Le Divorce by Diane Johnson

Author:Diane Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dutton
Published: 1997-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

23

“Yonder,” I said to myself, “some poor wretch may be struggling on in grief, or wrestling with death . . . the certain end which brings neither consolation nor peace.”

—Adolphe

IT WAS SOON after my birthday that I stayed one Thursday night at Edgar’s. He had gone on the last train to Avignon, and I was lazing around his apartment, trying to read a book I found on his nightstand. (Tocqueville. “I am ashamed to say I have never read him,” he said. “To confess, I was never much interested in the United States, I just thought them a lost cause. But now that I have become the friend of an American, I find it fascinating. He has an enviable gift for aphorism. And what do you make of this, Isabel? ‘In France, simple tastes, orderly manners, domestic affections, and the attachment which men feel to the place of their birth, are looked upon as great guarantees of the tranquillity and happiness of the State. But in America nothing seems to be more prejudicial to society than these virtues.’ ”)

We had been talking about whether American movies should be kept out of France. Edgar thought they should.

“If they’re so bad, why do people go see them? If you love peace and order so much,” I objected.

“This is an essential difference: You Americans think that if people want something, it must be allowed. Then you punish yourselves with ugliness for indulging what you actually despise. It is that paradox that will destroy you, or so says the philosopher.

“We French know that people want not what is good but what is easy, and to give in to the lazy side of human nature is not so admirable. We give permission to be saved from our worst nature, or to challenge our better selves, to put it that way.”

“France is groaning with luxury,” I pointed out. “It is much more luxurious and gourmandish than we are.”

“Well, and then we reward ourselves for our good character.”

Such discussions made me uneasy. Was I a compendium of all American faults and virtues after all? When Edgar had gone, I got to reading Tocqueville myself. Tocqueville says, “The happy and the powerful do not go into exile.” Was this true? Applying it to Roxy and me?

Eventually I fell asleep. When I woke up it was morning. I didn’t worry about this, as Roxy doesn’t expect me to be home nights if we haven’t prearranged that I was needed to babysit, and she doesn’t check as to whether I am. I sometimes didn’t go down to her apartment to have breakfast until after she had left for the crèche with Gennie, so she didn’t always expect to see me in the morning.

Paris is clean and wet in the mornings with the ministrations of street sweepers in bright green uniforms who slosh the flooded gutters with their plastic brooms and make little river dams out of pieces of old carpet. As I came up out of the metro at almost

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