Deux décas

The winter that C and I began dating, I decided to buy a toaster oven. We were both living in campus apartments for graduate students. The apartment kitchens came with a range and refrigerator; any other kitchen equipment was up to us. I had brought plates and bowls and utensils and, I think, a hand mixer West with me the year before, when Madame Mère and I had driven from the right to left coasts. Why I decided that I would acquire a toaster oven I no longer remember.

Why isn't important, because I didn't buy one. I didn't buy one because, on the day that C went with me to get one, he stopped in the kitchen appliances aisle, turned to me, and said: Why do you need a toaster oven when I already have one?

Just like Bogie and Bacall, I know. But when we began deciding that we didn't need duplicates of household appliances, that's when we knew, I think, that we were heading towards setting up housekeeping. That was 18 years ago.

We didn't bring the toaster oven (we had replaced it in the meantime with a newer model) to France because, of course, American kitchen appliances don't work in French kitchens. Different electrical current or voltage or, at any rate, a different-looking plug. (In our relationship, I'm then one who knows where the train is going; C's the one who understands how it gets there.) Nor did we bring a coffee pot. We're not big coffee drinkers--C has always abjured hot liquids, and I drink tea all day long. But what we found when we moved here was that we could order a petit déca--a tiny decaf espresso--in a café, or after dinner out, and that we enjoyed sitting over it, enjoyed the whole quiet coffee ritual.

So we started looking at espresso machines. There are about 139 varieties on sale, everything from gorgeous Italian-designed stainless models that do everything but hand you a fresh croissant with your coffee, to lilac plastic machines that take up less space on your (already small) kitchen plan de travail and stick to handing out espresso, neat. Last summer we made several trips to Darty, the French appliance store, to examine various models, and we talked to our friends for recommendations. It was a long process because C likes to make decisions carefully, and because we were espresso machine novices (how many bars? how much pressure? capsules or not, and if so, what kind?), and because the local Darty is 45 minutes away.

The summer turned into early fall while we were still trying to figure out bars and pressure and capsules. Another element began to sidle into our espresso maker conversations: the plug question. None of the machines we had seen would work in an American kitchen. They were all wired (or magicked, as I think of it) for European kitchens. So if we bought a European machine it would be inutile in our Stateside life.

We came over in the summer of 2007, after more than a year's worth of planning and conniving and cajoling. C's contract brought us for two years. The moment we arrived--from the hardship-posting heat of Washington, DC to the lovely dry heat of our hillside, with cool evenings and open windows and no mosquitoes--we learned that several of C's American colleagues had been able easily to extend their two year contract to four or even five years. Et voilà, we thought, and we settled in for the duration. Happily ever after in our village, at least until the girls could finish lycée and go off to university.

And then. The economy collapsed.

We stayed the course.

It collapsed again.

We did some figuring, and stayed the course.

Again.

And then we started rethinking the espresso machine.

We've struggled for months now with the decision. C's contract won't be renewed; he could stay on, but on very different terms, and there wouldn't be a job waiting in America when he got back. We would have to move house, move village. I don't have the right visas to work in Europe, and, even if I did, my collection of diplomas doesn't mean a whole lot in France. The girls will be ready to start high school next September; if we're going to make a move, this seems the time to do it. So we're going home.

We'll go in the summer, as we came, and try not to notice the difference in climate too much. Life at La Bastiole will go on til we close the gates and hand Jules the keys. We are sorry--no, we are heartbroken--to leave this good life. The saving grace is that we've had this moment, and that the four of us will have it to remember together.

Today is C's birthday. Later this afternoon I'll pick up the gâteau aux trois chocolats that I ordered from Gilbert at the boulangerie, and we'll have it tonight for dessert, after some salad and linguine with truffle sauce (wish us luck with the truffle). The first birthday of his that we celebrated together was in my graduate student apartment, without a toaster oven; after that year, and ever since, we've shared the toaster oven and everything else, and we've come, on our best days, to think the same thoughts without need of speech, and babble the same speech without need of meaning. Next year we'll mark this day on a different continent, in the same time zone and even area code as much our famille éloignée. But it will still be the four of us, and, even more, the two of us, at the table, and that thought is what makes leaving La Bastiole bearable. That, and knowing that if we start the research now, by next February we might have bought an espresso machine. Then after dinner we'll have deux décas and remember this.

