A Crossing on the France

The late Somerset Maugham, a master traveler, once told me that he felt completely relaxed only aboard ship. There is the blessed moment when the slight tremor of the engines under your feet indicates you are off. Then the coast recedes into a bluish haze and, with it, the burden of conventions and responsibilities. Ahead of you there is the unknown. "No matter how often you sail it's always an experience," the Very Old Party said wistfully. I thought of Maugham recently as I watched the tip of Manhattan fall away from the observation deck of the S.S. France. The panorama has been spoiled by the two obscene supertowers of the World Trade Center, but I didn't mind. I've been happy aboard ships ever since a summer day in the Twenties when I sailed from Bordeaux to New York as the impecunious fiddler in the three-man ship's orchestra on the tiny La Bourdonnais—a poor French Line relation of which the France would be ashamed today. The France is the flagship, the world's longest liner—1035 feet—and most luxurious. Her crew of 1100 includes 19 musicians, each playing several instruments. Times have changed.

Nowadays I travel as a (nonworking) passenger, but it's still an adventure and the only civilized way of going. Airplanes and railroads are often useful but rarely pleasant. You don't expect something wonderful to happen as you board them; on planes you worry whether you'll get there. But aboard ship you can be surrounded by people in the discothèque or meditating blissfully in your stateroom. For a few days, you feel out of this world, living the life you always wanted to live: The dream has come true. Peace and privacy—today's great luxuries—and maybe a little caviar at night. Unlimited freedom or splendid isolation.

On a spiritual level, something strange and confusing happens to many people as the rhythm of the big boat catches up with them. The pace slackens. The first day out you are still a prisoner of the past. The ship-to-shore phone or the radio operator may catch up with you. It was better in the old days, when no one would try to reach me while I fiddled in the Red Sea on our way to Indochina. No union, no fixed working hours, no uniform. I worried a little whether my violin would survive the heat; there was no air conditioning. (One night I forgot to put it away in the refrigeration chamber, and in the morning I found a few pieces of lacquered wood in my violin case. The glue had melted and the fiddle had come apart. I bought one in Djibouti that was nailed together, and sounded that way.)

Around the third day of the crossing, the past is discarded with the garbage that they throw out to the sea gulls. Resistance ceases: Subconsciously, one surrenders to the unreality of life aboard ship, happily suspended in a seeming vacuum of euphoria as the gravitational pulls from both continents cancel each other out. One no longer thinks of what was and not yet of what will be. Decisions and duties are mercifully postponed. A new pattern of pseudo life emerges. One gets interested in the vagaries of wind and weather (will the rough sea spoil dinner tonight?), the ping-pong tournament, how to work up an appetite between meals, what to eat without gaining weight, the temperature of the water in the swimming pool. Some males are beginning to look at the apparently unescorted blonde. I am pleased to notice that two definitely unescorted brunettes give me that maybe look, even though (and perhaps because) my hair is what they call silvery at the temples.

We've passed the point of no return. We are in the middle of the ocean, spiritually weightless, unconcerned about the realities on either end. Temporarily, I've lost my identity; I haven't felt so contented in a long time. Some people don't read even the news in the ship's paper, L'Atlantique. Cold-blooded speculators ignore the stock-market reports on the bulletin board. Other things have become more important. Should one have a bloody mary or a bullshot before lunch, or maybe a Fernet-Branca with a drop of crème de menthe? The best thing against the mal de mer is alcohol, straight. But then, according to Henri Delaude, the barman, the mal de mer doesn't exist. The Texas billionaire won the ship's pool, naturally, and he is happy about the $90 he made. Lunch was wonderful. The pleasure of choosing from the enormous, unpriced menu. No check—no bills, no boss, no dentist, no income tax. Everything free: life and love and the view from the sun deck.

