Love and France at 100 Degrees
Surviving a historic Paris heat wave with my immortal beloved — and rediscovering what Marc Bloch, love, and France still mean to me.
Heat changes the scale of life.
A city famous for ideas, beauty, argument, and appetite is suddenly reduced to shutters, water, moving air, and the nearest patch of shade. The future contracts. Ambition disappears. The body takes command.
Paris was burning, and I was spending the week with J., my immortal beloved from childhood, living from one cold bath to the next.
Extreme heat strips romance of its staging. Charm becomes useless. Grand gestures require too much energy. What remains is attention: a glass refilled, a fan adjusted, a wet towel offered, a hand placed briefly on a forehead.
Outside the apartment, France was turning discomfort into argument, history into ceremony, and memory into meaning. Marc Bloch was being carried toward the Panthéon beneath the same merciless sun, honored for defending not simply a country, but an idea of one.
That was when the week began to feel like more than weather.
Heat removes everything ornamental. It reduces love to its smallest, most practical acts — and reveals that those acts may have been its truest form all along.
Paris in Slow Motion
I spent the week in Paris with J. during one of France’s most intense heat waves. Outside, temperatures hovered near 100 degrees Fahrenheit; inside our unairconditioned apartment, they rarely fell below 89. Fans and a Dyson air purifier kept the air moving but offered little relief.
Paris continued functioning, but in slow motion. People walked more carefully, spoke less, and avoided unnecessary effort. Extreme heat does not necessarily make everyone angry. It turns the city into zombies.
Disaster Is Always Local
I am not unfamiliar with climatic disasters. Raleigh has tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, ice storms, and summers even hotter than Paris. The difference is air conditioning. In North Carolina, you move between climate-controlled buildings and cars; in Paris, old apartments depend on shutters, thick walls, and cooler nights that sometimes never arrive.
Tornadoes are spectacular but selective. A house half a mile away can be destroyed while your subdivision remains untouched. Their violence is almost personal, determined by the bad luck of where the funnel decides to descend. Hurricanes are more democratic. Floods destroy indiscriminately, while ice storms leave houses dark and families listening to branches break outside. Like a Paris heat wave, they test the soul — and the people enduring them beside you.
Arrival in the Furnace
I arrived in Paris on Monday morning, and J. came from Strasbourg that afternoon. By five, we reached the apartment like exhausted refugees. Earlier, I had searched several grocery stores for water before finding a hidden six-pack of Vittel and some carbonated Vichy. I bought them with cheese and salami. The bakeries still had baguettes, so that evening we ate bread and charcuterie and drank water with the seriousness usually reserved for wine.
The Summer We First Met
When hardship arrives, J. is a real trooper. A former competitive swimmer, she understands when to move, when to rest, and when determination must give way to biology.
There was something fitting about facing this heat with her. We first met during the drought and heat waves of 1976, when my mother moved my brother and me to Sèvres. As the moving truck arrived, ten-year-old J. was riding her bicycle outside. I was the thirteen-year-old American kid with too much acne. She lived one floor above us with her sister, V., and immediately noticed the cat I was holding.
At sixty, J. still has an extraordinary connection with animals. A few years ago, she domesticated an abandoned magpie that mistook her for its mother. She had that gift then, too.
We spent the next five years growing up as neighbors. Those were my Wonder Years, and she was my Winnie Cooper. Half a century later, we were together again in another brutal French summer, closing shutters, filling water glasses, and trying to sleep in an apartment that never cooled.
Our Heat-Wave Strategy
On Monday evening, we developed a survival strategy: frequent cool baths, closed shutters, fans around the bed, constant hydration, and as little movement as possible. We slept naked on top of the sheets, careful not to touch for too long. Romance in extreme heat becomes practical. Love is measured less by passionate embraces than by who refills the water glasses and repositions the fan. The shutters lowered the temperature by a few precious degrees. Bowls of ice were useless; the refrigerator generated as much heat making them as they could remove. What worked was shade, wet skin, moving air, water, and patience.
We drank constantly: water, sparkling water, coffee, tea, and lemon water. The goal was simple — replace what we lost through sweat. I thought of Ralph Bagnold, the desert explorer who founded the Long Range Desert Group during the Second World War. Crossing the Sahara required a precise understanding of heat, machinery, and the human body. Bagnold began his mornings with large quantities of hot tea, not because it magically cooled him, but because hydration had to be deliberate and continuous. In the wartime desert, water was rationed. In a Paris apartment, there was no virtue in rationing it.
Living by the Temperature of the Body
When the body overheats, cool water brings the fastest relief. We began with lukewarm showers and gradually lowered the temperature. Standing wet in front of a fan afterward felt miraculous: the heaviness lifted, the mind cleared, and the apartment became survivable again.
Extreme heat also changes sleep. You wake alert in the middle of the night, then collapse with exhaustion in the afternoon. I remembered the same rhythm at the Nefta Oasis in Tunisia in 2006, where life began after sunset and continued until two or three in the morning. Paris was becoming nocturnal too, awakening only after dark as the pavement slowly released the heat of the day.
Heat and the Soul
Even in extreme weather, the French go out. The cafés remained crowded because a terrace with a cold drink was still preferable to a sun-baked apartment. Heat is spiritually clarifying. It pulls the mind away from abstractions and back toward immediate reality: water, shutters, fans, and the next few hours. Anger, anxiety, and even desire require energy, so the body becomes economical.
Writing, however, remains soothing. As I write this, it is 41 degrees Celsius outside and 32 inside. We avoid alcohol and rely instead on black coffee, sugar, cold water, and nicotine — J. with cigarettes, me with nicotine pouches. These are not health recommendations, merely the rituals that keep two people focused on the present.
