Seeing My Aix: French Boot Camp Part II
“For him tourism is not the objective presentation of the interesting features of a place but the subjective unfolding of what occurs in his soul. It is an internal tourism: the exploration of one’s sensations, one’s moods, one’s fantasies.”
–Dominque Fernandez on Stendahl’s Memories d’un Touriste*
“Even in the columns of a newspaper, Willa Cather is very frank about nostalgia. As life goes on, loyalty to the past is to become an ever more important element in her writing. Indeed, the last short story she ever wrote, “The Best Years,” is almost surely in part about…a ‘certain small brother’…to whom she had given her heart’s affection.”
—George N. Kates on Willa Cather, 1956
Nostalgia can both under and over-deliver. After our inspired weekend in Arles, I made my way deeper into the past, taking a train through time to my long-missed Aix-en-Provence, where I studied 1999-2000 and to which I hadn’t returned since 2006. In my imagination, Aix is the one that got away, the grass—or marché—that is always greener. It was so formative for me to learn a second language at age 19 that there is something of a cultural umbilical cord between me and this place, where the contrast between my hibernal life in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan up to that point could not have been more stark.
But this wasn’t about me! For Chapter Two of the kids’ “language boot camp,” I wanted to simulate living in Aix once again. The plan was for Bret and I to work from home while William and Cordelia attended a multi-sport camp at Country Club Aixois. At ten times the cost of camp in Banyuls, it was still half New York prices, and it seemed like a safe bet. Home was an Airbnb near center city, and not only did it prove to be a gorgeous find but an odd and exciting four-story layout with bedrooms on the first three floors, the toilet on two, the shower on three, and the kitchen on four, with a big bright table for dining and work, plus a terrace atop a precipitous flight of stairs. With creative genius, its lovely owner-architects Gregory and Claire had been resourceful in raising two daughters there before moving just outside Aix for more space. One beautiful aspect of travel is seeing how others make life work.
To top things off, our rooftop terrace overlooked the 12th Century Cathédrale Saint-Sauveur d’Aix-en-Provence.
That week, however, I struggled with the tension between needing to work (or parent) and my desire to turn back time. Revisiting one’s past is such an abstract, private, and navel-gazing experience, it can be hard to share with either spouse or kids, and let’s face it, the ”Here’s where I used to always…” vignettes rarely translate. (Maybe only one’s mom can stand it!) I’d already tortured Bret thus back in 2006, when I first brought him to Aix after getting engaged in Lyon. It would have been egregious to re-enact that tour de nostalgie, so I didn’t even try this time, and yet I still felt a deep need to personally explore what remained of my memories. To that end, I treated myself to a little solo time in the unabashed name of nostalgia (a word dignified by its etymology meaning a “complicated longing for home) between camp dropoff and work.
Looking back, it’s clear I’d had two lives in Aix, a highly governed routine with my strict host family and my private schoolday life. My host parents, whom we had plans to see, had sadly (for me) sold the beautiful home I’d lived in and downsized to a lovely apartment in town. The first day after dropoff, I ran to see the old house, peering through the gates and cypresses for glimpses of the yard and my room window whose view once staggered me. I ran a joint-jarring few miles downhill home which put me in mind of Henry James’s quote on Arles, “the streets…were paved with villainous little sharp stones, making all exercise penitential."
Multi-sport camp dropoff at Club Aixois.
My Narnia-like passage between worlds
The next day I retraced my steps through town in search of sense memories as my actual memory flagged. Then I saw it, the Passage Agard, a tunnel built in 1841 to connect the city’s convent with the Palais de Justice. Today it’s filled with shops and provides the shortest path from the “new” half of town to the Cours Mirabeau, Aix’s mini Champs-Élysées. Little was more romantic to a 19-year-old than this tunnel (housing a Sephora no less!) that channeled me from the duties of school to café-hopping, solo or with friends on the Cours—coffee, Perrier, rosé, repeat.
Successfully transported, I entered the Passage wonderingly and emerged for a brief moment with time travel achieved, taking in the still-familiar sights in the Place Verdun that led to my school, a path I traced now by instinct, putting aside my GPS. Then I bolted right past my now-unrecognizable school—the once peach-colored villa painted a bleak gray and being turned into a spa center of sorts. A splash of cold water, I still squinted through the gates to make out the classroom where, Emily in Paris style, I’d learned about core cultural differences between France and the States. Semi-satisfied and with my self-indulgent time running out, I got over myself and bustled back home to Bret..
