I take it you spoke French to her, I said. Well, Lee Miller did, her French was nearly perfect, you said. As is yours, I said, and you gave a self-deprecating shrug, but it was true, your French was much better than mine. I could read French with only occasional recourse to a dictionary, and I had felt a glow of self-congratulation when I discovered I could follow most of the Easter Sunday sermon in Saint-Eustache, but then the priest’s enunciation had been exquisite, and I knew the theme — of darkness, light and resurrection — well enough from similar childhood sermons. It was familiar territory, and I knew the signposts. And I thought I could speak French reasonably well, but when I did, my collocutor, assuming I knew French well, would unleash a torrent of words in which my comprehension would immediately flounder. But you, Nina, were never out of your depth: French was a second element to you. Your whole body language would change as you spoke, adopting a vocabulary of Gallic shrugs, pouts, frowns and gesticulations, as if you were clothed by French, and became someone other than the one I thought I knew. I loved and admired you for it, and wondered sometimes if I envied you, if envy ever entered into love, for both are emotions, whereas admiration is dispassionate. And, half-jokingly, I’d propose that the whole world should indeed have learned Esperanto, for then we would not need to learn the languages of different nations in order to communicate with them. But that’s precisely the point, you’d say, the point is the difference. Vive la différence, as they say. When I speak French, when I listen to French, I think differently, and I say things other than what I’d say, were I speaking English, you said. And of course I knew this myself, for Irish, after all, was my first language, and I not only thought differently in it, but felt differently. Or at least I did once, for now my Irish is like a ghost of itself behind my more accustomed English. As it was then.
We’d gone to Montmartre one day. From the steps of Sacré-Coeur, we gazed down at Paris, radiantly clear in the meticulous April light. I always think that Paris is like the French language, you said, the way it’s departmentalised, as you pointed out the various districts, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Tuileries, the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse, the Invalides, the Marais. Of course the boundaries, the definitions, have been eroded over the years, but then so has the language, if you’re to believe the academicians. But the old fabric is still there under all the changes. Look, over there, and you pointed to a green space in the distance, that’s the Jardin des Plantes, rue Mouffetard’s not far off, you can’t see it, but we’ll have to go there, they have a brilliant market, it’s been on the go for centuries. It’s this steep narrow street, it’s packed with shoppers, stalls along the pavements, open shop fronts with their awnings out, butchers, trays of calves’ liver and tripe and the lovely pot roasts they do, all parcelled up with butcher’s string, it’s a work of art, and those yellow chickens with the heads and feet still on them, then there’s the greengrocers, big fat knobbly tomatoes, all kinds of fresh salad stuff, and the fishmongers, marble slabs awash with cod and halibut and sea-bream and ray and conger eel and lobsters and sea urchins, and God knows what other kinds of creatures, I know what they are in French, but I couldn’t tell you the English for them. And the cheese counters are really unspeakable, I don’t know how many hundreds of kinds they have, and you have all these smells wafting around, between the cheese and the fish and the fruit and vegetables and flowers, the smell of anchovies and olives and Gitanes. Then you come to the end of the street, you turn a corner, go down an alleyway, and you’re in an empty Roman amphitheatre, it’s been there since Paris was, if not before.
That’s what I love about Paris, you never know what’s round the next corner, you said; and from my small experience of the city, it seemed true. I remember especially the evening we dined early in one of the streets off rue Montorgueil. Chez Bibi, that was the place, we were the first customers, and Madame Bibi herself, as we supposed her to be, engaged us, or rather you, in a long colloquy regarding the merits of the food we were about to eat. And the food was good, if a little heavy, solid Bordelaise cooking with wine-reduced sauces, and the wine was good too. By the time we stumbled out, satisfied and half-dazed, rue Montorgueil was thronged with people out for the night, the restaurants and cafés overflowing on to the pavements, and the cool evening air was resonant with conversation and clinking glasses.
We walked north, we crossed a boulevard; suddenly, as if a curtain had descended, the buzz of rue Montorgueil died behind us and we entered a silent zone, a maze of grey deserted streets and alleyways, which turned out to be the garment district. You remember, Nina, how entranced we were by the window displays, the cards of loom elastic, buttons, needles, pins and hair-clips, reels of cotton thread displayed like colour charts, long fat bolts of pink and blue and green cloth, the dresses that seemed thirty years out of date, the tailor’s dummies posed in attitudes of faint surprise? I never knew this place existed, you said, and I was somehow pleased that we were both foreigners now, explorers of a strange new world.
We turned a corner and for the first time we saw people: two women in their forties, maybe, each followed by a string of youngsters. Each carried a pillowslip. The bins outside the shops were overflowing with scrap material and oddments, and these families, we realised, were rag-pickers. Each would stop at a bin and rummage it quickly and professionally, choosing some pieces, discarding others, stuffing them into the bulging pillowslips. There was obviously a hierarchy of stuff, whether chiffon, organdie, tulle, lace, gauze, poplin, whether plain or patterned, whether this pattern or that, and we wondered why some pieces were deemed more valuable than others, for they all appeared equal to our eyes. And where did they all end up, what patchwork did they make? It’s like something out of Victor Hugo, you whispered. We walked on, and in about two minutes we entered the red light district of Porte Saint-Denis to a swirl of competing perfumes.
Paris did indeed seem intricately classified, and had I known then what I now know about the history of artificial languages, I might have expanded your analogy of the city as language. For the earliest attempts at a universal language arose from the medieval idea that man, by reconciling himself to the City of God, in which everything had its proper place and purpose, might attain to a perfect knowledge of the universe. The whole sum of things might, it was thought, be brought by division and subdivision within an orderly scheme of classification. To any conceivable thing or idea capable of being expressed by human speech might therefore be attached a corresponding word, like a label, on a perfectly regular and logical system. Words would therefore be self-explanatory to any person who had grasped the system, and would serve as an index or key to the things they represented. Say you want to find a book in a library. You look it up in a catalogue, where you find its reference number — say, PZ0477.f.26D. If you have learned the system of classification of that library, the reference number would tell you where to find that particular book out of millions; moreover, it would indicate what kind of book it was. The initial P would at once place the book in a certain main division, and so on with the other numbers, till those at the end of the series would lead you to a particular bookcase, a particular shelf, and finally to the book itself.