October 6, 2024 • 28 mins
When you talk about your memories in French, you evoke your souvenirs. So what does mémoire mean? Memoirist Scott Carpenter is here to help us navigate this strange discrepancy between two false friends.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/paris-lost-and-found-a-memoir-of-love-scott-dominic-carpenter/21040045
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Credits
Host: Emily Monaco. @Emily_in_France; Website: http://www.tomatokumato.com and http://www.emilymmonaco.com Producer: Jennifer Geraghty. @jennyphoria; Website: http://jennyphoria.com
Music Credits
Édith Piaf - La Vie en Rose (DeliFB Lofi Remix)
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About Us
From one Emily in Paris to another... just speaking French isn't enough to understand the intricacies of the locals, but it's definitely a good place to start. Famously defended by armed "immortals" of the Académie Française (no, we're not making this up) the French language is filled with clues that show interested outsiders what, exactly, makes the French tick.
Each episode, listen in as Emily Monaco and an expert take a deep dive into a word that helps us gain a keener understanding of the French.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/paris-lost-and-found-a-memoir-of-love-scott-dominic-carpenter/21040045
Join us on Patreon: patreon.com/parisundergroundradio
Find Us Online
Website: https://www.parisundergroundradio.com/navigatingthefrench
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/parisundergroundradio
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/parisundergroundradio/
Credits
Host: Emily Monaco. @Emily_in_France; Website: http://www.tomatokumato.com and http://www.emilymmonaco.com Producer: Jennifer Geraghty. @jennyphoria; Website: http://jennyphoria.com
Music Credits
Édith Piaf - La Vie en Rose (DeliFB Lofi Remix)
🎵 MSKD Sounds: https://www.instagram.com/mskd_sounds/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRql... https://soundcloud.com/mskd_sounds
🎵 DeliFB: https://www.youtube.com/c/DeliFB https://soundcloud.com/delifb https://www.instagram.com/cativo.kevin/ https://twitter.com/DeliciousFB
About Us
From one Emily in Paris to another... just speaking French isn't enough to understand the intricacies of the locals, but it's definitely a good place to start. Famously defended by armed "immortals" of the Académie Française (no, we're not making this up) the French language is filled with clues that show interested outsiders what, exactly, makes the French tick.
Each episode, listen in as Emily Monaco and an expert take a deep dive into a word that helps us gain a keener understanding of the French.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You are listening to Navigating the French on Paris Underground Radio.
For more great content and a bonus episode of Navigating
the French, please join us on Patreon.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Hello and welcome to Navigating the French, the podcast where
each episode we take a look at a French word
and try and see what it tells us about French culture.
I'm your host, Emily Monico. Today I'm joined by Scott Carpenter,
the author of Press Laws and Found a Memoir of Love.
He's here to discuss a word that evokes a host
of themes related to the things we remember, but is not,
(00:36):
oddly enough, the word the French used to refer to
individual memories, memoir. I am very excited to welcome you
back to the podcast, Scott. Thank you so much for
joining me again. Happy to be here, and you are
here on the tales of what was a I'm sure
a big job for you. You've just released a new book.
(00:58):
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Be happy to so. A few years ago I released
a book called French Like Mai, sort of a memoir
of anecdotes about living in Paris, and what I've just
released now is a new one. Just got actually the
copies because we're just releasing it. Paris Lost and Found,
a Memoir of Love. So this is the new book
that picks up a little bit on the stories and
the situation from French like Ma, which was telling tales
(01:24):
about living in Paris over the course of a number
of years. Paris Lost and Found takes a somewhat different
tack a little bit later in life, and it tells
a more sort of sobering tale, still laced with humor.
Bizarrely that has to do with what it's like to
lose a loved one. So it starts with the tale
of my wife sinking into early onset Alzheimer's disease at
(01:47):
the beginning, and what that was like being in a
city like Paris, and then easing from that into what
Paris was like when I was coming out of that experience,
which was Paris of Us dated by COVID, and then
shows what it's like for the city to come roaring
back to life after that very bleak period, which was
(02:08):
also the period of which I came roaring back to life.
So some new opportunities, some new experiences, and ultimately a
happy ending.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
I mean, I think it's amazing that you're able to
tell that story with so much humor and heart, and
I think it's just a testament to you as a
as a writer and as a storyteller. And I'm excited
to have you here to talk about this word today
because it is threaded through your book, as we're going
to talk about a little bit later on the podcast.
But before we get into that, I want to jump
in with this idea of memoir because memoir is a
(02:39):
false friend, as so many of the words that we
talk about on this podcast are, But it's a false
friend that does sometimes mean what you think it means,
and then sometimes you have to use other words to
get at the meaning that you mean. So it's frustrating
in the sort of all squares or rectangles but not
all rectangles or squares kind of mindset. But basically, when
(03:01):
we're talking about memoir, sometimes we say memoir and sometimes
we say souvenir.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Right, give us.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Sort of a global look at what we generally mean
when we say memoir in this context, because there are
other contexts and what we mean when we say souvenir.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Yeah, So this is a great topic, and I think
in translation, all friends are false right that there are
no perfect translations. There's always a little bit of slippage
between the language, but this is a particularly subtle one,
I think, And to start in a sense with the
easy one, I would say souvenir is identifiable by all
(03:38):
English speakers because it's a where that has like crossed
the Atlantic, and we think of it as that trinket
or that bauble that is connected to a particular place
or a particular experience, you know, the mini Eiffel Tower,
the coin with the face of Napoleon on it from
the envalid that sort of thing, and the job there
is still linked to memory. Right. The job of these
(04:00):
objects is to trigger a memory or to somehow hold
that memory. And that's true in the French word souveno
as well. Right, that exists as a noun which can
mean these objects, but it also as a noun refers
to a specific event, a specific memory, a story or experience, right,
that we have recorded somehow, and is tied then of
(04:22):
course to the verb susuveno, which is that act of
remembering this specific thing. Meanmohile is a little bit different
because it's referring not so much to that specific event
or the thing that we're remembering, but that function the
capability or ability to remember. So I think of it
as being a little bit like the if you put
(04:43):
this in the context of a computer that you have
a hard drive, and the hard drive is where all
of these things are collected. The hard drive is meanwhile,
and in fact it's the word that is used for
computer memory in French is meanwhile. And then the various
data file that are stored on it are the verious
souvenir that we are able to call back to mind.