You no longer wonder why so many passengers prefer to watch the documentary The France in the Atlantic in the 664-seat movie theater to going out on deck and watching the France in the Atlantic. Which of the two is the real France, anyway? (Incidentally, the boat is le France, while the country remains la France.) The Cali-fornian plays from the aft end of the ping-pong table, watching the heavy seas ahead that will finish his opponent if he doesn't: the Bobby Fischer Method. According to Events du Jour, Rotarians, Lions and Kiwanians aboard meet at the Verandah Deck Lounge in the afternoon, and tomorrow their picture will be in the paper. After lunch they show City Lights with Charlie Chaplin, and tomorrow an old Jeanette MacDonald film; they must please Frenchmen and Americans, priests and atheists, anarchists and conservatives. All these strange things you accept as a matter of course, which is the strangest thing of all. The woman from Detroit who travels in "Normandie," the grand-luxe suite, all by herself, almost $4000 for the five-day crossing, complains bitterly because she was not asked to sit at the commandant's table.

• • •

Few fine ships are left in the jumbo-jet age. The finest of all is the France, the only luxury liner with an indefinable mood of its own, a sublime blend of tradition and taste, style and esprit that is almost a state of mind. Old French Line hands call it l'atmosphère Transat, which refers to Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. On the old De Grasse, the unforgotten Ile de France, the Normandie, I took this ambience for granted. Then I discovered, during a meeting in the office of Robert Bellet, the chief purser of the Liberté, years ago, that the atmosphere was not a spontaneous Gallic phenomenon but the result of imagination and strategy as carefully put together as a Swiss watch. L'atmosphère Transat even managed to transform the former German Europa into the Liberté, as French as Gauloises cigarettes.

Bellet had been a purser's apprentice when I was second fiddler on the Ile de France around 1930. We became friends. Two of his duties were to try to make us musicians keep regular working hours—somebody was always somewhere else with a jolie femme—and to prevent us from stealing bottles of wine from the passengers' tables. (We kept them under our beds and later disposed of them on the thirsty American mainland for nondevalued dollars.)

That memorable meeting was held on the morning of the Liberté's first day out of New York. At nine o'clock, Bellet already knew who had spent the night where he wasn't supposed to be, and about a holiday couple who were just married and already fighting and of an argument among the tourist-class waiters. He knew all the secrets aboard; (continued on page 98)Crossing on the France(continued from page 92) his subordinates—bellboys, barmen, waiters, stewards, night watchmen—formed a well-integrated intelligence network. Nearly all French Line employees start their training early; the bellboys attend special schools at the age of 16, later become stewards and perhaps maîtres d'hôtel and retire at 55. Many are second-or third-generation Transat men, fiercely loyal to the company. No other line can make that claim.

This time I again attended the purser's morning meeting on the France. M. Guy Samzun and his staff made up the lists of the passengers who might sit at the commandant's table at captain's dinner, two nights before arrival, provided Commandant Christian Pettré agreed. They designed the strategy for the get-together gala, the second night out, the invitations for special cocktail parties and other social affairs. They tried to match unescorted women and single men, blended nationalities, using VIP lists from their agencies and their own card files with the names of all regular French Line passengers, listing their likes and idiosyncrasies, parties attended, invitations refused. They worked hard, knowing they must not make a mistake; time was short. (They let me see my own card, with the dates of my private luncheons with Commandant Pettré in his personal dining room behind the bridge and some other cryptic data.) They made plans for a masked ball in tourist class. Louis Pelle-grin, the maître de, reported about the problems involved in assigning people their seats in the dining room, a tricky business. Some want to be alone, some like company, some want to be seen and some like to hide. Many people won't say so, and M. Pellegrin must guess. Everybody agreed that the favorite lady passenger had been Leonardo's Mono Lisa, traveling to America in 1963 in M-079, protected by built-in batteries to guarantee a steady temperature, and by special guards in the adjoining staterooms. No dining-room-seat problem.

