Chapter 6: The Serious Journalist

Margot Fleming had rules about train travel. She broke them within forty minutes of leaving Geneva.

Rule one was simple: You did not talk to men. You gave them a false name and a fictitious fiancé in the gendarmerie, you put your feet up on the opposite seat so that there was nowhere for them to sit comfortably and you read your book. All the while, you ignored any and all attempts at conversation.

The rules had served her well through a great many train trips.

She had not accounted for a six-foot-three American boy who turned from the window with an expression of total sincerity and asked how he should act.

She was thinking about that now, on a hot Tuesday morning in June 1974, at her desk in the newsroom of Le Monde when she should have been thinking about the abortion debate in France.

The newsroom of Le Monde was not a glamorous place. It was a warren of low-ceilinged offices in an old building in the ninth arrondissement, dimly lit and choked with cigarette smoke. The walls were lined with filing cabinets. Pneumatic tubes carried copy from floor to floor with a whomping sound. The men and women who wrote for the newspaper were among the most respected, most feared in France and Margot was one of them.

She had been hired in January, fresh from four years at Sèvres, the women’s École Normale Supérieure, where she had taken a degree in philosophy and a second in modern letters. The university was the most rarefied institution of learning in France: a place for the future ministers, philosophers, and academics of the Republic.

She considered herself an intellectual. She had strong opinions on Althusser and could hold her own in an argument about post-structuralism and the mechanics of power with anyone in Paris.

Le Monde had hired her, she understood perfectly well, because the women’s movement had become too large to ignore. The editorial board had decided that it would look better if a woman were the one sent to cover women’s issues.

“The Women Question,” as her section editor had called it on her first day. “It’s everywhere now, Mademoiselle Fleming. America. England. Italy. Here. The manifestos, the marches. The abortion business. We need someone who can explain it to our readers in a serious way. Without, you understand, becoming hysterical.”

She had smiled and said nothing, and gone back to her desk, and written a precise four-thousand-word piece on the history of French reproductive law since 1920, which Lacoste the editor had cut to eleven hundred and run on page nine. She thought it extremely good. None of her colleagues had mentioned it.

Her colleagues were nearly all men. There were sixty reporters and editors on the floor, and of those, six were women. Two were secretaries. One was the fashion correspondent, who was never in the office. And the other three were, like Madame Roux at the next desk, women in their fifties who had come of age during the war, who covered the Assembly, foreign affairs, and labor unions. They smoked like chimneys and swore like dockers and all three of them, according to rumor, had been members of the Resistance.

They had earned their desks in this room by surviving something Margot had only read about. They regarded her, the twenty-six-year-old college graduate with the short hair and her theses on Sartre, with amused tolerance.

So, she worked harder than anyone else. She went to every meeting of the MLF (women’s liberation movement), meetings held in back rooms where women sat on the floor and argued until two in the morning about whether men could be allies or were constitutionally incapable of it. She interviewed doctors who performed illegal abortions and women who had had them.

In May, she had gone to Vienna, at her own expense, for three days in June, because the Austrian Parliament had just passed a law legalizing abortion, because she wanted to understand how it had happened in a Catholic country and whether it could happen in France.

The new Health Minister, Simone Veil, was said to be preparing a bill. Everyone said the Assembly would tear her to pieces. Margot intended to be there when they tried, and to write it properly, so that in fifty years people would read her articles and know exactly what had happened and who had said what.

She had gotten on the train flush with ideas and new resolve and had foolishly ignored her rules. Now, a blue-eyed boy would not get out of her head.

It was absurd, and she knew it. He was nineteen and had spent eight years in a Swiss boarding school with the sons of robber barons, drug lords, and Saudi princes. He had asked her, a feminist of modern France, to teach him about talking to women. He was, by any reasonable definition, a child, a very large, very handsome and polite child who had been let out of a prison and was now wandering around Europe looking at everything as though it had just been invented.