(05:05):
So that for me is really the big distinction. And
I think, as we'll see, there are some other little
rabbit holes that we can go down because they open
up into many different areas.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah, and I think that distinction that you're drawing is
really interesting. Like as you were talking, I was thinking
about how you would never say I had a memohile
like a memory, but you have my global memory that
makes me me, and then you have many many souvenirs
that make up your memory.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Yep, exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
And as someone who's also lost a loved one to Alzheimer's,
I remember what it's like to sort of see that
cohesive whole of everything that you are kind of starting
to become a little bit more fluid. And this idea
that you bring up in your book of sort of
this juxtaposition between someone that you love losing their memory
(05:54):
and losing a little bit of themselves in this city
which is in some ways a capital of memory. Can
you tell me a little bit about how that works
in your storytelling and what that meant for you when
you were comparing those two ideas.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Yeah, so I think it is particularly poignant to discuss
this in the context of Paris. Right, Paris has this
special status as being the city that everybody remembers before
they have even gone there. Right, everybody knows the city
ahead of time. They've seen it in movies and books,
They've watched emily in Paris, they see it the Eiffel
(06:32):
Tower imprinted on handbags. It's really everywhere. It's part of
popular culture at the same time that it's part of
high culture. And there are such memorable aspects of the city.
The city was basically built, rebuilt in the nineteenth century
to become a locus of memory. Right, to have these
incredible views, the spectacular visions that you see when you
(06:53):
turn the corner and suddenly there's an opera house at
the end of the boulevard, that sort of thing. They
imprint memories to such an extent that the very specific
and idiosyncratic kinds of monuments that we have in Paris
are recognizable and memorable because of their distinctiveness. So you'd
(07:15):
have to be really far gone to look at the
Eiffel Tower and say, what is that thing? Right? These
things really stick, So in that kind of context, for me,
it was very poignant to watch my wife, who had
lived with me for many years in Paris. We raised
kids partly in Paris, to see the tiles of that
mosaic starting to fall down or become untethered. Sometimes it
(07:38):
was that capacity for memory that was being lost, but
the individual memories were still somehow there, but they became
dislocated and moved into different places and then would vanish entirely,
and then the ability to create new memories was lost.
So that was particularly devastating, I think, in that particular situation.
(07:58):
And one of the things that I recount in the
book is the last trip that we took, so we'd
come back to the States for a period of her
as she was declining, but with my sister in law,
my wife's sister. We went on one last trip somehow
thinking that I think this was something we both understood
(08:20):
but didn't really tell one another. My sister in law
and I that that the re entry into Paris, because
it's such a memorable place, would help to kind of
consolidate what remained of her memory. Of course, that failed.
The city's actions on memory are not going to be
able to stand up to the test of human existence,
but that was sort of the effort.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
And how does your sort of return to Paris feel
in terms of interacting with Paris in a place that
not only is this memorable place for so many people
that you don't know, but was so memorable for you
in your life.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Yeah, good question. You know, when I returned to Paris,
it was after that chapter of my life, right, and
then returning as COVID was sort of the after effects
of COVID. The city was a very bleak place. A
lot of things that I attached memories to, including people,
had vanished. I have friends who moved from the city
(09:16):
definitively during that period and they said they're not going
to do it. So the city was recognizable, but it
was also very, very different so in terms of memory,
that was a bit of a game of trying to
rediscover the things that were still there, that were still
anchored in my particular memory, but also beginning to fashion
(09:37):
new ones as the city reinvented itself.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah. I think that also sort of paves away for
one of the questions that I wanted to discuss with you,
which is one of the ways that I think is
really fascinating, or the things that I think is really
fascinating about the way that the French use the word
memoir is that you can have a collective memory, and
this idea of sort of a shared and common memory.
(10:01):
I think that kind of exists in other cultures, but
I hear it used a lot in the French language
a lot, which makes me think, you know, when you
hear a phrase used over and over again, it feels
like it has a specific resonance in that culture. Is
that something that you've noticed, this idea of a collective
memory or even being responsible as a community or as
(10:23):
a society for remembering things.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Yeah, So I think memory is terrifically important to French culture.
Of course, memory is important to every culture, right, There
is this sense that we have some shared history and
therefore we have some shared memories. I think that is
what sort of glues people together in some ways. But
we also see cultures that become somewhat unglued because their
(10:47):
sense of a shared identity and a shared past is
not as strong. In France, this notion of the memohile collective,
this collective experience and shared memories of the past is
quite strong, I think, and I think it's partly due
to the way that the culture is so centralized, and
(11:09):
so France is a much more centralized country than, for example,
the United States, which has this sort of federation of
states with their their all acting somewhat autonomously, whereas in
France everything is sort of governed by the mostly by Paris, right,
And there is this notion of a central education. There
is a national education in France the way that there
(11:31):
is not in the United States, which means that everybody
is learning pretty much the same curriculum. And there was
this dream in the early twentieth century that one could
achieve this state where every school child in France would
be reading the same page of the same history manual
on the same day. They never achieved that, thank goodness, right,
(11:53):
there's more variety than that, but that gives you a
sense of this idea of sameness across Spain and across
age and culture that exists in France that doesn't exist elsewhere.
