France & Martine

Paris in the spring of 1957 was a city in the third year of its postwar reconstruction tax-credit cycle, the seventh year of the Fourth Republic, and the eight-hundredth year of the Louvre. None of those facts mattered to the twenty-two-year-old Army corporal who arrived at the Gare de l'Est on a Friday evening late in the winter with three days of leave, a wallet full of francs, and a copy of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way in the side pocket of his uniform jacket. The corporal had been in France for three months and had spent every weekend before this one in his Lorraine barracks reading and writing reports of his own confection at the largest U.S. Army ammunition depot in Europe. Now, finally, the colonel had signed his pass. The corporal — whose name was Barney Ebsworth and whose Olympic-track-team self-discipline was the only thing that had kept him from dying of impatience — had three days. He had decided, somewhere in the back of his life, that those three days were going to be the most important seventy-two hours he had so far lived.

He was not wrong about that. He was, however, wrong about the order of operations. He thought the seventy-two hours would peak at the Louvre. They peaked at a USO dance hall a week and a half later. The Louvre would change the rest of his career. The USO would change the rest of his life.

The Louvre, Side Door, March 1957

Before I. M. Pei's glass pyramid was built — that was 1989, thirty-two years away — the Louvre had no monumental front entrance to speak of. Visitors filed in through what amounted to a side door of one of the building's two long wings, climbed an unmonumental staircase, paid a small admission fee at a wooden booth, and emerged onto the grand staircase proper. The first thing they saw, framed at the top of the staircase as if the architect had been commissioned to stage exactly this moment, was the Winged Victory of Samothrace. It is a Hellenistic marble of a winged female figure, headless and armless, alighting on the prow of a ship. It dates to the early second century B.C. It had stood at the top of the Louvre's grand staircase since 1884.

Barney walked up the staircase. He had been to art museums before — the St. Louis Art Museum on a high-school field trip, the small museum at the University of Missouri — but he had never been to anything like this, and he had never seen the Winged Victory. He stopped at the top of the staircase. Whatever the arithmetic of his life had been until that moment, it underwent a small but unrecoverable revision in front of the marble. He was twenty-two and an Army corporal and a Mizzou-trained accountant on his way to a career nobody could yet name, and he was looking at a sculpture made by a Greek who had been dead for two thousand one hundred years and whose name nobody knew.

He spent the rest of the afternoon walking the Louvre's galleries with a slightly elevated heart rate. He had no map and no audio guide; the Mona Lisa hung in a small room without bullet-proof glass and could be approached as casually as one approached a painting on the wall of a friend's apartment. There were no crowds. The high-tourism summer was three months away. Barney moved through the rooms in the Italian wing, then the French wing, then the Dutch wing. He had, by his own later admission, no system. His training in art history at this point consisted of the survey of Western Civilization he had taken at Mizzou as a freshman, plus whatever images he had absorbed from a few illustrated books he had taken from the base library on previous weekends.

What he discovered on that first Saturday in the Louvre is the thing that will define the next sixty-one years of his life: the eye learns by looking. Or, in his own characteristic phrasing, the only sentence in his autobiography about his self-education in art history that is also a complete description of his methodology:

The Apartment, the Brothel, and the Three-Day Pass

The first weekend, Barney did not stay alone. He came to Paris with two of his closest Army friends, members of what the three of them had jokingly named — for their respective religions, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant — the Unholy Three. Dan Devine, the Catholic from Chicago, ran the officers' club at the depot. Wally Sugar, the Jew from Chicago, ran the enlisted men's club. Barney, the Protestant from Missouri, ran the three NCO clubs. The arrangement of their respective religious affiliations was a running joke for the eighteen months they served together. The arrangement of their weekend passes was managed by the sergeant major of Barney's company, who controlled the passes and was also Barney's main NCO-club bartender, and who signed Barney's passes in exchange for Barney signing the sergeant major's drink-receipt invoices in a smooth and never-discussed weekly transaction. Barney got a pass every weekend the colonel was not in residence. So did Wally and Dan, by extension.

The first hotel the Unholy Three stayed in, near the Gare de l'Est, turned out to be a rent-by-the-hour third-class establishment. Barney, who had grown up on Kingshighway and spent two years at Fort Leonard Wood, was unbothered. The second hotel, near the Champs-Élysées and, the three soldiers initially thought, of higher class, turned out to be exactly the same kind of establishment. They moved on. Barney rode the Paris Métro thirty-eight times in three days, learning the city by walking each arrondissement and watching faces in cafés. He had no French. He had no need of any. I didn't speak the language, he wrote later, but how could they be mad at me? I was the walking chamber of commerce.

