Saturday we were invited down to the country to meet Dina Vierny. Her son, Bertrand, is our host in this charming penthouse (a bit drafty these last days, with the cold) & he came to walk over with us to the station: local train with famous destinations, Versailles all the way to Chartres. En route he filled us in about his mother.

Born in Russia, her family came to France after the revolution. In the late thirties as a buxom eighteen-year old she became the last model for Maillol's sculptures, introduced to him because someone, I think it was Matisse, thought she looked like a Maillol. Down at his studio in the South, near the Pyrenées, he showed her his own secret path into the mountains & across the border. When the war came, she used the knowledge to lead Jews & other victims of the Nazis to safety on moonless nights. After the war with the same determination & courage she went on to create a famously successful art gallery. When she saw that the French government was doing nothing about establishing a Maillol museum, she also did that herself.

On the train, I took the opportunity to ask Bertrand for help with a poem I've been trying to decipher by Mallarme: a sonnet he placed at the head of his collected works -- a mysterious story of greeting & traveling that sounds especially fine when read by a native but still doesn't yield its sense. From the train we got a glimpse of the monster chateau rising amid its regular rows of trees above its lake: enough to make me remember Frederick the Great's chateau at Potsdam, Sans Souci (that's "carefree" in French), quite a different style, Bertrand remarked, not an extravagant showplace for the whole court with desperate nobles peeing into corners but a retreat for the emperor & his cynical intellectual inner circle.

On arrival, one of Dina's farmers met us: a solid, cordial man with ruddy cheeks, tweed jacket, & cap, looking quite the way a prosperous French farmer ought to in my mind. Along the way we saw whole orchards pruned into espalier forms, trees in narrow ranks, branching like candelabras. At one place, where fields stretched very far to the south, Bertrand strained to show us Chartres, which can be seen on the horizon rising above the plain on clear days. Saturday the haze was too heavy & the sun too low, hiding the horizon in diffused light; but I remember when I drove my little Fiat 600 down from Paris to Chartres in 1963 how puzzled I was at seeing what at first I mistook for a school house in the distance, but then it seemed never to get closer, until I finally realized I was seeing the cathedral.

In honor of our visit, I understood Bertrand to say, they slaughtered the steer yesterday. Seems it was a three-year old & there won't be another for another three years. But the meat has to rest for two weeks before eating, except for the tongue, which was on the menu for our lunch, only that Dina was afraid not everyone would like tongue, so she had them also slaughter a sheep. All this bloodshed to make us feel welcome reminded me of the Iliad, I told Bertrand, where Achilles cuts the throat of a sheep & roasts choice bits over the fire when Odysseus & Ajax come to call. When I asked why they grow beef instead of pigs, which can be butchered after a year, Bertrand said that pigs are too intelligent & ingratiating. One would get too fond of them to be able to have them killed. As it is, no one talks to the butcher when he comes to do his work & no one mentions his name. It all brought back my own memories of "la macellazione dei maiali" at La Quercia: no sympathy for pigs there.

Finally we came to a long side road lined with cherry laurel & slender poplars, then an orchard of rugged old apple trees, with some red & yellow fruit still there. Bertrand promised us some fresh cider for lunch. Behind the orchard lay a whole complex built of yellow, aged limestone that looked especially warm in the winter sun. The roofs were steep & covered in thick grey thatch, speckled with green moss, which sparkled in turn with frost. We passed through the outer row of buildings into a wide court. On one side a square tower with a pointed roof, rising from a moat: the oldest part, going back to the c16, of a chateau & hunting lodge. To my question, Bertrand explained that in the forest not far away there still are stags & wild boar & as well as pheasant & hare.

Inside, the house rather like a museum: massive armoires, a Louis XIV basin in marble in which the grandsons like to tumble in make-believe bathing, then the cozy kitchen & with three busy women & long, low dining room, with a great green & red parrot on a perch near the window & a toucan in an elaborate cage.