There's a historian named pire No Rats who helped to
assemble a great collection of essays, fantastic collection in several
(12:15):
volumes called Lieux de Memoile Sites of Memory. And what
he's looking to do in this collection, where a number
of historians and sociologists participated contributed essays, is to identify
those particular touchstones of French culture that are not maybe
(12:36):
universally shared, but are very broadly shared. And some of
them you might expect. It might be Charles de Gaul.
There is an essay on the Eiffel Tower, but it's
also very small, mundane things, the baguette, the institution of
the cafe, all sorts of small ordinary things also elements
(12:59):
that each into the spiritual life. So the notion of
the cathedral, not any specific cathedral, but the Gothic cathedrals
that are sprinkled around France that people become familiar with
and then become they had that sort of shared experience
of cathedrals and it's everything from the everyday experience to
the spiritual, to the political, to almost any facet that
(13:21):
you can think of, and there are many of these
in French culture. So I think that's a really terrific
example of collective memory. There's a philosopher from the end
of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renand who spent a long
time trying to think about what it is that pulls
together a society, what holds us together? And he looked
at all these various things. Is it a common language,
(13:44):
It's like, well, no, I mean, because you have countries
where many languages are spoken. Look at Switzerland. Is it
having some sense of stable borders? No, because borders are
often changing and we see that all of the time.
Is it a common religion? Now, it's not. So we
go through all of these various things, and what he
settles on is the notion of collective memory. It's shared
(14:06):
memories that really bind people together, and in particular, he says,
memories of suffering. So societies cultures that have suffered together
really have this very strong sense of collective experience, a
kind of collective nostalgia sometimes of the before or the
after of traumatic events. And I think that is more
(14:28):
powerful in France than it is in many other places.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
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Speaker 2 (15:05):
Navigating of the French will be right back after award
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And I think what you said about Paris being the
central locus of so much of that is really essential
to that. You know, you do obviously have these events
like I can think, you know, the French Revolution, people
have a lot of storytelling around that, or even you
(15:25):
know World War two and the occupation, people have a
lot of storytelling around that. But one thing you also
notice in Paris when you were talking about these places
is France being a nominally secular society. We delve into
that on the Lacta episode if anybody wants to hear why,
I say nominally, But there we are a nominally secular society.
(15:46):
We do have a lot of churches, but we also
have a lot of buildings that were churches that become
monuments almost to memory. So I'm thinking, like specifically of
the Pantheon in Paris you have I'm sure there are
many others that we could come up with, but places
where it is sort of the knowledge and the memory
and the collective consciousness that's being held to the same
(16:07):
esteem as you know, a judacute religious place would be
in many other countries.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Yeah, I love that idea and I love that specific example, right,
because the Pantheon, the Ponthillon is that place where luminaries
across the sentries have been a little selection of them
have been buried, and so it's a kind of a graveyard.
There are graveyards in Paris as well. You think of
(16:35):
something like Perlachez, which is another place for keeping memories. Right,
that's the function of a grave, of a tombstone, to
have this little relic and trace of a person's passing.
Those are individual memories, they're you know, not necessarily small
but more familial memories. And then the pantheon is for
(16:56):
the big family, right, It's for the family of French culture,
and these are in a sense the mothers and fathers
of French science and culture writ large who are represented there.
And it does show something special about France, right. We
don't have the equivalent, I think in the US of
a space where these collective founding figures, right have been enshrined.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Absolutely so. One thing that I remember as a French
learner when I was first learning French that totally baffled
and really frustrated me, and I think I'm not alone
in this is that you know, you'll misgender a noun
and the person you're talking to will pretend they can't
understand you. And then I remember the first day that
(17:45):
a different foreigner was talking to me and misgendered noun
and I was like what, And I did the same
thing that had been annoying me the entire time I'd
been learning French. Because the reality is, once you get
those gendered noun things in your head, they are you know, unbreakable.
And with memoir, this is a particularly apt sort of
(18:07):
thing to know about because using the wrong in quotes
or using the you know, the a different gender for
the noun can actually change its meaning.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
Right.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
So there's memoir singular masculine, memoir singular feminine, and memoir plural, right,
and you clear that fog for us. What do those
three things mean?
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Yeah, So first what I want to do is sympathize
with that situation of all foreign you know, learners of
French as a second language, right, who are struggling with
gender and that experience that you described of using the
wrong gender and then suddenly and people have no idea
what you're speaking about. And it always makes me think
of what they say of beehives, right, that if the
(18:55):
bees go out and if you just move that hive
six inches, they'll come back. They'll never find it. He
just been, you know, moved a little squinch to the side.
And that's a little bit what happens with language. You
just like changed that tiny little thing. You think it
ought not to matter, but sometimes it matters a lot,
and that's sometimes the case here. So to clarify a
(19:17):
little bit, this notion of meanwhile that we were speaking
of before, collective memory, the faculty of memory, things like that,
that's meanwhile in the feminist la meanwhile, la meanwhile collective,
things like that, But it does also exist in the
masculine meanwhile, which is in part this right. So this
(19:39):
is a memoir, and it can be in the masculine singular.