That weekend he saw the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Cœur, the Panthéon, the Madeleine, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, the Palais-Royal, and as much of the Louvre as he could absorb in a single afternoon. He saw, in other words, what every American soldier on a three-day pass to Paris in the spring of 1957 saw. The difference between Barney and most of those soldiers was that he came back the next weekend, and the weekend after that, and the weekend after that, for nearly a year and a half, until he had been to the Louvre approximately seventy times.

New Year's Eve, the USO, the Stroke of Midnight

On December 30, 1956 — nine months into his French posting and just under a year before his discharge — Barney got drunk for the first time in his adult life. He had spent the previous several years training as a college sprinter and had kept his body alcohol-free as a matter of competitive habit. In Paris on the eve of the eve of New Year's, with the Unholy Three buying rounds of champagne, he abandoned the habit. He paid for the abandonment. The next day, December 31, he was profoundly hung over. At six o'clock in the evening, when Dan and Wally were ready to leave their hotel for the night's celebrations, Barney told them to go without him. He went back to bed.

He woke up around ten p.m. He was hungry. He was, against all odds, well. He went out into the Paris night with no specific destination and the slightly disoriented appetite of a man who has slept through the dinner hour. He walked. He passed restaurants. He thought about going into one. He kept walking. Somewhere around 11:50 p.m., he found himself near the USO. The USO was the United Service Organizations' Paris hospitality club, established to give American servicemen on leave a place to dance, drink soft drinks (the USO ran dry, more or less), and meet local girls who were practicing their English. Barney was in civilian clothes — he never identified as a GI off the base — but he had not wanted to spend New Year's Eve alone in a hotel room, and the USO, at minimum, was a place where people were speaking English. He went in.

What happened next is the most precisely told scene in his autobiography, and the only scene in his life he describes in real-time present-tense reconstruction:

The girl was nineteen years old. Her name was Martine de Visme. She was at the USO not on a date but with her older sister Christiane, both of them studying English and using the USO's polite mid-century social atmosphere to practice. Christiane had been across the room. Barney had not noticed her. He noticed Martine. He moved.

The dance lasted exactly thirty minutes, because the USO closed promptly at 12:30 a.m. and the band stopped playing. Barney did not want the evening to end. He proposed they continue to the new place around the corner that was beginning to draw American military attention — Whisky à Go Go, which would later become the namesake of an entire international club franchise but in 1956 was simply a converted Paris cellar with a band. Martine hesitated. She was, she explained, with her older sister. The older sister, Christiane, was summoned. Christiane assessed the twenty-two-year-old American in his civilian suit, the careful courtesy of his manner, the sober-but-warm look in his eyes, and approved. Permission was granted.

The Six A.M. Taxi

Barney and Martine danced at Whisky à Go Go until the Paris Métro stopped running at 2 a.m. The Métro would not start again until 6 a.m. They had four hours to fill. They filled them. They danced; they walked; they sat at a café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain that did the late-night bread bakers' trade and ate pastries fresh from the oven; they walked some more. At six in the morning the Métro started up again. Martine, who had stayed out far later than she had told her sister she would, said she had to get home. Barney offered to take her.

She refused. Her apartment was in the wrong direction. He insisted — partly to be chivalrous, but mostly, as he later confessed in print, because he wanted to know exactly where she lived so he would not lose her. He took her. He logged the address in his memory the way a Mizzou accounting student logs a financial statement. He returned to his hotel at eight a.m. Wally Sugar rolled over in the next bed, opened one eye, and said, “Sick, huh?”

Barney told the Unholy Three about Martine over breakfast. They did not believe him. To prove it, he proposed they all return to the USO at 4 p.m. that afternoon, which was the time Martine had said she would be there. They went. She did not show. The Unholy Three ribbed Barney all the way back to the depot on the train that evening: Suuuuure, you met this girl.

A week later a letter arrived at the depot. I'm sorry I couldn't get back in time, it said. We were having a family celebration, and I was waiting on the oysters. It was from Martine, and it was — he was right — the most important letter Barney would ever receive from anyone.

