A Year in the World (27 page)

The village houses look private and closed. Lace curtains hang in all the windows. Not traditional handmade ones, these are machine worked with corny designs of gamboling horses, cats with balls of yarn, and windmills. No doubt made in China. Lace curtains exist solely for a hand to part them, for someone to peer secretly at the street.
What’s going on there among those others? Especially that Mary Magdalen
.

In
the characteristic wine town Beaune, we choose the archetypal sidewalk café and linger under the plane trees. Henry James in
A Little Tour of France
describes Beaune as “a drowsy little Burgundian town, very old and ripe, with crooked streets, vistas always oblique, and steep, moss-covered roofs.” No longer drowsy, the town today perks with energy—inviting shops, the Saturday market, and locals out to visit with friends. I would like to photograph all the weathervanes. We find a heavy copper pot to take back home to Giusi, who cooks with us. We probably should go to the Marché aux Vins, which my notebook reminds me is at 2, rue Nicolas Rolin, named for the man who founded the famous medieval hospital here. There you buy a
taste-vin
, a tasting cup, and then by candlelight sample up to eighteen regional wines. Sounds overwhelming. I could taste three, then my active little buds would shut down.

Ed photographs the glazed orange, green, black, and tan geometrically patterned tile roofs on the hospital, L’Hôtel Dieu des Hospices de Beaune. Half-timbered sections, jacquard-patterned gables, and pitched roofs give a toylike appeal to the buildings. The colonnaded courtyard sheltered nuns going from wing to wing, carrying, I imagine, vats of
boeuf bourguignon
, and loaves of bread tucked under their arms. We walk through thinking of being sick in one of those red-draped beds. Not bad, as long as the illness were not the plague. Rogier van der Weyden’s great painting,
The Last Judgment
, which once hung above the altar in the paupers’ section, crowns the hospital’s gallery. How sobering from the sickbed to contemplate the damned heading toward an inferno. Fewer in the painting look toward paradise.

The charity hospital was richly endowed, thanks to the fifteenth-century Duc de Bourgogne, who solicited donations to finance the construction and continuance. Sixty hectares of donated prime land proved to be the lasting boon. Thirty-nine vintages are created from these hillsides, and the hospital’s benefit auction every November on the third Sunday is one of the most important wine events in France.

In Beaune we’re in the heart of Côte d’Or wine country. Pommard is just down the road. In the wine shop the great bottles are lined up like jousting knights: Gevrey-Chambertin, Corton, Meursault, Pouilly-Fuissé, Puligny-Montrachet. A knowledgeable man helps us select a case. I’m already imagining bringing out these wines for our Italian friends.

Colette, with her innate understanding of the natural world, writes about wine in the most elemental way. A great vintage, she maintained, results from “celestial sorcery,” not the hand of the vintner. She writes:

The vine and the wine it produces are two great mysteries. Alone in the vegetable kingdom, the vine makes the true savor of the earth intelligible to man. With what fidelity it makes the translation! It senses, then expresses, in its clusters of fruit the secrets of the soil. The flint, through the vine, tells us that it is living, fusible, a giver of nourishment. Only in wine does the ungrateful chalk pour out its golden tears. A vine, transported across mountains and over seas, will struggle to keep its personality, and sometimes triumphs over the powerful chemistries of the mineral world. Harvested near Algiers, a white wine will still remember . . . the noble Bordeaux graft that gave it exactly the right hint of sweetness, lightened its body, and endowed it with gaiety. And it is far-off Jerez that gives its warmth and color to the dry and cordial wine that ripens at Château Chalon, on the summit of a narrow, rocky plateau.

While Ed indulges in a chocolate walnut tart, I step inside a cheese heaven. Hundreds of artisan cheeses. The women who work here are dressed impeccably in white, like nurses presiding over newborns. One waves a branch of leaves so that no flies land on one of her charges. She looks mythic. Why was there no goddess of cheese?

