Extreme Magic Read Free

(“Ecrivain? Romancier?” asked my monitor faintly.)
    “Ah,” said the old man. “I am familiar with one of your writers. Père Le Buc.”
    “Père Le Buc?” I shook my head sadly. “I regret, but it is not known to me, the work of the Father Le Buc.”
    “Pas un homme!” he said. “Une femme! Une femme qui s’appelle Père Le Buc!”
    My monitor raised his head for one last time. “Pɛrləbyk!” he chirped desperately. “Pɛrləbyk!”
    I listened. “Oh, my God,” I said then. “Of course. That is how it would be. Pearl Buck!”
    “Mais oui,” said the old man, beaming and raising his glass. “Pɛrləbyk!”
    At the bar, the loungers, thinking we were exchanging some toast; raised their own glasses in courteous imitation. “Pɛrləbyk!” they said, politely. “Pɛrləbyk!”
    I raised mine. “Il pleure,” I began, “il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut…”
    Before the evening was over, I had given them quite a selection: from Verlaine, from Heredia’s “Les Trophées,” from Baudelaire’s poem on a painting by Delacroix, from de Musset’s “R-r-ra-ppelle-toi!” As a final tribute, I gave them certain stanzas from Hugo’s “L’Expiation”—the ones that begin “Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Morne plaine!” And in between, raised or lowered by a new faith that was not all brandy, into an air freed of cuneiform at last—I spoke French.
    Making my way home afterward, along the dark stretches of the Rue du Bac, I reflected that to learn a language outside its native habitat you must really believe that the other country exists—in its humdrum, its winter self. Could I remember to stay there now—down in that lower-case world in which stairs creaked, cops yelled, in which women bought brassieres and sometimes made the false couch?
    The door of my hotel was locked. I rang, and M. Lampacher admitted me. He snapped on the stair light, economically timed to go out again in a matter of seconds, and watched me as I mounted the stairs with the aid of the banister.
    “Off bright and early, hmm?” he said sleepily, in French. “Well, good night, Madame. Hope you had a good time here.”
    I turned, wanting to answer him properly, to answer them all. At that moment, the light went off, perhaps to reinforce forever my faith in the mundanity of France.
    “Ah, ça va, ça va!” I said strongly, into the dark. “Couci-couça. Schpuh.”

Two Colonials
    W HEN YOUNG ALASTAIR PINES came out from Leeds, England, to teach on an exchange fellowship at Pitt, a small college about a hundred miles from Detroit, Michigan, he was the second foreign teacher ever to be in residence there. Pitt, founded in the Eighteen-sixties by a Presbyterian divine, and still under a synod of that church, had kept its missionary flavor well up to the Second World War. Set in Pittston—a bland village of white and cream-colored houses whose green roofs matched, even in summer, dark lawns compelled by lamasery effort (and perhaps a cautious hint of divine favor) from the dry Michigan plain—the school had kept a surface calm even during the war. It was the centripetal calm of those who, living in the sacred framework of morning, noon and evening service and a perfect round of dedicatory suppers, could not help feeling ever so slightly chosen—of people whose plain living and high thinking was not that of poverty, but of ample funds conserved. Some of the college halls had been built as recently as the Thirties (when labor was so cheap) and the organ (though not baroque to the point of Episcopalianism) was first-rate. Salaries had lagged well behind. Since, however, the non-smoking rule was still in effect on campus, and no teacher was supposed to have wine or spirits in his larder, he was officially helped to escape the extravagances of the age, as well as some of its anxieties. True, the table set by most of the younger faculty was somewhat farinaceous, but this might be less Franciscan than Middle Western, since most