For several years, in the early 'eighties, I was a regular visitor at this august address. The massive, arched oak door led into a spacious courtyard, with an ash tree growing at its centre. As is customary in big Parisian houses, a narrow service door led to the chambres de bonne at the top.  (That was also the door I took in those days, or a little later, to a tiny squalid room I borrowed, on floor seven and a half,  of a maison bourgeoise in the rue Gay-Lussac.)  But in the place des Vosges, I took the main staircase, which swept up in an elegant, capacious spiral to Madeleine's door.  My first visit ? I would have to burrow into some buried diary for exact details.  But I would have been accompanied by Biddy, my wife to be, and we gave each other courage in this latest adventure of our recently started Parisian life. To ring at the door.  

Was there a letter of introduction ? It seems a usage belonging to a different generation - but I realize it was a different generation - thirty years ago!  We certainly came to Paris armed with a list of names and numbers, transcribed in the tall, crabbed handwriting of the poet David Gascoyne. Some of the names he gave us were impossibly grand - a certain Etienne Coche de la Ferté, possibly a Marquis, on the Ile Saint Louis, was an example. Some of them were posthumous.  The name of Madeleine Follain was on the list. But how did we conquer our shyness ?  We had - I can feel that we had - the gauche breathlessness of youth about us.  I can measure that by recalling my pique, and after it my shame, when on being introduced to William Golding at a British Council function around that time, as a young English poet living in a Parisian garret, the bearded sage nodded wryly and said ' It's been done before !'  It was like being found out, and I felt a fool.

I wasn't such a fool, however, as to present myself at Madeleine Follain's door without having read a word of her husband's poetry.  So that must have been it, the original, slightly grubby cream Gallimard volume of Territoires (1953), picked up at Le Divan bookshop, or at a bouquiniste along the Seine - that was my real carte de visite.  What gave me courage also was the fact that I had instantly liked what I had read, and the urge to attempt a translation was already upon me, and sufficiently strong in this case for me to know that I would do so.  We rang at the door.  A silence. Then the shuffle of feet, and a stentorian Qui est là ?  The door was opened by a small, vigorous, elderly woman, her hair a fading red, and thinning, but cut in a youthful bob;  she was gamine.  'Ah ! Les anglais, les amis de Gascoyne - entrez, entrez!'  

She led us down a corridor, an impression of dark wood, and walls covered, or rather stacked, with paintings.  And into the dining room, a little table in the centre of it, laid with a patterned cloth, and on it a lamp.  The whole scene, instantly, was intimiste, like a Vuillard painting of an attic room. Madeleine was busy at a huge tallboy, that seemed to occupy almost the whole of one wall, collecting glasses, and a bottle full of a deep fiery-orange liquor.  We were to be initiated into what was evidently an unchanging ritual: le vieux Calvados. The tallboy, we later discovered, contained worlds. Like the armoire in the Norman childhood of Jean Follain, or the Breton childhood of his friend, Eugène Guillevic - it was a source of food and drink, but also the dark hiding place of unfathomable family secrets. Madeleine's contained the glasses and the Calvados, but also, I later found, stacks of manuscript, that was in fact the pages of Follain's Journal.

'Ah, ce sacré David ! Comment va-t-il ?' At the name of Gascoyne, it soon became clear to us, faces would lighten up, and tongues would loosen.  As we choked on the fiery liquor, we gave her news of David:  but any story we might have would be trumped by those who had known him during his years in Paris. It is well known that the poet suffered from episodes of florid psychosis:  the most frequently cited example being just after the War, when in 1946 he took it upon himself, very early one morning, to warn Le Général in the Elysée Palace that the English were about to launch an attack on la Patrie - and it was imminent. The vision of the tall, ascetic, frenzied, gesticulating Englishman arraigned by a cloud of small gendarmes, certainly, despite its poignancy, forced a smile. Once in the Café Flore, the great translator and humanist Pierre Leyris came upon Gascoyne, and started to converse.  All seemed quite normal at first, until David, who had become increasingly nervous, and was looking around, remarked to Pierre that the café floor was covered in a sheet of flame, that was now climbing the walls. Pierre managed to usher the poet out of the café and across the boulevard Saint Germain - no small feat - into the carpeted and curtained hush of a friendly analyst's consulting room nearby.

