I swore I would not do this. Nevertheless, I push the shutters open and look out onto the rolling lawn and the three hundred-year-old trees of La Paumardiere as the Eurocopter EC 135 sets down and starts up Christmas Eve.

 

A few minutes later, as we fly over the forests and woods of southern Normandy and the Yvelines, heading towards Versailles, I stretch out in the sleek, spartan Hermes interior, I'm wearing the black Chanel patent and suede stilettos and black tights with little red and green king Charles cavaliers on them (my design, made by John Galliano's little fairy-fingered seamstresses in one of his sweatshops), a bit corny I know but I find them darling and have never met a woman who didn't drop dead for them; men don't care, so long as they come off, and I start thinking about how I know next to nothing about this American and I'm so trying not to panic or jump to conclusions the way Carla did that time we were having a very late lunch at L'Arpege a few doors down from my house in Paris and she was wearing the cutest little sleeveless black cashmere turtleneck dress and I had on the gold silk sleeveless cocktail dress with the wide, rounded A-line skirt intersected with a black velvet half-moon at the midriff and all of a sudden she whispered frantically "Oh my God, Loulou, don't turn around. At the table right behind us: Arab terrorists wearing those towel things with the big black silk napkin rings on top of their heads and they're carrying rifles!" And I swiveled and saw a vase of lilies and some breadsticks and told her to put her contacts in and she was like "My bad." I call Carla and tell her that I am going to kill her if her American kills me. I've sometimes thought of the people I would least and most enjoy being killed by, and the former include that man disguised as a nurse in the episode of "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" called "An Unlocked Window," where he takes off his wig and says "Yes, you forgot about Sam, didn't you Stella?", Carol Channing and a female evangelist named Joyce Myers, who is for some reason on CNBC in Paris on Sunday mornings when all I'm trying to see is whether I'm still worth only 30% of what I was before the sky started falling a few months ago, while the latter would have to include the Fernandel of Le Spountz, James Stewart and Annette Funicello (when still a Mousketeer) and the more I think about the American the more I think of Carol Channing and I am really just so so scared that I find myself no longer sipping but gulping champagne.

 

And this relaxes me somewhat so I start sort of comparing him to other American men and thinking how when American men are cool they're Steve McQueen in The Blob-Clint Eastwood-Jim Jarmusch-Barack Obama cool, i.e., as cool as a man can possibly be. But then I think what if he turns out to be not like them but nutty a l'americaine, i.e., as nutty as a man can possibly be, because when Americans are insane they are crazy insane. Not that we can't be bonkers in France. We love and even worship our voice-hearing loonies, from transvestite murderess (and Blue Beard's bitch) Joan of Arc to Napoleon Bonaparte and Bernadette of Lourdes and Nicolas, who told me he has actually heard voices telling him about "la vraie France," the true France that has never taken part in the judicial history of "France." And we cherish our lunatic superstitions. Our French forefathers used to believe (and by used to, I mean until a few years ago in places like the Bearn region) that you could clear a field of weeds by burying a cat alive. Had a nasty spill? Chop a tomcat's tail off and suck the blood out. Got pneumonia? Drink blood from a cat's ear in some red wine. Colic? Mix some cat shit into your wine. Want to become invisible? Easy-peasy, at least in Brittany: just eat the brain of a freshly killed cat. (It only works if the brain is still hot, though.) And my personal fave: Want to get pregnant? Eat a cat.

 

But, as the simple Americans say, I axe you, in France have we really ever had people as totally, utterly bananas as Albert Fish who kill and eat your children and write you letters to tell you how they tasted or Ed Gein who kidnap you and remove your face and wear it as a mask and who've killed enough people to have been able to make an entire belt out of nipples and have shoeboxes and jars around the house filled with vaginas omigod and then I remember that both Al and Ed were red-blooded American boys just like my date or whatever you want to call Carla's American friend tonight and omigod omigod omigod I don't want anyone else to wear my face and I like my nipples and my vagina right where they are please God don't let him make earmuffs out of them or put them in a jar and now I've scared myself so much I have to pee only one can't in this little helicopter, but we'll be landing shortly.

 

And I remember seeing those interviews with Charles Manson where the interviewer goes "Like some coffee, Charles?"

 

And Charles goes "It's not a matter of 'like' or 'dislike': I am the coffee, don't you see?"

 

And the interviewer says "So is that a yes or a no?"

