Page 77 of Jackie

While Jack meets with De Gaulle, André Malraux is my guide through Paris. Months ago I asked my chief of staff, Tish, to tell the French ambassador I hoped to meet Malraux.

“Your intellectual crush,” Tish teased me.

“How could one not be a little in love with a French Resistance fighter turned cultural minister who literally scrubbed the soot-black stones of the Louvre?”

But just a week ago, Malraux’s two sons were killed in a car wreck. I sent word to him immediately, saying we should cancel. To my surprise, he wrote back, insisting we still meet.

He is an extraordinary man of intellect and grace. We walk together through the Musée du Jeu de Paume, then drive to Empress Josephine’s Château de Malmaison outside Paris. I’ve told him I want to see the restoration work Stéphane Boudin did on Josephine’s house. I find it curious, I tell him, the degree of extravagance Napoleon’s wife engaged to shape the most beautiful garden in Europe—not just the two hundred varieties of roses and lilies from her native Martinique, but her insistence on three hundred pineapple plants in the orangery, as well as kangaroos, llamas, black swans. The curator walking with us mentions that Josephine was “extremely jealous” of Napoleon.

This makes me laugh. “But she wound up on her feet,” I say, “while he was exiled to Saint Helena.”

Malraux smiles. “Tonight at Versailles, we’ll dine on gold-trimmed china that once belonged to that exiled emperor.”

I take his arm as we walk. “I’ve been thinking, André, that someday you might lend me a French painting. Who knows, perhaps La Joconde?”

He laughs, and a bright joy floods through me that my audacious, absurd request for him to send the Mona Lisa might dispel, if just for a moment, the dark grief of loss he suffers.

—

De Gaulle looms, a towering figure at dinner in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. I am seated next to him. We talk together in French about art and my love of Paris, my experiences as a student on Boulevard Saint-Michel. I tell him that earlier that day, when I was supposed to be resting, I asked one of the Secret Service agents to drive me around the city, just so I could cross over my favorite bridges and drive down the streets I walked as a college girl.

The candelabras are lit; the mirrored walls catch the bouncing light like stars. The ceiling soars. Through the tall arched windows, I can see the outline of the night gardens, the spangled flow of water from the fountains.

We discuss French history. “Remind me, please,” I say, “who did Louis XVI’s daughter marry?” As we chat on in French, I can feel that sterner aspect of him soften. We walk from the dining room to a ballet Malraux has arranged, which was first performed for Louis XV. Flaming torches light the theater.

“And from here you travel to Vienna?” De Gaulle says.

“Yes. The president will meet with Chairman Khrushchev.”

“Watch out for his wife,” De Gaulle says, a dour smile. “She’s the craftier of the two.”

…

The Russian leader compliments my dress and draws his chair closer. We talk about horses and Ukrainian folk dances.

“Remind me, please, Mr. Chairman,” I say, “of the name of the dog you sent up into space.”

“Strelka.”

“Such a lovely name!”

“There are puppies.”

“Why don’t you send me one?”

He laughs. “Perhaps I’ll send you two.”

We are at the state dinner at the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. We can hear the low drone of crowds outside.

“It’s your name they’re chanting,” Khrushchev tells me.

I smile. “I think it’s my husband’s.” He studies me for a moment, then cocks his bald head, pretending to listen.

“No,” he says, “they are for you.”

There’s something cozy about him, though I remember a line from the briefing papers about how he gets ornery when he’s tired. Just last year, he took off his shoe and brandished it at the UN. Now at the Schönbrunn Palace, I ask Khrushchev about a book I read, The Sabres of Paradise, the story of a Muslim guerrilla leader who fought for decades against the czar. I tell him how intrigued I was and ask if he can tell me more. He frowns for a moment, then starts to talk about how the quality and number of teachers in the region are far more robust now under the Soviets than they were under the czar. I let him go on for a while, puffing himself up, then I touch his arm and smile.

“Oh, Mr. Chairman, please don’t bore me with statistics.”

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