bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992) — Summer 1992 // Été 1992, pp. 15–16
During his long and truly distinguished career in External Affairs, Charles Ritchie held such top posts abroad as Ambassador to the United States, High Commissioner in London, Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany, Permanent Representative to NATO, and more. Nothwithstanding the gruelling nature of such assignments, during all of this time Charles managed to write diaries which, in his retirement, have been converted into four volumes of Diaries published by Macmillan have delighted readers throughout the English-speaking world.
In the early post-World War II years, Charles served as Counsellor at the Canadian Embassy in Paris where, quite in addition to writing diaries, he kept up a delightful correspondence with Under-Secretary Lester B. Pearson bout readers will recall the very amusing letter, published in a recent issue, about his vicissitudes, as a bachelor, in finding housing in 1947 Paris.
A year later, by then married to Sylvia, he writes to Mike Pearson about the oddities of life in the apartment they are occupying — but without their own effects, for which they had been waiting over two months for shipment by Ottawa. The spiritual landlady, the plumbing complete with bidet, the shared telephone, the stone-deaf manservant, the aged and toothless cleaning lady, the toothbrush that disappeared down the toilet and threatened the entire plumbing — all vivified in the spring of 1948 for the Under-Secretary in the kind of language that, I am confident, the present Under-Secretary does not see today, even in communications from PAFSO Sidney Freifeld Editorial Board
by Charles Ritchie
Paris, 23 March 1948
Dear Mike,
I feel that the time has come for me to render to my Superior (if I may borrow monastic phraseology) some account of myself and of life in the Ritchie menage in Paris. Marriage is indeed a very Beautiful Thing — a far more beautiful thing than I ever guessed in the unregenerate days of my bachelordom. [..J Our home life is organized along simple but effective lines. In addition to a stone-deaf man-servant who spends most of his time ironing my ties with a hot iron till they bloom into a curious shade of rusty yellow, we have at our disposal the services of an aged and toothless crone who wields an ineffective feather duster in her chilblained and trembling fingers. Our landlady is a spinster of the most refined sensibilities and comes of one of the (very nearly) best French families. She resides on the top floor of the house and gives herself up to good works which seem principally to consist of the moral regeneration of a number of young strapping men who are described as “nephews”. We occasionally hear the soothing murmur of spiritual counsel percolating from her quarters. We have the privilege of sharing a telephone with her, which is operated to her part of the house or our own by a series of switches, the mechanics of which I have not yet mastered. In any case, like so many French mechanical devices, they are usually abandoned in an emergency in favour of the more direct human contact. This means a good deal of screaming up and down the stairs whenever the telephone rings in either division of the house. Sometimes our landlady’s head appears over the bannisters as she calls us to communicate a telephone message. On such occasions she presents a surprising appearance for, owing to her finely stretched nerves, she cannot bear the weight of her abundant tresses pressing upon her forehead so that when at home she allows her positively Victorian length grey locks to fall in a shroudlike manner over her shoulders. If one didn’t know this background one would think that the witch of Endor was blowing down the stairs on a broomstick.
The sanitary arrangements in the house have all the peculiar charm and interest of French attachments in the best homes of France. There is a mystery about French baths, w.c.s and bidets. These objects of glistening white porcelain seem to have been installed as a matter of fashion in some period in the 1920s. Their installation was purely for prestige purposes and not for use. This at once becomes evident if you try to use them. For example, no hot water comes out of the taps despite the fact that they are heated by a circular gas contraption (alarmingly labelled Vesuvius). I asked our landlady why there was no hot water even after one had risked one’s life by igniting this device, and she blandly replied that in the winter the water was cold but in the summer naturally it was warmer. This seemed at the time a self-evident proposition and I felt that I had asked a foolish question. On reflection, however, I feel there must be a catch in it somewhere. My own method of washing is to sit in the bath while my man-servant pours vats of boiling water taken off the stove over my person. This I believe to be quite customary among the samurai in Japan. I have no idea how Sylvia manages […]
I must admit that I have not assisted the smooth working of the sanitary arrangements as, while brushing my teeth, I let fly my toothbrush which, guided by some mysterious force of attraction, described a circle in the air and precipitated itself down the w.c. From then on it was impossible to pull the plug. Plumbers arrived and said that the toothbrush was so deeply buried in the entrails of the plumbing that it would be necessary to take up the bathroom floor tile by tile and strip the pipes. This would have entailed pulling down most of the interior of the house at the cost of about half a million francs. Fortunately, however, such drastic methods were not in the end necessary. The toothbrush has been rescued and is now used by the man-servant to apply brown shoe polish to the more delicate whorls of my brown brogues. Everything works together for the good of those who love the Lord.
The furnishing and interior decoration of our house is in the style of the First Empire and it contains a number of relics of our landlady’s grandfather, a Marshal of Napoleon. The most interesting of these is a moustache comber presented to him by Napoleon personally and with which I have personally combed my own moustache. Delightful as these period relics are, I am still looking forward to the possibility that the Department will be able to despatch to us our personal effects, for which we have now been waiting for more than two months, as it would be quite a pleasant change to have something about the house which dates from the last century of progress. Unfortunately, we have not inherited the Marshal’s war chargers, so that until our car, which is also being despatched to us by a kindly Department, arrives we have no means of transport.
Despite the bizarre elements in our home life, we are very pleased with existence in Paris and, insofar as is possible for a hard working and conscientious public servant like myself, we are enjoying life. Not a hard word has passed between my wife and I since our marriage day except that she once asked me whether I always left my clothes lying in heaps upon the floor. I said that I always did, that may late father always had, and that my dear brother always does. She seemed to accept this as being in the Nature of Things.
Our love to yourself and Maryon. I do hope that we may see you both in Paris before the year is out. That would be a real cause for rejoicings.
Yours ever,
Charles
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992) — Summer 1992 // Été 1992, pp. 15–16. Read the rest of this issue →