Telling it slant

It has been brought to my attention that I may have made some uncharitable comments about Jules last week. Uncharitable, maybe; true, nevertheless. However, truth is a complicated creature, and so is Jules.

Friday Jules and Madame invited us to dinner. Don't come too early, he told me in the afternoon. He had stopped by the house to apologize for the power being out. But it's not out, I said, showing him the digital clock on the oven. You must have turned it back on, he said. Let me look at the fuse box.

It was futile to explain that I had not touched the fuse box and that the power had not so much as blinked. He was already kneeling on the floor in the electrical closet, flipping switches on and off. When he was satisfied that the power was in fact on, he stood up and backed out the back door, trying not to leave too much dirt (he had been out in the mud that surrounds the replanted olivier) on the floor. Don't come too early tonight, he said. We're not terribly organized.

We had been up to the big house for drinks after Epiphany, just before Jules and Madame went back to Paris. Jules is a different person as a host: warm, funny, expansive, gracious. It is bad form to talk dirt about the workers over a drink, so he tells stories about his grandparents, his trips to America when he was a young man, his daughters and grandchildren. And he tells us how remarkable we are and the girls are, which is always easy to listen to. When you came, you could not speak a word, pas un seut mot, of French, and now, look at you! Incroyable!

Then Madame chimes in with, And they know more about the area than people who have lived here for years. The way they have adjusted to living in a foreign country, and especially how they put up with living with the French, c'est vraiment formidable.

Leaving aside the decades of our lives that we have both devoted to studying French, it is nonetheless flattering. That night we talked about truffles--the truffle season is upon us--where to find them, how to buy them. C and I were planning to go to the marché aux truffes in the next village on the weekend. Jules and Madame asked us to buy them a truffle if we found any. And then we came back down the terraces, and Jules and Madame left for Paris early the next morning.

Friday night we sat down to dinner at 9.30 with Jules and Madame and another set of neighbors. The first course, served at room temperature, was a bowl of what looked like green beans tossed with canned tuna. Tuna and haricots verts are a familiar combination from salade niçoise, so, though I'd never thought to have the two on their own without the rest of the salade, I was happy to take a serving.

An aside: the risk, when dining en famille with a French person, is that something will end up on your plate that, while it is well within the parameters of the ordinary French diet, will require an American, even a fairly broad-dieted American, to move the goalposts back a bit. I was once served a whole barracuda which still sported its eyes and, more alarmingly, its teeth. Also, a pâté made out of cod liver.

So green beans tossed with tuna fish seemed pretty tame. Even though the tuna looked, well, it looked like cat food. The canned tuna spectrum is significantly wider in France than it is in the States. There is canned tuna that comes marinated in extra-virgin olive oil in a beautiful yellow tin with green belle-époque script and an etching of Marseilles, and then there is tuna that comes in a plain white and blue tin and looks, when you open the tin, like cat food.

But it didn't have teeth and wasn't known for its DocosaHexaenoic Acid content, so I took a bite.

It wasn't tuna. It was foie gras.

At that moment there was enough rapid French happening at the table that C could lean over to me--his place was across from mine--and say, What is this?

It's foie gras, I replied.

He took another bite. These, he said, are the best green beans I've ever tasted.

I did suggest to him shortly after midnight, when we had come home and were reviewing the evening, that you could mix foie gras with chex mix and that would taste pretty good, too. Or, for that matter, with cat food.

