As I have now written about eight hundred weekly posts, I have to forgive myself for forgetting most of them and, no doubt, inadvertently repeating subjects now and then. Inadvertent but inevitable: I have nowhere near eight hundred ideas. This week, however, I am fully aware of the repetitive element. My subject must once again be the achievements of one of our children. Katherine Fleming has been honored with yet another prestigious award by the Republic of France. Thus it was that a week ago we found ourselves Ubered up the Turnpike through really beastly traffic to Manhattan. Our destination was an event at the French consulate on upper Fifth Avenue to attend the award ceremony.
There are all sorts of reasons to continue to admire French civilization, the chief of which is that it is so wonderfully civilized. But teachers and scholars have a special reason for their appreciation. At least since the days of Napoleon the French have been leaders in giving public recognition to outstanding men and women renowned in science, humanistic learning, and teaching prowess. Among the honorific categories of French knighthood are the three grades of the “Ordre des Palmes Académiques,” the “palms” involved belonging to the realm of allegorical botany, sort of like the laurel leaves you see in pictures of Virgil, Dante, and Petrarch. The three grades are chevalier (knight), officer (officier), and commander (commandeur). None of these awards is cultural chopped liver, but the highest, commander, is of course particularly prestigious, and this was the one with which Katy was being presented on this occasion.
The site of the ceremonial event was the Villa Albertine, a part of French consular properties on Fifth Avenue. It is the home of a French cultural center and small library. This historic building is an imposing mansion on the east side of Fifth Avenue just south of the Metropolitan Museum. It was built by a captain of industry, William Payne Whitney, just at the beginning of the twentieth century. The house he built is truly baronial, but I don’t hold that against him. There is an important distinction to be made between barons and robber barons. I insist on a a fairly high level of genuine iniquity in my robber barons, and Mr. Whitney by no means qualified. He was to be sure of the category of “Patrician, Filthy Rich,” but a number of our great ones of the Gilded Age combined opulence with civic consciousness and philanthropical zeal, and there were several noble Whitneys whose names are remembered for their cultural good works. (Of course the founder of Whitney Museum of American Art had the maiden name of Vanderbilt. So it goes, or at least used to go.)
There were perhaps sixty people at the event, only a quarter of whom were blood relatives of the honoree. Lots of what I think of as New York People. It was presided over by Mons. Mohamed Bouabdallah, who holds the titles of Cultural Counselor of France in the United States and Director of the Villa Albertine. If you try hard enough to imagine just how polished and suave somebody holding those ranks is likely to be—that is to say, a public-facing French diplomat housed in a Fifth Avenue mansion--that was Mons. Bouabdallah to a T. Katy herself is a terrific performer, so that there was a subliminal sense of repartee just beneath the high seriousness of their dialogue.
Though this was my first visit to the Albertine, I had seen Katy “perform” there one other time on video. A year or so ago in that venue she had a recorded public conversation with Laurence des Cars, the head of the Louvre Museum in Paris. The Louvre is perhaps the most famous art museum in the world. The Getty may be the most opulent; so one learned from the conversation between their two directors a lot about the deeper challenges facing the international museum world. Those challenges cannot be reduced to any single issue, but they all must involve the delicate negotiation between keeping artefacts safe and making them public. That is the fundamental issue, but it seems to have an endless number of fascinating corollaries.
Of course our daughter had to make a little acceptance speech—like all of her formal communications elegant, witty, but also at heart substantial. It was also very kind in its allusions to her parents, to whom she gave probably too much credit in the formation of her international cultural perspectives. But we loved it; and it is true that her breadth of cultural range, her remarkable abilities in several foreign languages, and the catholicity of her intellectual sympathies do have their origins in part in her experiences in various of our sabbatical stays in England, France and in Italy. I remember her so well as a very little girl living on a farm on the outskirts of L’Isle-sur-Sorgue in 1968, the year of the great French student rebellion and general strike. There she was in her little red polka dot dress gobbling escargots and gabbling in peasants’ French. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive….Sometimes I ponder in my mind the remarkable differences between the lives lived by my grandparents and those being lived by my grandchildren. One might think that they represent not different generations but different species. Yet the through-line is family, which remains for many of us the indispensable constellation of social cohesion in a vast galaxy of whirl and change.