To surprise Ed, I buy a round wooden box of
epoisse
, buttery, runny, tangy, and local. Its pert orange rind, the nurse/goddess tells me, comes from the
marc
it’s bathed in after it ages for a month. I select two little goat’s nubbins, too, both the size of my thumbprint. We find bread and return quickly to our shabby manse. Ed empties the rowboat and dries it with the house’s scruffy bath towels. We row upriver to a fenny area and spread a cloth on the middle seat. If the cheese is right, the bread is right, and the wine—this a Pouilly-Fuissé—is right, then a floating dinner with the boat resting on a glissade of light eases us happily into darkening twilight. We propose a few toasts. First I raise my glass to Colette.

As we hoist the rowboat out of the water, Ed says, “When are we going to Saint-Sauveur? We’re not far away.”

He knows that I’ve saved the trip to Colette’s childhood town, savoring the anticipation. Saint-Sauveur—the crucible. “I’m ready. Let’s go tomorrow.”

Standing
in front of 8, rue de Colette (formerly rue de l’Hospice), with her inspired, passionate descriptions in mind, I confront a tall dun-colored house with white shutters. It looks neglected. A doctor’s name is above the doorbell, which I imagine ringing—
would it be possible to see Colette’s room
—but don’t. She wrote:

A large solemn house, rather forbidding, with its shrill bell and its carriage entrance with a huge bolt like an ancient dungeon, a house that smiled only on its garden side. The back, invisible to passers-by, was a sun trap, swathed in a mantle of wisteria and bignonia too heavy for the trellis of worn ironwork, which sagged in the middle like a hammock and provided shade for the little flagged terrace and the threshold of the sitting room.

Her perspective: the child hiding while her mother looked for her. “Where are the children?” Sido calls, never looking up into the branches of the walnut where gleamed the “pale, pointed face of a child who lay stretched like a tomcat along a big branch and who never uttered a word.” Colette interrupts her description long enough to ask herself, “Is it worthwhile, I wonder, seeking for adequate words to describe the rest?” She then continues in a lyric key:

I shall never be able to conjure up the splendor that adorns, in my memory, the ruddy festoons of an autumn vine borne down by its own weight and clinging despairingly to some branch of the fir trees. And the massive lilacs, whose compact flowers—blue in the shade and purple in the sunshine—withered so soon, stifled by their own exuberance. The lilacs long since dead will not be revived at my bidding, any more than the terrifying moonlight—silver, quicksilver, leaden-gray, with facets of dazzling amethyst or scintillating points of sapphire—all depending on a certain pane in the blue glass window of the summerhouse at the bottom of the garden.

The flash of memories accompanies her realization that “the secret is lost that opened to me a whole world.”

Time, sun-baked time, time that keeps on slipping, slipping, elusive time, time like the stone Romanesque eyes peering from behind a clump of leaves, the startled pagan looking toward a transformed future. Art historians refer to this recurrent motif of the face in the leaves as “the green man.”

My childhood was not edenic, far from it, but the concatenation of first experiences remains a vein of gold in memory. Going back, dipping into those impressions, gives me not nostalgia, no, no, no, but private renaissances. Swinging on the wooden supports of my mother’s canopied bed, climbing out the window to play in the moonlit garden, painting myself all over with house paint (my mother shrieking
You’re going to die
), riding on the back of a sea turtle making its way back to the waves, the sweet reek of pork roasting on a pit fire, my sashes tied in bows, my father whispering
You can have anything you want
, hiding in the hydrangeas, imagining my face as one of the pale blooms—the ten thousand images that compose a childhood, those imprints last forever. Wright Morris, of the Craft of Fiction class and the important novels, told me, “If you’ve had a childhood, you have enough to write about for the rest of your life.”

I wonder if the garden once was larger or if her memory expanded the dimensions, out of love for every petal and twig.

The reality of her home must remain a cipher. The present facade reveals as much of Colette as a tombstone tells about the occupant below. I visited the house twenty years ago. I remember a young couple whizzing up on a Vespa. They paused, he revved the engine, and the girl waved to the upstairs window. “
Bonjour
, Colette,” she called as they spun off.