What memories Madeleine had of the English poet I forget, or whether she divulged them, but her eyes took on a familiar humorous glint as we spoke of him.  She helped us to more Calvados, and started to speak of her late husband Jean, visibly softening when I produced my copy of Territoires and stammered out my (genuine) enthusiasm. Adjoining the dining room was his study.  It seemed that nothing had been changed in there, papers, pens, stacks of old copies of the NRF, and a striking cartoon of the poet as a young man, like something out of Belloc or Beerbohm, both angular and hunched, the face screwed up, peering myopically through a pair of enormous spectacles perched on a long nose.  I think it was done by his friend the poet Armen Lubin.  In his later years, Follain, who was then the French equivalent of a circuit judge, became spectacularly ugly, obese and potato-nosed. His love of hearty regional cooking - he wrote a book called La Table which contains recondite Norman recipes from his childhood - combined with a fastidious taste - was perfectly reflected in his face and figure.  But most striking of all in that room was the view.  The poet, working at his desk, would have looked straight out onto a beautiful house with the pinkish brick facade of the place des Vosges, formerly la place Royale, in the style of Louis XIII.  This house, which is now a museum, had once belonged to Victor Hugo.

Madeleine Follain, née Denis, painted under the name Madeleine Dinès. Understandably, she wanted to detach herself somewhat from her famous and by all accounts overwhelming father, Maurice Denis. For Madeleine was one of the chubby little girls with pale skin and red hair, that the Nabi theorist and painter liked to put into his work, though most commonly the model would have been Maurice's beloved first wife, Marthe Meurier.  There were many other siblings… Denis was a staunch Catholic, married twice, and raised his famille nombreuse in the elegant Prieuré at Saint Germain en Laye, which is now a museum dedicated to his work. Denis's stylized woodlands, with their sinuous, flitting naiads, or groups gathered in some angelic coven, never appealed to me very much, though the portraits of his children retain a certain period charm.  His daughter Madeleine seemed to have sloughed off any paternal influence.  Her own paintings - or the few I remember - were austere, small studies of abstract furniture in an attic room - with a tinge of Balthus about them - though the nymphettes were missing from the décor. Judging from her work, it seems that she took seriously her father's famous dictum - so fundamental for art in the twentieth-century - that a painting, 'before being a war horse, a nude, or an anecdote of some kind, is primarily a flat surface covered with colour, arranged in a certain order.'  It comes as a surprise to find - as I just have - that it was Denis who first worded this; Braque and his colleagues were soon to say much the same thing.

I distinctly recall Madeleine cackling when I mentioned wanting to translate some Follain.  She knew better than I what the difficulties were. But she was enthusiastic at the idea, though I did not know then, what I was to find out later - that she would be on hand, very much on hand, to supervise my every word.

(As I write that, a strong memory returns, that of a translator's despair, or of despair in general, le désespoir dans ses grandes lignes, as Breton says somewhere. Sitting at a café table, near the Place des Vosges, after a session with Madeleine, rearranging words - trying to make syntactic sense of the poet's cunning elisions and ellipses - with my life in chaos. Thinking that this sterile exercise could actually go on for ever; and that whatever liberty I took, the veuve Follain, keeper of the flame, and arch-literalist when it came to translation (she was no 'versioner'), would complain. It is not surprising, in retrospect, that my translations lay unrevisited for several years in a fading green folder at the bottom of a cardboard box. To exacerbate this pressure, I was supposed to be completing a PhD thesis at the time, which included a discussion of the existence, or otherwise, of la poésie pure - I keep the term in French for the concept can only survive where it properly belongs, in the language of Racine, or Valéry.  Afternoons under the green lamps of the Bibliothèque Nationale, back in the glory days of the rue de Richelieu.  A dame d'une certaine âge would do one's photocopying, a few pages at a time, and at an exorbitant price. Poetry an essentialist language, a language within a language, an unsayable, ectoplasmic essence, something like Aristotle's human seed. It was doing my head in. 

Everything seemed an echo of Rilke's early experiences in Paris, which he recorded through the voice of Malte Laurids Brigge:  loneliness, and a vision of hospitals and prisons. Following, with an awful fascination, the blind, the halt and the lame in the streets. He, too, spent his afternoons reading the German classics in the library. As did another neurasthenic before him, Jules Laforgue. Though he was not even permitted into the library proper, for he never got his bac, being too morbidly shy to attend the oral part of the examination.  Laforgue was consigned to the outer, public library, where the tramps and the bag ladies went for shelter. In this place there was no heating, and no light, so the young poet had to decamp at dusk, and return to his tiny room, where he would eat a couple of eggs and console himself reading Schopenhauer by candlelight. Poetry came at me also in the contrasting form of a mad, vaguely urinous American expat, who lurked in the passageway that runs between the rue Monsieur le Prince and the rue de l'Ecole de Médecine, who would appear like the ogre under the bridge and attempt to peddle his photocopied pamphlets. In my bad moments, I could have struck him when he cried out in a thick accent, as I declined to buy - Ah !  Monsieur n'aime pas la poésie ! )

