In memory of Maurice

Aujourd’hui mon ami Maurice est parti.

Today my dear old friend Maurice is gone. He was a friend of my parents, his sister was a friend of my grandparents. I have known Maurice my whole life. He was a film producer and the most dashing man I have ever met. When Maurice smoked a cigarette, he did it with such style! When I was a little girl he would show up in Normandy on the lawn riding his horse, he said he would marry me and I was amused, he would say ‘vous’ in jest to his wife, Florence, his companion throughout his life, he would make me sole meunière, and get lobster and open some good bottles of wine when my husband and I would come back from the USA to visit him, he made our visits feel so festive. He had a knack to enchant life even though he was perfectly well aware of its vicissitudes and misery.

My three year old daughter asks me ‘mummy where are the flowers ?’ when the flowers that were on the kitchen counter are gone. I tell her ‘they withered’, which is a word she does not know. ‘They died’ is a word she would not know either. I tell her we’ll go get new ones, that she can choose which color she wants. She likes to learn the name of new flowers ‘tiger lilies’, ‘tulips’.

Flora Temnouche

I think of Maurice smoking at the kitchen table after lunch. I watch the smoke unfurl. I can smell it. When Maurice smoked it smelled heavenly, because it smelled of Maurice.

Maurice’s house in Normandy is where I took my first steps as a baby, where I learned to ride a bike, where I shared so many dinners with my parents and their friends, where I brought my boyfriend and then husband whom Maurice immensely approved of, where I brought my daughter whom Maurice was so playful with. I grew up at that table, I became a child, a sultry teenager (‘why is she so sullen?’ he would ask to tease me which only made things worse), a young woman, a married woman, a mother, and now he won’t sit at that table anymore but every inch of that house, and that garden carries the memory of him. If I ever go to that house again, I am sure I will encounter him again.

Here is a painting by the French artist Flora Temnouche, who just had a show in LA. I love her still lives, the light they carry, the subtle melancholy that embues each canvas. I think Maurice would have fallen in love with her work.