 

And Charles says "There's no such thing as 'yes' or 'no'; you people try to wall things off into your neat little categories. I am yes, I am no! I am the question and I am the answer and the answer is you are just so blind, man."

 

And I think about what hard work it must be being mad, what with your having to focus on sounding like a lunatic 24/7. On the other hand, you would just love to see him paroled so he would try that shit on some little Starbucks barista who would so scald him with boiling hot latte that he'd be lucid for life.

 

Anyway, it would wear me out. And so I'm thinking what if this American turns out to be like that, Carla hasn't really ever said what they spend all their time talking about, other than me, and Carla, bless her little Italian heart, is just so naïve. In France, we often say that it is impossible to underestimate the intelligence of the American people (two words: Carrot Top), and although we tend to think of Americans as friendly, stupid, non-smoking, money-obsessed workaholics who speak louder than their clothes (Americans who listen to what the rest of the world is saying about them are as unhappy-and as dangerous-as poor people who think), just as they tend to think of us as well-dressed bathless overeating alcoholics whom an almighty but unjust God makes thin instead of fat and witty instead of drunk, nevertheless our two hundred-year-old alliance means that beyond some shady economic interests we have nothing in common.

 

I prefer Frenchmen in general if only because you don't have to tell them how to dress (last Sunday, I saw the American ambassador and his wife out wearing matching sweats in the rue de Grenelle),although Hubert Vedrine, who is as French as a frog fart, once showed up at my door wearing a camel cashmere overcoat with a mink collar and I said "Hubert, how unspeakably vulgar," and closed the door.

 

So why am I playing along then? No idea. I have all the crushes I can handle right now, what with the Peruvian ambassador and the Secretary general of UNESCO and the minister of Finance all sending me notes with phrases plagiarized from Chateaubriand's correspondence with Juliette Recamier: "I write to tell you I love you. I wait to tell you in person," and I start thinking back to all my former boyfriends and husbands and am alarmed to recall that only a couple of them have not been insane. I went out with two of our foreign ministers: Hubert Vedrine, until I found out he'd organized the Rwanda genocide in 1994, and Bernard Kouchner until Carla brought it to my attention that he'd signed a petition in favour of decriminalizing sex with children and is "that way." (GIYF)

 

I went out with two rather prominent intellectuals, one, named Claude Levi-Strauss, was light years older (I just went to his 100th birthday party the other night) but fascinating until I realized that he'd been stealing thousands of "artifacts" from poor people for our museums, motivated by a conception of the superiority of France and the French language that only a foreigner eager for acceptance into French society such as Claude could believe in. The one I miss more is a Hungarian named László, and he was a librarian and 20 years older and with the exception of Nicolas (only Nicolas is sort of like Laszlo Lite) he is the only man I've ever known with whom I could talk about everything and if it wasn't Thomas Aquinas or fashion or skiing or Robert Musil then it was Bach and mathematics and sex and food and colours and nature and sex again, and he's now President of Hungary but is undulled by the office.

 

And I went so far as to actually marry a Scot, Angus, Laird of the Elephants and the Mists (really, that was his title and I was, for a time, Louise, Lady of the Elephants and the Mists, you can look it up) who went mad reading The Scots New Testament. (Where-Angus liked to bay-Luke 21:25 in the King James Version-translated, by and large, by landlubber scholar-thieves who shamelessly plagiarized William Tyndale's brilliant one-man effort-speaks of a shipwreck, with "the sea and the waves roaring," The Scots New Testament has "the dumfounerin rair o the jowin sea." And where St. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 11:25, describes his own shipwreck and how he had to swim for a day and a night in the waves, The Scots New Testament, translated by seafarers, has: "ae time I wis a haill nicht an day i the hairy roughers.") I miss him, although not the thousand-year-old castle and its pre-medieval plumbing.

 

I miss living with my neighbour in Paris, a wonderful artist named Sempe, who has spent as much time at 60, rue de Varenne as at his own home. And I miss Nicolas and his pathetic side which even I found and find irresistible. We women are such fools.

 

Half an hour and an entire bottle of Bollinger later, we touch down at the small airport of Toussus le Noble near Versailles and now, after twenty more minutes in the car, a driver has deposited me in the pitch-black early December evening right in front of the deserted chateau of Versailles. Versailles, built to impress foreigners, the symbol of all that is best and brightest in France and in our history, the lever on which not only France but planet Earth is actually balanced like a see-saw, because everyone believes in what it represents: elegance, civilization, the good life in the reasonable land of human rights, "eternal France," a concept that dates from 1929, but whatever. I can't even see any lights on inside.

