. Like Robert. Like anyone who has ever started or finished a book, or a love affair, or confused the two, in sweet anticipation of the fall.

Fin





It is a nice thing to take over a household so living, complete, and warm, and dig up radishes that someone else has planted for you and cut flowers in a garden that someone else has tended.

—Ludwig Bemelmans

“The Isle of God,” an essay on the origins of his Madeline series





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong, but one American, despite (or because of) his affection for Paris, can be; I apologize for any errors herein. I did rely on roughly fifty million resources, however, and am grateful to all of them for the information and advice they gave.

Thank you to my earliest readers, Alfredo Botello, Lauren Fox, Dan Kois, and Emily Gray Tedrowe, and to Christi Clancy, Aims McGuinness, Jon Olson, and Annie Rajurkar. A very special thanks to Caroline Leavitt, whose early enthusiasm made all the difference, and to Susan Richards Shreve, who connected us.

Thanks, too, to all those whose expertise I tapped, including Professor Larry Kuiper, Emily Griffin, and Susan Keane for French-language advice. Thanks to Professor Tami Williams for help with French cinema, and Professor José Lanters for help with Dutch zines. To Dr. Kevin Wheeler for advice medical. To my Parisian readers, Nata?a Basic, Sophie Rollet, and Ingrid Johnson, for insights on parenting, Paris, French, the French, and combinations thereof. A special mrc to my teen-SMS linguist, Hattie Rowney; to Antoine Laurain for his advice on French bookstores and bookselling; and to Michael Bula and James Frasher for alerting me to “imminent peril.”

And to those who saved me from constant peril—my agent, Elisabeth Weed; her colleagues Dana Murphy and Hallie Schaeffer; Jenny Meyer; and the mighty Maya Ziv, this book’s editor and champion and merciless savior, and her colleague, Madeline Newquist—mille mercis.

And thank you to the incomparable Daniel Goldin, of Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, for his insights into the art of bookselling and his support of authors everywhere (this one in particular).



* * *



—

I encourage those interested in the life and work of Ludwig Bemelmans to consult a beautiful book by Bemelmans’s grandson, John Bemelmans Marciano, Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s Creator (Viking, 1999). Much of the Bemelmans lore I share, especially the material relating to his final project, comes from this book. Marciano acknowledges, as I will, the exhaustively detailed Ludwig Bemelmans: A Bibliography (Heineman, 1993) compiled by Murray Pomerance. It’s an extraordinary guide for those who want to read beyond Madeline (or to know where to read all of Madeline’s many iterations). For an introduction to Bemelmans’s “work for grown-ups,” as Leah and the girls describe it, the anthology Tell Them It Was Wonderful (Viking, 1985) is a great place to start. Finally, the exhibition catalogue Madeline at 75: The Art of Ludwig Bemelmans (Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, 2014) by Jane Bayard Curley is a rich resource, and includes a gorgeous illustrated essay by Maira Kalman.

Though, like Leah, I treasure the book version of The Red Balloon (Doubleday, 1956), the best way to get to know Albert Lamorisse is through his films. White Mane (1953) and, of course, The Red Balloon (1956) are available in beautifully restored form from the Criterion Collection. Lamorisse’s son, Pascal, made a haunting short documentary, Mon père était un ballon rouge (2008), that’s available from Shellac Sud.

Piet E. Schreuders’s remarkable magazine, Furore, devoted almost an entire issue (no. 21) to hunting down locations and other information about The Red Balloon; it’s deeply researched and engrossing. I’m grateful to another magazine, Bidoun, for introducing me to the piercing montage assembled by Lamorisse’s Iranian collaborators after he died. The Red Balloon critic mentioned here is Charles Silver; the quote comes from a brief essay of his on the Museum of Modern Art website.

Even when I was not in Paris, I did my best to live there through books. I benefited from Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) by Rosecrans Baldwin; Shakespeare and Company (Harcourt Brace, 1959) by Sylvia Beach; My Paris Dream (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) by Kate Betts; Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, 2004) edited by Adam Gopnik, as well as Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon (Random House, 2000); The Red Notebook (Gallic Books, 2015) by Antoine Laurain; Time Was Soft There (St. Martin’s, 2005) by Jeremy Mercer; Petite Anglaise (Spiegel & Grau, 2008) by Catherine Sanderson; A Family in Paris (Penguin Lantern, 2011) by Jane Paech; and The Only Street in Paris (W. W. Norton, 2015) by Elaine Sciolino.