A French Lesson We Could Use Here
The city of Tours is, like most French cities, encrusted with history. The past saturates this place, soaking it with heavy Romanesque architecture, menacing Gothic plumes and the elegant symmetry of classicism. Tours, like all of France, is a coral reef. Centuries cling to it, embedding themselves on the luxuriant, rich soil that hugs the River Loire and affixing themselves to the cold limestone castles furry with moss.
Tours is not a big city, nor necessarily an important one. It is not much bigger than Waterbury and, like Waterbury, its best days are behind it. Centuries ago, back in the days when Frances I, Henry II and Catherine de Medici cloaked the Loire Valley with chateaux and collusion, Tours was a vibrant battleground of pleasure and royal benevolence. It was here, back in 732, that Charles Martel, master of the Frankish kingdom, halted the advance of the Moors into France, setting the stage for the Carolingian Empire
All of that was autrefois, as the French like to say; literally, “another time,” or “long ago.” Since then, this cobbled city of about 130,000 has swollen and contracted like the levels of the river that nourishes it. It is now largely a center of commerce, the new regime. Banks nestle against Gothic naves, and flying buttresses umbrella over insurance firms. But along the cobbled quays of the Loire, men with faces like withered apples launch their lines into the capricious current, hoping for a nibble, as they have for hundreds of years.
Tours is a stop on my pilgrimage home to Angers, the Loire Valley city where I lived and attended school in 1983. I am on my way there to see the adoptive parents I loved and to whom I owe much. It is a retreat into the past for me, a burrowing into memory, to that time when I was unfettered by mortgages and mutual funds and could survive on a baguette and a round of Camembert.
At the Quatre Saisons, a tidy, spacious restaurant that sits snugly embraced by one of the town’s circles, I sponge the seeping yoke of my omelet fromage with my pain, and drown in the lyrical conversations gurgling around me. Meals take time here, and the restraint pleases me. Earlier in the day, I had gone to one of the growing, but still archaic, fitness clubs in the city, where I was chagrined to learn that you can escape the United States, but you cannot escape Britney Spears.
The din of the techno-talent clattered clumsily through the cramped gym. Down the street, a McDonald’s does a robust business, while in the next city, Blois, a “Brico Depot” assures the aspiring home refurbisher that “you can do it.” The kiosk in the town center advertises the film, “Rachroche,” the French title for Diane Keaton’s “Hanging Up,” and, in the worst offense of all, Air France shows the film “Vatel,” with Gerard Depardieu as the 17th century steward of festivities for the rich.
The film is set in France, but all the actors, including Depardieu, speak English, a growing trend in French cinema, which is acquiescing to the insatiable French appetite for the English tongue.
At the Quatre Saisons, the couple next to me inform me that they have been to the United States many times and, with few exceptions, have enjoyed it. The gentleman is in business, and has noticed an increasingly raw competitive spirit in American businessmen. “They are the winners of the Cold War,” he explains. “And they know it.”
His wife assents but is shocked to find out what Americans do not know. She tells of the time, while in a saloon in Arizona, she was asked where she was from.
The interlocutor was unaware that Paris was in France and equally ignorant as to the location of France itself. It shocked Madame, but not as much as the young law student she welcomed into her home a few years later. The exchange student, who attended Phillips Exeter Academy and possessed exemplary credentials, dismissed the Roman Empire as mythology. Latin was never spoken, the law student asserted, and the Romans were fairy tales, like something out of the Brothers Grimm.
I feel my head drop to my chest. How do I explain this ignorance? How do I explain to this woman that American students are tested to death on their ability to take tests, completely oblivious to knowledge? How do I explain to her that in the United States you are given the option for everything except seriousness? I cannot account for it any more than I can account for the French hunger for Britney Spears or Big Macs.
It is still light when I leave the Quatre Saisons. Dusk takes its time in France, and along the boulevard in Tours, the couples promenade. The boutiques have been locked for hours, but the cafes cater to the lovers and the loungers long after dark. In this city, blemished like most of Europe with pustules of American culture, the French have a monopoly on just what eludes us in the United States. This city, which most Americans don’t know and others couldn’t place, knows how to stay alive.
We may have spewed the exhaust of American culture into the French atmosphere, but we have yet to export our unique ability to demolish our cities.
A city like Tours doesn’t need a mall. It doesn’t need a civic center. It doesn’t need a spokesman dressed in a silly cape or a slogan as daft as it is ineffective. It is a city not much bigger than Waterbury, CT, and perhaps not even as clever. But it caresses its visitors and seduces them to its broad, clean boulevards and cozy, crepuscular alleys.
It has endured the Vikings and the Moors, the Black Death, the English and the Nazis. It will endure the pestilence of American culture just as effectively.
Some day, perhaps, a wiser urban master may look across to cities like Tours and find therein the secrets to resurrecting cities like Waterbury. Then we may understand what Tours understood long ago: There are limits to the number of hills to which you can flee. Sooner or later, you have to hunker down and build on what you’ve got.
Written by Tracey O’Shaughnessy. c. Republican-American, 2000