Somebody reported that one passenger had bought up all available small-scale models of the France and sold them at a good profit. Everybody laughed. Last night a member of the clergy had got happily intoxicated. Again everybody laughed. Apparently l'atmosphère Transat was already working, since it affected even a servant of the Lord. But one woman, sitting with three men, had brusquely got up in the middle of dinner, "and she was not sick." Well, they would investigate.

At ten o'clock I attended the meeting in the office of Commandant Pettré, who looks the part, with his Flying Dutchman beard, witty eyes and a sardonic sense of Gallic humor. Only the top-ranking officers were present. Policies were discussed and Pettré made the important decisions. During the France's round-the-world cruise in 1972—91 days, minimum $5065, maximum $99,440 in the luxurious Ile de France suite—the ambience virtuosos had worked hard, but it took two months to bring the French-and English-speaking people together and to bridge the barriers among 22 nationalities.

"I attended over two hundred official affairs and I shook hands at least three times with every passenger," Pettré said, with a shrug. "Still some complained. One man wanted to call the president, I don't know which president, because he missed sweet rolls for breakfast." The various nationalities formed groups, and within the groups there were factions and cliques, since some came for fun and others for status, and some wanted only instruction. There were the blasé rich, and others who had spent their life savings on the trip and naturally wanted all they could get for their money. There were many minority complexes, but only one fight, between two friends who had got drunk. One threw a plate of spaghetti across the table and the other emptied a bottle of red wine over his friend's white suit. "Reminded me of a Marx Brothers picture," said Commandant Pettré, who will take the France on another round-the-world cruise next year.

• • •

Poets, novelists and psychologists have ascribed the erotic atmosphere aboard ship to the influence of the aphrodisiac sea air and the temporary freedom from earth-bound inhibitions, but the new freedom between the sexes has changed the basic patterns. There is a new clientele: tired businessmen trying to get a few days of rest between meetings and career women who travel alone and do as they please. They enjoy a sense of anonymity among people they have never met and may not meet again. They are relaxed, sitting alone at the bar—which they wouldn't do in their home towns—and they're having fun.

"The atmosphere creates a common bond," says Miss Claude Haynes, from Pasadena, the ship's hostess. "After a couple of days everybody feels as if they're at a large, successful house party. No one is scared. The women don't worry about getting home safe at night. No one cares whether the couple from S-015 is married. They are happy. Good for them. I remember an Englishman who met a nice American woman here months ago. Now she often flies to London for a long weekend." People even fall in love. Some old-fashioned ones want to get married and are disappointed when the captain, maître après Dieu, tells them he is not authorized to perform a marriage ceremony. (One captain did the next best thing, giving the couple connecting staterooms.)

The older barmen and maîtres de who have worked aboard French Line ships for over 30 years remember the small girls who not so long ago traveled with their parents and are now traveling with their small girls. "They come to greet me, though I should go and greet them," says Roger Regoudy, the chef de réception. The staff members have forgotten more about love and other affairs than most gossip columnists ever learn about them. If they could only write, they say: Almost every crossing is a novel.

Not long ago an immensely rich oil sheik was aboard with a retinue of 14 men. One asked Miss Haynes, "Are you the one who handles the women aboard?" She told him, tactfully but firmly, that women are not "handled" on a French Line ship; there are parties and other social occasions. In the end some of the sheik's men wound up with some pretty Jewish girls in tourist class.

Almost all problems are approached with diplomacy, tact and Gallic finesse, and it's a rare staff member who is even momentarily stumped. One was the old night watchman on the Ile de France, who was approached by an irate woman at two in the morning. Her husband had disappeared into the stateroom of another woman; couldn't one do something about it? The night watchman asked for the number of the stateroom. "That's the problem," the woman said desperately. "He was involved with two or three. Couldn't we call him on the public-address system? That would at least spoil their fun."

