Paris: A Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

paid to look after us. Even after we were reunited as a family and began our long journey to freedom in America, nothing was ever the same again. That brutal separation from my parents at such an early age left a deep mark.
    A decade of life of relative ease as a Hungarian refugee in suburban Washington, D.C., had not erased those memories.
    “I’m home!” I wrote my parents at the sight of the European coastline. “10 years wiped away!”
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    My introduction to French life was in the ancient city of Tours, in the Loire valley. It helped that I already spoke the language. French had been drilled into me during my Hungarian childhood by a starchy French woman we called “Madame.” She and I did not like each other. I could not persuade my parents that she was too impatient to be our nanny. My mother was determined that we should learn French, even in communist Hungary, where Russian was the mandatory second language. Now, having read the secret police files on my parents, I am vindicated in my early judgment of Madame. She was an agent of the AVO, the Hungarian KGB, using my sister and me as her informants. She did, however, teach me French, and did plant the seed, which in Tours first began to flower.
    Annoyingly mixing French, English, and Hungarian in the first of my weekly letters home, I described my impressions:“The narrow winding streets, the aroma of fresh bread, the sound of pure French and the Cathedral down the street from where I live on the rue Jules Simon, flowers partout. ” A late adolescent inhaling beauty, I was electric with excitement at being in Europe again. “The whole way of life is so different from what we have become used to in the US,” I wrote my mother and father. “It just feels much more natural for me. People live and talk and enjoy everything: flowers, food, wine—without shame. How different from the puritanical lives of so many Americans of comparable means!—just so they can save up for a new car or TV. Here, crumbling shacks are covered with flower boxes and rich and poor carry their fresh baguette and wine home from work.”
    Lodged in a so-called maison particulière, a historic townhouse belonging to the faded aristocratic descendants of the Renaissance painter François Clouet, I preened at how smoothly I fit in with such august company. “The Clouets are wonderful people and I have met few families with whom I can be so totally and uninhibitedly myself. I can be almost as ‘ szemtelen ’ [Hungarian for fresh] with Baron Clouet as I am with you, Papa, and he even seems to enjoy it. They tell me that they’ve never met anyone like me, especially an American!—without any shyness and with opinions on every subject,” I boasted. “Somehow, I feel a closeness—meeting of minds and spirits—with the Clouets and with other French people I have met—that I seldom feel with Americans.”
    There was nothing that did not enchant me about French life. “The Clouets have not changed their life style since beforethe Revolution,” I wrote my parents on October 8. “Every weekend, Monsieur le Baron and his three sons perform the ritual of La Chasse, hunting. Then we have gibier [pheasant, rabbit, all kinds of strange birds] deliciously prepared, for the rest of the week. Madame la Baroness does even less than her husband,” I wrote, seemingly full of admiration. “It’s absolutely incredible to an American [which I have become] that these people can spend so much time, talking, eating, knitting, and giving orders to servants—now there is an art!” I marveled.
    “The week’s most pleasant afternoon I spent at the château of an impoverished Count and Countess. They make their living entirely off the land and don’t have a car. Or a radio! But their salon is filled with masterpieces, and their land stretches for miles on a promontory overlooking the Loire. We sat on the grass surrounded by their moutons and horses, eating fruit from their trees and