Baxter - A year in Paris: season by season in the city of light

The Champs-lyses under wheat, 1990.

Photograph by the author.

I stayed there for the rest of the afternoon, caught in an eddy of time that returned Paris 1990 to an era three centuries in the past, when no laws applied except those of the seasons. The Arc de Triomphe dominated the hilltop, celebrating the victories of Napolon Bonaparte, but this was no day for emperors. The wheat, bowing lazily in the breeze, put worldly pomp in its place. One saw why Katharine Lee Bates, who wrote the lyrics of America the Beautiful, specified amber waves of grain as an element of the new nation. No wonder the presidential hopes of Michael Dukakis never recovered from his 1989 suggestion to Iowas corn farmers that they replant with such boutique vegetables as Belgian endive. Fields of grain were the irreducible minimum of a civilization, the rock on which it stood.

Implicit in the presence of this field here today in the heart of Paris was the message that France, with the same population as Britain but three times the area, belonged to those who controlled the land. Defy them, as Louis XVI had done in 1789, and you risked being handed your head.

At that time of year, the setting sun lingers for a few minutes in the very center of the Arc de Triomphe, sending a blaze of light the length of the Champs-lyses. As it did so, engines growled on the other side of the arch. A minute later, a line of combine harvesters belching smoke lumbered into sight and crawled toward us, devouring the wheat.

In their wake rose a golden cloud of dust from which materialized hundreds of young men and women, each carrying a spear shaped like a wheat stalk. From the watchers rose a collective sigh of satisfaction and awe.

That nights television news explained that the day had been a demonstration by 1,500 farmers on behalf of French agriculture. Three thousand six hundred tons of wheat, grown to maturity around Paris on pallets, were trucked in overnight to stun us three hundred thousand who came to gawk.

Politics had provided the pretext, but one sensed that the farmers would have staged this show just for the pleasure of it. They had gone into the streets often in the past, sometimes to celebrate but more often, as in this case, to warn. The beliefs behind such manifestations were already ancient when Christianity came squalling into the world. Between France, the land, and the seasons, it was a matter of blood.

Richebourg, ledeFrance. December 1990. 1 degree below zero C. Hailstones rattle like gravel against double layers of glass. Beyond, in a gray murk of nearhorizontal freezing rain, ancient trees, trunks sodden and black, lurk like gallows.

Had the weather been this bad in Bethlehem, Jesus would have imitated the ancient gods and waited until spring to be born.

S IX MONTHS LATER , I TRIED TO RECAPTURE A SENSE OF THAT DAY: the glare; the grains dry, vegetal smell; the sting of the sun through my thin jacket. It was hopeless. However warm the memory, the chill of December quenched it.

For almost a week storms had battered the sixteenthcentury house in Richebourg, one hundred kilometers from Paris, where we were spending the holidays.

The house, my motherinlaws country home, was an unexpected dividend of marrying into an old French family. Handhewn chestnut beams, already old when Bonaparte became emperor, supported this onetime farmhouse that in its indestructibility could have served as a metaphor for Frances landowners, the backbone of the nation.

The church and the aristocracy, known as the First and Second Estates, barely survived the revolution of 1789, but if that bloody conflict had a winner, it was the Third Estate: the landowners, farmers, and people in business