It's more often in the masculine plural. So Fleubert had
a little book called meanwhile in the plural meanwhile de
fu memories of a madman. But it's a memoir of
a madman, and we see that frequently. And then there's
(20:00):
this other use of meanwhile that is a little more unusual,
meanwhile in the masculine meaning a kind of report, or
sometimes in English we might call it, we might call
it a thesis. So if you write a master's, if
you do a complete a master's and you have a
master's thesis to write, that would be referred to as
a meanwhile why what in the masculine, why would that
(20:23):
be referred to as meanwhile? What? Connection to memory? The
idea is that these are longish reports, and they are
mostly supposed to be compilations of knowledge, so sort of
a wave recording knowledge. In recording we know, especially if
we think of the Spanish recordar means to remember, right,
So remembering, compiling, and recording are all connected in that.
(20:46):
Of course, as you move into the PhD level or
the doctoral level, then it's no longer a meanwhile. Then
it's the TES or the thesis, and that has a
different sort of resonance because because the TES is not
just a compilation of knowledge, it's proposing something new. It's
a more philosophical treatise. In English will also use the
(21:10):
word dissertation, which has this origin from Latin of examination
and discussion. Right, these are richer, larger ideas that are
being presented. The meanwhile is somehow a little bit more settled,
which is tied I guess to the last meaning I
would evoke with meanwhile, which is a simple kind of memorandum,
(21:30):
especially in accounting, where you might turn in a list
of receipts referred to as the meanwhile, And it's again
just a way of recording things that were spent, things
that happened. So there's this idea that it should be
more material in a sense.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Okay, so lots of different ways to use this word. Unfortunately, Yes,
and so I did a master's here, and I kept
misgendering my memoir and calling it my memoir and I
think I confused a lot of people, so what life
goes on? So I think one, you know, there's lots
of different ways that memory works, as I'm sure you
(22:07):
saw firsthand, and as I'm sure you detail in your books.
So anybody who wants to learn a bit more about
what that experience was like and to get, you know,
sort of a view into your experience with that should
definitely get a copy of Parasols and Found. We'll be
putting a link in the description in the show notes.
But with all of this sort of strange ways that
(22:27):
memory can work and the way that it's connected to
our other senses, you smell some you know, my family
moved every single year when I was a kid, So
i walk past a place where they're renovating, and I'm like,
it's the smell of home.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
You know.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
In France we have, though, a very specific memoir that
makes a lot of sense given the culture that we have,
which is the memoir de vant, the stomach memory. So
most of the time when we talk about memoile de
vant in French, we use the expression the madeleine de puste,
so evoking the madeleine dipped in tea that sort of
(23:00):
sets us on the journey of the six volume Pristian novel.
But I'm curious, from your perspective, having spent so much
time here and having navigated, you know, the loss of
the big memoir, what were the ways in which food
and memory remained linked for you? And how do you
see French society as having a particular link between food
(23:23):
and memory that we might not see in other cultures.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Yeah, well, that's a deep and thorny question, right, I mean,
there are many different connections. You bring up the Pristian example,
and that is famous for a bunch of reasons, but
one of them is that it's an example, one of
the earliest examples in literature of what is called the
involuntary memory. Meanwhile, AVALENTEO, So you're not looking for it.
(23:52):
Sometimes we're sitting around scratching our heads. What was the
name of that person? I guess I'll look it up
on Wikipedia. But then sometimes memories fall us, Right, Sometimes
we're not looking for them, and suddenly they happen, and
they often come in through not the front door, but
the side door. The front door is when we're really
searching for them. That's what we're focused on. We're trying
(24:13):
to find something. But when other senses are at play,
and especially taste and smell, they're able to short circuit
some of that more conscious operation and they slip in
in these unexpected ways. You know, in my neighborhood in Paris,
I live in the thirteenth and in my neighborhood there are,
(24:34):
as in so many neighborhoods in Paris, shops lining the streets.
So I can go right downstairs, and in my building
on the ground floor there's a bakery. Across the street,
there's a fruit and vegetables stand, a couple of shops
down there's the butcher. Then all of a sudden, that's
the cheese shop. And so one of the things that
(24:54):
happens is that when you're just out for a stroll,
you encounter smells in a way that you don't in
any other city that I've spent time in, and they
are wafting out onto the sidewalk. Many of these shops
have open doors, sometimes, like the fruit and vegetable shops
have stands out in front, or you're going through one
(25:17):
of the open air markets which are springing up on
different days in different neighborhoods in different times. And it's
really a feast for the senses. And because you're not
looking for them, you're actually going to the post office,
or you're trying to get your shoe repaired or something
like that. You're focused on something else. You go past
(25:39):
these shops and suddenly, boom, something is sparked. Sometimes they're
famous sorts of universally experienced events, the event of smelling
fresh baguet. You get these maybe three times a day,
when the fresh bagets are coming out of the ovens,
and suddenly that aroma is so powerful. It may not
(26:01):
be calling to mind a very specific experience, but more
kind of a collection of experiences, and what you referred
to as the meanwhile duvantre is partly that, right. It's
all of these wonderful sensations that connect us to other experiences,
but in particular they might be tied to meals. So
(26:24):
this idea of the stomach having its own kind of memory,
it's tied to the meals that you had, the food
that you ate, but then especially the things attached to
that which are the company that you shared the meal with,
the wine that you had at that meal, the particular
aroma of that wine when it was first poured those
(26:45):
sorts of things and it becomes one of these great
networks of memories. So it's not just one thing, it's
one thing connected to another and another, and then there's
this web that you suddenly find yourself immeshed in. I
think that's one of the particular joys of living in
Paris is being taken by surprise as you're going down
(27:08):
the street and you encounter something that you're not looking for,
and sometimes that's in the form of aromas and sometimes
taste amazing.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Well, you've inspired me to go on a search for
new memories in Paris and very I mean, I just
feel like it's a completely different way of looking at
the city and I thank you for that. Anybody who
wants to gain more of Scott's wisdom should definitely pick
up a copy of the book. Thank you so very
much for joining me today. It's always a pleasure to
have you on and have a fantastic rest of your day.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Thanks so much. It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
This has been navigating the French. You can find more
from me Emily Monico at Emily Underscore in Underscore France,
on Twitter and Instagram. This podcast is produced by Paris
Underground Radio. To listen to other episodes of this podcast,
or to discover more podcasts like it, please visit Paris
Underground Radio dot com. Thanks for listening and abiento.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
This episode of Navigating the French was produced by Jennifer
Garrity for Paris Underground Radio. For more great content, join
us on Patreon at Patreon dot com slash Paris Underground
Radio
You are listening to Navigating the French on Paris Underground Radio.
