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The 1938-1939 School Year: Part 1The Lycée I RememberGabrielle GriswoldConway, NH We thank Gabrielle for this latest installment of her recollections of the happy times spent at her alma mater. We hope you enjoy reading the lively words and feel as strongly as we do about the wonderful heritage that we, the LFNY alumni, are lucky to be a part of. When I was 10 years old and living with my family in Riverside, Connecticut, my French godmother (who was my mother's best friend) came over from France on one of her periodic trans-Atlantic crossings and proposed that, when she returned to France, I should accompany her. For me, this idea came as a grand and happy surprise. Had my parents and she been planning this trip for some time, or was the proposal entirely spontaneous? I didn't ask and never knew. I simply viewed the prospect as a fine adventure. The time was November 1936, and the only way to cross oceans in those days was by ocean-going liner. My godmother and I traveled on the French Lines' "Lafayette," [see photo above] an experience I found exhilarating as, on a big luxury ship, there was always so much to do and to explore. Besides, every day of the week-long trip, I had a new present to unwrap, which my family had prepared for me and entrusted to my godmother. It strikes me now (but it didn't then) as perhaps somewhat unusual that, although I loved my family dearly, I was never homesick for a single moment during the entire "enrichment" year that I spent at Cannes with my beloved Marraine. I must have lived then, as I have since, vividly "in the moment," because I enjoyed my year abroad to the fullest possible extent. Certainly there were challenges of adjustment in a new and different environment, but they were never daunting for me, only novel, interesting and exciting. My godmother, Mlle. Marie-Louise Fontaine, had earlier founded and for some years run a girls' school at Cannes for the English-speaking daughters of American and British parents living in France (business people, diplomats, voluntary expatriates), and it was one of her former teachers, a Mlle. Simonot, who came daily to tutor me in French. She and I had textbook lessons in the mornings, and in the afternoons we went for long walks, either in town or in the neighboring countryside, sometimes following the canals up into the hills behind Cannes, sometimes roaming farther afield. Whatever we did, we always spoke French, so that, at the end of three months, I was sufficiently prepared to attend, full-time and at the proper grade level, a private French school called the Institut Lochabair. Thus, when I returned home to the U.S. in December 1937 at the age of 11, neither my parents nor I wanted me to lose the French language skills I had gained during the year just past. This led, at least in part, to my family's decision to move to Manhattan so that, come tall 1938, I could attend the Lycée, where my brother, Arthur, would have an opportunity of his own to learn French. The Lycée My first year at the Lycée was one of sheer bliss. I entered the Classe de Sixième in September 1938, at the age of 12 and felt instantly at home among my French, English and American classmates. Although we didn't know it at the time, this would be the last year before the outbreak of World War II. At that time, the Lycée was only three years old, newly located at 3 East 95th Street, in a beautiful mansion only minimally altered from its former use as a private home to accommodate the school. Our Sixième classroom was located at the southwest corner of the building's second floor, a bright, sunny room day-lit by four tall windows, two on each exterior wall. My desk, one among approximately 15 others, was at the center of the second row. Besides me, the other students (more boys than girls) included Jacques Changeux, Marcel Lavignette, Marcel Monory, Pierre Grelet, Charles Haines, Ethan Davis, Martin Moynhan, Gerard Tanqueray, Christiane Donat, Gloria Iden, Helene Barbet, and Pauline Frassati. (Later in the school year, Greta Unger would join the class, as would Natasha Dorfman, daughter of concert pianist Anya Dorfman.) Girl friends Almost immediately, Christiane Donat and I formed a close friendship, which included her older sister Odile, who was one or two grades ahead of us. Sadly for me, at some point during that school year, even before World War II had broken out in Europe, Christiane left the Lycée to return with her family to France. I never knew why, unless it was that they sensed the coming upheaval and had personal, business or patriotic reasons for returning before war exploded. But later their departure would perplex me even more than it did at the time, considering how many other students would begin traveling with their families in the opposite direction, coming to America for safety from the war, rather than leaving this country to plunge into Europe's fiery vortex. Another good friend was Gloria Iden. Gloria was blonde, sophisticated and seemed more "American" than the other girls in our class. She also seemed to lead a more social life outside of school than the rest of us. I suspected this largely because of her mentioning that she was a friend of Oona O'Neil, then one of New York's top debutantes (who later married Charlie Chaplin), and Gloria herself seemed to dip not infrequently into the social whirl. When I visited Gloria at her Manhattan apartment, she and I, with the