• • •

Noel Coward once told an interviewer that he always sailed with the French, "where there's none of that nonsense about women and children first," but he later apologized for his crack. Actually, the French have done well with women, children and men, as the survivors of the Andrea Doria remember who were picked up by the Ile de France. Today people take the France for other reasons. Many come attracted by the ship's epicurean reputation. "Here we don't have dinner, we dine," a woman says. Some want to see, at least for a few days, a style of life that won't last long—at best, another ten years—"so we'll have an idea what it was." Quite a few are young people in search of nostalgia, having heard from parents and older friends how beautiful it was.

"There will never be another luxury liner as large and elegant as the France," says M. Edmond Lanier, the dynamic president of the French Line. Even gold-rich governments cannot afford such an extravaganza. There will be medium-sized ships, fast, air-conditioned, self-service, with cafeterias, computerized—but who (continued on page 203)Crossing on the France(continued from page 98) wants to sail on a computerized ship?

A nice English couple, around 30, said they'd saved a long time for their round trip, and loved every minute of it. "No one forgets the first crossing," the wife said. They had only 36 hours in New York, just enough time for a walk on Fifth Avenue, in Central Park, to the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim, the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station and dinner at the Rainbow Room, "to get a touch of New York. But the best thing was the two American couples who shared our dining-room table, on the way to New York. They took us for lunch there, invited us into their homes and bought presents for our kids in England. I almost cried."

A successful transatlantic crossing aboard the France is already a study in nostalgia. The goodbye parties in New York sometimes draw as many as 2000 visitors, each paying half a dollar for the Seamen's Fund. There are the sports and innocent parlor games of the belle époque—shuffleboard, clay-pigeon shooting, horse races, French lessons, bridge games—but also up-to-date lectures on high finance on the high seas, by a Wall Street broker. Always, of course, the most popular pastime is watching the other people; aboard ship everybody becomes a voyeur. The women watch each other's evening gowns and jewelry. The men watch other men: Some are quite dress-conscious, bringing along three dinner jackets for the three formal nights in first class. And everybody watches what goes on between men and women.

Tourist-class people travel for different reasons. Some want to get a touch of French life before getting to France. Parents with small children feel more relaxed below. So do quite a few people who could easily afford first class but "don't like to dress." But they have their little social problems, too. The tourist-class purser has his own VIP list and some people expect to be invited by him. There are always a few hippies, resting from, or for, the rigors of hippie life in Europe. Westbound, there are often emigrants—French, Germans, Swiss—who take the boat because they have much baggage and want a little extra time to get ready for the Big Adventure.

I think it's a waste of money to go first-class on a plane. There is no value for the extra fare, and who wants to be surrounded mostly by expense-account aristocrats? But on a big liner it's worth it to travel first-class for the action and the luxury and, in this case, the full benefits of the traditional French Line service. The best stewards, waiters, barmen and many other employees arc promoted from tourist to first, where the tips are larger.

If you are lucky with your first-class-cabin steward, he will anticipate your wishes before they are uttered. He may not be as formal as the English butlers they used to have on the Queen Mary (Where Is She Now?) nor as amusing as the part-time tenors on the Italian liners, but he's always around, though often invisible. You forgot to tell him to have your pants pressed. When you come back to the stateroom, they are hanging there, pressed. Some fancy people, reluctant to mix with the misera plebs in the dining room, have nearly all meals in their stateroom.

Ships are basically undemocratic. The class system is a relic of the feudal past. The 500 first-class passengers on the France have proportionately more floor and deck space than the 1500 tourist-class people. The first-class Chambord dining room seats 450. On most cruises, when the France becomes a first-class-only ship, to be seated in the Chambord becomes a coveted status symbol, depending on the price of the stateroom. The minimum fare for the 1974 round-the-world cruise is $5770, but it costs almost twice as much to be seated in the Chambord. Yet the expensive staterooms are always sold out first. Apparently no one wants to be banished to the Versailles dining room, though the food is the same, the lights more flattering and there is more space. Yet many consider it a sort of Siberia; they seem allergic to the second-class atmosphere hanging in the air, though on cruises the commandant goes there for the gala dinner.