 

I cross the courtyard and my steps, lighted by the moon, echo like gunshots as I glance at the great equestrian statue of Louis XIV and I think of how when you look at it, or when you look at Hyacinthe Rigaud's magnificent official grand siècle portrait of the Sun King, at this astounding, hugely-bewigged, ermine- and velvet-clad Most Christian Majesty in high-heeled clogs, coquettishly raising his cloak to display a perfect leg in a snow-white leotard, this godlike creature bearing the official title of "Louis XIV, by the Grace of God, King of France and Navarre," you don't even have to know that he was the patron of Molière and Lully, that he was the builder of Versailles or that he made the word France synonymous with that of civilization around the globe, in order to hear yourself thinking, irresistibly: what a fucking moron.

 

Incredibly, the Europe of the Aufklärung looked to this man, who taxed peasants to death, exonerated the nobility from any levies whatsoever and harassed and tortured Protestants and Jews, as a paragon of Christian virtue and strived to emulate him. Voltaire, the apostle of the Enlightenment (and a virulent racist and highly selective promoter of human rights for people he liked), called him "The Great Monarch." Even the German Protestant Leibniz, a world-class philosopher and nincompoop, called him "one of the greatest kings that ever was." And for having made France Jesus's biggest sunbeam, Louis XIV became known as the "Sun King," a name that has stuck.

 

A banner hangs from one of the outer walls in the courtyard To the Great Khan, King of the Khazars, announcing an exhibition on ninth century Serbia, which replaces Jeff Koons. I go inside, down a series of marble corridors and as I follow the moonlight, I think about how chillingly glamorous winters at Versailles must have been for the female courtiers in their shoulderless, sleeveless dresses, until I am walking towards the War Room and I make my heels strike the marble floor like they mean it and pray that the American, wherever he is, will please not be allowed to leap out from behind a marble column in the dark wearing a vagina mask or a nipple belt because if he does I will defecate.

 

I continue walking and I start to relax a little and I even find myself thinking what could be more romantic and French than a love affair at Versailles? But then I remember that Louis XIV was married to Marie-Therese, a non-entity, so he played musical beds with Mme de Soubise, Mlle de Ludre, Mlle de Fontanges and Mme de Montespan until he met the nanny hired by Mme de Montespan for her children, Francoise d'Aubigne, a poor girl who had married a rich older man in a wheel chair, (chirping with sunny cynicism "I'd rather marry a cripple than a convent") and then Louis XIV gave Madame Scarron the title of marquise de Maintenon and she became his mistress and morganatic queen and she had Louis revoke the edict of Nantes, which is sort of like having thought up the Trail of Tears. And Louis XIV and Francoise spent their evenings going through the seized theological papers of the Jansenists looking for heretical details that could justify killing or excommunicating or imprisoning someone else, and it's sad to read her descriptions of him sitting across from her in front of the fire and how language really just wasn't his language and basically it was him going, like every half hour or so, "Nobody likes me" and she'd be like, "Well, some people do," and he'd be like "Who? Name one person," and she'd go "I do" and he'd go "Aw, that's so sweet," and then he'd cry. Then they'd go to bed separately. Courtier and diarist St. Simon writes: "The King went over to the toilet-chair and used it then back to Mme de Maintenon's bed to say good night."

 

In the Journal of M. Dangeau, a courtesan whose diary covers the period 1684-1720, he includes a brief obituary of Madame de Maintenon, "She was a woman of such great merit," writes Dangeau, "who had done so much good and prevented so much wrong during her favor, that it would be impossible to speak too highly of her." Saint-Simon comments: "Now that's what one calls a plain, filthy, stinking, bold-faced lie."

 

The double doors on the other side of the War Room are closed. They lead to the Hall of Mirrors. I walk across the room in the dark and stop in my tracks when the moonlight reveals that the doorway is actually being guarded by two men sitting on folding chairs, both of the men are blind and they're wearing badges identifying them only as 42 and 49. And now they are speaking, one in Spanish, the other in French with a loopy British accent, and they're talking about labyrinths and mirrors and branches of trees that lead us ultimately to God and I can only think how inauspicious this is for meeting someone I am so hoping is not a lunatic.