complicity of the family maid, would sip Coca-Cola (parentally forbidden to both of us because of its high caffeine content) from red glass goblets that concealed the beverage inside from adult eyes — and felt wonderfully worldly doing this. Once I went to stay with Gloria at her parents' vacation house in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. That weekend was a hoot because we spent most of the time sailing and socializing with two boys, named (I think) Henry and David Chaffee, whom we conned for two days into believing that I could speak no English but only French. This meant that Gloria had to translate everything they said to me and everything I said to them, then translate back our respective responses. What made the feat difficult to pull off was that she had tried the same thing with another French-speaking friend the summer before, so naturally the boys suspected at first that this was a trick like the last one. Somehow I managed to play the part well enough to convince them that this time it was genuine — so that when, on the second afternoon, they asked Gloria to translate something for me into French, I totally dumbfounded them by saying coolly in English, "Thanks, I don't need a translation. I've understood every word!" At the time we were all four sitting on a dock, swinging our legs out over the water, and I think the two boys nearly fell into the drink from sheer shock at having been hoodwinked a second time. Autre temps, autre moeurs ... It is a truism nowadays to say that those were more innocent times. But they genuinely were. One thing that strikes me, when I look back, is how innocent our diversions were. The foregoing is one instance. We had no television, no drug culture, no celebrity culture, we were subjected to no media hype, peer pressure hardly existed, and, while we were literate and sophisticated in some ways well beyond our American peers, in other ways we shared their simplicity. By which I mean that simple things amused us. It took little to entertain us, and we were eminently capable of entertaining ourselves. We had radio and records, we had movies and theater, but we also played simple games and laughed at simple things. Another thing that seems anomalous now is how safe (and inexpensive) New York was then. A ride on the Madison Avenue bus cost five cents, ten cents on the double-decker Fifth Avenue bus (and how we loved to ride on its second level, especially the summer open-tops with the air fresh on our faces). [See photo above] Manhattan was safe enough for my brother and me to walk alone to school (granted the Lycée was only a block from home that first year and only three blocks distant thereafter), but other youngsters coming from farther away also often walked. Beginning the following year in Cinquième, my best friend and I routinely took buses downtown to shop or to see movies and plays, with no one, least of all ourselves, concerned about the safety of two young girls on the loose in Manhattan. Even Central Park was safe. Often, especially during that first year, my mother would take my brother and me to roller-skate in a nearby park playground, where there was also play equipment available to exercise on. One of his and my favorite things was chinning ourselves on the iron bars of the "jungle gym" — it made us feel so muscular and strong! On summer evenings, the whole family would sometimes sally forth from our apartment to take a cooling after-dinner stroll around the reservoir, a thing unthinkable today when the park is generally regarded unsafe after 5 p.m. Boy friends Two boys in Sixième were of special interest to me. Ethan Davis was the eldest of three sons of a friend of my mother's from earlier days, whom she was delighted to meet again as a fellow Lycée parent. Early on, Ethan took a particular liking to me and became, in a sense, my "boyfriend en titre." I've always thought he was fonder of me than I was of him, but I did enjoy his friendship and our times together. Ethan was studious and intelligent, and because of our parents' friendship and the proximity of our two apartments (only a block apart), he, his brothers, and my brother and I often walked together on Saturdays to the 85th-and-Madison Trans-Lux cinema for the 11 o'clock children's show. When the kiddie show was over, either we'd all walk home again together, or Ethan and I would send the younger ones home and stay on ourselves for the adult movie. This didn't happen often, though, and only when our parents had previously given consent to the film being featured. That is another thing about those times. Going to the movies was not something we did often. It was a treat. Youngsters then were not accustomed to, and did not expect, the steady diet of entertainment they get today. Instead, I believe we focused more on what was real and tangible in our lives, and used our imaginations for the rest. There's a wonderful story I've heard in recent years about a young boy of today's world who was asked which he preferred as between television and radio. The boy reflected a few moments, then surprised his adult questioner by answering, “Radio.” Why radio, the questioner wanted to know? "Because," the boy replied, "the pictures are better." This purports to be a true story and I hope it is, because I truly believe that the imagination is more richly developed by creating its own pictures than by passively accepting those imposed by someone else's vision, however creative that