Associate Professor of French Cheryl Morgan shares her knowledge with a reunion group during a promenade through les passages de Paris — a lesson in early mall shopping.
Jack Markowitz '69: Could life have been any better for a budding novelist?
With all its faults, the one sterling feature that Hamilton offered me was the school's deservedly acclaimed study-abroad program. Spending my junior year in France was all I could think about from the time I enrolled until I was actually climbing aboard the SS France, steaming for Le Havre. As a French major I was offered the opportunity to study at the Sorbonne after a six-week summer sojourn in Biarritz. And as a budding writer, the thought of cruising Paris for a year and visiting the haunts of the Quarante Immortels was champagne to my imagination. At the time, I was very sympathetic with the philosophical and literary writings of André Malraux, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. I couldn't wait to visit the fabled cafés and bistros that they made famous — the Deux Magots and the Café de Flore.
I was placed with a middle-class French family in a luxurious three-bedroom apartment that was located at 14, avenue Denfert-Rochereau in the mostly upper-class 14th arrondissement of Paris. I was within walking distance of the school's base of operations at 4, rue de Chevreuse, the boulevard St. Germain, the Latin Quarter and the Jardin du Luxembourg. In other words, I was in heaven. I lived with the woman who owned the apartment, whose name was Madame Marie-Louise Renaud, and another student who studied photography. His name was Jean-François Malamud, and we became good friends.
Fortunately for me, Madame was an excellent cook who pre-pared the evening meals for all of us. And she made sure that every meal was accompanied by an excellent table wine served with fresh delicious bread and a generous serving of at least one of France's best cheeses. Madame also enjoyed the company of her boarders and the dinner conversation, even though my French was more than a little rough around the edges.
Though my mangling of the language sometimes made her wince, Madame was sufficiently conversant with English to understand what I was trying to say if I had to abandon French and revert to my mother tongue. And Jean François was also able to serve as a translator in a pinch. So we all managed to get along very well together, each of us more or less keeping to our own rooms and routines until the evening dinner, which invariably turned out to be a two-hour affair. Dinner was never to be hurried or rushed, no matter what pressing engagement awaited or how much my studies were neglected as a result of these evening soirées.
As luck would have it, the year 1968 in France turned out to be a year of strife and revolution, just as it was back home in the United States and all over the world. Set against the backdrop of the unpopular war in Vietnam, the French students were in revolt against the de Gaulle government's policies with regard to the super-selective and ultra-elitist higher education system, which discriminated against the less intellectually gifted and the economically disadvantaged. Général de Gaulle responded with an iron fist, which caused the usually indifferent French middle class to side empathetically and politically, if not ideologically, with the radical students, who were also joined in the massive street demonstrations by most of France's organized labor unions. There were pitched street battles all summer long from May through September 1968.
No matter. Classes were still in session no matter how many barricades had to be traversed or how much residual tear gas hung in the air. I was attending classes at the Sorbonne, the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, the Ecole des Langues Orientales and the Institute de Phonétique as well as Hamilton's own required classes. Traveling to and from classes was like trying to traverse an obstacle course, except that the tear gas was real, and so were the police batons. I mean, seriously, could life have been any better for a budding novelist, poet, screenwriter? Could I have asked for a better backdrop to feed my nascent writer fantasies? I think not!
