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- The 1938-39 School Year: Part 2The Lyçée Kids I RememberBy Gabrielle Griswold ('44)Gabrielle Griswold (class of 1944) has become the de-facto historian of the AALFNY. In several previous editions of our newsletter, and to date, she has written seven invaluable articles memorializing what it was like to attend the Lycee in its early years. Please click on the links to the right to access the previous articles. Your comments would be welcome and will be forwarded to Gabrielle. Using the word “kids” in titling this piece, I cannot help both wincing and smiling inwardly a little, recalling my mother’s insistence on the niceties of the English language when I was young. That word is so universally current nowadays that most people probably don’t realize that it was once a slang word, at which my mother scoffed whenever she heard it, saying, “’Kids’ does not mean children; it means baby goats!” Since slang, with rare exceptions, tended to be frowned upon in my family when I was growing up, I heard little of it until I was older. As a former English teacher (who also taught English at the Lyçée), my mother was a purist about language. Probably I ought to have written “Lyçée Classmates,” for that, essentially, is what I mean. In any case, the classmates I remember here are those I found in Sixième when I entered the Lyçée in September 1938 at the age of twelve. Looking back, I remember that first Lyçée year as one of the most blissful years in a long and happy life (as I write this, I am 80 years old). American-born, from late-fall of 1936 until late-fall of 1937 at the ages of ten and eleven I had lived in France and Switzerland with a beloved French godmother, where I had relished my French experience and in Switzerland had also relished meeting people of other nationalities. Now I was enormously happy to find myself back in an international environment. Arriving at the Lyçée on the first day of school, I was ecstatic to be there, with a joy so intense I can feel it still. At the time, the Lyçée was only three years old and was then newly located at 3 East 95th Street in a beautiful mansion only slightly altered to accommodate the school. Our Sixième classroom was located at the southwest corner of the building’s fourth floor, a bright and sunny room day-lit by four tall windows, two on each exterior wall. My desk, one among about 15 others, was at the center of the second row. The other students (more boys then girls that year) included: Jacques Changeux, Marcel Lavignette, Marcel Monory, Georges Gonod, Ethan Davis, Pierre Grelet, Charles Haines, François Lee, Martin Moynihan, Gerard Tanqueray, Jean-Pierre Pétolas, Christiane Donat, Hélène Barbet, Gloria Iden, and Pauline Frassati. At this distance in time, I cannot be sure whether or not I’ve left anyone out. Later in the school year, Greta Unger would join the class, as at some point also did Natasha Dorfman, the daughter of concert pianist Anya Dorfman. Among this mix of boys and girls, some entirely bi-lingual like myself, others less so, I felt immediately at home. Almost at once I became fast friends with Christiane Donat, a friendship that also included her older sister, Odile, who was one or two grades ahead of us. Sadly for me, at some point during that first year, even before World War II broke out in Europe, Christiane left the Lyçée to return with her family to France. I never knew why the left, unless it was that they sensed the coming conflict and had personal or patriotic reasons for returning before war exploded. Their departure would prove all the more perplexing a year later when I realized how many other students began traveling with their families in the opposite direction, coming to America for safety rather than leaving to plunge into Europe’s fiery vortex. For some months after her departure, Christiane and I corresponded, but when war came we lost touch. I never learned whether she and her family survived, and to this day I wish I could somehow have reconnected with her after it was over. Recently however, to my surprise an old address book unexpectedly surfaced in which I found the French address at which I’d written her: “Manoir des Piliers, Belleville-sur-Sâone, Rhone, Lyon, France.” Perhaps if I’d had that address with me when I returned to France after the war, I might have found her. One thing that strikes me when I look back on those days is how innocent our diversions were. The foregoing is one example. We had no television then, no drug, sex or celebrity culture, we were subject to no media hype, peer pressure hardly existed, and, while we were literate and sophisticated in some ways beyond our American peers, in other ways we shared their simplicity. By which I mean that simple things entertained and amused us. We had books, we had moves and theaters, we had records and radio, but we also played simple games and laughed at simple things. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, François Lee, who sat next to me in class, I also briefly rather liked, but not for very long. However, I had forgotten (if I ever knew) what a trouble-maker he must have been until many years later he wrote to me saying how negative (unlike my own) his memories were of his Lyçée days, of which he recalled little beyond endless hours spent in various kinds of punitions. Marcel Lavignette was a tall, lanky, dark-haired boy, full of fun and games, occasionally mischievous, who never seemed out of sorts. I remember him as always laughing, joking and pulling pranks, which sometimes drew admonishing comments from teachers. One of his closest friends was Jacques Changeux, a cheerful soul of both mirth and character. I’m not sure whether it was in Sixième or during the following year that the Lyçée held an essay contest on the subject of “Democracy,” which I can remember writing but which I believe Jacques won. Today, for me, a sort of mystery seems to surround Jacques Changeux. He was my classmate in Sixième, yet must, like me, have skipped a grade somewhere along the way (I skipped Troisième) because, when I reached Deuxième, he was again my classmate there. Then, many years later in some Lyçée alumni publication I saw his (business) address given as 2, rue Saint-Florentin, Paris—which astounded me because for years I had worked at that same address, first for the Marshall Plan and later for N.A.T.O., and never run into him there! Unforunately, I have not been able to discover when he worked there, nor for what organization. Interestingly, when I recently went on-line and tried to Google his name, a listing came up apparently linking him with the O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services, WW II forerunner of the C.I.A.). In that listing, the following words appear: “Jacques Changeux, Veterans of OSS, List of Members. 1990. pages cited this search. Order hard copy of these pages. Try another NameBase search NameBase … www.namebase.org/xcea/Jacques Changeux.html-Similar pages.” But I could get no farther than that in my search Does this perhaps mean that the Jacques Changeux I knew at the Lyçée later worked in American intelligence? On a recent return to Paris (in 2000), I revisited 2 rue Saint-Florentin, and seem to remember learning that there was then, or earlier had been, an office of the C.I.A. located somewhere in the building. But of course my focus was on the Ambassador’s office where I had worked, and at that time I had not yet discovered that Jacques presumably had once worked in that same building. If I had known that then, I would have pressed on in search of further information, as it seems rather striking that we two former Lyçée classmates may both have worked at the same address at some time or other, without our paths ever crossing. Another of my classmates in Sixième was Pauline Frassati, who I gather had been a Lyçée student from the school’s inception. She, I early learned, had consistently pulled down the Prix d’Excellence every year from the beginning and was generally considered the class’s superstar student. A petite girl with dark, curly, shoulder-length hair, who would have been pretty had she ever smiled, Pauline held herself aloof from the others, as though her academic status placed her above the rest. This unsociability of hers, her scholastic intensity and her air of unassailable superiority, together with my own innate love of learning, acted as a spur to me. Normally not of a competitive nature, I now found myself in a school where prizes were awarded in every subject at an annual Distribution des Prix, for first, second, third and runner-up places. This concept further motivated me, and I quietly 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 in first or second place in every subject during trimestrial exams. This pattern held throughout the school year, right up through the actual ceremony of the Distribution des Prix, when she and I shared class honors in all the various subjects. When the moment came for the Prix d’Excellence winner to be announced, I held my breath. Would it be Pauline? Or would it be me? It turned out to be both of us! A shared honor between two equals. But, at that point, I no longer cared. I’d felt no burning need to be sole top dog. All that mattered was that I’d proved what I’d set out to prove, namely that Pauline’s supremacy could be challenged. Now she was no longer the only star in class. I was right up there with her. When that first year at the Lyçée ended with the Distribution des Prix, held in the school’s beautiful, glittering ballroom, I was in heaven. The school year that had begun in bliss ended in bliss. Shortly thereafter I would set off to spend the summer at a girls’ camp in upper New York State. Little did I know that, soon after my return, World War II would break out in Europe with the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, within only days of the Lyçée’s reopening for the next school year. |
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