Bret with Nicole and Dominque. Young people, take your study abroads! What a gift this pair’s efforts were to me.
Once your host parents, always your host parents. Mid-week we had been invited to lunch with the people who, in one eventful year together, had filled some gaps in my breeding and worked hard on my French. We hadn’t seen each other since they surprised me at our wedding in New York 14 years ago. Ripe with emotion, I went to buy them flowers beforehand and learned I never knew the word for housewarming. An old woman hanging out at the shop taught me the phrase and its history: “pendre la crémaillère,” “to hang the cauldron,” meaning a cauldron filled with food over the resident’s new hearth, customary when a home was finished in the middle ages. Language as time capsule, as conversation piece, as brain food. These were the study abroad sensations I have been missing and seeking for over twenty years.
With orchid in tow, Bret and I walked 15 minutes, another passage through time, to the animated reception of people who’ve married off three children and welcomed six grandbabies in the years since our wedding. Their faces registered the humble contentment of a family accompli. After a delicious, gabby, and jestful lunch, my host mom Nicole insisted on driving us to pick up the kids from the Country Club, where one set of her grandkids normally also go to camp, sparing me the bus ride and making me feel cared for, as if right at home.
At the same time we lunched, Bret was on hold with Delta, irresistibly pushing back his flight to spend a few more days with us and fit in a dinner at Roches Blanches, where a former New York colleague and friend had just moved from Paris after her husband took the hotel’s executive chef position. “Doro” had booked us a table and offered to keep William and Cordelia with her boys, giving us the double gift of a date night and more peer-immersion for the kids. Jazz provided the highlight as we overlooked the Calanques, a marvelous quartet with two (French) female singers who nailed their adorably all-American repertoire with compelling arrangements of “Bobby McGee,” “Georgia On My Mind,” “Summertime,” and “All of Me.”
The next day, Bret’s for-real last, we finished strong with a climb on Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne’s greatest subject and another re-creation from our 2006 trip. It was the kids’ last day of camp as well as the last of the season, and we arrived to a scene of festive awards, counselor roasting, and sugar consumption. Tears sprang to my eyes at William’s protracted good-byes, all tween fist-bumps and promises to see each other next year. After being ignored at length, Bret and I finally extracted them for what turned out to be our best dinner in Aix at Grenache, where the owner most cheerfully waits his own tables. Chapter Daddy officially closed.
Bret left before dawn on Saturday, and we had intended to return to Cassis for a last beachy weekend before Paris. I awoke, alone again with the kids, and knew we couldn’t yet leave Aix. One of the best travel feelings is following one’s heart, throwing out plans and making new ones as the spirit moves. I pivoted with a surge of adrenaline, cancelling my Airbnb in Cassis and reaching out to my host to see if we could stay. No such luck. I quickly found another and packed our four floors furiously as my host dad, a retired fighter pilot, was picking us up at 12:15—on the dot.
The chaotic scene of Dominique meeting my kids while stuffing his car with our worldly goods was endearing in its paternalism, something even grown-up girls need. It reminded me of when he picked me up from the Marseille airport in 1999, as well as how my own dad used to move me in and out of dorms each year. Joking back and forth with the kiddos, testing Cordelia’s French as he always used to test mine, he chauffeured us to his son-in-law’s country estate for a long lunch beside pool, ping pong, and trampoline. Upon my not-so-subtle hint earlier in the week, Nicole had made her secret-recipe tomato and eggplant tarte. (I told her if she gave the recipe to Gotham, we would send her residuals.) We had a special quiet day together, quite as if we did this every weekend, but there was something more in the air. A heightened awareness of time, perhaps—the effect of memory on time past, how fleeting this day together ultimately was, the uncertainty of when and where we would see each other again.
We said our pregnant good-byes, then Dominque drove us to our new home, smack downtown above Gallifet art center and restaurant, which proved to be another miracle Airbnb, sparking many debates over which we’d pick “next time.” Its very chic owners, French Nicolas and British Kate, who speak each other’s languages without accents, are re-creating this old Aix mansion bit by bit. The current effect is dramatic, Oz-like even, as the worn entrance and grand staircase open to reveal a stunning apartment overlooking a courtyard restaurant that tinkles with charm. The gallery was featuring an exciting exhibit of works, He(art) Stories, from Francisca Viudes’ (He)art for (He)art Program out of Nice, and the restaurant served exquisite seasonal garden food. We kind of couldn’t believe our luck.
