E Finch

  There is a lofty incredulity 2 Julian's attitude. How can a religion based among the poorer castes of society and without a true civilisation behind it, have come to conquer the GraecoRoman world—declining as it was—in such a short time, and with such a deleterious effect? Especially when the laws of government, the form of tribunals, the economy and beauty pertaining to cities, the increase of disciplines and the exercise of the liberal arts, were only evident among the Hebrews in a miserable and primutive state? Part of the answer was just that: Judaeo-Christianity was not a civilisation with a religion, but an oppressive religion with little of a civilisation to back it up. Juban underestimated how this might be one of Christianity’s unique selling points. “Civilisation” could come later, if at all; their religion was their civilisation. It was freestanding, therefore absolutist and—inevitably—monopolistic. 

It was obvious to Julian that the adherents of such a religion shouldn’t be allowed to teach Hellenistic philosophy. “If a man thinks one thing, and teaches another contrary to what he thinks, in what respect does this differ from the conduct of those mean-spirited, dishonest and abandoned traders, who generally affirm what they know to be false, in order to deceive and inveigle customers?” Further, those parvenu Galileans displayed a hysterical nature, as shown in their taste for martyrdom, which, as Julian puts it, “make[s] them think death desirable, that they may fly up to heaven, after having forcibly dislodged their souls.” 

Finally, the Apostate is baffled by Christianity’s sheer lack of sophistication, its refusal to acknowledge experts, its preterence for lauding the fool and the simpleton over the scribe and the wise man. Thomas Taylor, Julian’s English translator of 1809 and himself a “philosophic polytheist,” expatiated enthusiastically on this: 

[Jesus] also seems chiefly delighted with little children, women, and fishermen; carefully recommended folly to his apostles, but cautioned them against wisdom; and drew them together by the example of little children, lilies, mustard seed, and sparrows, things senseless and inconsiderable, living only by the dictates of nature, and without either craft or care ... In scripture there is frequent mention of harts, hinds, and lambs, than which creature there is not anything more foolish, if we may believe that proverb of Aristotle, sheepish manners, which is taken from the foolishness of that creature, and is usually applied to dull-headed people, and lack-wits. And yet Christ himself professes to be the shepherd of his flock, and is himself delighted with the name of a Lamb! 

It’s worth pointing out that recent scientific studies have demonstrated that, contrary to age-old received opinion, sheep are in fact highly intelligent and emotionally complex animals, with good memories, the ability to form friendships and to feel sadness when their companions are sent to slaughter. 

Publicly, Julian was opposed to violent measures. “I have resolved,” he wrote, “to employ gentleness and humanity towards the Galileans; I forbid any recourse to violence ... It is by reason that one must convince and instruct men, not by blows, insults and torture.” Further, “One should feel pity more than hatred for people so unfortunate as to be mistaken in matters so important.” 

This was principle, but also pragmatism. Miracles and martyrdom were the two great selling points of early Christianity. You died for your religion and gained eternal life: the notion still inspires some today. But Julian declined to persecute them. 

Q. What happens (in the minds of men and women) when a god is no longer worshipped? Does he cease to exist? Or does he continue to circle the earth like another piece of space junk, beeping hopefully on a dead wavelength? 

What was left, apart from the example of his life, was his famous last stand against Christianity—the more famous because, for Gibbon, it was always doomed: 

The genius and power of Julian were unequal to the enterprise of restoring a religion which was destitute of theological principles, of moral precepts, and of ecclesiastical discipline; which rapidly hastened to decay and dissolution, and was not susceptible of any solid or consistent reformation. Julian had dismissed the corrupt and venal court eunuchs when he came to power, just as he had dismissed the preposterous number of barbers. He might himself have given an example of austerity and simplicity, but that example wasn't followed by even those closest to him. 

But these deaths are just precursors to Sebastian’s own. Like the best martyrs, he first escapes several attempts to kill him. The most famous of these pre-death deaths is when the emperor Diocletian orders him to be tied to a tree and used for archery practice: “They hit him with so many arrows that he looked like a hedgehog” (aha, I thought, remembering EF’s notebook—and here is a confirmatory tick in the margin) “and they left him there for dead.’ The scene is familiar from many art galleries, and I have always assumed—as did Diocletian’s archers—that their arrows were the actual cause of death. In fact, St. Sebastian survived this hedgehoggery, and his gateway to martyrdom consisted instead of being beaten to death with clubs and thrown into a sewer. 