vision might be. For me, this is also the advantage that reading books has over any movie, TV, cartoon or computer version of the same material. So, I persist in thinking that yes, for my generation the pictures definitely were better. The other boy I rather liked in Sixième was Pierre Grelet, who was something of an artist. He drew pencil sketches of medieval castles that appealed to my romantic nature. One day I asked him to replicate that subject in miniature, to fit into a tiny circle I traced for him, and when he did, I cut it out and placed it inside a gold locket I frequently wore — which apparently rather embarrassed him. Years later (when I was in my 70s!), I was surprised to learn from another alumna that Gerard Tanqueray had nourished a longstanding passion for me, of which I was totally unaware. He horrified me in Sixième because, an artist of quite a different stripe, he was forever drawing pictures of knives dripping blood and similar gory subjects, and, then as now, I had a horror of horror. There again, those times were so different from these. There were none of the sexual pressures to which young people are exposed today. Boyfriends were merely boy friends. We remained sexually innocent much longer and were, I believe, far more romantic. Academic goals and achievements The quality of education we received at the Lycée is still something I marvel at all these years later. Our teachers, our textbooks, and the whole learning ambience was wonderful. The academic expectations laid upon us were the only pressures we might have experienced. (Even social pressures were virtually nonexistent. There was none of the peer-pressuring conformity one often sees among American teenagers. Every student's individuality was simply taken for granted in a remarkably tolerant environment.) Study, however, was definitely at the forefront of our minds. We were there at the Lycée to learn, and the relative sternness of some of our instructors only served to motivate us the more. Even the French system of numerically ranking each student's standing in the class was just one more incentive to excel. We received trimestrial report cards, and at the end of each school year, a Distribution des Prix awarded prizes to the best students. When I entered Sixième, there was one girl in the class who apparently had been a Lycée student from the school's inception three years before. This was Pauline Frassati, a petite girl with dark, curly, shoulder-length hair, who would have been pretty had she ever smiled. Pauline, I learned, was considered the class's superstar student, having consistently pulled down the Prix d'Excellence every year from the beginning. Pauline, however, had few social graces, and held herself aloof from the others, as though her academic status placed her stratospherically above them. This unsociability and her air of unassailable superiority, taken together with my own innate love of learning, triggered an unfamiliar impulse in me. Not normally competitive by nature, I determined to challenge Pauline's status as the smartest kid in class. Thereafter we ran neck-and-neck throughout the school year, one or the other of us finishing first or second in every subject on trimestrial exams. This pattern held until it came time for the Distribution des Prix in June. Then, I wondered, when the Prix d'Excellence winner was announced, would it be Pauline — or would it be me? It turned out to be both of us! She and I won all the Classe de Sixème's top prizes in our various subjects, and tied for the Prix d'Excellence —a shared honor between equals. But, at that point I no longer cared. I'd felt no burning need to be sole top dog. All that mattered to me was that I'd proved what I'd set out to prove, namely that Pauline's ascendancy could be challenged. Now she was no longer the only star in class. I was right up there with her. Later, another girl who joined the class would also challenge Pauline. This was Greta Unger, and, like Pauline, she was of diminutive stature. Mousy in appearance, with pale, straight hair and eyeglasses, she was the picture of the studious bookworm. Like Pauline, she also kept largely to herself, but without the same icy reserve. Here I would point out that at the Lycée, there was never any social stigma attached to being brainy, as there often is in American schools. One's personal popularity was not affected, one way or another, by one's academic standing. Whether a poor student or a good one, you were accepted for the person you were. It was only when a student affected airs of superiority, as Pauline did, that his or her popularity suffered. I was popular because I was sociable and treated everyone equally — and because every so often I would take it upon myself to play the class clown, something I hugely enjoyed at the time, but never repeated thereafter. But enough about the 1938-39 Lycée school year. It was a halcyon time — perhaps one of the happiest years of my life (and there have been many happy ones). I can qualify it with no other word than "blissful." The following year, coinciding with the onset of World War II, would prove to be more somber — no one who lived then would be so carefree again. Still, the Lycée was a unique and wonderful experience, and those of us who attended in those early years were privileged indeed. It was a very special time. ***************************************************************** |
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