For more great content and a bonus episode of Navigating
the French, please join us on Patreon.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Hello and welcome to Navigating the French, the podcast where
each episode we take a look at a French word
and try and see what it tells us about French culture.
I'm your host, Emily Monico. Today I'm joined by Scott Carpenter,
the author of Press Laws and Found a Memoir of Love.
He's here to discuss a word that evokes a host
of themes related to the things we remember, but is not,
(00:36):
oddly enough, the word the French used to refer to
individual memories, memoir. I am very excited to welcome you
back to the podcast, Scott. Thank you so much for
joining me again. Happy to be here, and you are
here on the tales of what was a I'm sure
a big job for you. You've just released a new book.
(00:58):
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Be happy to so. A few years ago I released
a book called French Like Mai, sort of a memoir
of anecdotes about living in Paris, and what I've just
released now is a new one. Just got actually the
copies because we're just releasing it. Paris Lost and Found,
a Memoir of Love. So this is the new book
that picks up a little bit on the stories and
the situation from French like Ma, which was telling tales
(01:24):
about living in Paris over the course of a number
of years. Paris Lost and Found takes a somewhat different
tack a little bit later in life, and it tells
a more sort of sobering tale, still laced with humor.
Bizarrely that has to do with what it's like to
lose a loved one. So it starts with the tale
of my wife sinking into early onset Alzheimer's disease at
(01:47):
the beginning, and what that was like being in a
city like Paris, and then easing from that into what
Paris was like when I was coming out of that experience,
which was Paris of Us dated by COVID, and then
shows what it's like for the city to come roaring
back to life after that very bleak period, which was
(02:08):
also the period of which I came roaring back to life.
So some new opportunities, some new experiences, and ultimately a
happy ending.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
I mean, I think it's amazing that you're able to
tell that story with so much humor and heart, and
I think it's just a testament to you as a
as a writer and as a storyteller. And I'm excited
to have you here to talk about this word today
because it is threaded through your book, as we're going
to talk about a little bit later on the podcast.
But before we get into that, I want to jump
in with this idea of memoir because memoir is a
(02:39):
false friend, as so many of the words that we
talk about on this podcast are, But it's a false
friend that does sometimes mean what you think it means,
and then sometimes you have to use other words to
get at the meaning that you mean. So it's frustrating
in the sort of all squares or rectangles but not
all rectangles or squares kind of mindset. But basically, when
(03:01):
we're talking about memoir, sometimes we say memoir and sometimes
we say souvenir.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Right, give us.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Sort of a global look at what we generally mean
when we say memoir in this context, because there are
other contexts and what we mean when we say souvenir.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Yeah, So this is a great topic, and I think
in translation, all friends are false right that there are
no perfect translations. There's always a little bit of slippage
between the language, but this is a particularly subtle one,
I think, And to start in a sense with the
easy one, I would say souvenir is identifiable by all
(03:38):
English speakers because it's a where that has like crossed
the Atlantic, and we think of it as that trinket
or that bauble that is connected to a particular place
or a particular experience, you know, the mini Eiffel Tower,
the coin with the face of Napoleon on it from
the envalid that sort of thing, and the job there
is still linked to memory. Right. The job of these
(04:00):
objects is to trigger a memory or to somehow hold
that memory. And that's true in the French word souveno
as well. Right, that exists as a noun which can
mean these objects, but it also as a noun refers
to a specific event, a specific memory, a story or experience, right,
that we have recorded somehow, and is tied then of
(04:22):
course to the verb susuveno, which is that act of
remembering this specific thing. Meanmohile is a little bit different
because it's referring not so much to that specific event
or the thing that we're remembering, but that function the
capability or ability to remember. So I think of it
as being a little bit like the if you put
(04:43):
this in the context of a computer that you have
a hard drive, and the hard drive is where all
of these things are collected. The hard drive is meanwhile,
and in fact it's the word that is used for
computer memory in French is meanwhile. And then the various
data file that are stored on it are the verious
souvenir that we are able to call back to mind.