On Sunday I went to buy train tickets to Paris for the following day, but none were available until Wednesday. Aixtended again! I adjusted our Paris Airbnb and this time our home was mercifully available. But now I needed an organizing principle to do justice to our stolen time, so I glommed onto Aix native Paul Cézanne. Another artist who didn’t receive—nor seem to need—much renown in his lifetime, Cézanne-mania didn’t begin in earnest until Picasso called him his “one and only master.” Today his enormous posthumous fame has made him the poster child of Aix-en-Provence, with cafés and rosé labels and even the merry-go-round bearing his images and name.
We started our program with the short film, Cézanne au Pays d’Aix, playing at the Caumont, where we were also introduced to the jaw-dropping work of French-Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013), who was influenced by Cézanne. The film was so well done, it held both kids’ attention, and I was deeply moved by the life of this good man who wanted to “astonish Paris with an apple.” Something more personal was stirred too, memories of the first time I’d learned intimately about Cézanne from Jill Steenhuis, an acclaimed painter who was my art teacher when I lived in Aix. I found Jill on Instagram and messaged her on the off chance she had a studio in town where we might find her.
Little did I know what this reunion would mean. Jill remembered me well and invited us to spend the next day at her five-acre estate just outside Aix, even offering to come pick us up. We kicked off the day by visiting Cézanne’s studio, paid our daily visit to the trampoline park, then waited for Jill to collect us at the famous 1668 La Fontaine des Quatres-Dauphins.
It turned out Jill’s home was nothing short of a Provençal Eden scattered with olive trees and sculptures and anchored by a studio that her sculptor hubby Serge had re-created to emulate Cézanne’s. (Hers is a tad nicer.) Owing to COVID, Jill and Serge’s three grown sons were living at home, the eldest a sculptor, the middle a sculptor who works with Jill, the youngest a filmmaker whose first project outside of school was a beautiful documentary about his mom, Painting the Invisible. We got a tour inside and out, meeting her 30-year-old horse Danilou and very jealous six-toed Beauceron. We swam, played ping-pong, and even got to watch Jill paint before heading home to pack, for real this time.
With our time in Aix doubled from five to ten days, I was finally satisfied, and it did feel like time to go to Paris, making our way back to New York spiritually, too, by way of a city. Setting up to paint in the courtyard then run out for my regular COVID test* before heading to the train station, Jill called saying she’d found her guest book from my year in Provence as well as my school’s catalog with pictures of me in it. She wanted to show them to me and also drive us to the train, a gift in more ways than one. Our reconnection was now striking me as heaven sent.
*To keep my Pass Sanitaire active, every 72 hours I paid 25 euro to get tested at a pharmacie and refresh my pass for presentation at planes, trains, and cafés.
We got to the station, and our fun very much ended; the train was an hour late, and we waited with eleven bags in the beating sun. It was the official last day of the season, as school started country-wide the next day, and every last seat was taken. I learned we were all booked in different cars, so I was prepared to stand for three hours to stay near the children if needed. Luckily we got three scattered seats in one car and, after cramming our luggage in unlikely spots, braced ourselves for an uncomfortable ride, which it was. How unexpectedly unpleasant the illustrious TGV was on this day, setting up a welcome contrast upon our survival and arrival into Paris. See you there!
A painting of mine from Jill’s class, circa 1999. 2. Me with fellow AUCP students and our theatre teacher. 3. The kids putting brush to paper in the Gallifet courtyard. 4. William and Cordelia deciding to gift Jill their still lifes.
My dining buddies showing off Aix at night and. Cordelia’s improved wardrobe after the trip’s second successful shopping trip thanks to an end-of-season sale at Catimini.
“The longer one stays in the south, the more suggestive the olive tree becomes. It is such a gracious and humble tree; it struggles so hard and patiently against circumstances the most adverse, and yet, like the people who love it, manages always to preserve in its contour, no matter how stony the soil, or how heavy the white dust hangs on its leaves, something of grace and beauty.”
—Willa Cather