Book review: “Civilisation Francaise” by Mary Fleming

Chicago-born Mary Fleming’s Civilisation Francaise is a novel of layers, like an onion, layers slowly peeled away for the reader to learn the stories of the book’s two central characters, Madame Quinon, an all-but-blind woman in her eighties, and her part-time helper Lily Owens, who arrives in Paris in September, 1982, as a virginal 21-year-old university graduate.

For eight months, they live in spacious elegant apartments in a building on a square called the place des Vosges in the Marais district that Madame’s husband Francois bought in the late 1950s with great plans to refurbish.  Most of the building, however, lies empty and rundown because Francois was hit by a bus in 1963 and died in 1967.

Madame’s longtime cook and housekeeper Germaine is friendly and welcoming, but the old woman treats Lily tersely, angry that her nephew thought she needed what she calls “a babysitter.”

Lily, at loose ends with no career plans, is taking a course at the Sorbonne for foreigners called civilisation francaise in which she is learning about French history and culture.  Before she goes to class, her job is to prepare and deliver Madame’s light breakfast each morning.  For that, she has her own room on the upper floor, the room that once belonged to Madame’s husband.

 

Lily’s “real” Paris life

Late in the novel, Lily looks back on her months in Paris and realizes that, despite her Sorbonne classes, her “real” Paris life, “the one that is more likely to stick to my ribs,” is in the house.

“Beyond its karmic relevance, this strange house is where the important developments are taking place.  The life-changing elements of the year abroad.  My real discoveries have revolved less around the course work or fleeting friendships and more around Thibaud’s mattress, even if he too will move on…”

Lily is never sure whether to think of Thibaud, a teaching assistant, as her boyfriend, but it has been on his mattress that she, for the first time, somewhat regularly engages in and enjoys sex.  And, adding a pinch of danger, that mattress is in one of the empty apartments in the deserted half of Madame’s building.

Later, Lily is shaped even more by her life in the house. When Germaine’s adult daughter was dealing with cancer, Lily steps in to do much of Madame’s cooking and discovers that she has a culinary talent and zest.  For the first time, her adult life begins to have a focus.

A time of discovery

Lily’s time with Madame and with Thibaud and her American friends at the Sorbonne is a time of discovery for her.  Meanwhile, the reader learns that Lily is technically an American even though she’s never lived there.

As layers of her story are revealed, the reader finds out that Lily is the third of three daughters born in England to American parents who met there during their year of study on Fulbright Scholarships and never went back. The girls, though, have been eager to leave — flee — home for a long time.

When Lily was seven and Maude, the oldest, ten, their mother tried to kill herself. She was rushed away in an ambulance and didn’t come back — neither did their father — for five years.  During that time, she was in a Swiss hospital where, the sisters surmise, she was given a lobotomy.

“Our father said she was ill and that we would live with Madame Flaviche until she got better.  The old witch really hated Maude and told her what had happened as a form of torture.  Our mother had put a towel under the kitchen door and turned on the gas over.  Our father woke up and noticed her missing just in time.”

The five years with Madame Flaviche were hell for Lily and her sisters.  They were sent, during the day, to the French lycee which is why Lily is now fluent in the language.  And things weren’t much better when the parents finally came back home.

 

Madame’s long-stretching past

Meanwhile, the layers around Madame’s story are slowly unrolled, as she begins keeping a diary, not so much about the present, but about her long-stretching past.

An American like Lily, Madame grew up on the family ranch in Wyoming.  Her mother clung to her East Coast past, and, when she gave birth to a daughter, she bestowed on the child the name of her hometown, a New York City suburb, Amenia.

Whisked away to Paris by a young Frenchman who spent a summer on the ranch and stole her heart, she was the glamorous Amenia Quinon in 1920s Paris, attending parties hosted by Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, being ogled by Ernest Hemingway and listening to James Joyce talking in his lyrical Irish voice to the owners of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore.

While Lily is looking forward with great hope and expectation, Madame recalls tragedies, such as World War II when Francois and their son Henri worked with the Resistance against the Nazi occupiers and when Germaine and her Jewish family were shipped off to the death camps.  Only Germaine survived.

 

Two novels in one

In a way, Civilisation Francaise is two novels in one.  In sections of about a page each, alternating from Lily’s point of view and then Madame’s, Fleming unlayers the stories of her two characters.

Both are intelligent and somewhat courageous women, but Lily and Madame never quite get to know each other.  Madame’s reserve cools a bit, and Lily’s timidity fades, but they never have a heart-to-heart talk.

In the end, the reader knows much about both women, but each knows little about the other.

Yet, for these eight months, Lily and Madame have been important to each other. And their lack of connection bring a bittersweetness to the ending of Civilisation Francaise, a rich novel about Paris and Parisian life and about life in general.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

8.20.24

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 7.23.24