On regular crossings, tourist-class food is almost as good as in first—less choice, to be sure, with some difference in prime beef and poultry, but the menu still surpasses those of many famous restaurants in France. However: Only in first class can you order anything any time, at no extra cost, which remains a great shipboard attraction. (You pay only for drinks and special wines.) Many French Line regulars who couldn't care less about status go first-class for that reason. I know some people who make up the difference in price by subsisting entirely on caviar and vodka. It's a nice fantasy for a few days. If you get bored with the blasé rich people in first, you can always join the swinging crowd in the tourist-class discothèque, sometimes until five in the morning. They call it Left Bank, not tourist class. Vive la différence!

• • •

Eating is the second most important physical activity aboard the France, perhaps the only important one for some people. Gastronomic experts have written ecstatic reports on the ship's cuisine, calling the France "one of the world's greatest restaurants." At its best that may be true, but Henri Le Huédé, the modest, soft-spoken chef de cuisine, feels his restaurant should not be compared to the great temples of French gastronomy. Madame Point's magnificent Pyramide in Vienne rarely serves more than 60 people. At the Tour d'Argent in Paris they may serve 150. On the France they often feed 2000 passengers three times a day, as well as 1100 crew members. Everything is out of proportion. M. Le Huédé rules over a kitchen empire of 5000 square feet, and 180 sous-chefs, potagiers, poissoniers, grilladiers, sauciers, pâtissiers, tournnnts (floaters), and others—including the plongeurs (dishwashers), whom he respects, deservedly so.

His problem is to produce quality in spite of quantity, and occasionally great cooking. He makes it a point of culinary honor never to serve the same dish twice, even on a 91-day world cruise. Once in a while, M. Le Huédé tries to do what no other chef has done before. On our recent trip, he put cailles (quails) Souvaroff, a very complicated grande cuisine dish, on the menu.

"Escoffier would have done it, for thirty or forty people," he said. "I took a chance. We served almost five hundred. But I don't think we'll do it again. It was a tour de force, too risky."

Well-known French chefs have been completely lost on the France, unable to cope with the problems of maritime gastronomy. How can you turn out 3000 lamb chops in less than an hour? When steak au poivre is on the menu, the grilladiers may receive 800 orders within 40 minutes, ranging from saignant to very well done. M. Le Huédé invented a code system, using water cress and pommes frites, that helps the waiters distinguish among medium, à point and medium rare, so that everybody gets the steak exactly as he ordered it.

To complicate matters, M. Le Huédé must have French Nantes duck and Long Island duckling; both American beef, juicier but less tasty, and French steak, with more flavor but closer grained. "Americans don't like to chew hard," a grill cook says. "They would like everything mashed, even their steak." The French at least try everything once. They justly love calf's liver, kidneys and sweetbreads, all of which most Americans dislike. They like to have their big meal at lunchtime. The Americans like theirs at dinner, possibly after three cocktails, which dulls their palate and demands more seasoning. M. Le Huédé has other problems the late Fernand Point never dreamed about. He cannot send out to the market for more oysters or partridges when he hasn't enough. A sudden storm may wreck his carefully made plans. He orders his cooks to prepare several hundred fonds d'artichauts farcis when he puts them on the day's menu—his first command is, "The menu must be honored"—and may find himself stuck with hundreds of artichokes and other highly perishable things. He never knows how many people he'll serve for lunch or dinner. He must always be ready, but in la grande cuisine nothing must be finished in advance and every dish should have that very special taste of having been made to order. Every morning he designs four different menus (first-class, tourist, officers, crew), and there are special menus for children and even for dogs, I'm sorry to report. His job is mostly logistics, strategy and intuition, though he always makes the rounds of all the stations in the kitchen shortly before the service, tasting the soups, sauces, vegetables, everything, while there is still time to correct mistakes.

