Bastille Day, 2014

Sixty years ago today I was in Paris, near the end of a 7-week back-backing trip through Europe, that began in Bruxelle, continued along the Rhine, through the Tyrol and the Alps, on into Italy to Rome, Assisi, Florence and Venice, the Austrian Tyrol, Switzerland, and Paris, which was in mourning, flags at half mast and festive lights off, because the fortress of Dien Bien Phu had fallen: France had decisively lost its colonial war in what was then called French Indo-China, now Vietnam. 

It was my fourth visit to Paris, and it left a long, sad shadow that wasn't erased completely until repeated visits, commutes by TGV from WHO/HQ in Geneva and Eurailpass holidays with Wendy, renewed my affection for the City of Light. We came close to having another Bastille Day in Paris under happier conditions but never quite managed to mesh exactly. 

My most memorable Bastille Day was in 1977 in New York, when I met my editor at Appleton-Century-Crofts, Appleton's for short, to sign the contract for my first go-around as editor in chief of the big reference textbook of public health now eponymously known as Maxcy-Rosenau-Last. That day New York was shut down by a massive power outage caused by overloaded generators burning out in a prolonged heat wave. The publishers, still flush with funds in those days, had booked me into a luxury suite on the 37th floor of the Sheraton near the top end of Times Square; I'll never forget that it was the 37th floor because that evening I had to walk all the way up - the elevators didn't work during the power failure, unlike those in my condo which are powered by an emergency generator. I walked up in a convoy, led at first by two chaps with little flashlights; one peeled off about the 20th floor, the other somewhere in the low 30s; after that I was on my own, feeling my way and opening a door on to the landing at each floor where a faint glow of distant lights in Connecticut that wasn't blacked out by the power failure told me where I was. Fortunately in those days my room had a key, not an electronic key card which probably wouldn't have worked in the absence of electric power. Next morning I awoke very early in time to have a cold shower while there was still some water in the rooftop tanks.  I walked down 37 floors that were dark as the inside of a cow, because the emergency lights in the stairwell didn't work. That was worse than walking up. I was carrying my overnight bag, very heavy with the weight of books I'd bought the previous afternoon. By the time I reached ground level, my legs felt like rubber.  

I met Rich Lampert, my editor, outside Appleton's office building which like everything else in Manhattan was closed; we had our business meeting on a bench in the little park beside the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, and instead of the customary luxury luncheon in a posh restaurant, we ate street food from a barrow, washed down with luke warm coca cola. The power came on again late that afternoon, when I was on a Carey bus to La Guardia airport. It was an inauspicious beginning to my 20-year stint as editor in chief of the Big Green Monster. Fortunately for all of us, things went fairly smoothly from then on. Almost everything did, anyway.

Bastille Day was good again this year. David was in town, and we spent much of the day in the National Gallery, visiting a superb exhibition of Gustave Dore's works.  I hadn't known than in addition to his brilliant drawings, illustrations of the Bible, Milton's Paradise Lost, Don Quixote, Rabelais, and many other classics, he  was a landscape painter, a sculptor, and designer of elaborate ornamental clocks and suchlike extravaganzas of 19th century civilized Parisian life. This exhibition was well worth seeing.