The rest of the evening passed in a blur of poulet à l'estragon, rice, cheeses, chocolate cake, funny stories, and Bordeaux. At one point, after the cheese but before the dessert, Jules put on his 1950 Rock-ola juke box, choosing first a French song from the 1960s, Capri c'est fini, then a Elvis singing Blue Suede Shoes, the Rolling Stones Satisfaction, and, to top it off, Janis Joplin singing The Rose. Jules and Madame took the plates to the kitchen, where Madame stayed, assembling the next course. Jules came back and forth, though, doing a few dance steps on each trip. C helped them while I talked over Mick Jagger to the other neighbors.

All three came back and sat down for dessert, and C threw me a look that said, More to come.

There was. After dessert we had tisanes and coffee in the sitting room and then, at a quarter to midnight, we stood to go. Jules disappeared into the kitchen and came back carrying a small, heavily used, paper bag. He passed it off to C with a studied, mischievous nonchalance. We all kissed goodbye, and the neighbors walked back up the hill while we walked down.

We had gone only a few feet from the door when I made C tell me what was in the bag.

It's a truffle, he said. They found a dealer.

And so, let it be said that Jules is a complicated creature. This truffle set them back a few dozen euros, not a lot compared to the cost of rerouting the drainage away from the dead olive tree, but a lot for something that a pig noses out of the ground. We'd talked about how we wanted to get one, try it, figure out what it was about truffles that made food people so excited. So when Jules and Madame bought truffles for themselves, they bought one for us, too.

C was up early Saturday morning to write a thank you note. I came down and proofread the French before handing it over to the real experts in the house, who corrected errors that neither of us had recognized. Then we mailed the letter up to Paris, where Jules and Madame had gone even earlier Saturday morning. And this week, in between wiping the mud off the dogs' paws and trying to find a place to park between the ouvriers' camionettes and brouettes méchaniques and tarps and piles of stone and the concrete mixer--in between all that, I'll be studying truffle recipes. I know we'll have an omelette scented with truffles, and I'm thinking about a risotto, maybe some pasta, maybe just a fresh baguette, toasted a little, with some of our olive oil and a few shavings of truffe. All courtesy of Jules. La vérité, she is so complicated.

Oui, on peut

The model in the bubble on the billboard near the Collège des vignes has been replaced a few times since I last mentioned her, with ads for Christmas tree sellers and hardware stores and, for a week, an ad for a restaurant that actually left off the restaurant's name. Location, check; new menu, check; photo of a chef and waitress who looked more like a female Peter Lorre than might have been entirely relaxing over dinner, check; name of restaurant, oops.

Yesterday when I took the girls to school there was another new ad, and I had to check with E and G to make sure that we had seen the same thing. The billboard is advertising a Chevrolet SUV, a Captiva. The big black diesel guzzler was prominently pictured, and, across the top of the sign, we read: Jusqu'au 28 février, le TVA disparaît. The TVA is a hefty tax that the French pay on most purchases; if it's not applied for the next month, as the sign says, that could be a big savings. The next line on the sign was printed in large red letters and it said: Yes we can.

That's when I asked if they had just seen what I saw. They had. It was in English.

The folks at Chevy France have hopped on the America-is-cool-again bandwagon. Can you imagine a French Chevrolet ad campaign in 2003 using the tag line Mission Accomplished? Neither can I.

But the question is: yes we can what? Yes we can save money on our quatre quatres? Yes we can be just like the Americans and drive great big cars? (Has anybody, anybody at all, at Chevy France read the economic news recently? Any articles about, oh, maybe, Detroit? It's hard to get a driver's licence in France; surely people who do are smart enough to sort these things out.)

Of course the point is not SUVs or emissions or gas prices. Chevy France is using Obama's campaign slogan to convey optimism, a fresh approach, the willingness to change. Buy this car in the next month, and you, too, will be cool, new, hopeful; hell, you might even be handsome. Yes we can is a profoundly American sentiment. If the French tried to say something like that, it would come out as: Maybe we will, but first we're going to have a cigarette. Or, We might want to, but it won't work out. Or, We could, but it would involve unseating thousands of government employees who would then all go out on strike and bring the country to a standstill, so let's have lunch instead. (In fact, there's a grève this week in France--protesting some of the changes that Sarkozy wants to make in the way the country works--that is so widespread and well-organized that is has its own website.)

