{"id":95645,"date":"2016-03-16T12:31:27","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T16:31:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=95645"},"modified":"2016-03-16T13:00:29","modified_gmt":"2016-03-16T17:00:29","slug":"protection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/16\/protection\/","title":{"rendered":"Protection"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Louis-Robert Carrier-Belleuse, Porteurs de farine. Sc\u00e8ne parisienne,<\/i> 1885.<\/p><\/div>\n

Before I traveled to France this week, I made myself go back and read my diaries from the time I\u2019d lived there, years ago. I had avoided rereading them ever since, and I was relieved to find, in my actual words, very little of the sadness I knew lurked between the lines. I\u2019d said plenty about all the different jobs I did, about the people I taught and the children I nannied and the soup kitchen at the local church. There were details about deals I\u2019d gotten late in the day from the vegetable vendors and stuff I\u2019d found discarded by the side of the street. Well, I was never very good at being young.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But most striking was my apparent obsession with two recurring characters. I\u2019d remembered them, of course, but I hadn\u2019t realized how large they loomed in my daily routine. \u201cHad to pass horrible guy,\u201d I wrote one day. \u201cHe cursed at me and said something under his breath I couldn\u2019t understand.\u201d A few days later, \u201cInsulted again. Don\u2019t know what is best to do. Also had to deal with insinuating guy and he made me v. uncomfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n

In case it\u2019s not clear, \u201chorrible guy\u201d and \u201cinsinuating guy\u201d were two separate people. The latter was a young man who sold slices of pizza and sandwiches outside a nearby bakery. He would address me familiarly and sometimes stroke my hand, and it made me deeply ashamed.<\/p>\n

The other guy was a panhandler outside the supermarket. He had swastika tattoos and looked like a skinhead, but I\u2019m not sure if this had anything to do with the insults he leveled at me; later, when my French was better, I could understand him, but I only remember his hissing disgusting sexual things at me, and calling me a bitch and worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if everyone was on the receiving end of this sort of thing. I doubt now that it was personal. But at the time, it so charged and informed my days that I\u2019d add an hour to my route to avoid him. Back then he came to symbolize my general failure: at authority and adulthood and living free of fear. Now, the intensity of the obsession strikes me as, at the very least, unhealthy, and the failure much more complicated.<\/p>\n

\u201cShould I give him money?\u201d I asked myself in one day\u2019s entry. \u201cShould I memorize French insults?\u201d As best as I remember, I stuck with my general plan of looking scared and miserable and sometimes bursting into tears. No, that\u2019s not completely true: once, I asked my friend Dan to make the walk with me and hold my hand as if he were my boyfriend.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now that I\u2019m back in France, my husband asked if there\u2019s anything I wanted to revisit. I didn\u2019t want to revisit the person I was then, but when I found myself in my old neighborhood, I decided to walk by the bakery and the supermarket, just to see what it felt like now that I wasn\u2019t unhappy and lonely. My heartbeat quickened as I approached the two storefronts\u2014they were very near one another\u2014and I thought of all the things I would say, my disdain, my triumph.<\/p>\n

But of course, neither of my old nemeses was there; they had their own stories to live. Instead, a young woman outside the bakery asked if she could help madame. And I realized that was me.<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before I traveled to France this week, I made myself go back and read my diaries from the time I\u2019d lived there, years ago. I had avoided rereading them ever since, and I was relieved to find, in my actual words, very little of the sadness I knew lurked between the lines. I\u2019d said plenty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[15275,12511,7682,14380,865,12796,14988,270,123,9909],"class_list":["post-95645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-adulthood","tag-city-life","tag-diaries","tag-fear","tag-france","tag-insults","tag-misogyny","tag-paris","tag-travel","tag-youth"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn France, Rereading Old Diaries<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein revisits a strange chapter from her youth.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/16\/protection\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Protection by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 16, 2016 \u2013 Before I traveled to France this week, I made myself go back and read my diaries from the time I\u2019d lived there, years ago. 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