We had been in France for nearly two years, and amid the alternating sensations of regeneration and disarray that this upheaval had inevitably incurred, Annie Ernaux had come to represent for me a troubling point of constancy. Then, last October, the writer Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Frenchwoman ever to do so.
I listened on the radio to an astronaut reading passages aloud from Marguerite Duras from his space station to his earthbound audience below. Bookstores still held their ground here among the shopfronts, and the deification of French writers living and dead was evinced everywhere in street names and statues and advertising hoardings for new novels.
It was pleasant, I had often been told, for a writer to live somewhere where reading and writing were accorded the highest respect, and it was true that - in Paris at least - these were semipublic activities: In every park and cafe, on the Metro and on the benches along the Seine, people were openly engaged in what for me had always been the most private and solitary of occupations. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that “France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older - intelligence and good manners,” we packed up our possessions during the last dark days of one December and decided to move to Paris.
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