The actual process of translating Follain took place, as I have said, at home or in cafés;  I would then go with my 'homework' to have it corrected by Madeleine.  Famously, Follain never employs the first person singular, and makes almost abusive use of the usefully neutral French pronoun 'on', which can, depending on context, be translated by I, you, we, one and they.  Often I opted not to translate it at all, as in the lines from his lovely poem 'Absence' : 'On voit un filée de fumée/ une feuille qui s'envole' that becomes 'A wisp of smoke/ a leaf that flies away' - but Madeleine was not happy at the loss of the pronoun.  It was this kind of snag - often repeated - which made the translation of Territoires heavy going, and in need of revision when at last I dug out the faded green folder.  The bottle of vieux Calvados, produced from the tallboy at the end of our sessions, was probably what kept me going.  (This is not intended in any way as malicious gossip, but I have it on good authority that Claire Paulhan, grand-daughter of Jean Paulhan, had a hard time ot it editing Follain's journals when they were finally allowed to emerge from the tallboy. Arch-literalist when it came to supervising my translations, it appears that Madeleine was not above editing the written evidence of Follain's journals (but then, she is neither the first nor the last widow to have done that.) My affection for Madeleine remained real to the end - but she did have strong opinions and 'temperament'.

Follain was that paradoxical thing: an urbane, metropolitan poet, who practised at the bar in Paris and frequented the literary salons of his day, and whose poetry and prose almost exclusively draw from the well of his childhood, which was spent in rural Normandy.  He knew the Surrealists, and went on record as 'admiring' their work, but admitting that his own voice and style lay somewhere entirely different. He was a poet, to use Browning's phrase, who 'dug in the same place' and in doing so he recreated, by a cunning blend of crystalline image and impersonal presentation, a child's world of tremendous emotional force. Just one example: in his prose piece 'La guerre', taken from L'Epicerie de l'enfance' (1938), he describes the feelings of 'the child of 1914'  (Follain would have been eleven), and especially of the father who, just before marching off to the front, comes into this child's bedroom in the early morning: 'A few drops of coffee laced with alcohol hung on his drooping moustache, his naked heart was bleeding, he asked the child's forgiveness for unfair bouts of anger, an entire and incredible love coming to light;  an hour later the winter sun had shone, putting bright touches on birds' plumage and the bayonets of columns of men : they were marching down the frozen road.'

There was one visit with Madeleine to the Normandy of Follain's childhood. The poet himself had dated the final destruction of his childhood world to the 1940s, when he visited the charred ruins of what had been the local town, Saint-Lô.  All I remember of that visit with Madeleine in the 1980s was walking round a bleak, featureless ploughed field, and the grey, shuttered high street of Canisy. The visionary gleam had comprehensively fled.  After that, for various reasons, I saw Madeleine less frequently. In the end, I moved away from Paris.  Occasionally I would receive a fantastically scrawled letter from her, with its always bracing opening: Cher Romer… On my rare visits, I found her more and more shrunken, grown ever more elfin and translucent. But the Calvados unfailingly came out.  I was abroad when she died.  In short, I felt I had neglected her, latterly, and I badly regret that.

Follain himself, whom I never met, died in 1971, run down by a car on the place de la Concorde. The great flâneur had taken to wandering through the Tuileries in the evenings, and had simply forgotten, or had failed in his myopic fashion to see, the new underpass, symbol of de Gaulle's - and what was to be even more Georges Pompidou's - spanking new technological France, the climax of the trente glorieuses. Madeleine's father, Maurice Denis, was killed in a car accident in 1943.  She had, understandably, a particular loathing of the automobile.  A vivid memory of her remains.  

One evening we went out to eat at her favourite couscouserie near the Bastille, close by the place des Vosges. We then wandered up the rue de Lappe; Madeleine was anxious to show us the celebrated dance hall, le Balajo. There used to be a singles afternoon (for all I know it goes on to this day) that catered especially to middle-aged and even quite elderly ladies. A line of gigolos would sit on velveteen chairs along one side of the dance hall. This fascinated Madeleine, though to my knowledge she did not avail herself of their services.  As we walked back to the place des Vosges, a car passed too closely, and Madeleine brought her walking stick down on its roof with a great crash, and a stream of robust, argotic French, that would have made her husband proud.  

*

Schools[1]

For some people, the nursery school had a look of decorated poverty, suggested by its name, the Charity School.

