My French Mama — Mme. Mareschal

I was 20 and I had just settled into the apartment above her cafe “Les Arcades” at 19, rue Leon Blum, right next to the marketplace of Amiens, France.

It was not exactly a tourist region. It produced neither wine nor cheese. But its medical school was one of two which Napoleon had said was okay to provide surgeons for his army. More important, with 650 students in the first year class and 110 in the second, it had the BEST such ratio in all of France for an aspiring doctor.

By the time I actually bought a glass of mineral water at Les Arcades, Mme. Mareschal had already saved my life by having several conversations with people I never met.

She had told several men that although the apartment above the cafe was usually reserved for prostitutes, the reason there was a light on in the apartment at 3 am was that this crazy American girl did nothing but study for medical school.

I ranked 38th out of 650 and earned my right, by the 1802 Napoleonic Code, to stay in medical school for the princely sum of about 20 dollars a year.

She was about 60 years older than I. She had a metal rod in her left humerus from an explosion of the gas main in the last cafe she had run, about 5 years before.

I started working as a waitress with her and ended up eating with her. Sometimes we split tips. She wouldn’t let me serve things that were too complex for my meager skills, like coffee or milk. Just things you could pour out a bottle and measure easily. The tips were good mainly because I was a curiosity; an American medical student tending bar.

Soon I expanded my hours and my skills. I greeted the “working men” in hours before class when the cafe opened, when they took their powerful coffee followed with (I poured them freely) the “pousse-cafe” which was usually a strong brandy said to protect them from the cold.

I didn’t know until afterward she had been asked to file reports on me with customs and immigration, and told them not only that I seemed honest and didn’t “turn tricks,” but that I was a medical student who did nothing at all but work.

She told me that her days, the “avant-guerre” (years before the war) she had lived openly with a man without being married as she did not not want to simply “be regarded as his property and estate.” She drove his car, a rather large and impressive one, down the main street of one of Picardie’s more modest villages, at a time when it was considered unseemly for women to drive.

I paid a florist to send her a corsage to wear at my thesis defense for the M.D. I never figured out why she just kept the money and never showed up.

The honor of wearing a corsage is usually reserved for the mother of the person defending. She deserved that.

Not enough has been said or written about the nature of woman’s friendships — how they can nurture and advance, preciously.

PS: If you haven’t seen it yet, I invite you to peek at the short film some talented ladies made about me.

Please share the link with anyone you feel might enjoy it or maybe get something helpful from it.