Karnow on the French

 The longer I remained in France, the more its intricacies daunted me. But I derived some consolation from observing that the French themselves—philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, poets, journalists and just ordinary folk—-seemed to be just as bewildered as they constantly sought to define their society. Though emblematically une et indivisible, France was riddled with baffling and often incomprehensible contradictions. The French were simultaneously sophisticated and parochial, methodical and anarchistic, individualistic and conformist, flexible and stubborn, liberal and antediluvian, prudent and rash, puritanical and wanton, logical and wildly irrational. While espousing the principles of the Revolution- liberté, égalité, et fraternité—they recoiled from performing the most elementary civic duties. They combined tolerance with bigotry, kindness with malice, elegant taste with appalling vulgarity. Politeness ranked high on their list of virtues, yet they could be uncommonly rude, not only to foreigners but to each other. Beneath their exterior of lighthearted gaiety, the “ooh-la-la” stereotype that attracted tourists, they were frequently morose—a trait dramatized in films about tragic love triangles and the desolation of provincial life. 

Their cavalier “je m’en foutisme” also veiled their perpetual paranoia, To hear them tell it, they were forever under siege—by everyone from their mother-in-law and the tax collector to the neighbor’s snarling dog. Their standard reply to the greeting “Comment ca va?” was a shrug and a grunted “Je me défends.” 

Yet another incongruity was the contrast between their contempt for government and their veneration for the state, a perplexing notion for an American accustomed to authority vested in a constitu. tion that could be amended. But, to the French,  l'etat was the durable, indestructible entity that assured France’s immortal continuity. This concept, which preceded the idea of nationhood, developed from the efforts of successive monarchs to centralize their sovereignty and operated through a permanent civil service that regulated the country’s essential institutions—judicial, economic, fiscal and educational. The apparatus was refined during the eighteenth century by Louis XIV, the divine incarnation of letat, and his minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, one of the architects of modern France. It evolved over the years into an elite corps rigorously trained at the three grandes écoles: the Polytechnique, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Locked into generations of tradition, functionaries were still confined after World War II to antiquated offices without typewriters or adding machines, consulting dossiers tied with ribbons. They were responsible only to their hereditary hierarchies and stood aloof from the wrangles of ephemeral politicians. Like Chinese mandarins, they owed their positions to stiff examinations; appointed for life, they could hire or dismiss officials, and even revise parliamentary decisions merely on the grounds of “raison d’état.” In short, they were supreme—or, as the cliché put it, France “was administered rather than governed.” 

Whatever their differences, the French fundamentally shared the ambiguous yet pregnant vision of Jules Michelet, the distinguished nineteenth-century historian, that France was “une personne.”

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But, though it introduced the beginnings of democracy to France, the Revolution was never entirely consummated. The bourgeois classes, while pledging allegiance to its egalitarian tenets, arrogated to themselves the power and privileges of the Neanderthal ancien régime nobility they had supplanted. From the early nineteenth century onward, with the complicity of an entrenched bureaucracy determined for its own sake to preserve the status quo, they supported any government that furthered their narrow interests. Their unbridled greed and venality provoked a series of financial swindles, stock market crashes, and huge scandals involving senior officials. They conspired to discourage competition, artificially curbed production as a device to keep prices high and, to protect their domestic markets, overvalued the currency, imposed quotas and erected tariff barriers against imports. Calculated to promote stability, these and other such policies propelled France into stagnation and decay. 

By the early 1950s, the economy had made practically no headway in four decades. Meanwhile, the population had been steadily dwindling, the result of the carnage of World War I and a consequent decline in marriages, exacerbated by inheritance laws that deterred families from having large numbers of children. The population would have fallen even more had not France, suffering from a severe labor shortage, brought in multitudes of immigrants from Poland, Italy and elsewhere to work in its mines and factories. In 1935, for the first time in history, deaths exceeded births, and the lopsided demographic pyramid augured danger for the nation’s destiny. Politicians, military strategists and foreign diplomats all recognized as World War II approached that the French were too exhausted to confront a German onslaught, but, driven by hubris, they plunged into the abyss. 