Across the dining room we were led through a low door, through winding passage, & up a few steps into a high, long hall with heavy beams supporting the peaked roof. A table made of one massive slab ran down the center & at the far end was a fireplace so huge that I could walk into it without bending. We were ushered to the circle of high-backed armchairs in front of the fire to await Dina. She made her entry, I would have to say, moving with energy & authority across that space, which she quite commanded although she must be less than five feet tall & is even more buxom than when immortalized by Maillol. Her eyes were so lively, taking us in. Then she had Bertrand scrambling to bring in more logs for the fire (& I mean five foot trunks & split timbers), offering us fine-sliced Hungarian sausage & Polish vodka, slipping slices to the dogs, then shooing them off, & doing the same with her delightful little grandsons when they came trooping in. The vodka put me in mind of the great linguistics scholar, Roman Jakobson, another Russian, who liked to pick up the glass in his teeth & drink it down in one gulp to impress the ladies: that was the word I managed to get-in-edgewise to Dina.

The tongue came vast & steaming out of the pot: served with white, sharp horse-radish & sweet, pink currant sauces. The leg of lamb was rarer than I would ever dare make it at home. Steamed turnips, leeks, carrots, & potatoes were the vegetables: here I like turnips, though I never did at home. We put them & celery root in our pot roast last week.

After lunch Bertrand took us for a walk, first to visit the coach museum & stable. Dina has collected every manner of private & public horse-drawn conveyance. Phaeton, which, if I understood correctly, was a vehicle, that the owner could drive himself (sounds like the myth of the son of the Sun who insisted on getting his hands on the reins, with fatal results), but many types of hunting vehicles, with boxes to carry the dogs, & even a coach that belonged to Chateaubriand, with pouches for diplomatic correspondance on top.

We continued on out through woods to a road that took us through a village: on one side the fortress-like farms, behind their walls, & on the other the new villas, with their iron fences, floor to ceiling glass, parked Mercedes. Around the bend we came on a sign advertising "Foie gras": a genuine local product, I said, & insisted on getting some from the very cordial lady who came to the door. The tiny packet came to ffr 180 (ca 5.5 to US$1), so not being given away. We decided to make a dinner back in the apartment Monday night & Bertrand promised to cook & bring a friend from Haiti who teaches Caribbean literature. So Paris plot thickens. In fact, I spent Monday morning on rue des Ecoles exploring the bookstores specialized in francophone literature from over-seas, i.e. the former colonies of France.

Our walk left the village to follow a rutted way along fields where winter wheat was sprouting. We were in the shadow of the woods & the frost was still thick on the ground, though the day had been sunny. I don't know when I've been so cold. On one field we saw two good sized, black, plover-like birds, which flashed white tail bands when they flew, made me think of lapwings we saw in Peru.

Dina had ordered tea for us before the great fireplace. Ours was a fragrant jasmine served in transparent cups. Hers came Russian style, with lemon in a glass presented in a metal holder. She also alone had special Turkish coffee at lunch: learned to prefer it in Egypt, she said. This was the room, Bertrand added, that had been destroyed by fire one Christmas about ten years ago. The decorations caught & the place was gone in a moment: furniture, tapestries, all. Only a few of metal sculptures survived (Renoir, Maillol) because the heat at ground level did not quite reach their melting point. It flamed up to the beams & roof. The help with extinguishers managed to keep it from spreading (I thought of the terrible fire that killed Frank Lloyd Wright's children & wife at Taliessen). After an hour, the volunteers arrived & put out what was left. When everyone gathered around in the dining room, Dina took charge: I don't want to see any gloomy faces here. Chateaus burn (On sait che les chateaux brûlent).

Pierrot was ready to take us to the train. The sky was pink & robins-egg blue, Chartres still shrouded in bright haze. I dozed in the train, while Bertrand told of his visits to Cambodia before & after the horror. As we approached Paris, the sky harbored a fine, crescent moon.