Why,
you ask, would I recall February, rather than steamy August, as the apex of
Gallic malodorousness ?
I remember this from the old days,
living with an insane cousin who was hiding out in north Paris ( even in 1970,
all-Arab-all-the-time) from his American ex. Most of the flats,
including his, simply did not include facilities for bathing the body. No bath, no
shower. One went to the public baths, the Piscine des
Amireaux.
I noticed the French were most reluctant to bathe during the
colder weather. Well, it was cold in the unheated rooms
of the Piscine, and even more so in the unheated flats, but a real
man gets his butt in there every day and cleans himself - period. Not so
? Mais non, mes amis. Pour quoi ?
Now, in August the French are all
in sleeping bags head-to-foot along the roadside on the Cote d'Azure. Not
so bad- they dip in the Med during the day and at worst carry the
faint scent of sewage (from the city) and diesel (from the Arabs' yachts)
afterward.
So that explains that. But there's more...
Mon cousin
went native and lived in this manner himself until his death from natural
causes on April Fools' Day, 2001. I think he was about 70 -75 years old at the
time, but even with the cancer he was famously youthful. Note to self:
try not to work a day in your life so as to maintain a youthful appearance.
Everyone thought he was mad with this paranoid fear of his ex
with whom he had, after all, made a divorce settlement in the 1950's.
But behold! No more than
thirty minutes after he expired, lawyers claiming to represent his two children by that ex
were in a Parisian court filing claims on his rather considerable (inherited) estate.
Forty-eight hours later the lawyers filed in New York. Everybody
has always known these are not his biological children - that's how come he
divorced their mother, see? She was a woman who was no better behaved than was
absolutely necessary. DNA testing has never been done. Cousin's second
wife, a prudent Finnish woman and her son, too, just caved-on-cue to these
necromantic demands.
Nolo contendere, mon vieux.
I believe the persistent rumors to
the effect that these
vulture children
were sired by a notable American personage, somebody very big. So big all
parties, conflicted as they were, agreed his identity would best not be
discovered.
As Kissinger famously said, even
paranoids have real enemies.
The last thing I said to my cousin, by
phone from Hawaii a few days before he ( as he would put it ) croaked,
is that I would make a film of his life.
What's interesting about this life
apart from the tragicomic mystery of the first wife is that Cousin was a
genius at pandering to the great European artists of our time. He photographed
them all:. Picasso, Dali, Cocteau - all of them. Never did anything
productive with this skill except get a lot of free food and leftover groupies.
Cousin was on an allowance all his life until his parents committed double
suicide in the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan in 1972, and then he inherited.
Do you see any entertainment value in
this true story ? I think it is a morally instructive.
This is a man who as a child escaped
Prague ahead of the Nazis. They made their way to Canada and then to Manhattan. In
Prague, these were some rich Jews - they owned a tile factory which was said
to be the largest private industrial facility in Central Europe. They got away
with a couple of Strad violins, sold them and started over in the New World.
The mother had a
talent for fashion, so they started a 7th Avenue apparel business designing
and producing clothing for, well, the Pat Buckleys of the world. Elegant,
conservative. Built a considerable empire of Manhattan real estate, too. Then,
after the war, the US Government distributed various Czech government assets,
such as had been frozen when the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia, to certified refugees living in the
States. They got another big boost.
Their
son, this crazy cousin, is most interesting because he spent his life trying
as hard as he could to be a total degenerate European nihilist - but
failed. He never worked a day in his life and wrought havoc, chaos and high
anxiety wherever he went. No inhibitions whatsoever.
It was only after
his death, when so many of the people whose lives he had touched, who he'd
encouraged or helped in some way were gathered in Paris for his funeral that his
very positive mark on the world became apparent. Positive human nature
could not be overcome by decadent ideology. Good triumphed over evil.
He'd created a Burkean little platoon of his very own.
Individuals unacquainted with each other, and scattered about the world, to
whom
he'd imparted something of value and set on a course to achievement and good
works.
By the way, he croaked in his Paris
apartment on a Friday afternoon. Had cancer, and was on morphine. Said he was
getting up to take a squirt and dropped dead. His wife called for an
ambulance.
The paramedics pronounced him and proceeded to pack up
and leave. The wifee asked if they were not going to take the corpse to a morgue. Mais non
, replied the paras, that's not our job - one is certain they shrugged.
There was no choice but to park
him back in his chair and wait until Monday to make private arrangements for
the body. I suppose a few glasses were tipped back, but not many. Mon
cousin loathed alcohol. Given this crack in his nihilistic, licentious
facade the truth is he could only be reasonably happy in a country where
everyone provided him with grounds for immediate loathing.
Now, that's France for you.