The only other operation I can think of in this respect was the U. S. Army Quartermaster Corps in World War Two. On a cold December afternoon in 1944, they sent me my Christmas turkey dinner, with all the trimmings. White meat only, as I had requested, though I was only a tech/sgt, momentarily stuck in an icy foxhole near Luxembourg, just 100 yards away from the Germans over there in the Siegfried Line. My turkey was still warm on delivery and the stuffing was fine.

On a somewhat different scale, M. Le Huédé also provides miracles once in a while. The boeuf bourguignon, the "regional" dish on the menu, tasted more Burgundian than any I'd had in Burgundy. The blanquette de veau à l'ancienne, an old-fashioned veal fricassee like Mom used to make it, was "just like home," though we were a long way from home. Once they made one of M. Le Huédé's great specialties for us, gourmandines de veau au gratin—thin veal scallops, very quickly sautéed, stuffed with minced mushrooms, rolled in thin crepes, covered with a light sauce Mornay, sprinkled with gruyère, finished under the salamander. It took the clockwork cooperation of four sous-chefs. One cooks the veal scallops, the second makes the crepes, the third the stuffing and the sauce and the fourth puts it all together—all this in the middle of the service while some 500 other first-class passengers are waiting for their orders. All things considered, I would agree that the France is a very great restaurant.

Provided you're going to cooperate. Ordering well from the enormous menu is a lot of fun but also hard work. What's the sense of shelling out $150 a day and having steak and French fries, as back home? The right order can make the difference between good restaurant food and a gastronomic experience. Ask your captain what is fine and fresh. Oysters, clams and wild strawberries must be served within two days. Leaving New York, order fresh American sea bass and not a Dover sole that has been sleeping on ice for a week. After leaving Le Havre or Southampton, order sole or turbot, preferably grilled or poached, that hasn't seen the inside of a cold chamber.

The staff will respect you for ordering complicated creations if they know that you know what you want. On a recent trip they did not respect a self-appointed gourmet from New York who ordered La Toque du President Adolphe Clerc, about which he'd read somewhere. It is one of the three most famous pâtés of la grande cuisine, listed in Lucieu Tendret's classic La Table au Pays de Brillat-Savarin. I had it once in my life, at Alexandra Dumaine's in Saulieu, the greatest chef after the death of his friend M. Point. The incredible recipe calls for a whole hare, woodcock, partridge, lots of black truffles and other incredible things. It took Dumaine four days to make it, yet the "gourmet" sent word to M. Le Huédé that it was "really quite simple." From then on, he was ignored.

There are fortunate people who never gain weight, no matter what they eat. For them the France must be the earthly version of paradise: breakfast, bouillon at 11 on deck, lunch, tea at four, dinner and an early-morning supper at the Cabaret de l'Atlantique, with smoked salmon, foie gras, onion soup, Welsh rarebit and le hot dog. Most other people, though, have to ration their pleasures if they want to be able to eat after the third day. Breakfast alone is a major temptation, with 16 egg dishes and omelets, grilled ham, a small steak—and, and, and. Best are the delicious petits pains, 5000 of them freshly baked three times a day; the incision on top of each is made with a razor, by hand. For the gala, the cold-buffet men make ice castles for the caviar. The pâtissiers create beautiful pièces montées out of colored sugar bunds, edible sculptural masterpieces. I asked one of them why they spend hours on them though they know that many passengers believe they are made of plastics.

"It's a tradition." he said. "They made them exactly like that sixty years ago." Tradition is wonderful—if you can afford it.