Saturday after Saturday at the Louvre

From that letter forward, Barney spent every weekend in Paris with Martine. The Friday-night arrival, the cheap hotel, the Métro to Martine's family apartment, the Saturday morning together, the Saturday afternoon at the Louvre. We visited the Louvre every Saturday, he writes in the autobiography, with the specific simplicity of a man stating a fact that does not require ornamentation. He had already learned, on his first solo trip, that the Louvre rewarded methodical attention. He now had a companion who shared his pace, his patience, and (although she would not have phrased it this way at nineteen) his belief that the most efficient way to spend an hour was in front of a single painting that deserved that hour.

Within a year, Barney could give a tour-guide-quality account of every major room in the Louvre. Martine, who would have spent considerably less of her free time in museums had she not met him, also became fluent in the collection. They saved the more demanding wings — the Italian Renaissance, the Dutch Golden Age — for the later weekends. They were saving themselves an aesthetic vocabulary that would, over the next sixty years, do most of the work of telling Barney which paintings to buy.

Italy, the Engagement, the Kansas Relay Medal

In March of 1957, three months after the USO night, Barney was scheduled to take a ten-day leave to Italy. The leave had been booked, paid for, and confirmed before he had ever heard of Martine de Visme. The trip was through a German-run travel agency that specialized in cheap tours for American GIs — ten days in Capri, Naples, Rome, Pisa, Florence, and Venice for ninety-nine dollars, including hotels and three meals a day. Barney had no idea how the company made any money on the arrangement. (The answer, he discovered later, was that the company did not make money: it went bankrupt the following year.) He could not get out of the booking. Martine was still in school. They agreed he would go.

He spent ten days in Italy thinking about Martine. The Sistine Chapel did not register. The Uffizi did not register. The Trevi Fountain did not register. Venice, even Venice, did not register. He wrote her letters from each city. By the time he returned to Paris he had decided what he was going to do.

He went to her apartment with no ring — he was an Army corporal earning seventy-eight dollars a month and could not afford a ring — and he gave her, instead, the engagement substitute he had: his Kansas relay medal. It was an athletic medal he had won as a Mizzou sprinter, a small bronze disc with the Mizzou lettering and a date. It had no monetary value. It was, in his calculation, the single object he owned that he could prove he had earned through years of his own committed work.

They had known each other three months.

The Wavering, and the Decision

The wedding was originally set for July of 1957 in Paris. Barney's twin sister Muriel flew over from St. Louis to be the maid of honor. As the date approached, Barney did something that he would later describe as the most pragmatic decision of his life: he postponed. The reasons were two and they were both rational. He was on active duty and could be reassigned anywhere in the world at any time, and he did not want to leave a new wife alone in a foreign country if the Army shipped him home or to Korea. Second — and this was the harder reason — some part of him wanted to be sure he was not making a French-romance decision. He wanted to go home, work for a year, miss her, and come back if the missing was real.

Martine understood. She did not love the postponement, but she did not fight it. The three of them — Barney, Martine, and Muriel — took the trip Muriel had crossed the Atlantic for and used it instead to spend three weeks together in Great Britain. It rained every day. They visited Barney and Muriel's English grandmother, whom the twins had never met and would never see again; she would die before the next family trip became possible. Barney's Aunt Muriel, named for the same grandmother, hosted them for a weekend.

Barney sailed back to St. Louis in late summer of 1957. The intention was law school. The reality was that he sat in his first law-school class for two hours and walked out. He had no business being there. He took a job in insurance for the next nine months — analyzing policies for a million-dollar-roundtable agent who was selling big institutional plans — and he wrote Martine letters every week. The letters reported not on the work but on his certainty. He missed her in the precise way he had hoped he would. The decision became unambiguous.

In March of 1958 he sailed back to France. They were married on March 22, 1958, in a small civil-and-religious ceremony arranged by Martine's family. None of Barney's family came: Muriel was teaching school and could not get away, his parents could not afford the trip, and Aunt Jean was not in good enough health to travel. Barney's best man was his Army friend Gene Czerwinsky, who was still stationed in France and was happy to stand in. Bob Ahern, another Army friend, lent them a black Volkswagen as a wedding gift — or, more precisely, as a wedding loan, since the car was Bob's and Barney was supposed to return it after the honeymoon.

The honeymoon was two weeks on the French Riviera. They drove the Volkswagen south in late March, painting two hearts on the back of the car with arrows through them — one heart marked “USA” for Barney, the other marked “F” for France. The words Just Married were written across the top in both languages. Other drivers honked. Riviera children waved. Barney and Martine spent a week at the L'Oasis hotel in La Napoule, paid for by Martine's aunt's wedding gift of one hundred and twenty-five dollars in francs. The room was tiny and damp. The food was excellent.