Marc and Simonne Bloch Enter the Panthéon
In the middle of the heat wave, J. and I watched another love story unfold beneath the burning Paris sky. France welcomed the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch into the Panthéon, symbolically accompanied by his wife, Simonne. President Emmanuel Macron delivered the eulogy in temperatures near 100 degrees while soldiers carried their cenotaphs in a long procession up the rue Soufflot.
Marc Bloch was one of the most important historians of the twentieth century. With Lucien Febvre, he founded the Annales school, which transformed history by looking beyond kings and battles to study geography, work, customs, psychology, and ordinary life. After France collapsed in 1940, he wrote Strange Defeat, a brilliant account of the failures that had allowed the country to fall so quickly.
Bloch was also a decorated soldier, an Alsatian Jew, and a member of the French Resistance. The Vichy government stripped him of his position, property, and rights, while Nazi and collaborationist propaganda portrayed him as an enemy because he was Jewish. Yet he never stopped loving France. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, he was tortured and executed without betraying his comrades.
Bloch died for an idea of France rooted in reason, truth, citizenship, and human dignity. Simonne had shared the burden of his life, raised their six children, read his work, and endured persecution beside him. Their symbolic entrance into the Panthéon together honored not only a national hero, but the woman who had walked beside him.
Watching the procession with J., I was struck by how love of a person and love of a country can resemble one another. Neither depends on perfection. Both can survive disappointment, separation, betrayal, and time. What remains is the essential idea of the beloved.
Between America and France
I have become a hybrid of America and France, moving between Raleigh and Paris and loving each for different reasons. America’s greatest virtue is equality of opportunity: the belief that birth does not determine destiny. My father came from a proletarian background, yet in America he joined the Air Force, earned a master’s degree, and became an international banking executive. That capacity for reinvention remains one of the country’s greatest strengths.
Other aspects of America drive me mad: the lack of a shared high culture, the commercialization of public space, performative identity politics, and a tendency to celebrate ignorance as authenticity. America has tremendous energy, but it does not always know what that energy is for.
France represents something different. It remains a beacon of intellectual seriousness and of the belief that education, art, architecture, food, language, and public life deserve discipline and even perfectionism. France still believes that ideas matter, that society is more than a marketplace, and that citizens owe something to one another.
In an age of ecological crisis, that idea of France matters more than ever. We must believe that people can reason through catastrophe, act collectively, and accept limits for the common good. Americans instinctively ask what they can do individually; the French are more likely to ask what society must do together.
In that sense, I feel a kinship with Marc Bloch. I was not born French, and I will always remain partly American, but France is a country I have chosen willingly. I love America for allowing my family to become something new. I love France for the civilization it asks us to preserve.
My deepest devotion is for Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the most modern of French mystics, whose “Little Way” teaches that grace is found through small acts of love — and that through them, we slowly find our way back to God.
The Americans and the French
Watching television during a climate emergency reveals the difference between Americans and the French. American coverage follows a familiar script: repeated instructions to “stay safe,” stories of neighbors helping one another, and a family sitting in the ruins of its home thanking Jesus that everyone survived. A smiling Labrador usually appears somewhere in the wreckage. It is sentimental, but not entirely false. Americans respond to disaster by rebuilding and insisting that tomorrow will be better.
The French respond by organizing a debate. A heat wave becomes an examination of capitalism, urban planning, public health, energy, inequality, and government responsibility. While apartments approach 90 degrees, experts calmly debate who is responsible and which public agency needs more funding. France retains a deep belief that even uncontrollable problems can be mastered through sufficiently rigorous analysis.
What Love Looks Like at 100 Degrees
Heat strips life down to essentials. There is no glamour in lying motionless beneath three fans. There is little eroticism in asking your beloved whether she has urinated recently enough to prove that she is properly hydrated. But perhaps this is one of the purest forms of intimacy. J. and I first met during the great heat of 1976. Half a century later, we found ourselves together again, closing shutters against another brutal French summer. As children, we shared a building, a courtyard, a cat, and several formative years. Now we share water bottles, cold baths, restless nights, and the slow passing of overheated afternoons.
The heat reduced our world to a few rooms and a few basic needs, yet I never felt trapped. I was in Paris with the woman I love. Every few hours, one of us filled the bathtub while the other brought fresh water. We checked on each other, adjusted the fans, and waited for the sun to descend behind the rooftops.
The emotional highlight of this exhausting week was watching Catherine Trottmann perform during the Panthéon ceremony for Marc and Simonne Bloch. Her voice rose above the military procession, the speeches, and the suffocating heat, transforming a national commemoration into something intimate and human. It seemed to express everything the ceremony represented: sorrow, courage, devotion, memory, and a love of France that survived persecution and death.
Beside J., I watched President Emmanuel Macron stand beneath the burning Paris sky and deliver his eulogy. Whatever one thinks of Macron politically, this was France at its ceremonial best: intellectual, historical, theatrical, and profoundly serious about the meaning of the Republic. Marc Bloch had fought and died for an idea of France. More than eighty years later, France carried him and Simonne together into its national temple.
Macron ended with four simple declarations:
Long live Marc Bloch.
Long live Simonne Bloch.
Long live the Republic.
Long live France.
After a week of oppressive heat, sleepless afternoons, cold baths, shuttered rooms, and endless glasses of water, those words felt unexpectedly moving. They reminded me why I continue to choose France, and why I was grateful to experience it beside J.
Sometimes surviving together is the most romantic thing two people can do. Sometimes a country, like a person, reveals itself most clearly under pressure.
Long live France.