(05:05):
So that for me is really the big distinction. And
I think, as we'll see, there are some other little
rabbit holes that we can go down because they open
up into many different areas.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah, and I think that distinction that you're drawing is
really interesting. Like as you were talking, I was thinking
about how you would never say I had a memohile
like a memory, but you have my global memory that
makes me me, and then you have many many souvenirs
that make up your memory.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Yep, exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
And as someone who's also lost a loved one to Alzheimer's,
I remember what it's like to sort of see that
cohesive whole of everything that you are kind of starting
to become a little bit more fluid. And this idea
that you bring up in your book of sort of
this juxtaposition between someone that you love losing their memory
(05:54):
and losing a little bit of themselves in this city
which is in some ways a capital of memory. Can
you tell me a little bit about how that works
in your storytelling and what that meant for you when
you were comparing those two ideas.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Yeah, so I think it is particularly poignant to discuss
this in the context of Paris. Right, Paris has this
special status as being the city that everybody remembers before
they have even gone there. Right, everybody knows the city
ahead of time. They've seen it in movies and books,
They've watched emily in Paris, they see it the Eiffel
(06:32):
Tower imprinted on handbags. It's really everywhere. It's part of
popular culture at the same time that it's part of
high culture. And there are such memorable aspects of the city.
The city was basically built, rebuilt in the nineteenth century
to become a locus of memory. Right, to have these
incredible views, the spectacular visions that you see when you
(06:53):
turn the corner and suddenly there's an opera house at
the end of the boulevard, that sort of thing. They
imprint memories to such an extent that the very specific
and idiosyncratic kinds of monuments that we have in Paris
are recognizable and memorable because of their distinctiveness. So you'd
(07:15):
have to be really far gone to look at the
Eiffel Tower and say, what is that thing? Right? These
things really stick, So in that kind of context, for me,
it was very poignant to watch my wife, who had
lived with me for many years in Paris. We raised
kids partly in Paris, to see the tiles of that
mosaic starting to fall down or become untethered. Sometimes it
(07:38):
was that capacity for memory that was being lost, but
the individual memories were still somehow there, but they became
dislocated and moved into different places and then would vanish entirely,
and then the ability to create new memories was lost.
So that was particularly devastating, I think, in that particular situation.
(07:58):
And one of the things that I recount in the
book is the last trip that we took, so we'd
come back to the States for a period of her
as she was declining, but with my sister in law,
my wife's sister. We went on one last trip somehow
thinking that I think this was something we both understood
(08:20):
but didn't really tell one another. My sister in law
and I that that the re entry into Paris, because
it's such a memorable place, would help to kind of
consolidate what remained of her memory. Of course, that failed.
The city's actions on memory are not going to be
able to stand up to the test of human existence,
but that was sort of the effort.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
And how does your sort of return to Paris feel
in terms of interacting with Paris in a place that
not only is this memorable place for so many people
that you don't know, but was so memorable for you
in your life.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Yeah, good question. You know, when I returned to Paris,
it was after that chapter of my life, right, and
then returning as COVID was sort of the after effects
of COVID. The city was a very bleak place. A
lot of things that I attached memories to, including people,
had vanished. I have friends who moved from the city
(09:16):
definitively during that period and they said they're not going
to do it. So the city was recognizable, but it
was also very, very different so in terms of memory,
that was a bit of a game of trying to
rediscover the things that were still there, that were still
anchored in my particular memory, but also beginning to fashion
(09:37):
new ones as the city reinvented itself.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah. I think that also sort of paves away for
one of the questions that I wanted to discuss with you,
which is one of the ways that I think is
really fascinating, or the things that I think is really
fascinating about the way that the French use the word
memoir is that you can have a collective memory, and
this idea of sort of a shared and common memory.
(10:01):
I think that kind of exists in other cultures, but
I hear it used a lot in the French language
a lot, which makes me think, you know, when you
hear a phrase used over and over again, it feels
like it has a specific resonance in that culture. Is
that something that you've noticed, this idea of a collective
memory or even being responsible as a community or as
(10:23):
a society for remembering things.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Yeah, So I think memory is terrifically important to French culture.
Of course, memory is important to every culture, right, There
is this sense that we have some shared history and
therefore we have some shared memories. I think that is
what sort of glues people together in some ways. But
we also see cultures that become somewhat unglued because their
(10:47):
sense of a shared identity and a shared past is
not as strong. In France, this notion of the memohile collective,
this collective experience and shared memories of the past is
quite strong, I think, and I think it's partly due
to the way that the culture is so centralized, and
(11:09):
so France is a much more centralized country than, for example,
the United States, which has this sort of federation of
states with their their all acting somewhat autonomously, whereas in
France everything is sort of governed by the mostly by Paris, right,
And there is this notion of a central education. There
is a national education in France the way that there
(11:31):
is not in the United States, which means that everybody
is learning pretty much the same curriculum. And there was
this dream in the early twentieth century that one could
achieve this state where every school child in France would
be reading the same page of the same history manual
on the same day. They never achieved that, thank goodness, right,
(11:53):
there's more variety than that, but that gives you a
sense of this idea of sameness across Spain and across
age and culture that exists in France that doesn't exist elsewhere.
There's a historian named pire No Rats who helped to
assemble a great collection of essays, fantastic collection in several
(12:15):
volumes called Lieux de Memoile Sites of Memory. And what
he's looking to do in this collection, where a number
of historians and sociologists participated contributed essays, is to identify
those particular touchstones of French culture that are not maybe
(12:36):
universally shared, but are very broadly shared. And some of
them you might expect. It might be Charles de Gaul.
