Of the Legion d’Honneur & Driving Tests

What a week so far. So, imagine you’re having a normal Monday. You’ve organised groceries, prepared the gates for painting earlier in the day – then your phone starts ringing and ringing. As usual you don’t answer, thence begin text messages for you to please pick up, urgently. In my usual way, I thought, yippie, someone’s died and I finally get an inheritance! Flashes of a house in Cadaqués or Cascais cross my mind 😀 I finally pick up and receive the request to join a Zoom Call in 20 minutes. Some diplomatic affair. On the call will be someone from the French diplomatic corps, someone from SOS Racisme, someone from the Alliance Française and my father’s two sisters. They’d like me to join because apparently my memory is very precise. Odd, but they’re very insistent so I agree.

It begins. I’ve never used Zoom, but Mike’s phone seems to know exactly what to do. A man begins speaking. My grandmother was nominated for the Legion d’Honneur and they need her detailed history with highlights. And off we go. I own and have read her diaries, so, I can do this. Born between wars, she lived at 2 Rue Debrousse in Paris in the 16eme. Her mother is a wealthy heiress and her father in the military. He was a war hero in WWI, then prisoner of war (later founder of one of France’s largest associations of Ancien Combattants). During the occupation they go to their country house in the Southwest because it’s calmer and in the Free Zone. Her father has tuberculosis and dies in 1944. After that, they return to Paris. She studies at the lycée Molière in the 16th arrondissement. Then goes to the Sorbonne. She wanted to study law, but just as women who wanted to study medicine at the time were pushed to do nursing first – women who wanted to study law were pushed to become “executive secretaries” first. At the Sorbonne she meets my grandfather who’s studying in the biochemistry department. She’s a militant feminist. Despite that she decides to get married, and off to Brazil she goes. It’s the 50’s. She arrives in a land where slavery had only ended just over 60 years before (1888).

She finds herself as the only French woman in the very small, very wealthy, very closed society of Bahia. A place where speaking French is highly prized since everyone who can sends their children off to be educated in Europe (usually Switzerland). People beg her to teach and so she does. In the process she becomes the unofficial French Ambassador of Northeast Brazil. Along with Jorge Amado and Zelia, she hosts her friends Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre in 1960.

They stay at the beach house and also visit the Cocoa plantation of an uncle in Ilheus. Over the years she goes on to organise Pierre Balmain‘s first show in Brazil, and to found the Alliance Française in Bahia. It’s the Franco-Brazilian Cultural Centre with French library, art exhibition space, theatre etc.

She helped organise Visas to the US, UK and France for Brazilian artists escaping the Brazilian dictatorship. Her own house was nearly a cultural centre in itself where intellectuals, academics and artists met and exchanged ideas. She had lunch with Brigitte Bardot at the Mercier house in La Madrague and Angela Ro Ro used to say she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She’s quintessentially French, and believes in the values of the republic, secularism, women’s rights and in spreading those ideas throughout the world. She did everything in her power to accomplish that. So, there.

She’s also very glamorous. Incredible taste in clothes and jewellery. She shocked my grandfather’s family by getting married in a cream Chanel tailleur instead of a big white dress with a veil. Oh, yes, she’s also heavily involved with charities aimed at improving the lives of Blacks in Brazil, particularly street children.

And now, the driving test is coming soon. The teacher from the auto-ecole is becoming more and  more strict. Meanwhile, to lighten the mood, I’m deciding what to wear. I want something that says I’m a responsible, thoughtful, middle aged man — but also that implies that if they don’t pass me, I’ll dedicate the rest of my days to ensuring generations of the family of the driving examiner die in abject misery, poverty and despair 🙂