 

In May of 2006, at Nicolas' request, Le Figaro airbrushed President Chirac out of a photo with a sleazy businessman acquaintance. (http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/charles_bremner )

 

On November 20, 2008, Le Figaro erased the ring (a grey and gold diamond ring worth €15,600 from Chaumet that Nicolas gave her for her birthday) worn by Rachida Dati because http://blogs.lexpress.fr/a-l-elysee/2008/11/exclusif-le-figaro-retouche-un.php Nicolas said it made him look bad. Paris Match last year lopped off Nicolas' love handles from a beach shot http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6959180.stm It's the sort of neo-reality that exists, in theory, only in a banana republic. Yet the world takes great care to pretend not to see this grown-up side of France, with its obligatory "rectal search" for anyone taken even briefly into custody by the French police, with its government-sponsored lies regularly and dangerously voted into law, i.e., "reality," with its Photoshopped, fairy-tale versions of "fact" permanently imposed as historical truth, even though these realities form the most significant thing you can know about our culture, along with, of course, Claude Fucking Monet. As my former neighbour Talleyrand put it, the nice thing about French laws is that you can rape them and they don't even scream. And that's why our image remains untarnished, and is, in fact, untarnishable, no matter whom we kill or how we do it. You'd think there would be a difference between the starry-eyed tourists with their vision of Paris as a Hollywood set, all poodles and accordions and beautiful women, and the foreign correspondents with their hard-boiled war correspondents' eyes, but there really isn't. Like children discovering that Santa Claus doesn't exist, foreigners must be so hurt by the discovery of a Parisian reality with its daily dose of police torture and judicial frame jobs that they can't bring themselves to believe that it's true. They prefer lying to toppling over into the unbearable reality of grown-up France.

 

What is fact (AKA Science, History, Non-Fiction), and what is fiction? Was Madame de Maintenon a woman of great merit, or wasn't she? Are our famous Parisian whores, such as the ones you see in the chapel of Saint Rita, the patron saint of lost causes, up in the Pigalle sex district, free to come and go, or are they part of a slave army controlled by half a dozen pimps who happen to be police commissioners and the ministers of the interior and of justice? What is passed off as history, as science or as non-fiction is often, at best, fiction and very often indeed a criminal set-up, or, as Saint-Simon so perfectly put it: a plain, filthy, stinking, bold-faced lie.

 

The guards open the doors for me without standing up and I walk into the Hall of Mirrors and in the middle of the long marble corridor, an exquisite table for two has been beautifully set with candles and a thick stiff white linen table cloth is covered by a white organdy table cloth, embroidered with pine cones and sleighs and everything is dark except for the candles but these are reflected a thousand times and moonlight from the gardens striates the long room.

 

And on the table next to my plate are two napkins, only one of them isn't a napkin but a parchment scroll. And I unroll it and see the words:

 

 

Why would a Texan have left me, a Frenchwoman, a message in Arabic? Well, I take a picture of it with my cell phone, and send it to my darling friend Abdullah, who is currently holding down a job as King of Jordan and who worships me and he says "Louise, my dear, it promises that the owner of the parchment will possess all things,"

 

And I say "Darling, what on earth does that mean?"

 

And H.M. says "Well, it's about as cryptic and idiotic a thing as I've ever heard," and then he added "Loulou, don't sign anything."

 

And as I wait for the American to finally show, I remember how Angus had once told me that where "the bookworms" say that Christ spent forty days and forty nights in "the wilderness," The Scots New Testament says he was in a vast, grassy, lochless, "heart-moanin' wasteland." And that makes me remember that Varenne actually means a barren wasteland, unfertile but rich in game, and that the spot on which my home stands today was not so very long ago a sprawling, heart-moaning desert fit only for wolves.

 

And the American still hasn't shown, but my eyes must have gotten used to the dark because now I see that the key has been right there on the table all along. And I take the beautiful strongbox out of my bag and I open it and inside there is indeed a book, and at the top of the cover is my name, Loulou de la Paumardiere, and then below it the title: 60, rue de Varenne.

 

And I look up and I see a figure, surely the American, moving in the mirrors, but I can't tell whether he's coming or going, and I call out "Monsieur?"

 

And I hear my own voice echo the answer from the dark at the end of the long room: "C'est moi."

 

© 2008 Louise de la Paumardiere