Among the teachers, there was a Miss, so sad, so human, so womanly, she would sit in a little clearing underneath the chestnut trees, a place where all the winds blowing round the world seemed to be stilled. Held in her delicate fingers, always, was some child's hand.

She appeared eternally smiling, and martyred, so gently sacrificed to her condition. To the exhalations of her tired body, each leaf on the protecting, sap-swollen tree trembled invisibly in the soft air. The child saw without seeing the rise and fall of her bosom.

With the one child whose hand she held, she was accepting of her burden, this gentle, living, grieving soul, which was to be the schoolmarm, and to be greeted with the hypocritical low bows of sanguine white-bearded gentlemen, with decorations in mourning-violet, who went their ways, digesting their autumn pheasant.

A few steps away, little boys played games stretched flat out on the ground, with the sickly smell of the scrubbed up poor about them, a dull, diluted and wretched cleanliness; cheap cloth, cheap soap, cheap hair oil, a sickening smell that would have irked the beggars of Naples, the smell of children from the workhouses of the Republic, that would have been the same if there were still a king.

While the gentle soul was glared at by a schools inspector patrolling to and fro behind the tables at lunchtime, each child was served up with one fried egg, the yolks in variously violent shades of yellow. They showed up the gloomy effluvia of philanthropic civilizations.

In the yard of the Convent School, the little girls played tag, biting into their red-currant sandwiches, or into their pink ones, of candied sugar and crushed strawberry.

The white shutters were fastened by brackets in the form of sphinxes, which intrigued the littlest girls. In one corner of the yard was a big wobbly stone basin, covered with moss, and eglantine petals floated petals floated on its surface, and young girls with clear laughter and growing breasts played around it in the premonitory daylight. In the water-closets, which smelled of age, pages from the Pilgrim or from the Chronicles of the Holy Childhood, were fixed by a rusty nail; and some of the feverish, trembling girls would read them, hatching plans and imagining a future that stretched well beyond the coming months of sun or rain. Their fine eyes looked at the picture of missionary nuns shepherding Chinese children, with pointy pagodas in the background.

Scraped by hobnailed wooden clogs, the playground at the Boys' School was a barren patch of earth, where nothing grew but unkillable couch-grass and some frail, almost transparent weeds, holding on despite the wind. Here and there: a bit of clinker, a ferruginous stone, a beach pebble.

The sun would beat down hard. Sometimes, a rabbit escaped from its hutch would make a mad dash for it across the playground.

The last gleams of dawn would gild the hair of a gentle little boy, whose miserly, upright parents measured out quantities, of bread, and salt and cider.

The master used a silver whistle kept in his fob pocket, and his coat fell in long loose folds down his back; he blew the whistle, and the children would file into the school house with its bare wall, in which each irregular stone was sealed to its neighbour by lines of grey, hardened cement.

And the lesson began: on the Templars, on the tributaries of the Rhône, on the uses of marble, these things filled the peacefulness with a tender gleam of intellectual learning, that mixed with the scents of mint and roses wafting from the gardens, and a minute in the world that held, and there and then imbued the soul, with a presentiment of future pleasures.

On a shelf in a dusty little glass-fronted cupboad, was the carapace of a sea spider, some flints, and a starfish that was curled up, exactly as it had been when it gave up the ghost.

Unrolled from their black casings, the cloth maps of the world spelled out in bold Egyptian font the capital cities and the lesser cities in some corner of the earth less comprehensible even to the children's minds, than their violent notions of God or the devil.

One day, a small boy went up to the assistant master, who wore the yellow clogs of the elementary school, and presented him with a hen's egg found in the ditch. The master broke it open into an empty scallop shell, taken from the little museum where it sat next to the starfish, and he pointed out the white, the yolk and the embryo, and then he flung the whole thing as waste into the gutter and the broken shell into the playground where the fiery July sun soon dried out its surface that had been smooth to the touch.

The Lias, the Trias, and the Jurassic: words that struck lightning into the brains of the young peasants who toiled away in the upper primary. In the small town, they lived in the same building as the older boys from big school, who called them groundlings[2].

Their speech was slower and they had more books than the younger pupils. They studied subjects unknown to their juniors, Common Law and Political Economy. The lines on their hands were more marked.

At the beginning of the holidays they would reappear at the entrance to their villages and the hobnails on their boots shone like silver; on the oak table they set down their books covered in soft paper, grey or pink or blue, onto which they had transcribed the titles in their round hand, and in one village the wreckage of a communal oven[3] still existed, while not a single steam engine shown in their books did.