Les Rêves de mon père is number 34 on the Amazon France bestseller list, right between one of vampire novelist Stephenie Meyer's lesser known works, Les âmes vagabondes, and the Guide officiel du film Twilight, which is probably not the strangest place that the new president is ever going to find himself. Just before the inauguration, a French edition of Obama's latest came out. I came across it at the store the other day and it made me smile. Not just because it was a book of the president's in French--though that, too--but because of the way the title translated. Le Changement: nous pouvions y croire. The Change: we are able to believe in it. Which may be why Chevy France went with the English on their ad.

L'Olivier

Jules is here for the week. He and Madame have come down from Paris to escape the cold and to look after some work that Jules is having done in our garden. He's often having work done in our garden. His pattern is: begin a project; change his mind midway through the project about what he wants the men he's hired to do; decide the project is too expensive or the workers are too expensive or the weather is too bad or he doesn't have the proper permits; pile the project debris in the corner of the garden; wait one month and begin again.

This week's projects include finishing the pool house, finishing the stone wall, fence, and hedge at the bottom of the garden, and redirecting the drainage from the house around an olive tree. Four men, more or less full time, one small- and one medium-sized backhoe, a couple of large trucks, a brouette méchanique, which is a motorized wheelbarrow, do we have those in America? --and Jules, helping. Helping looks like this: Jules in his oiled canvas coat, green wellies, slouch hat, corduroys, old Façonnable shirt, and work gloves, telling the ouvriers where to dig the trench and non non non non! attend attend attend! wait wait wait! you have to be careful, mon dieu, watch what you're doing there, you'll screw up the whole thing. Arms wave. Hands wring.

It's not easy working for Jules. Eventually everyone whom he hires talks to me about it. Olivier and I made friends over the fact that we both had to put up with Jules; at the end of last summer, though, Olivier had had enough after 15 years of being told that he was heavy, lazy, and slow--Jules' standard characterization--and took himself off. The current set of workers are new to me, though not to Jules, and we are still sussing each other out.

One of the 35 olive trees in the garden died about six months ago. At least, to the unschooled, non-Julesian eye, it looks dead. No leaves, brittle branches, but what do I know? Maybe olive trees routinely resurrect themselves. Jules spent a good deal of time messing about with it last summer, when it was perhaps dying and not yet manifestly dead. He sprayed it with various poisons. He dug a low trench around it. He had the ouvrier who owns the small backhoe, M. Loglie, dig a meter-deep and foot-wide trench leading down the hill, away from the tree, because Jules had decided that the problem was the tree was getting too much water.

I found M. Loglie standing in the trench one day, with Jules shouting into his cell phone nearby. When I raised my eyebrows at M. Loglie, he grinned. This is how we work here. We do a job, then we undo, then we do it again. C'est un vrai cirque. It's a real circus.

The trench didn't help, and while Jules was here over Christmas, he spent a couple of afternoons circling the (now clearly) dead tree. I lurked in the kitchen. If he sees me, that's at least half an hour gone. He was hatching a plan, and this week, he has carried it out.

First, M. Loglie, his son, and their friends dug a large trench from the side of the house near the olive tree, the olivier, to the edge of the garden. Huge piles of thick mud; you may have heard that there's been some rain in France recently. Jules walked back and forth along the trench in his country squire outfit, directing. More there, less here, what are you doing, non non non not like that. When he was distracted, I slipped out to go to the grocery store.

When I came back, the olive tree was laying on its side, dug up. Oh, I thought, how sensible. He's given up on the dead tree, and dug it up so we won't have a stump.

