Allons enfants de la Patrie, le jour de gloire est arrive

Today is Bastille Day, which is French for Fourth of July.

I was going to write about Paris, and the half-dozen times I've been there. And how, when "it" is over, and the seat belt sign is off and we're all free to walk around the cabin, I'll get there again.

Then I was going to write about the Bastille Day celebration that Boston's French Library runs every year on Marlborough Street, just around the corner from where I live. It's a big block party, with champagne, baguettes, pâté, and dancing under the stars. I've never been, but I have walked by a few times.

But thinking about the French Library got me thinking about how you get to know (or get to know someone who knows) some VERY (OR AT LEAST SORTA) IMPORTANT PEOPLE - especially if you live long enough in the same place, and if that same place is a small big town like Boston.

Many year (decades) ago, my apartment was broken into. The place was a top floor studio in a funky and exceedingly oddball building on Beacon Hill. 

Among the other peculiarities were the eccentric live in supers, an Irish immigrant couple who oddly took off in the middle of the night at some point, without telling anyone (including the building's owner) that they were leaving. For some reason, I got the idea in my head that they were on the lam, and possibly had some involvement with the IRA. In any event, they were gone baby gone. The Sheas were replaced by a family, a dour threesome of parents and adult daughter, all morbidly obese, such that they could barely move. 

Each apartment had access to a dumbwaiter used for trash which opened up into your kitchen - and the kitchen of the apartment that abutted yours. My opposite number was a flat occupied by an elderly gentleman and his nosy home health care aide, who spent most of her days (as far as I could tell) with her head in the dumbwaiter shaft, trying to listen in on whatever was happening in my apartment. It was great sport to creep into my kitchen and yank open the door to the dumbwaiter, only to find Sally's head in there. 

With two exceptions - me and a "career gal" in her late thirties - there were no tenants under the age of 70 in the building. They were all quite nice and quite quiet, but they demanded that the outside door, which opened onto the foyer that contained the mailboxes and the apartment buzzers, be locked by sundown. Thus, if you had company - and I think I was the only one in the building who ever had company - they had to call you from the payphone around the corner. (The payphone was in front of a firehouse that, a few years later, became the place where Spenser lived on the TV show Spenser for Hire.)

It should go without saying that I loved that place. 

Anyway, I was away the night of the break in, but one of my ancient (which is how I thought anyone over the age of 70 was when I was in my twenties) stopped me on the way in to alert me about the event - and to let me know that I was going to find my door smashed in. The thief in the night had come in through a window - quite a feat, considering that there was five story drop and, while there were small balconies, there was not stair-type fire escape connecting them. According to the police officers, the thief - a known quantity to the BPD, a man they had dubbed the Flying Puerto Rican - had managed to swing himself up from balcony to balcony. All that work. He must have been so disappointed to land in my apartment and come away empty handed, except for a handful of costume jewelry that included my old Girl Scout Pin. 

The person below me had heard the thief breaking in to my apartment and had alerted the police. They came crashing in through my front door, but the Flying Puerto Rican had already made his escape by trapeze-artisting his way off my balcony and up onto the roof. He was making away across the roofs on my block, looking, I suppose, for a way down and out, when he fell through the sky-light of the home of the ancient widower a few doors down the street. 

When the Flying Puerto Rican crashed through the skylight, he fell into the ancient widower's bathtub. It is there where the ancient widower encountered him, and began a wrestling match that managed to contain the thief until the BPD arrived on that particular and peculiar scene. I'm a little fuzzy here, but I think the ancient widower may have pulled a gun on the Flying Puerto Rican at some point.

I ended up meeting the ancient widower when we all went to court to testify against the Flying Puerto Rican. I was there to identify my costume jewelry and Girl Scout pin; the ancient widower, of course, had the more interesting story.

Alas, the Flying Puerto Rican was a no-show.

The cops returned my jewelry, and asked me whether I also wanted a solid gold chain that they had yanked off the thief's neck, which still had flesh and blood in the links. No thanks! And the cops returned General Georges Doriot's bloodied, pale blue Brooks Brothers pajamas. 

The visit to court was how I got to meet General Doriot.

If his name rings no bell, it's not because he wasn't a VIP.

Georges Doriot was born in France, and came to the US as a young man to get his MBA from Harvard. He liked it well enough that he stayed on to teach there. He took time off during World War II to serve in the US Army, where he became a general. After the war, he founded one of the world's first venture capital firms, and eventually became known as "the father of venture capitalism." (He also went on to found INSEAD, the international business school.)

It's not that we became friends, but when I would see him on the street, we would always nod and smile. The General would tip his hat. He died in the late 1980's, by which point I was no longer living on Lime Street.

Other than General Doriot's being French, what does this have to do with Bastille Day?

I thought you'd never ask...

From what I heard, Georges Doriot's wife (dead a couple of years by the time I met him) had been a secretary at Harvard Business School. Because she had held such a lowly position, she was looked down upon by some of the other HBS faculty wives. So, looking for something important and prestigious that his wife could do, Georges got Edna involved in the French Library, and the couple (and their funds) became the key to growing the Library and keeping it alive. Edna became the president of the organization, and also held a number of high visibility board positions in Boston. And the snobby HBS wives ended up having to eat some crow. 

So there.

And so here's to Georges. Here's to Edna. Here's to the French Library. Here's to Bastille Day, from one modern democracy to another. And here's hoping that we can hang on to ours. Allons, citoyens!