June 2 1992
This ‘sage petite fille’
was not always so sage.
‘Gouvernantes’ giffles’
cured her juvenile ‘rages.’
“Don’t pass pers’nal remarks,”
her Miss Fallows would say;
so safe are our foibles
with her to this day.
As in reading to Papa
she’d skip ‘faits divers,’
parts marked ‘don’t read’ in novels
were as if they weren’t there.
Not that all one demanded
would she do to please:
to this day she’ll sit only
on gentlemen’s knees.
From her first glimpse of D’Anunzio,
with his fabled gloves of green,
through the trash-can with Herr Tillich:
much flirtation has there been.
And how often has she chuckled
when we cite some grand persona:
“Ah, comme il était charmant, c’ui-la,
et un Grand Flirt à moi!”
But all these flirtations
count as nothing at all
since that fated tea in Brussels
when Gaby met her Paul.
Ever trusting intuitions,
what she wrote she knew was right
when she resolved they’d “Pass NOT
Like Ships in the Night.”
So with the Bruxelle Banque seal
and a sense of certainty
was Gabrielle duly delivered to the
“Forêts sauvages de la Germanie.”
There Paul at once discovered,
with a little more than pride,
his prenuptial scientific lecture delivered,
he had married a “verry intelligentt brride.”
Their Odyssey to Princeton
now is history:
Sans their goûters and déjeuners,
oh where would we all be?
So thank you, Gabrielle,
for sharing this, your centenaire:
See you fin-de-siecle to
usher in the millenaire!
Etienne
Monday 25 August 1997
Chère Gabrielle,
I am sorry I could not say goodbye to you in person, while you were
here. Now that you are everywhere, even this email proxy will reach you
wherever you are. You of course believed — and were right — that we
are nowhere when we are no longer alive. But in the same breath, you
would have understood exactly what we meant when we said you would be
everywhere.
You were the vanguard for many, many of us. Our life-voyage always
followed territory that had already been charted in advance and
certified as safe for passage by you. It was reassuring to think
“Gabrielle is ahead of us, and there is no way we can overtake her to
pass! She’ll ALWAYS be ahead of us” (as the Tortoise said to
Achilles).
But to think you’d always be ahead of us was perhaps to commit the same
inductive fallacy that the chicken commits, when she thinks there will
always be a tomorrow. For here we are in a world that is — for the first
time for any of us — Gabrielle-less. And yet how can it be
Gabrielle-less, if we are here, at 57 Princeton Avenue, remembering,
talking about you?
You used to say, after Paul died, that you wished people would talk to
you about him more. We failed you in this regard, and I’m not sure why.
It’s probably because we each had our own side of Paul, one that we
thought was our very own, and that we also knew there was a side of Paul
that was completely reserved for Gaby — despite those many
flirtations about which the agreement had been that you need describe
them to one another only in “generalities.”
You continued your voyage for nearly two decades without Paul, but you
stated clearly from the outset that your heart was not in it. You
continued the dejeuners for as long as your health permitted, and your
gouters continued to the last. If asked, you would have said it was all
“de la tenue,” because it would be ungracious to do otherwise. And yet
we know that was not entirely true. You genuinely loved your many
friends, and even some women too. (Lewis Carroll’s “I love children,
except boys” has an echo here!)
There was a brilliant, eccentric Hungarian mathematician — not John
Von Neuman, whom you knew, but Paul Erdős — about whom it was said
that if you collaborated directly with Paul Erdős [pronounced
“err-dirsh”], then you have an Erdos number of 1; if you collaborated
with a collaborator of Erdos, your Erdős number was 2. Well it turns
out that once you reach an Erdős number of 4, you have exhausted the
ranks of the elite mathematicians — Fields Medal calibre — the world over.
We all have a Gabrielle number of 1. You are everywhere because those
Gabrielle numbers will just keep growing and growing.
Bises et adieu, Etienne