I was out hiking all day yesterday. The girls and I came home after the ouvriers had left for the day and Jules had gone back up the terraces to Madame and his scotch. I noticed when I came in that the trench had been filled in and the mud distributed more or less evenly around it. Then, walking back and forth in the kitchen--mail, groceries, answering machine, dogs--I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

It was the olivier, replanted. In the same spot, but, if you looked closely and remembered well--if you had, in fact, spent some time walking around the tree and listening to a discourse in rapid French on whether or not the tree was dead--you would notice that the tree was planted less deeply. More of the trunk was exposed, a good six inches more. Other than that, same dead tree, same spot. It was like a Steven Wright joke: someone dug up the tree in my garden and replanted it in the same place.

An hour or so ago, I saw M. Loglie's son when he came back to work after lunch. Ça va? he said.

Ça va, ça va, I replied. No rain today.

Non, non, il fait beau. We both looked up at the blue sky.

And, I said, no trees to replant today?

He met my eye then, and twinkled. Not yet, he said. But you never know. Maybe this afternoon.

Foreign Relations

I am talking to Gilbert, at the boulangerie.

Why weren't you in Washington this week, for the inauguration?

My invitation was lost in the mail, I say. (My level of French has progressed to being able to make feeble jokes.)

I order my baguette--don't say, pas trop bien cuite, say, pas cuite, Gilbert tells me--and, while I'm counting out change, he looks over my shoulder and says to the squat elderly lady behind me that Madame est Américaine, and La Poste lost her invitation to the inauguration.

Américaine, she says. Et vous êtes contente?

I glance back at her and nod, Mais oui, très contente, very happy, and finish counting out my change.

The floodgates open. Moi, je suis trop contente pour vous, pour nous, pour le monde entier. I was 14 years old when the Americans came, when they liberated us, and I have always loved America, loved Americans. They saved us, you saved us. But these last years, they have been atroce. We did not know what had happened to America, where it had gone. This man, Bush, he was un catastrophe, un désastre, pour vous, pour nous, pour le monde entier. And after Clinton had left everything très fort, l'économie et tout, and then Bush came and the economy is ruined, there are wars, the environment, c'est un catastrophe partout, a worldwide catastrophe. But now Obama, il est si beau, si jeune, si intelligent, et maintenant, j'ai encore de l'espoir. Now I have hope again. Félicitations, madame. Je suis trop contente.

Gilbert has gone long since to help the man behind my new friend, and I am standing in front of her listening and trying to follow. She is a short woman with hair dyed orange, in a house dress with a hand knit cardigan and a jacket over that; a striped scarf, also hand knit, is looped a couple of times around her neck. She peers at me out of plastic-rimmed glasses, and around her slightly magnified green eyes there is a quantity of pale green sparkly eyeshadow. She carries her sturdy leather pocketbook in one hand and her straw market basket in the other, and leans forward, toward me, while she speaks, so intense and emphatic in her bearing that I wonder if she's going to throw her arms around me.

I have been weepy all week but manage this time not to well up; it's probably the effort of concentrating. I think of this woman as a young girl, only a little older than E and G, living through the Occupation, and I think of the fear that she must have breathed in and out every day, the neighbors who disappeared, the men who didn't come back. I think of her in her mother's kitchen when the neighbors come with the rumors in August 1944, and I think of them peeking out from behind the lace curtains, afraid, anxious, and yet thinking, maybe, maybe this time. And then the sound of the soldiers in the distance, the jeeps, the boots, and finally the sight of the soldiers themselves, and this young girl with the green eyes standing on the roadside and watching as these men come into her village and dispel the fear while they pass out chocolate and hope. And how all her life she's carried this memory, and now she feels hopeful again.

Merci de me dire tout ça, Madame, I say. Thank you for telling me this.

Couette

Do you know David Sedaris' essay In the Waiting Room? If you don't, you can (and should, it's funny) read it here. In the essay, Sedaris writes about what it's like to live in France and not speak the language fluently, about how you can find yourself in situations that you did not entirely foresee.

