a cold apartment in Paris

 

[excerpt from Camera Girl] --------------------- Jackie had found housing with the widowed countess Germaine de Renty who had a four-bedroom apartment on the Avenue Mozart.  The countess had her own room, renting a second to two American students, while her daughters, Claude and Ghislaine, lived in a third with the latter's young son.  Countess de Renty leased the largest one to Jackie.

        It was her own piece of Paris, a room of "dark pink walls, green woodwork, a sort of Dubonnet curtains and dark brown wood furniture," she described it to a family friend.  "I feel exactly as if I'm in my own home," she wrote Yusha....

        The sun fell rapidly in the October afternoons when she first took occupancy, and the room was frigid due to a postwar coal shortage.  She did her studying under blankets, "swaddled" in "scarf, mittens, sweater and ear muffs," the bedspread strewn with textbooks, graph-paper notebooks, airmail paper for her letters home, and a range of sweets from nearby patisseries.  

        Despite the cold, now and then she couldn't help but dash out of bed, grab her Leica, and snap photographs from her window.  When she couldn't capture an image with her camera, she did it with her pen, crafting letters as narrative episodes from her adventures as the American College Girl in Paris.

        Into the wee hours, Jackie incessantly wrote.  Considering that she did not revise her drafts, her descriptions could be startlingly polished.  The sea had "water sparkling like bits of broken glass in the sun" and the view from her room was "always gray with a thick mist that hides the end of the street and the buildings with spiky roofs and steeples of grillwork stand out against the sky about twilight, when it gets clearer and you watch the smoke from the chimneys all blowing in the same direction."

        Sometimes upward of six pages long, her letters to Yusha were the most personal.  "You just have to get used to 'emotional letters' - I can't stop it," she admitted in one.  "I'll just splurge on this first letter and all the others will be very correct and controlled and I'll discuss the weather and Post-War Plans."...

        Her increasingly precise writing was likely the result of her ongoing effort to grasp the nuance of written and spoken phrases of a foreign language.  Every aspect of life with the de Rentys  was French.  "We never speak a word of English in this apartment" she reported home.  The rooms were furnished with French antiques, and the French cuisine prepared by the widowed countess was served on French porcelain.

        Her life was initially limited to the apartment and the Sorbonne, together a "lovely quiet gray rainy world."  She told Yusha, "I had every intention of hurling myself into the fray and emerging triumphantly laden with culture and arrived loaded down with pencils & books and two pairs of glasses!"

_______________________________

{Camera Girl, The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy.  Written by Carl Sferrazza Anthony.  Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster.  2023.}

-30-