Inside a Pearl by Edmund White

unless it was happening to other Americans: a hit play where the audience had to vote every night whether to behead Marie Antoinette or not? No interest. The reopening after many years of the Musée Guimet, one of the great collections of Asian art? No interest. Fashion was interesting, since anyone could buy it and everyone would eventually be affected by it. A lawsuit by Margaret Mitchell’s heirs against Régine Deforges, a French woman who’d adapted the plot of
Gone with the Wind
to France during World War II (the Nazis were the Yankees), was interesting since it dealt with an American classic and an American legal victory, though it was shortlived as Ms. Deforges later won her appeal.
    Fortunately I didn’t understand the limitations of my role as American cultural reporter in France until after I’d read through hundreds of books and looked up thousands of words—many of them time and again. At one point it occurred to me that I had to look up the same word five times before I’d learned it. And of course I nearlyalways got the gender wrong. Jane Birkin, an English actress who sang in French in a high, squeaky voice, in interviews always confused the
le
and the
la
and French comedians impersonating her always used this habit of hers as the basis of their send-ups. I remember once saying
la mariage
and a five-year-old corrected me, “But it’s
le marriage
.” Quickly, her mother, blushing, whispered to the little girl, “Don’t correct Monsieur. He’s a professor.”
    In the winters it was gray and would rain every day, but my apartment was snug and had good heat. I lay on my couch, actually a daybed, and read. I had just two rooms. My bedroom was twice the size of the double bed with tall French windows looking out on the slanting roof of the Saint-Louis-en-l’Île church with its upended stone volute like a colossal snail that had broken through the rain-slicked tiles and was inching down toward the gutters at geological speed. The sitting room was larger, with two windows, a desk, a basket chair, a dining room table, and the daybed in an alcove. The apartment had been the study of the landlady’s deceased husband, an epigraphist, and on the walls held up by metal brackets were ancient stones inscribed by the Romans, marble fragments he’d excavated in Algeria.
    Language problems guided me in my choice of friends. Women, especially old bourgeois women, spoke more clearly than their male or younger counterparts. The very speech patterns (emphatic, precise) I might have found annoying in English came to me in French as a blessing. My favorite old woman was my landlady, Madame Pflaum, an Austrian who’d lived in Paris since the 1930s. She had me to tea with her best friend. The two women had known each other for over forty years but still addressed each other as
vous
and referred to each other as “Madame Pflaum” and “Madame Dupont.” Perhaps because she was a foreigner, Madame Pflaum spoke her adopted language with unusual care.
    At the gym I met Barbara, a girl with a pretty, chubby face and an almost neurotic level of curiosity, and I cherished her for her clear enunciation, her avoidance of slang, and her linguistic patience. Like any good teacher, Barbara took my cloudy, twisted sentences and reworked them into model phrases out of a textbook. “Do you mean …” she’d say in French, and then rephrase my hazy remark in crystalline language.
    Barbara had divorced parents—an architect father who worked in his spacious studio overlooking a garden and a batty, out-of-work mother who lived in a project for the poor, an HLM (
Habitation loyer modéré
, or medium-rent housing), though hers was located in a sleek skyscraper that Pompidou had thrown up in La Défense in the 1970s to modernize the capital, rival New York, and ultimately destroy the Parisian skyline. Fortunately for many Parisians, Pompidou