One day last winter I sat down to work on the baby quilt that I was making for the birth of my second filleul. It was already late: the baby was a week or two old. I had managed to finish quilts for my niece and my elder filleul well before they were born, and I had been working and commuting and volunteering raising girls who were younger and needier than they are now and generally running around quite a bit more. Nevertheless. Having less to do meant taking more time to do it in, and I had not yet finished Baby B's quilt. So I sat down with my four inch squares of fabric, many of them already sewn together in strips, and began laying them out on the table in front of me in a pattern.

The squares had come from half a dozen or more different fabrics, each of them with a history. One or two came from a batik dress that Baby B's mother wore in college. Another came from the remnants of a fabric that went into E's bed quilt, that I made for her when she was a toddler. Another came from G's bed quilt, same vintage. One came from my grandmother's stash of quilting fabric--it was one of my favorites, blue printed with cowboys and cacti, clearly printed at the peak of Bonanza's popularity. And there were new fabrics, too, some provençal prints that I had bought here. The fabric in the quilt would tell Baby B stories about his family, about how he was connected to the world.

As I sorted the squares and the strips I saw quickly that I had not cut or sewn them all evenly. The squares were all roughly four inches by four inches, but the emphasis there should be on roughly. (I am not a straight line person; I cut the fabric to get the fabric cut so I can move on, perfection and right angles be damned. This is sometimes frustrating for the engineer who lives with me and believes that 90 degrees should be 90 degrees and not 103 or 86.) As I sorted, I trimmed here and there, where a square was truly lopsided or veering towards the not at all square even if you squinted.

Violette, our sometime housekeeper, arrived about then. We chatted--she spoke locally-accented French without moving her lips and I tried to follow--for a few minutes, and then I showed her what I was doing. Instead of nodding and moving on to the vacuuming, which I what I had expected, she sat down opposite me at the table.

The squares aren't square, she said.

Yes, I know, but when I sew them together, it will be good enough.

She humphed and said something quickly while looking down at the not-square squares. Not being able to see her expression robbed me of any clues to what she was saying, so I went with Hmmm.

Then she picked up the scissors and ruler and began to trim. It won't do. You have to start over.

I was startled. But I reviewed my options. I could contradict her and point out that I had made quilts before, I knew what I was doing, and she should carry on with the housecleaning. Or I could agree that the quilt needed some work (which, really, it did) and start doing it. My French was not then, isn't now, and probably never will be fluent enough to win an argument with a native speaker. Violette was certain that this needed to be done, and I knew her well enough to be sure that I would not dissuade her from it.

And that is how I came to pass the afternoon sitting with my housekeeper and working on Baby B's quilt. Violette instructed me to pick out the stitches while she began recutting the squares. (The vacuuming--what vacuuming?) After a couple of hours, she needed to leave to pick up her husband. I began putting things away, and so did she. When we were finished, she picked up the sewing bag and announced: I'll take this home and finish it, and bring it back next week.

Oh no, I said, c'est pas nécessaire de faire ça. You don't have to do that.

Non. I'll do it. (Having seen my work, Violette clearly didn't think much of my abilities.) I'll bring it back Monday.

And then, like David Sedaris, I heard myself say, D'accord. Okay. It's the most useful word in the French language, because nine-tenths of the time, the conversations that people have with you don't really require you to offer your opinion or even give any information. People are generally more than content to have you simply agree with them. If they need more information, they tend to find a different way to phrase the question; if they've asked you whether you want the meat or the fish and you've just said okay, then they'll ask you if you want the fish. If you keep saying okay, you're all set.

So I said to Violette, D'accord, and off she went with the quilt, and off I went to clean the bathrooms. The next week she came back--to get more fabric. She'd laid out the squares and found that there weren't quite enough. Off she went with my box of fabric bits.

Two weeks later I saw her again. She came in carrying my sewing bag and the box of bits. She set everything on the table and then, slowly and ceremoniously, pulled the completed quilt top out of the bag. She had recut the squares to be truly square, sewn them into straight strips, and assembled the strips into a rectangle. Everything was plumb. It was lovely.

