We knew nothing of Madame outside the walls of our convent school.
The nuns were a French order. Madeleine Sophie Barat founded the order to teach the daughters of the upper middle class during the French Revolution. Religious education was forbidden during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and Madeleine Sophie went to the guillotine. For this she was declared a saint.
In the 1950s the order was still teaching upper-middle-class daughters around the world and, in one particular instance, in a gracious, leafy suburb of San Francisco. I attended high school in their three-story Victorian monstrosity at the end of Palm Drive. The education offered was still very French. Everyone studied français from first grade on. In the high school two years were required—presided over by tiny martinet Mother Perry. If you continued for your third and fourth year, you were passed on to Madame du Planty. She was French . . . from France.
Madame du Planty—I never learned her nom chrétien, but I imagined it to be Régine—was about medium height, that is, as tall as I was, and plump, with gray hair piled above her round face. Although probably in her fifties, she wasn’t dumpy or frumpy, but stylish. Not stylish in a flashy way, but, well, in a . . . French . . . way, understated, but with presence. She wore gray suits (or perhaps just one gray suit) and white blouses with either a plain bow flowing from the high collar or a frilly jabot. Her shoes were black and sensible—what older women wore in those days—and her hose beige and opaque, not the wonderful new transparent nylon. I don’t remember that she wore jewelry, just a small gold watch pinned to her left lapel.
Her eyes, behind rimless round spectacles, were a faded blue or perhaps even originally bluish-gray. Her full lips seemed shaped by the constant oi and eu of her language. When we mangled its sounds, she complained that the hardest word to pronounce in English was model. For weeks I rolled that word around in my mouth.
The nuns provided a textbook for French 3 and 4, but Madame didn’t use it. We studied instead tattered issues of Paris-Match. We learned that France produced great artists and even greater cooks and that French criminals still met their death by guillotine. We read the contes of du Maupassant and, my favorite, Alphonse Daudet—stories, filled with pluperfects and past subjunctives, about windmills in the south and the mule of the pope.
Between bouts of reading, which must have frustrated Madame deeply, we listened to recordings of Edith Piaf on little 45 rpm disks, and sang along—sang songs about life that is rosy and under the bridges of Paris. Even today, when I watch the elegant film Sabrina, studded with snatches of La Vie en Rose, I am instantly back in the shabby third-floor senior lounge with a half a dozen blue-uniformed classmates gathered around the tiny phonograph in that languorous stretch of afternoon between lunch and field hockey.
We knew nothing of Madame outside the walls of the school, but I was offered a glimpse of her life when she asked me and another student to help her move one autumn Saturday. We carried her few boxes of clothes, books, and kitchen supplies from a small upstairs apartment in a downtown Victorian to a modest ranch house out by the chaparral hills that rose west of our town. There wasn’t much furniture in the new place, but there was “M. du Planty,” a frail man who lay motionless with vacant eyes in a narrow bed in one of the two bedrooms. He was not, we were told, the original M. du Planty. This domestic arrangement seemed unusual to my friend and me, but we accepted it as thoroughly French. We placed our boxes on the bare wood floor of the living room and sat down beside them while Madame prepared a pot of tea.
In my senior year Mom invited Madame (Monsieur was still too ill) to our house for Thanksgiving dinner. We often took in “strays” at holiday time, but this was our first foreigner and we were all on our best behavior—my parents and my younger brother and sister as well as my father’s business partner and his wife. Mom placed Madame at the head of the table.
After the turkey and mince pies, the adults stirred strong coffee with tiny silver spoons and the conversation drifted as evening enveloped the candlelit room. It was then that Madame told us her story.
She had been a lawyer in Versailles, not far from Paris. She explained that her title was maitre; even female lawyers were called by this masculine form. She laughed and blushed as she recalled the day one of her clients rushed into the courtroom shouting, “Voila ma maitress—there is my mistress.” Even the Frenchman had not understood his lawyer’s title.
The dining room became quiet as Madame’s soft voice grew softer and she told us why she had come to America.
“I emigrated as soon as the war was over,” she said, “because I was a collaborator.”
If we around the table had been quiet before, we now sat suspended in a breathless silence. I was seventeen—what did I know? Only that in movies collaborators had their heads shaved, were stoned by their neighbors or hanged; only that occasional newspaper stories reported about weak or nasty people who had helped the Nazis.
Yet my Madame sat at the head of our table, backlit by the big front window, in her high-necked white blouse, gray hair piled high—an elegant woman who had taught me how to cook coq au vin and sing bittersweet songs.
No one asked for details—perhaps wishing not to hear, perhaps not knowing what our reaction should be, perhaps waiting for Madame to offer up herself . . .
But she said nothing more. Madame did not explain, she did not justify. She just went on to say she was grateful that our local Congressman had sponsored a special bill that gave her political asylum in the United States. This impressed me as much as her other story. Imagine—a law passed just for her.
I never shared this information with my classmates. French class continued as usual. I graduated and went away to college, carrying with me a reluctance to judge and a canker of self-doubt. A few years later my mother told me she heard that Madame du Planty had returned to France.
I wondered if she returned to Versailles, to her old street, filled with the ghosts of nobles and guillotines. Had she been a coward in the face of the Germans? Was she brave to go back? Who would have been waiting for her when she stepped off the train from Paris?