Following an American icon on her year abroad

In 2019, Ann Mah printed an article within the New York Times about 20-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier’s year in Paris as a school junior. As Mah traced Jacqueline’s days up and down the streets of Paris and into its museums and cafes, she revealed a brand new facet of each the American icon and the postwar metropolis. The article was the inspiration for Jacqueline in Paris, Mah’s novel about this formative year.

Mah shares a more in-depth take a look at the method of fictionalizing this story—and the unimaginable second when Jacqueline’s personal voice started to come back by means of.

A few years in the past in Paris, I walked by a stately artwork nouveau constructing within the sixteenth arrondissement. On the wall hung a plaque that proclaimed: “Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis née Lee-Bouvier (1929–1994), widow of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States of America, lived in this building as a student from 1949 to 1950.” It stopped me in my tracks.

By this level I’d lived in Paris off and on for a couple of years, and I had a fairly good sense of the well-known Americans who had lived in and liked the City of Light—however I hadn’t realized they included the previous first woman. As I gazed on the residence constructing, which was giant and chic, with a limestone facade that blended seamlessly with its neighbors, I attempted to think about her as a pupil, 20 years previous, pushing open the heavy picket entrance door, shopping for a newspaper on the nook kiosk, dashing down the steps of the metro. Suddenly I used to be overcome with a need to know extra about this younger girl who had determined to review in France solely 5 years after World War II. What had drawn her to Paris? With whom—and the way—did she stay? And how had her junior year abroad affected the remainder of her life, if in any respect?  

I started writing a journey article, retracing Jacqueline’s footsteps in Paris. At the library, I checked out a stack of biographies, scouring them for particulars about her year abroad, which have been few and much between. I re-created a few of her adventures: sipping cocktails on the Ritz Bar, driving horses within the Bois de Boulogne and visiting Reid Hall, the Parisian middle of American examine abroad for the reason that Nineteen Twenties. 

I interviewed Jacqueline’s French host sister, Claude du Granrut, who spoke of the bitter chilly of the winter of 1950, describing the earmuffs, scarves and sweaters they wore at residence to maintain heat. Their rambling residence lacked warmth: “It was broken,” she mentioned. “Jacqueline put on gloves to study. I remember her always being covered up.” She instructed me that she and Jacqueline by no means spoke a phrase of English collectively, which I discovered particularly touching, as a result of it illustrated how deeply Jacqueline cared about studying the French language. 

In du Granrut’s memoir, Le piano et le violoncelle, I learn extra about her mom (and Jacqueline’s host mom), the Comtesse de Renty. She and her husband had been Resistance spies throughout the warfare; within the closing days earlier than the liberation of Paris, they have been captured and despatched to focus camps, the place her husband died. The warfare left her widowed and impoverished, with two daughters and a grandson to help, and consequently she had taken in boarders, together with Jacqueline and two different women finding out abroad by means of Smith College. 

Piecing collectively these particulars of Jacqueline’s time in France felt each thrilling and painstaking. And but my unique questions on her nonetheless lingered. It occurred to me that the story of Jacqueline’s junior year abroad in Paris reached far past the scope of a journey article. How may I be taught extra? Famously guarded, Jacqueline didn’t grant many interviews, and most of her private letters stay personal. As a end result, her story has largely been instructed by means of the recollections and observations of others. But the intense, adventurous younger girl I had gleaned by means of snippets had her personal voice, and on this novel I’ve tried to let her communicate.

At first I heard her voice like a whisper, maybe her well-known little half-whisper. But after listening to the French radio interviews she gave as first woman—by which she spoke fluent French with clear precision—I spotted she will need to have deployed that girlish tone as a guise, a protecting cloak. Perhaps such subterfuge was vital for a younger girl of her milieu, one socially poised however financially precarious, dependent on her appears, appeal and talent to please. Her confident voice in French challenged the caricature of Mrs. John F. Kennedy and allowed me to glimpse a fast, intelligent facet of her. I couldn’t overlook it, and ultimately it guided me, even in moments of doubt and frustration, till Jacqueline appeared to be speaking to me instantly. 

Much of this guide was written throughout the early days of the pandemic, which meant I couldn’t go to France—my household and I barely left residence—however each afternoon I retreated to my automotive, which was parked within the underground storage of my residence constructing, opened my laptop computer and traveled to Paris. I tagged together with Jacqueline to museums and jazz nightclubs, nation chateaux and cafes, and on lengthy brisk walks by means of slim cobblestone streets, till historical past began coming to life on the web page and in my senses. I smelled the heavy smoke of her cigarettes, swallowed the icy brine of a uncooked oyster at Christmas, soaked up the fragile heat of an early spring day within the Jardin du Luxembourg. I wept with her, too, when she left Paris and got here to just accept that she would by no means stay there once more.

Yes, Jacqueline left France ultimately. I don’t suppose that’s a spoiler, proper? Most of us are aware of the triumph and tragedy of the remainder of her life, enjoying out because it did upon a worldwide stage and recorded in historical past. But it was her year in Paris, the tutorial year of 1949 to 1950, that she referred to as ‘the high point in my life,’ and it has been an honor and a privilege to accompany her there and permit her voice to information this story. I don’t faux to know the lady who was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, however I do really feel a kinship with the 20-year-old American pupil in Paris named Jacqueline—and he or she is younger, and completely happy, and carefree.