I admired it, taken aback, of course, puzzled, bien sûr, and touched. She had made this for the pleasure of making it, but she had also, it seemed to me, made it out of kindness, gentilesse. I didn't have a mother or an aunt handy to show me how to do a proper job, so she had stepped in.

Violette was pleased that I liked her work, and it was only with difficulty that I prevented her taking it away again to finish. She wanted me to give her the trim, the batting, and the backing fabric, and was looking forward to putting the quilt together herself. What finally persuaded her to leave the quilt with me was my telling her that it was for my second godson, and I wanted to have done the work on it myself. Once I managed to convey that in my faltering French, she gave a short nod and acquiesced.

Then she spent the next two months asking me, every visit, how the quilt was coming along, if I'd finished it yet, if she could see it. She advised me--a lot--about the borders, and about the backing, and clucked a little over my decision to quilt it simply and without an intricate pattern. When I finished it, she inspected it carefully and pronounced it satisfactory. Next time, you'll quilt a design, she said, shaking her finger at me. But this, c'est pas mal. Pas mal.

Which is about as good as it gets, coming from a French person.

The quilt now hangs on the end of Baby B's bed in America. He's a year old this week. When I began his couette, I thought that the story would be about the fabrics, and my having made it in France, the country where he was born. But the story unspooled differently than I had foreseen, and what we tell him now will not only be about the fabrics coming from California and Washington and North Carolina and France, not only about our families being together in all those places. It will also be about Violette, and speaking French, and how you can communicate without many words. And how it helps if one of those words is d'accord.

Here again

Sixteen winters ago I was doing my dissertation research at the Archives nationales in Paris. My apartment--calling it an apartment is being generous--had no television, and the Internet was still not much more than a twinkle in Al Gore's eye. I did not think that I would be able to see Bill Clinton's first inauguration. C, at home in California, had been planning to record it on our VCR for me to watch later. But the morning of January 20, he called me to say that our VCR had been stolen, along with his car and, oddly, several pairs of shoes. I remember being as distressed about the loss of the VCR, and thus of the planned tape, as I was about the break-in.

Off I went to the archives, then, and to my 200 year old trial records. Midway through the morning, one of the other American graduate students stopped by my desk to ask if I were going to watch the inauguration. I explained.

Come to my place, she said. Her apartment had more than one room (a real luxury for graduate student housing in central Paris), and she had a television with cable.

We all left the archives early that afternoon--the noontime Washington ceremony happens here, of course, at six. I remember it being a large group, but can't remember who was in it. I can't even remember the name of the person whose apartment it was, or where the apartment was. All I remember are two things. I remember toasting the departure of the outgoing president--I still know where I was sitting in the room when the screen showed the helicopter taking off from the east side of the Capitol. We were all young and, in the innocence of youth, thought that George Bush's invasion of Iraq had been imperialism of the worst sort, and that he was hopelessly, impossibly unhip and inarticulate.

The other thing I remember happened on the way to the apartment. Our pack of budding historians had left the archives and we were strolling down one of the main streets in the Marais. The plan was to pick up one more fellow-traveler on our way to the metro station. She was the companion of an older student, and an Ivy League professor whose books I had read as an undergraduate. I was intimidated at the prospect of meeting her. I had gone directly from my undergraduate college to graduate school, and I was still in awe of faculty.

The professor was sitting outside with a drink at a café, reading a newspaper. When she saw us coming down the sidewalk towards her, she jumped to her feet and came towards us dancing--dancing, on the Paris sidewalk, a short, middle-aged American woman, wearing drapey dark clothes and an exotic patterned scarf--and singing, in full voice, Happy Days Are Here Again.

Which is what I thought about last night when, during President Obama's speech, a friend sent me this link. The four of us were sitting together around the fireplace, watching the inauguration on BBC World, drinking champagne and eating chili and cornbread. A few minutes later, the phone rang. Family and friends were together watching and wanted to touch base. When I answered, the voice that came down the line said: Happy day.

Happy day, I responded. Here's to many more.