The years of sclerosis had left a widening gap between rich and poor that triggered strikes, boycotts and bloody riots as the dispossessed struggled for social justice. The chronic strife polarized France into the forces of order and the forces of change, reactionary and radical, royalist and republican. During my first days in Paris, the ideological pendulum was still swinging from one extreme to the other. The war had recently ended, and the French were squabbling over whether the Resistance had been justified in summanily executing Vichyites and other pro-German collaborators. An estimated ten thousand were shot, chiefly on the eve of the Allied landings, when rival cliques began to jockey for the roles they would play following the Liberation. The vast majority of those killed undoubtedly deserved to be punished, though many of them were the victims of personal vendettas. Under the pretext of purging traitors, the Communists went on a rampage, exterminating anyone they believed capable of frustrating their future political aspirations. After the fierce factional splits that had fragmented the Underground, it was understandable that the orgy of vengeance would spark controversy. But it amazed me that the French should have, with the same fervor, continued to debate issues as obsolete as the Dreyfus case and state subsidies to Catholic schools. Deploring their divisions, de Gaulle re. marked, “How can you govern a country with three hundred varieties of cheese?” 

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Before embarking on Curnonsky’s excursion, I consulted my dossier on the history of Paris restaurants. The earliest on record was started on the rue des Poulies near the Louvre in 1765 by a certain Boulanger, undoubtedly a baker. His fortifying dishes, he guaranteed, would cure, or restaurer, intestinal ailments, liver trouble and other complaints—thus the genesis of the term. Twenty years later Antoine de Beauvilliers, formerly steward to the Comte de Provence, the future Louis XVIII, opened La Grande Taverne de Londres on the rue de Richelieu. As its title implied, it resembled a traditional English tavern by providing both food and drink. Its success spawned imitators like Le Café Mécanique, named for its intricate system of pulleys and dumbwaiters, and La Galerie de Valois, where enlightened intellectuals congregated to debate the issues of the day. At first, however, few Parisians ate out. Common folk lacked the money, while the nobility and wealthy bourgeoisie maintained 1mmense staffs capable of preparing splendid meals at home. But then the Revolution ravaged the upper crust, leaving scores of chefs idle; and several of them, known as fraiteurs, founded restaurants. A coffee merchant bought Le Café de Chartres, which was concealed in the arcaded courtyard of the Palais-Royal, and sold it to Jean Véfour, who converted it into Le Grand Véfour. Its regulars were to range from Bonaparte and Josephine to Victor Hugo, Colette, Jean Cocteau and legions of French dignitaries. 

By the tum of the nineteenth century, Paris counted more than five hundred restaurants, and they rapidly became an institution. The most popular of them were bargain bistros, a term of ambiguous etymology. According to one version, the uncouth Cossacks who rode into Paris 

with the Russian Army after Napoleon’s downfall in 1815 would storm into cafés and demand instant attention by shouting “d7stro”—Russian for “quick.” Another interpretation was that the word stemmed from Bistreax, a cheerful innkeeper. As the town expanded, restaurants proliferated. Patrician dandies and bourgeois playboys whooped it up with actors, actresses and pricey cocottes at Tortoni, La Maison d’Or, Le Café Riche and Le Café de Paris, on the boulevard des Italiens, and Le Café Anglais, with its notorious Chambre Seize. Ideological distinc. tions blurred at La Grille, where leftists and conservatives mingled over veal patties or pickled pork An enterpnsing butcher named PierreLouis Duval launched an eatery called Le Bouulon, which provided the hoi polloi with inferior cuts of boiled beef—and was the precursor of the fast-food outlet. When France was compelled to cede AlsaceLorraine to Germany following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, Alsatian refugees flooded Paris, opened brasseries and bequeathed the city choucroute garnie. 

Restaurants swiftly spread across the Seine to the Left Bank. Situated on the quai de la Tournelle opposite Notre-Dame cathedral, the Tour d’Argent had been a sixteenth-century hostel before it was transformed into a restaurant in 1790. It was subsequently bought by Frédéric Delair, whose device for numbering his innovation, canard au sang, enabled him to identify precisely which duck was eaten when by luminaries like the maharajah of Jaipur, the emperor of Ethiopia, the president of Argentina and Charlie Chaplin. Another Left Bank landmark, Lapérouse, accommodated gentlemen with secluded salons decorated with risqué engravings and plush divans for their diners intimes with compliant ladies—and dishes that purportedly stimulated the libido. At Brasserie Lipp, in Saint-Germaindes-Prés, politicians, bureaucrats and journalists would huddle on banquettes beneath beveled mirrors, consuming such spécialités as cervelas rémoulade, téte de veau vinaigrette and huge schooners of beer called distingués. The literati ate, drank and argued far into the night amid the foliage of La Closerie des Lilas, which also lured expatriate Russian revolutionaries, among them Lenin, who played chess when he was not conspiring. 

