{"id":1155,"date":"2019-01-21T15:13:16","date_gmt":"2019-01-21T15:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=1155"},"modified":"2019-01-21T15:13:16","modified_gmt":"2019-01-21T15:13:16","slug":"gabrielle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2019\/01\/21\/gabrielle\/","title":{"rendered":"Gabrielle"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/a>June 2 1992<\/p>\n

Gabrielle’s 100th<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

This ‘sage petite fille’
\nwas not always so sage.
\n‘Gouvernantes’ giffles’
\ncured her juvenile ‘rages.’<\/p>\n

“Don’t pass pers’nal remarks,”
\nher Miss Fallows would say;
\nso safe are our foibles
\nwith her to this day.<\/p>\n

As in reading to Papa
\nshe’d skip ‘faits divers,’
\nparts marked ‘don’t read’ in novels
\nwere as if they weren’t there.<\/p>\n

Not that all one demanded
\nwould she do to please:
\nto this day she’ll sit only
\non gentlemen’s knees.<\/p>\n

From her first glimpse of D’Anunzio,
\nwith his fabled gloves of green,
\nthrough the trash-can with Herr Tillich:
\nmuch flirtation has there been.<\/p>\n

And how often has she chuckled
\nwhen we cite some grand persona:
\n“Ah, comme il \u00e9tait charmant, c’ui-la,
\net un Grand Flirt \u00e0 moi!”<\/p>\n

But all these flirtations
\ncount as nothing at all
\nsince that fated tea in Brussels
\nwhen Gaby met her Paul.<\/p>\n

Ever trusting intuitions,
\nwhat she wrote she knew was right
\nwhen she resolved they’d “Pass NOT
\nLike Ships in the Night.”<\/p>\n

So with the Bruxelle Banque seal
\nand a sense of certainty
\nwas Gabrielle duly delivered to the
\n“For\u00eats sauvages de la Germanie.”<\/p>\n

There Paul at once discovered,
\nwith a little more than pride,
\nhis prenuptial scientific lecture delivered,
\nhe had married a “verry intelligentt brride.”<\/p>\n

Their Odyssey to Princeton<\/a>
\nnow is history:
\nSans their go\u00fbters and d\u00e9jeuners,
\noh where would we all be?<\/p>\n

So thank you, Gabrielle,
\nfor sharing this, your centenaire:
\nSee you fin-de-siecle to
\nusher in the millenaire!<\/p>\n

Etienne<\/p>\n

\n

Monday 25 August 1997<\/b><\/p>\n

Ch\u00e8re Gabrielle,<\/p>\n

I am sorry I could not say goodbye to you in person, while you were
\nhere. Now that you are everywhere, even this email proxy will reach you
\nwherever you are. You of course believed — and were right — that we
\nare nowhere when we are no longer alive. But in the same breath, you
\nwould have understood exactly what we meant when we said you would be
\neverywhere.<\/p>\n

You were the vanguard for many, many of us. Our life-voyage always
\nfollowed territory that had already been charted in advance and
\ncertified as safe for passage by you. It was reassuring to think
\n“Gabrielle is ahead of us, and there is no way we can overtake her to
\npass! She’ll ALWAYS be ahead of us” (as the Tortoise said to
\nAchilles).<\/p>\n

But to think you’d always be ahead of us was perhaps to commit the same
\ninductive fallacy that the chicken commits, when she thinks there will
\nalways be a tomorrow. For here we are in a world that is — for the first
\ntime for any of us — Gabrielle-less. And yet how can it be
\nGabrielle-less, if we are here, at 57 Princeton Avenue, remembering,
\ntalking about you?<\/p>\n

You used to say, after Paul died, that you wished people would talk to
\nyou about him more. We failed you in this regard, and I’m not sure why.
\nIt’s probably because we each had our own side of Paul, one that we
\nthought was our very own, and that we also knew there was a side of Paul
\nthat was completely reserved for Gaby — despite those many
\nflirtations about which the agreement had been that you need describe
\nthem to one another only in “generalities.”<\/p>\n

You continued your voyage for nearly two decades without Paul, but you
\nstated clearly from the outset that your heart was not in it. You
\ncontinued the dejeuners for as long as your health permitted, and your
\ngouters continued to the last. If asked, you would have said it was all
\n“de la tenue,” because it would be ungracious to do otherwise. And yet
\nwe know that was not entirely true. You genuinely loved your many
\nfriends, and even some women too. (Lewis Carroll’s “I love children,
\nexcept boys” has an echo here!)<\/p>\n

There was a brilliant, eccentric Hungarian mathematician — not John
\nVon Neuman, whom you knew, but Paul Erdős — about whom it was said
\nthat if you collaborated directly with Paul Erdős [pronounced
\n“err-dirsh”], then you have an Erdos number<\/a> of 1; if you collaborated
\nwith a collaborator of Erdos, your Erdős number was 2. Well it turns
\nout that once you reach an Erdős number of 4, you have exhausted the
\nranks of the elite mathematicians — Fields Medal calibre — the world over.<\/p>\n

We all have a Gabrielle number of 1. You are everywhere because those
\nGabrielle numbers will just keep growing and growing.<\/p>\n

Bises et adieu, Etienne<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 2 1992 Gabrielle’s 100th 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 … <\/p>\n

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