At the end of the honeymoon, Barney took the car to a wash. He came out of the wash discovering that the two hearts and the “USA” and the “F” and the words Just Married in two languages had been baked permanently into the paint by a fortnight of southern French sun. He drove the car back to Paris with the message intact. He told Bob he would pay for a respray. Bob never asked.

Sumac Lane

Barney brought Martine home to St. Louis in the late spring of 1958. They moved first into a sixty-five-dollar-a-month apartment in South St. Louis — cramped, plain, conspicuously not the kind of place a French woman would have imagined herself living. Martine took a job as a secretary; Barney's insurance work was steady but unspectacular. He had decided, somewhere on the boat home, that he was not going to spend his career as a salaried employee of someone else. He was going to figure out how to start something. The IBM and NCR offers he had received as a Mizzou senior — before the army, before France — he turned down again, more emphatically this time, when the companies came back asking. He took, instead, a job at a local travel agency called Kirkland Deluxe Travel. The salary was lower than the corporate offers. The line of business was the only one he had ever been certain he wanted to learn.

Within a year he had moved on from Kirkland to a small Alton, Illinois travel agency called International Travel Advisors, and the rest of the story belongs to Part IV. But the personal arc of these years — the marriage, the apartment, the patient work toward a moment when Martine could live the way Barney had promised she would — concluded with the move to a brick house at 3 Sumac Lane in Ladue in the early 1960s. Sumac Lane was, by St. Louis standards, an arrival. Ladue is one of the city's old-money suburbs, leafy and quiet, the kind of address that confers the assumption of wealth even when the assumption is premature. Barney bought the Sumac Lane house when his INTRAV partnership had begun to produce real income but before it had produced anything resembling the future income of a cruise-line founder. The house was modest by the standards of its neighborhood. It was, for Barney and Martine, the exact opposite of a sixty-five-dollar-a-month South St. Louis flat.

It was on Sumac Lane that the family extended cousins met Martine for the first time. The Frauenthal Christmases, by the early 1960s, had begun to migrate around the city: Uncle Ed's house on Gannon Avenue was still the largest and the most central, but the cousins' children were growing up and the gatherings began rotating between several houses. Barney and Martine hosted at Sumac Lane on at least one Christmas in the early years. The thirteen-year-old Paul who shook Martine's hand on her first family meeting at Sumac Lane in 1958 was, by then, in his early twenties at Mizzou and beginning to understand that the older cousin he had always tried to keep up with was now operating on a completely different plane — the plane on which a young couple owned a house in Ladue with two cars in the driveway, one of them a Rolls Royce and the other a Mercedes.

The End of the Beginning

The personal arc of the Paris-and-Martine years closes here. Barney had transformed himself, in the eighteen months between his arrival in Paris and his discharge, from a Mizzou-trained accountant who had never been outside the United States into a self-taught reader of European art history with a French wife and a clear professional intention. The eye that had stood in front of the Winged Victory of Samothrace for the first time in the spring of 1957 was the same eye that, sixteen years later, would stand in front of Edward Hopper's Chop Suey in a New York dealer's gallery and conduct the negotiation that became the founding moment of the Ebsworth collection. The capacity to see, methodically and patiently, was acquired in the Louvre on Saturday afternoons.

The capacity to act on what he saw — to commit, to risk, to write the impossible check — was acquired at the USO at midnight on December 31, 1956. The two acquisitions are not separate. The same young man who walked across a USO floor at the stroke of midnight to dance with a girl whose name he did not know was the same young man who would later write a one-hundred-and-eighty-thousand-dollar check for a painting because he had decided he would regret not owning it for the rest of his life. The risk tolerance of the entrepreneur and the risk tolerance of the collector and the risk tolerance of the man in love were the same risk tolerance.

Barney would tell the story, sixty years later, in his autobiography. He would tell it in the precise present-tense reconstruction he reserved for the moments he considered most important. He would not edit it. He would not soften it. He would tell it the way he had lived it. The reader of A World of Possibility reaches the end of Chapter Four — the chapter Barney titled simply Falling for France — and discovers that the chapter is, in his own quiet retrospective evaluation, the chapter on which the rest of the book turns.

The fourth edition agrees.