Voguish Right Bank restaurants included Lucas-Carton, in the Place de la Madeleine, and Prunier, which carried the finest fish in Paris. The advent of the railway age spurred the erection of mammoth stations with turrets, clock towers and allegorical statues representing the cities on the line. Each had its restaurant—the most ostentatious of them, in the Gare de Lyon, ornamented with gilded panels, brocaded tapestries, precious bibelots and pastoral scenes of France. Called Le Train Bleu, it was the kind of place to which a proper husband might take his wife for their anniversary. But no respectable lady would dare be seen inside Maxim’s, whose Art Nouveau interior was the nightly venue for les grandes horizontales and the millionaire noblemen and businessmen who kept them. Fueled by champagne, they went berserk—smashing glasses, juggling dishes, climbing onto tables, swaying from chandeliers, leaping into the fountains in the nearby Place de la Concorde. They flung money around with reckless abandon. James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the Paris Herald Tribune, once handed a flower girl five hundred francs for a bunch of violets, while another American tossed out gold coins to the waiters as though they were pennies. For sheer profligacy, however, nobody matched the visiting Russian boyars; the Grand Duke Serge presented a courtesan with a twenty-thousand-franc pearl necklace neatly laid out on a platter of oysters. The doorman, Gérard, was able to retire to a chateau in the Pyrénées on his tips. 

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France’s two hundred thousand cafés—one for nearly every thirty adults—-were an entrenched institution. In dreary provincial towns and villages, which shut down after dark, they were social centers for shopkeepers, peasants and bored adolescents. For Parisians k café du coin provided a convenient escape from their cramped apartments—places where they could gather with friends and colleagues for conversation, the national diversion. Cafés were venues for young lovers and illicit couples; pimps and prostitutes operated out L of cafés. Books had been written, music composed and revolutions plotted in cafés. Many of them catered to distinct clienteles, for whom going elsewhere would have been treason. Or as the fin de sitcle playwright Georges Courteline once observed, “A Frenchman may change his religion, but never his café.” 

The intelligentsia, genuine and counterfeit, assembled at Le Flore and the Deux Magots, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, oblivious to the tourists craning their necks for a glimpse of “les existentialistes.” Another watering hole for the smart set was the snug bar of the nearby Hétel Pont-Royale. Politicians and journalists with fat expense accounts met to swap information at Chez Lipp, a belle époque brasserie, also in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Expatriate artists congregated at Le Sélect, Le Déme, La Rotonde and La Coupole, on the boulevard du Montparnasse. Farther up the boulevard stood La Closerie des Lilas, a rendezvous for the upper crust. Sorbonne students loafed on the terrace of Chez Dupont, in the Latin Quarter; playboys, couturiers, mannequins, aspiring actresses and dem1mondaines on the make frequented chic powder boxes on the streets off the Champs-Elysées. The rich sipped whiskey sur les rocks and champagne cocktails in the bars of such fashionable hotels as the Crillon, the Ritz and the Bristol, while, in the sooty industrial suburbs, workers spent their evenings playing belote at le plus proche, the neighborhood pub. 

When All the World

... Was Young... Barbara Holland

We sang the praises of our fighting men. However flawed they may have been in civilian clothes, once in uniform they were covered by a national blanket of love and admiration, and I was jealous. I wanted to be a soldier, loved and important, accepted among comrades, and learn to shoot guns and save the world. On the other hand, though it was unpatriotic to think so, soldiers might possibly be shot at instead of doing all the shooting themselves. They might get killed. Apparently they did get killed. It was part of being a man. Nobody killed women, not on purpose; who would bother? 

There were advantages to being female. Girls were required only to be mannerly, clean, and obedient, and our rules weren’t as binding; if we did run and shout and dirty our clothes, as in certain girls’ books, we would be scolded and punished and then forgiven. 

Boys’ rules were harder, and involved always being brave, never crying, and never refusing a fight or a dare, however dangerous. Mothers sometimes begged them to act like gentlemen, but Fathers told them to act like men, which was quite different, and ifa boy broke the code of boyhood with tears or cowardice, he slid far down in the world and might never recover face with his peers or his father. A father whose son fell from grace might struggle forever with the cold misgivings in his heart. 

