From the airport I went directly to their house forty minutes north of Paris. By happy circumstance, Margot was visiting from Belgium. There was a street fair in town that weekend, a crowded warren of wares that bore an unsettling resemblance to the street fairs on Third Avenue in Manhattan—the same standardized junk food and Chinese imports, punctuated only occasionally by dollops of French culture—crepes, “follies” of bonbons, artisanal cheese.
In some ways, the place hadn’t changed. The Mathieus’ house was still a ramshackle jumble, walls covered in giant antique mirrors, corners cluttered with the same faded vacation photographs of La Rochelle, immense wooden bookshelves teeming with éditions Gallimard, an entire ceiling in the parlor dangling with Carole’s fantastical chandeliers—baroque antiques she’d embellished with Belgian glass crystals she’d bought “pas trop cher” from a friend. It was the kind of house where you constantly bumped into a memory. A nineteenth-century pepper grinder. Ancient copies of Le Monde. A grandparent’s handmade doll.
“I’m reading this Icelandic author,” Carole enthused, foisting a French translation in my direction. “You must see if they’re translated into English.” (They were not.) A diplomat from the Ivory Coast, in town for a Euro-African cultural congress, came by for lunch the same day I arrived. They’d all known one another as students. Bertrand had held on to a copy of his friend’s doctoral thesis. The diplomat pleaded for it back, but Bertrand genially refused. “You gave this to me as a gift! It’s a work of genius and it’s precious to me—you cannot have it.” Everyone drank aperitifs in the garden while Margot’s toddlers played in the grass, lightly ignored the way small French children often are.
But the Mathieus’ world had changed in other ways. On Sundays, when most pharmacies are closed, the owners post signs to direct people in case of emergency to the one pharmacy open. Having remembered to buy a few toiletries I’d naturally forgotten to pack, I found myself that Sunday in a pharmacy in an unfamiliar part of town. Here amid the indistinct high-rises of low-income housing, the women wore headscarves; groups of men gathered on corners and street crime was common. I’d been shocked earlier that year when, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the fugitives allegedly took refuge in this medieval walled city surrounded by farmland, forest, and an old sugar factory, of all places. The village’s residents were not surprised.
Carole had cleared out three rooms on the third floor for a family of Syrian refugees, a young couple with a one-year-old. She’d installed a makeshift kitchen and left a pile of hand-me-downs from her seven grandchildren. “As long as they aren’t Muslim,” the woman before her in line told the village committee looking for families willing to accept placements. “We only want to take in Christian refugees.”
“We’ll take anyone, even if they’re Christians,” Carole informed the committee when it was her turn, a story she repeated with mischievous glee.
I spent the rest of the week in the old apartment on rue Rambuteau, leaving reluctantly Thursday night. The following day at work, the shocking headlines tore across my computer screen. Dozens of people had been killed at the Bataclan concert hall not far from the Marais. It was Friday, November 13, and Paris had again exploded in terrorist violence. Facebook quickly confirmed that all the Mathieus were okay. But what had happened to their city? What had happened to the city that I couldn’t help but think of as partly my own?
The book I turned to was Victor Hugo’s 1862 masterpiece, Les Misérables. I hadn’t read a single French novel for two decades, not since taking a French lit course at the Alliance Fran?aise in my twenties, before my brain got tired. When the class was over, I fully intended to come back to French novels—but only in French. Why read in translation when I can read them in the original? I reasoned. The result was I didn’t read them at all. But after Juliette told me she’d finished Zola’s entire oeuvre while pregnant, I decided I’d waited long enough. If I waited to read Zola and Hugo and Balzac in French, I’d be waiting another two decades.
That’s how long I’d been meaning to read Les Misérables, a book I first encountered, as many people do, in musical form. When I arrived in Paris as a college student in 1992, my closest college friend, Victoria, and our other roommates and I decided to see the French version, then playing at the Théatre Mogador. I had never read the book nor seen the show in English. I understood about a third of what was happening onstage, which naturally didn’t stop me from bawling throughout. I immediately purchased the cast album in French and, when I got back to campus, stuck the cassette in my car and left it there for the entire year, driving everyone who had the misfortune to ride in my car insane with rage. “Don’t you have anything other than that stupid French musical tape in your car?” they’d plead. Further marring the passenger experience, tears would inevitably stream down my cheeks as I drove along, quietly singing in French to myself. It took about three bars of an orchestral swell to get me going; I might still be in the driveway.
So fine, I was a bit of a Les Miz fan. I next saw the musical in Czech with my cousin Kirsten in Prague, and after much snobbish resistance—how could it possibly work in English?—I decided to see it on Broadway. “Only if you promise me not to mention a single time how much better it is in French,” Michael warned me before consenting to come along. We watched the movie version together, too, both of us weeping unabashedly at the moment of Jean Valjean’s redemption. When I deemed Beatrice old enough, I watched it with her. Then we watched it again. All three of my children groan when I get choked up just describing one of the songs.
Yet I resisted the novel. It wasn’t just its formidable length. Or that the thought of reading it in French made me want to lie down. It was that I already knew what happened. Could I get through thirteen hundred pages when I could anticipate every impending catastrophe? Jean Valjean’s onerous imprisonment for stealing a loaf of bread. The devastating abandonment of Fantine. The decision to entrust Cosette to the treacherous Thénardiers. Every plot point or at least the musical rendition of those plot points was something I’d idiotically sung to myself dozens of times. Was it possible to enjoy a novel when you knew the whole story in advance?