There is an essay on the Eiffel Tower, but it's
also very small, mundane things, the baguette, the institution of
the cafe, all sorts of small ordinary things also elements
(12:59):
that each into the spiritual life. So the notion of
the cathedral, not any specific cathedral, but the Gothic cathedrals
that are sprinkled around France that people become familiar with
and then become they had that sort of shared experience
of cathedrals and it's everything from the everyday experience to
the spiritual, to the political, to almost any facet that
(13:21):
you can think of, and there are many of these
in French culture. So I think that's a really terrific
example of collective memory. There's a philosopher from the end
of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renand who spent a long
time trying to think about what it is that pulls
together a society, what holds us together? And he looked
at all these various things. Is it a common language,
(13:44):
It's like, well, no, I mean, because you have countries
where many languages are spoken. Look at Switzerland. Is it
having some sense of stable borders? No, because borders are
often changing and we see that all of the time.
Is it a common religion? Now, it's not. So we
go through all of these various things, and what he
settles on is the notion of collective memory. It's shared
(14:06):
memories that really bind people together, and in particular, he says,
memories of suffering. So societies cultures that have suffered together
really have this very strong sense of collective experience, a
kind of collective nostalgia sometimes of the before or the
after of traumatic events. And I think that is more
(14:28):
powerful in France than it is in many other places.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
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Speaker 2 (15:05):
Navigating of the French will be right back after award
from our sponsors, and now back to Navigating the French.
And I think what you said about Paris being the
central locus of so much of that is really essential
to that. You know, you do obviously have these events
like I can think, you know, the French Revolution, people
have a lot of storytelling around that, or even you
(15:25):
know World War two and the occupation, people have a
lot of storytelling around that. But one thing you also
notice in Paris when you were talking about these places
is France being a nominally secular society. We delve into
that on the Lacta episode if anybody wants to hear why,
I say nominally, But there we are a nominally secular society.
(15:46):
We do have a lot of churches, but we also
have a lot of buildings that were churches that become
monuments almost to memory. So I'm thinking, like specifically of
the Pantheon in Paris you have I'm sure there are
many others that we could come up with, but places
where it is sort of the knowledge and the memory
and the collective consciousness that's being held to the same
(16:07):
esteem as you know, a judacute religious place would be
in many other countries.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Yeah, I love that idea and I love that specific example, right,
because the Pantheon, the Ponthillon is that place where luminaries
across the sentries have been a little selection of them
have been buried, and so it's a kind of a graveyard.
There are graveyards in Paris as well. You think of
(16:35):
something like Perlachez, which is another place for keeping memories. Right,
that's the function of a grave, of a tombstone, to
have this little relic and trace of a person's passing.
Those are individual memories, they're you know, not necessarily small
but more familial memories. And then the pantheon is for
(16:56):
the big family, right, It's for the family of French culture,
and these are in a sense the mothers and fathers
of French science and culture writ large who are represented there.
And it does show something special about France, right. We
don't have the equivalent, I think in the US of
a space where these collective founding figures, right have been enshrined.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Absolutely so. One thing that I remember as a French
learner when I was first learning French that totally baffled
and really frustrated me, and I think I'm not alone
in this is that you know, you'll misgender a noun
and the person you're talking to will pretend they can't
understand you. And then I remember the first day that
(17:45):
a different foreigner was talking to me and misgendered noun
and I was like what, And I did the same
thing that had been annoying me the entire time I'd
been learning French. Because the reality is, once you get
those gendered noun things in your head, they are you know, unbreakable.
And with memoir, this is a particularly apt sort of
(18:07):
thing to know about because using the wrong in quotes
or using the you know, the a different gender for
the noun can actually change its meaning.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
Right.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
So there's memoir singular masculine, memoir singular feminine, and memoir plural, right,
and you clear that fog for us. What do those
three things mean?
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Yeah, So first what I want to do is sympathize
with that situation of all foreign you know, learners of
French as a second language, right, who are struggling with
gender and that experience that you described of using the
wrong gender and then suddenly and people have no idea
what you're speaking about. And it always makes me think
of what they say of beehives, right, that if the
(18:55):
bees go out and if you just move that hive
six inches, they'll come back. They'll never find it. He
just been, you know, moved a little squinch to the side.
And that's a little bit what happens with language. You
just like changed that tiny little thing. You think it
ought not to matter, but sometimes it matters a lot,
and that's sometimes the case here. So to clarify a
(19:17):
little bit, this notion of meanwhile that we were speaking
of before, collective memory, the faculty of memory, things like that,
that's meanwhile in the feminist la meanwhile, la meanwhile collective,
things like that, But it does also exist in the
masculine meanwhile, which is in part this right. So this
(19:39):
is a memoir, and it can be in the masculine singular.
It's more often in the masculine plural. So Fleubert had
a little book called meanwhile in the plural meanwhile de
fu memories of a madman. But it's a memoir of
a madman, and we see that frequently. And then there's
(20:00):
this other use of meanwhile that is a little more unusual,
meanwhile in the masculine meaning a kind of report, or
sometimes in English we might call it, we might call
it a thesis. So if you write a master's, if
you do a complete a master's and you have a
master's thesis to write, that would be referred to as
a meanwhile why what in the masculine, why would that
(20:23):
be referred to as meanwhile? What? Connection to memory? The
idea is that these are longish reports, and they are
mostly supposed to be compilations of knowledge, so sort of
a wave recording knowledge. In recording we know, especially if
we think of the Spanish recordar means to remember, right,
So remembering, compiling, and recording are all connected in that.