I didn’t have all this spelled out at the time, but I did see that it was safer to be female, simply because we didn’t much matter. You could tell just listening: the very word “man” had a weight and solidity to it, an echo like the resonant clang of an anvil struck with a hammer, a bronze finality. The word “woman” was a wisp of a sound, like an apron on a clothesline. You could blow the whole word away with a breath, like a dandelion puffball. An elusive target, which was safer. 

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Sometimes I was deputized to take him down to Chevy Chase Circle, a longish walk, for a haircut. The barber shop was on the same street as the library, a proper, men-only barber shop, and I waited embarrassed and dwarfed in one of the huge black leather chairs, Fathers’ chairs. It was unseemly for a woman of any age to sit on leather, and almost indecent for a girl. Nobody there ever smiled, least of all Nick, who perched on a board laid across the arms of the barber chair, engulfed in a black cape, while Andrew J. Bible, a very solemn man, solemnly cut his hair, and ran the clippers up the back of his head and around his ears, and anointed him with manly and powerful perfumes. 

All little boys and many big ones wore Army-style crew-cuts, and a fresh one prickled deliciously under the hand like a baby hedgehog. When we got home, Nick went ritually around the family presenting his head to be touched and smelled. Men and boys got haircuts; Mother cut the female hair, including her own. She liked cutting hair, and long after we were grown she stalked us, clicking the scissors, anxious to take off just a little, Just to get it out of our faces. 

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We made butter. It was Winnie’s and Izzy’s idea. Butter was severely rationed or perhaps just not to be had, and the patriotic were told of the joys of margarine instead. The butter people wouldn’t let the margarine people sell it colored yellow, so it came white, with a capsule of coloring included, and it was some child’s duty to mash the stuff long and hard with a wooden spoon to spread the coloring through it. This never worked. It was always streaky, and never tasted like butter anyway, or felt like it in the mouth. Judith once found and ate a quarter-pound stick of real butter, probably the entire family’s ration for a week. She wasn’t scolded because, Mother said, she couldn’t have known it was precious, but it seemed to me that nobody who didn’t know it was valuable would bother to chew down a whole stick of butter like a banana. 

The Poisonwood Bible

 People are bantu; the singular is muntu. Muntu does not mean exactly the same as person, though, because it describes a living person, a dead one, or someone not yet born. Muntu persists through il those conditions unchanged. The Bantu speak of “self” as a vision residing inside, peering out through the eyeholes of the body, waiting for whatever happens next. Using the body as a mask, muntu watches and waits without fear, because muntu itself cannot die. The transition from spirit to body and back to spirit again is merely a venture. It is a ride on the power of nommo, the force of a name to call oneself. Nommo rains from a cloud, rises in the vapor fom a human mouth: a song, a scream, a prayer. A drum gives hommo in Congo, where drums have language. A dance gives nommo Where bodies are not separate from the will that inhabits them. In that other long-ago place, America, I was a failed combination of too-weak body and overstrong will. But in Congo I am those things perfectly united: Adah, 

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I'm losing my family, piece by piece. Father is lost, wherever he. is. Rachel I could only despise more if I knew for sure which way to direct my ire, presumably South Africa, where I guess she’s finally hit paydirt with her exceeding whiteness and mercenary husband. I can’t reliably get a letter to Mother or Adah. Mobutu’s chief postal minister, a relative of Mobutu’s wife, stopped paying all the post workers for the last year so he could use the money to build himsef a mansion in Thysville. Now it takes a huge bribe or a person contact to get mail out of the country, and the letters incoming] can only suppose are piling up somewhere in Léopoldville, beng sniffed for money or valuables. 

If people are shocked by these unexplained losses—the post, thet salary, a friend walking home on the road—they don’t mention it What do people here know but forbearance? They take one look a the expensive, foreign-made uniforms of Mobutu’s police and know to keep their thoughts to themselves. They know who stand behind Mobutu, and that in some place as far away as heaven, where the largest rules are made, white and black lives are different kind: of currencies. When thirty foreigners were killed in Stanleyville, each one was tied somehow to a solid exchange, a gold standard like the hard Belgian franc. But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant’s hand, and still not purchase a single banana. It’s dawning on me that I live among men and women who’ve simply always understood their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me. 

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 “What is that, Aunt Adah? And that?” their Pascal asks in his wide-eyed Way, pointing through the aisles: a pink jar of cream for removing hair, a can of fragrance to spray on the carpet, stacks of lidded containers the same size as the jars we throw away each day. “They're things a person doesn’t really need.” “But, Aunt Adah, how can there be so many kinds of things a person doesn't really need?”