This time I have come to see the recently opened Musée Colette. Too bad they could not buy her family home. The museum, only a stroll away, is in a seventeenth-century château, a grander villa than her mother’s house. If Colette had come back to Saint-Sauveur in her later years, she might have bought this house. But I suddenly realize that after she married and moved to Paris, she could have, but never did, return to live here. She loved other parts of France, especially La Treille Muscate (The Musk Vine Arbor), her house in Saint-Tropez. She liked in her early adult life to “move house.” Intensely domestic, she was also restless. This oxymoron is one source of my identification with her. “Wherever you are, you’re thinking of somewhere else,” my first husband accused me. Sadly, he spoke the truth. Only later, when I lived in places I wanted to be, did the restlessness cool.

The house on rue de l’Hospice became the lost paradise, endlessly there in memory for replenishment, for revisiting, and perhaps even for reinventing. But not for actual return. This is one answer that solves the riddle of home. Icons from this house and garden are scattered across her books like handfuls of fairy dust: a copper knob that used to shine on her bedroom door, the drumroll played in the village on New Year’s morning, a warming pan she took to school, the nectar inside a flagon swathed in spiderwebs, a broken basket of spindle berries, a bouquet of meadow saffron, her hooded cape that casts her in a heraldic role—thousands of images as fresh as the slushy paths in autumn, where she sought the “yellow chanterelles that go so well with creamy sauces and casserole of veal.” Her childhood is almost as real to me as my own: a “skimpy little urchin, brave under my red hood, I would crack boiled chestnuts with my teeth as I slid along on my small pointed sabots.” Forty-five years in Paris, she claimed, did nothing to erase the provincial girl in quest of the country home she lost.

Is there a more personal museum in the world? This house
is
Colette. Slides of her eyes are projected on the stair landing wall, her haunting eyes from infancy to old age, flashing as you ascend and descend the steps. You come to a museum to look; in this one, Colette is looking at you. On the stair risers, the names of her books are carved in gold letters. Scattered in the marble floor, her many addresses are engraved. She must have been one of the most photographed people of her time. Photographs of her line one room. The frames’ mats are colored, giving the room an air of gaiety. Seeing the early photo of her sitting at the piano with her braid hanging to the floor and her creamy shoulders poised, you almost can hear the music. An alcove is filled with photos of her with animals. She always had pets, usually an ugly dog. I’m thrilled to see handwritten manuscripts with corrections and her address book written in brown ink. Her pot of pens and eyeglass case echo in the photo behind them, where she is reaching into the same pot.

Around the doors the stone is painted with blue vines, reminding me of her garden in Saint-Tropez. One leads to her writing room and bedroom, copied and furnished from her apartment at the Palais Royale. The designers have managed to make the rooms seem real, not at all house-of-wax. I get to gaze at her library steps, white china dogs made into lamps, feminine slipper chairs with needlepoint panels of flowers, mottled pomegranate and sunflower-yellow walls, and the narrow bed wedged under a window. When she was bedridden with arthritis, this room is where she lived. Under a fur throw, with a neat wheeled desk built over the bed, she wrote, entertained her friends, and regarded her collections of butterflies, framed not in rigid rows but randomly as though in flight. She loved glass objects. Her glass bracelets and horse are saved, along with a rare collection of Cartesian diver bottles in many colors. I can see her lifting one of her paperweights with an imprisoned butterfly or flower as she stops midsentence to think. She often wrote on blue paper and even shaded her desk lamp with a sheet of it. Her blue light in the window of the Palais Royale apartment became famous. Those passing below at night would look up and know that Colette was writing. So much of her still lives in the intensely personal rooms lit with the colors of the South.

She would approve of the café downstairs. I wish she could join us for pâté, cheese, baguette, and a glass of wine.

What would make the
musée
a true earthly paradise would be a Colette garden planted from her memories of her mother’s, her own, and the garden she imagined when she no longer had one. If a garden is impossible, perhaps a meditative, labyrinthine walk could be constructed. Punctuating the way would be painted signs with quotes so powerful that the real garden could rise in the mind’s eye. Instead of leaning to sniff the bountiful roses, one could read:

The first stir of spring is such a solemn thing that the accession of the rose, coming after it, is celebrated with less fervor. Yet everything is permitted to the rose: splendor, conspiring scents, petals with flesh that tempts the nostrils, the lips, the teeth. But all has been said, everything has been born already in any year when once the rose has entered it; the first rose but heralds all the other roses that must follow . . . Riper than fruit, more sensuous than cheek or breast . . .