(20:46):
Of course, as you move into the PhD level or
the doctoral level, then it's no longer a meanwhile. Then
it's the TES or the thesis, and that has a
different sort of resonance because because the TES is not
just a compilation of knowledge, it's proposing something new. It's
a more philosophical treatise. In English will also use the
(21:10):
word dissertation, which has this origin from Latin of examination
and discussion. Right, these are richer, larger ideas that are
being presented. The meanwhile is somehow a little bit more settled,
which is tied I guess to the last meaning I
would evoke with meanwhile, which is a simple kind of memorandum,
(21:30):
especially in accounting, where you might turn in a list
of receipts referred to as the meanwhile, And it's again
just a way of recording things that were spent, things
that happened. So there's this idea that it should be
more material in a sense.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Okay, so lots of different ways to use this word. Unfortunately, Yes,
and so I did a master's here, and I kept
misgendering my memoir and calling it my memoir and I
think I confused a lot of people, so what life
goes on? So I think one, you know, there's lots
of different ways that memory works, as I'm sure you
(22:07):
saw firsthand, and as I'm sure you detail in your books.
So anybody who wants to learn a bit more about
what that experience was like and to get, you know,
sort of a view into your experience with that should
definitely get a copy of Parasols and Found. We'll be
putting a link in the description in the show notes.
But with all of this sort of strange ways that
(22:27):
memory can work and the way that it's connected to
our other senses, you smell some you know, my family
moved every single year when I was a kid, So
i walk past a place where they're renovating, and I'm like,
it's the smell of home.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
You know.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
In France we have, though, a very specific memoir that
makes a lot of sense given the culture that we have,
which is the memoir de vant, the stomach memory. So
most of the time when we talk about memoile de
vant in French, we use the expression the madeleine de puste,
so evoking the madeleine dipped in tea that sort of
(23:00):
sets us on the journey of the six volume Pristian novel.
But I'm curious, from your perspective, having spent so much
time here and having navigated, you know, the loss of
the big memoir, what were the ways in which food
and memory remained linked for you? And how do you
see French society as having a particular link between food
(23:23):
and memory that we might not see in other cultures.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Yeah, well, that's a deep and thorny question, right, I mean,
there are many different connections. You bring up the Pristian example,
and that is famous for a bunch of reasons, but
one of them is that it's an example, one of
the earliest examples in literature of what is called the
involuntary memory. Meanwhile, AVALENTEO, So you're not looking for it.
(23:52):
Sometimes we're sitting around scratching our heads. What was the
name of that person? I guess I'll look it up
on Wikipedia. But then sometimes memories fall us, Right, Sometimes
we're not looking for them, and suddenly they happen, and
they often come in through not the front door, but
the side door. The front door is when we're really
searching for them. That's what we're focused on. We're trying
(24:13):
to find something. But when other senses are at play,
and especially taste and smell, they're able to short circuit
some of that more conscious operation and they slip in
in these unexpected ways. You know, in my neighborhood in Paris,
I live in the thirteenth and in my neighborhood there are,
(24:34):
as in so many neighborhoods in Paris, shops lining the streets.
So I can go right downstairs, and in my building
on the ground floor there's a bakery. Across the street,
there's a fruit and vegetables stand, a couple of shops
down there's the butcher. Then all of a sudden, that's
the cheese shop. And so one of the things that
(24:54):
happens is that when you're just out for a stroll,
you encounter smells in a way that you don't in
any other city that I've spent time in, and they
are wafting out onto the sidewalk. Many of these shops
have open doors, sometimes, like the fruit and vegetable shops
have stands out in front, or you're going through one
(25:17):
of the open air markets which are springing up on
different days in different neighborhoods in different times. And it's
really a feast for the senses. And because you're not
looking for them, you're actually going to the post office,
or you're trying to get your shoe repaired or something
like that. You're focused on something else. You go past
(25:39):
these shops and suddenly, boom, something is sparked. Sometimes they're
famous sorts of universally experienced events, the event of smelling
fresh baguet. You get these maybe three times a day,
when the fresh bagets are coming out of the ovens,
and suddenly that aroma is so powerful. It may not
(26:01):
be calling to mind a very specific experience, but more
kind of a collection of experiences, and what you referred
to as the meanwhile duvantre is partly that, right. It's
all of these wonderful sensations that connect us to other experiences,
but in particular they might be tied to meals. So
(26:24):
this idea of the stomach having its own kind of memory,
it's tied to the meals that you had, the food
that you ate, but then especially the things attached to
that which are the company that you shared the meal with,
the wine that you had at that meal, the particular
aroma of that wine when it was first poured those
(26:45):
sorts of things and it becomes one of these great
networks of memories. So it's not just one thing, it's
one thing connected to another and another, and then there's
this web that you suddenly find yourself immeshed in. I
think that's one of the particular joys of living in
Paris is being taken by surprise as you're going down
(27:08):
the street and you encounter something that you're not looking for,
and sometimes that's in the form of aromas and sometimes
taste amazing.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Well, you've inspired me to go on a search for
new memories in Paris and very I mean, I just
feel like it's a completely different way of looking at
the city and I thank you for that. Anybody who
wants to gain more of Scott's wisdom should definitely pick
up a copy of the book. Thank you so very
much for joining me today. It's always a pleasure to
have you on and have a fantastic rest of your day.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Thanks so much. It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
This has been navigating the French. You can find more
from me Emily Monico at Emily Underscore in Underscore France,
on Twitter and Instagram. This podcast is produced by Paris
Underground Radio. To listen to other episodes of this podcast,
or to discover more podcasts like it, please visit Paris
Underground Radio dot com. Thanks for listening and abiento.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
This episode of Navigating the French was produced by Jennifer
Garrity for Paris Underground Radio. For more great content, join
us on Patreon at Patreon dot com slash Paris Underground
Radio
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