Paul from Paris

The Comédie Française, Paris

On 17 February 1673, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin died. He was better known under his stage name, Molière, and he was 51.

It doesn’t have a happy ending, but this is one of my favorite Molière stories.

Molière was a playwright and an actor: he starred in the plays he wrote.

The last play Molière wrote was Le Malade imaginaire (in English: The Imaginary Invalid). It’s a serious play, about love and marriage and choosing a partner wisely. It’s also a funny comedy about a miserly hypochondriac, Argan. Molière interpreted this role.

Molière died on the job. During a performance, the imaginary invalid, Molière, was struck by a very real coughing fit. He collapsed. But then he continued with the performance. Backstage, Molière was again struck by a coughing fit. He was taken home, where he died.

By all accounts, Molière suffered from tuberculosis, for which treatment options in 1673 were limited. I think that Molière’s death was heroic: suffered while acting in a play he wrote, with the irony that the imaginary invalid actually was deathly ill.

One of the legacies of Molière is the Comédie Française, started a few years after Molière’s death, in 1680.

Claude Lévi-Strauss has died, a few weeks short of age 101.

I admire Lévi-Strauss because he led a transatlantic life. He did anthropologic field work and teaching in Brazil, and subsequently taught in the United States.

I also admire Lévi-Strauss because he was a superb writer.

His most well-known and most accessible work is Tristes Tropiques. English translations usually keep the French title, which literally means “sad tropics”; one English edition entitled it “World on the Wane”, which captured the work’s spirit or feeling.

Tristes Tropiques is accessible because it need not be read cover-to-cover. The casual reader will find selected chapters worthwhile, or can put the book down, then resume it later. It’s also accessible because its prose is beautiful to read, although its structure and the ideas Lévi-Strauss expresses are intricate and complex. For those who are short on time or attention span, I’d recommend the first three chapters, which have enough content to inspire a full and stimulating college or executive education class.

I’ve read and recommend another book by Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage. The book’s title is usually translated in English as “The Savage Mind”, but the French is a pun: it also means “The Wild Pansy”. To drive the point home, French editions show the flower on the book cover. It’s a typically French work, heavy on theory, in this case structuralism.

Levi-Strauss’ death has been widely reported in France. He was arguably the last well-known French intellectual. There are others, especially in biology or physics, who are prominent but not familiar to the reading public.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall passed away last month, at home in Santa Fe.

I’m grateful to Hall for The Silent Language, The Hidden Dimension, and The Dance of Life. (Hall wrote other books, but these are the ones I know.) And I’m indebted to Hall for expressing novel ideas clearly, and for using evidence from everyday life.

As a modest gesture in memory of Edward T. Hall, this post aims to spread an observation about time and life in France: what sets the rhythm or beat of French life today is the school calendar.

I think that others have made this observation before me (and I’d be happy to cite them if they’d send me references). Original or not, here are the points that I’d like to make about the pace of French life:

• The year really begins with the rentrée, the “re-entry” period when the school year begins. In terms of how people think and act, this means something. It certainly means more than the start of the calendar year or a religious calendar (with the possible exception of rosh hashanah, the Jewish new year, which falls soon after the French rentrée). It’s also an odd inversion of the agricultural year: the beginning coincides with fall harvests, not plantings.
• The rentrée is meaningful for all families with school-age children. But it’s extended to basically all of society. It’s when publishers release new titles. It’s a time when people make resolutions (to lose weight, to join a gym, to subscribe to a magazine), when business and government make plans. It’s part clean slate, part new beginning, part the building of a new level or the writing of a new chapter.
• The school year lasts about ten months, just a bit longer than a human pregnancy. This makes necessary a summer recess (in July and August) and a tradition of summer vacation: without a recess, there couldn’t be a rentrée and a new beginning.

As a follow-up on yesterday’s post on visions for the future of Paris, I wanted to recommend an outstanding book on the city’s history: Norma Evenson’s Paris: A Century of Change, 1878-1978 (published by Yale University Press).

If I were allowed to choose one book on Paris (for a sojourn on a desert island, for a mission to Mars, or to introduce a Martian to the city), this would be that book. Here’s why:

• Through a series of painstakingly researched essays, dense with footnotes, Evenson paints a portrait of Paris as a living city.
• Each essay deals with an aspect of urban planning: commuting, where people live, building heights, automobile traffic. Each essay is readable alone, in a single sitting.
• Paris is shown as in evolution. The century-long scope is ideal. 1878 is close enough to us to be comprehensible, and the 1978 cut-off date permits Evenson to present major post-war changes, especially the growth of the periphery.
• Evenson’s scholarship is remarkable. For those with time and patience, her notes and bibliographic references help researchers to pick up where she left off.
• The book is fun: Evenson tells stories well.
• The illustrations and photographs have been chosen with care, like courtroom exhibits.
• It’s now 30 years old and has stood the test of time: it’s as informative and enjoyable today as it was when released. It may now be out of print, but I’ve seen it in architectural bookstores and in libraries.