Tradition makes the dining-room service at the Chambord the best in the world, even according to people who are not always completely happy with the cuisine. The maîtres de, captains and waiters love their métier; they don't want to be vice-presidents but the very best maîtres de, captains and waiters. They care; they want to make each meal a memorable experience. Our captain was Pierre Naffrechoux, whose father, the great Olivier Naffrechoux, is remembered by generations of French Line fans as the maritime César Ritz. A formidable man of elegant hauteur whom they called "Monseigneur" (he now lives in retirement near Bordeaux), Naffrechoux even intimidated his bosses, the captains and pursers. He knew that Providence was on his side; he had a ship go down under him in each of the two world wars. On the Ile de France and Normandie he would even make the hated first sitting attractive when he ran out of tables for the second sitting by telling the passengers that Marshal Foch or Marshal Joffre always insisted on the first sitting. "I hope the marshals will forgive me when I meet them in heaven." he once told me in a moment of humility. An hour prior to the captain's dinner he would put on his gala uniform and make a tour of the ship so that even the most informal-minded passengers got the message and went down to dress for the occasion. Then Monseigneur went to have his favorite supper: a little caviar, a baked potato, a glass of champagne. Monseigneur had class.

Now there was fine cooperation between Pierre Naffrechoux and our two waiters. André, the commis, would bring the dishes from the kitchen, often waiting near the range for something that had to be served immediately. Albert, the garçon, would serve in great style. Even the late Henri Soulé, master of impeccable service, would have liked it. The wine waiters, too, knew their business. They are not responsible for the small wine glasses that no one likes. With the fine Château Cheval-Blanc 1967 our sommelier brought the proper glasses. The wine list was well composed. The ship's motion occasionally makes the delicate Margaux seasick and madeiraizes the sauternes. The most expensive red Bordeaux were $18, while the champagnes—67 different vintners—ran from ,$9 for a Lepitre Crémant Blanc de Blancs to $13 for a Dom Pérignon. You don't have to spend money on extra wines, though. The complimentary red and white table wines are good and honest.

• • •

The France is now 11 years old, reaching middle age as luxury liners go. She is the third ship bearing the illustrious name. The earliest France, a clipper rigged four-master with a speed of 13 knots, was launched in 1865 by the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, founded ten years before. The second France, vintage 1912, was a lovely four-funnel liner, with a 17th Century wood-paneled smoking room, a Regency dining room, a Louis XIV lounge and beautiful tapestries. I tried to join the orchestra but never made it. Her speed was already 25 knots, six days from Le Havre to New York, much too fast for many happily intoxicated people aboard.

No one claims that the present France, with a service speed of 30 knots, is outstanding for her interior decorations, which remind some people of Very Late Hilton. There are some interesting paintings, by Segonzac and Chapelain-Midy, and modern tapestries by Picart Le Doux, Hilaire, Idoux and Coutuud. The France has an elegant silhouette and "maneuvers as easily as a Ferrari," according to a former commandant, but when they decorated the interiors, they were told to think of safety first. Some great French Line ships burned down: the Paris, the Normandie, the Antilles. On the France, all materials, curtains and carpets are non-inflammable. So much for the oxidized aluminum panels that you may or may not like.

The France can be chartered for about $80,000 a day, which includes the crew, cruise directors, night-club entertainers, all the caviar you can eat and l'atmosphère Transat. The Michelin people twice held their sales conventions on cruises to the West Indies. While the men had their meetings, the wives were entertained at fashion shows, make-up and cooking lessons. Everybody was said to be happy.

• • •

Almost everybody seemed happy at the Riviera Bar the last night before arriving in Europe. The faces were more relaxed and the voices louder than at any time before. A man at the bar said, "It's a shame it's all over now that the party is going so well," and a woman said, "Yes, it should last longer. Five days is not enough. Goodness, I feel we just met." Clearly, they'd done it again: L'atmosphère Transat was in the air. Only a few people seemed pensive, almost absent-minded. Perhaps they were already thinking of tomorrow—the duties, the schedules, the responsibilities.

At the Fontainbleau lounge, people were dancing. I stood near the orchestra and watched the musicians. They smiled at me and began playing I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby, which we'd loved to play in the gay Twenties. I thanked them and walked out on the protected deck. A thin, salty spray was coming through an open window. The ocean, dark and magnificent and eternal, was the same as ever. The fantasy was almost over. It was nice while it lasted.