Mavis Gallant - Overhead in a Balloon

In the meantime the old two-volume project, with its aging and dwindled editorial committee and its cargo of card-index files, had floated towards a reliable firm that published old-fashioned history manuals with plenty of colour plates, and geography books that drew attention only to territories that were not under dispute. The Ministry of Culture was thought to be behind the venture. The files, no one quite knew how, were pried away from the committee and confided to a professor of English literature at a provincial university. The Angliciste would be unlikely to favour one school of French writing over another, for the simple reason that he did not know one from the other. The original committee had known a great deal, which was why for some thirty years its members had been in continual deadlock.

It seemed to the Angliciste that the work would have wider appeal if a section was included on British writers known for their slavish cultural allegiance to France. First on the list was, of course, Victor Prism, lifelong and distinguished Francophile and an old academic acquaintance. He recalled that Prism had once lived in Paris as the protégé of Miss Mary Margaret Pugh, a patroness of the arts; so, at about the same time, had the future novelist and critic Henri Grippes. “Two golden lion cubs in the golden cage of the great lioness,” as the Angliciste wrote Grippes, asking him to contribute a concise appreciation of his comrade in early youth. “Just say what seemed to you to be prophetic of his achievement. We are in a great hurry. The work is now called French Authors, 1950–2000 , and we must go to press by 1990 if it is to have any meaning for our time. Don’t trouble about Prism’s career; the facts are on record. Payment upon receipt of contribution, alas. The Ministry is being firm.”

Grippes received the letter a week before Christmas. He thought of sending Prism a sixteen-page questionnaire but decided, reasonably, that it might dull the effect of surprise. He set to work, and by dint of constant application completed his memoir the following Easter. It was handwritten, of course; even his sojourn in California had not reconciled Grippes to typewriters. “I feel certain this is what you are after,” he wrote the Angliciste . “A portrait of Prism as protégé. It was an experience that changed his external image. Miss Pugh often said he had arrived on her doorstep looking as if he had spent his life in the rain waiting for a London bus. By the time he left, a few weeks later, a wholehearted commitment to the popular Parisian idols of the period — Sartre, Camus, and Charles Trenet — caused him to wear a little grey hat with turned-up brim, a black shirt, an off-white tie, and voluminous trousers. At his request, Miss Pugh gave him a farewell present of crêpe-soled shoes. Perhaps, with luck, you may find a picture of him so attired.”

Grippes’ memoir was untitled.

“ ‘The drawing room at the Duchess of B—’s overlooked a leafy avenue and a rustic bandstand in the city of O—. There, summer after summer, the Duchess had watched children rolling their hoops to the strains of a polka, or a waltz, or a mazurka, or a sparkling military march, remote indeed from the harsh sound of warfare that assailed her today.’

“Would anyone believe, now, that Victor Prism could have written this? That Prism could have poured out, even once, the old bourgeois caramel sauce?

“He did. The time was soon after the end of the Second World War. They were the first words of his first unfinished novel, and they so impressed Miss Mary Margaret Pugh, an American lady then living in a bosky, sunless, and costly corner of Paris, that she invited Prism to complete the novel in her house.

“His benefactress, if extant, would be well over a hundred. In his unpublished roman à clef, Goldfinches Have Yellow Feathers , Prism left a picture of Miss Pugh he may still consider fair: ‘Miss Melbourne, from a distance, reminded Christopher of those statues of deposed monarchs one can see at seedy summer resorts along the Adriatic. Close up, she looked softer, middle-class, and wholly alarming. Often as Christopher sat across from Miss Melbourne, trying to eat his lunch and at the same time answer her unexpected questions, he would recall a portrait he had seen of a Renaissance merchant’s shrewd, hardy wife. It had something to do with Miss Melbourne’s plump shoulders and small pink nose, with her habit of fingering the lockets and laces she wore as though drawing the artist’s attention to essentials.’

“Miss Pugh had spent most of her life abroad, which was not unusual for rich spinsters of her generation. She seldom mentioned her father, a common fortune hunter, soon shed by her mother — tactful hostess, careful parent, trusted friend to artists and writers. The ash tree whose shade contributed no little to the primeval twilight of the dining room had grown from a sapling presented by Edith Wharton. As a girl, Miss Pugh had been allowed to peer round the door and watch her renowned compatriot eating sole meunière. She had not been presented to Mrs. Wharton, who was divorced.

“What constituted the difference between Mrs. Pugh, also divorced, and the novelist? It is likely that Miss Pugh never asked herself this question. Most of her interesting anecdotes drifted off in this way, into the haze of ancient social mystery.

“The house that was to be Victor Prism’s refuge for a summer had been built in the eighteen-fifties, in a quiet street straggling downhill from the Trocadéro. Miss Pugh had inherited, along with the house, a legend that Balzac wrote Cousine Bette in the upstairs sitting room, though the prolific author had been buried a good three years before the foundation was dug. Madame mère probably bought the house in the eighteen-eighties. Soon after that, the character of the street changed. A considerable amount of low-value property changed hands. Most of the small houses were destroyed or became surrounded by seven-story apartment buildings made of stone, sturdily Third Republic in style. The house we are speaking of was now actually at the heart of a block, connected to the world by a narrow carriage drive, the latter a subject of perennial litigation. Tenants of the apartments could look down upon a low red-brick dwelling with a slate roof, an ash tree that managed to flourish without sunlight, dense thickets of indeterminate urban shrubbery, a bronze Italian birdbath, and a Cupid on tiptoe. The path from gate to door was always wet underfoot, like the floor of a forest.

“Inside, the rooms were low and dim, the floors warped and uneven. Coal fires burned to no great effect except further to darken the walls. Half the rooms by the nineteen-forties were shut off. Miss Pugh was no stingier than any other rich woman, nor had there as yet been an appreciable decline in her income. She was taking it for granted there would soon be another war, followed this time by the definitive revolution. Her daydreams were populated by Bolsheviks, swarming up the Trocadéro hill, waving eviction notices. Why create more comfort than one could bear to lose?

“ ‘To enjoy it, even for a minute’ would have been the answer of a Victor Prism, or, for that matter, of any other of the gifted drifters for whom Paris had become a catchall, and to whom Miss Pugh offered conversation and asylum. Some were political refugees of the first postwar wave, regarded everywhere with immense suspicion. It was thought they should go back to wherever they’d come from and help build just, Spartan societies. Not so Miss Pugh, who thought they should sit down in one of the upstairs rooms and write about their mothers. Some were young men on the run from the legend of a heroic father, whose jaunty wartime face, smiling from a mantelshelf, was enough to launch any son into a life of firm and steady goldbricking. Some, like Prism, were trying to climb on the right American springboard for a flying start.