Whether or not it had anything to do with his large size, by the dawn of 1912 the small French village had proven much too petit for Beauregard Roux. He dreamed of places full of automobiles and buildings so tall they blocked the sun; all Trouville-sur-Mer had to offer was a fish market and Beauregard’s own phrenology practice, kept afloat by his female neighbors. His fingers ached for skulls whose bumps he hadn’t read time and time again! So, on the first of March of that year — which was eldest daughter Emilienne’s eighth birthday, son René’s seventh, Margaux’s sixth, and Pierette’s fifth — Beauregard began to talk of a place he called Manhatine.
“In Manhatine,” he’d say to his neighbors while pumping water from the well outside his home, “whenever you need to take a bath or wash your face, you just turn the faucet, and there it is — not just water, mes camarades, but hot water. Can you imagine? Like being greeted by a little miracle every morning right there in your own bathtub.” And then he’d laugh gaily, making them suspect that Beauregard Roux was perhaps a little more unstable than they might have wished for someone so large.
It was to the dismay of the women in Trouville-sur-Mer — and the men, for there was no other character they liked better to discuss — that Beauregard sold his phrenology practice only one month later. He secured six third-class tickets aboard the maiden voyage of the SS France — one for each of his family members, with the exception of the family goat, of course. He taught his children the English words for the numbers one through ten and, in his enthusiasm, once told them that the streets in America were unlike anything they’d ever seen before — not covered in dirt like the ones in Trouville-sur-Mer, but paved in cobblestones of bronze.
“Gold,” my young grandmother, Emilienne, interrupted. If America was really the impressive place her father thought it was, then certainly the streets would be made of something better than bronze.
“Don’t be foolish,” Beauregard chided gently. “Even the Americans know better than to pave their streets in gold.”
The SS France, as I’ve come to learn in my research, was a marvel of French engineering. Over twice the size of any ship in the French merchant fleet, she would set a new precedent for speed, luxury, service, and cuisine for the French Line. Her maiden voyage departed from the bustling port of Le Havre, forty-two kilometers from Trouville-sur-Mer.
Le Havre of 1912 was a place clearly marked by the distinctions of class. Surrounded on the east by the villages of Montivilliers, Harfleur, and Gonfreville-l’Orcher, the Seine River separated the city from Honfleur. In the late eighteen hundreds, when the neighboring villages of Sanvic and Bléville were incorporated into Le Havre, an upper city developed above the ancient lower city with two parts linked by a complex network of eighty-nine stairs and a funicular. The hillside mansions of rich merchants and ship owners, all of whom had made their fortunes from Le Havre’s expansive port in the early nineteenth century, occupied the upper part. In the city’s center were the town hall, the Sous-Préfecture, the courthouse, the Le Havre Athletic Club, and the Turkish baths. There were museums and casinos and a number of lavish and expensive hotels. It was this Le Havre that gave birth to the impressionist movement; it was where Claude Monet was inspired to paint Impression, soleil levant.
Meanwhile, the suburbs and old districts of Le Havre, where the working-class families lived, and the flat quarters near the port, where the sailors, dockworkers, and laborers worked, were neglected. Here dwelt the effects of grueling and unreliable employment, poor sewer systems, and unsanitary living conditions. Here the cemeteries were overwhelmed with the dead from the cholera outbreak of 1832. It was where consumption found its victims. Here were the bohemians, the red-light district, the cabaret with the effeminate master of ceremonies where a man could pay for a drink and a little entertainment without having to take off his hat. And while the rich Havrais in the upper part of the city raised a toast to many more blissful and successful years, those living in the slums rotted away in a toxic smelly mess of insalubrity, shit, promiscuity, and infant mortality.
To the Roux children, the dock where the ship was moored was a melody of interesting sights, smells, and sounds, an unsettling concoction of the exotic and the mundane: the oceanic air, the sharp bite of coffee beans mixed with the acidic tang of fish blood, mounds of exotic fruits and burlap bags of cotton from the surrounding cargo ships, stray cats and dogs scratching their ribs for mange, and heavy trunks and suitcases marked with American addresses.
Among the crowd of news reporters, a photographer stood documenting the ship’s maiden voyage with his imposing folding camera. As the first-class passengers made their way to their private cabins, the Roux family waited with the rest of steerage to be inspected for lice. Beauregard lifted Emilienne onto his tall shoulders. From her perch, the cheering onlookers looked like a sea of broad-brimmed boater hats. A photograph printed in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro showed the grand ship at this moment — by squinting, a reader could just make out the shadowy shape of a girl balanced eerily above the crowd.
Embarking only one week after the implausible sinking of Britain’s Unsinkable Ship, the Titanic, the passengers aboard the SS France were keenly aware of the cold waters below as they gravely waved good-bye to the crowd on the distant dock. Only Beauregard Roux ran to the other side of the ship, wanting to be the first to greet the land of opportunities, bronze streets, and indoor plumbing.
The Roux family’s quarters contained two tiny bunk beds built into the cabin walls and a washbasin in the center. If Beauregard inhaled too deeply, he could suck all the air out of the room. Maman claimed that the ship’s ceaseless vibrations gave her palpitations. The children, however, loved the tiny cabin, even when Beauregard’s snoring left them with little oxygen some nights.
The SS France opened up a world they’d never imagined. They spent their evenings waiting for the sound of a lone fiddle or set of bagpipes that announced the start of that night’s impromptu celebration in steerage. Later still, they waited in hushed anticipation for the sounds of their neighbors making their own entertainment. The children spent hours listening to the noises resounding through the walls, stifling their wild laughter into scratchy pillows. Days were spent exploring the lower decks and trying to sneak their way into the first-class sections of the boat, which were strictly off-limits to third-class passengers.
When American soil could be seen from the ship, the passengers breathed a collective sigh of relief so strong, it caused a change of direction in the winds, which added a day to their trip, but no matter. They had made it — forever squelching the fear that the Titanic’s fatal end was a harbinger of their own disastrous fate.
As the SS France approached the dock in west Manhattan, my grandmother received her first glimpse of the United States. Emilienne, who had no idea that La liberté éclairant le monde — the Statue of Liberty — was as French as she was, thought, Well, if this is America, then it is certainly very ugly indeed.
The Roux family was quickly declared lice-free and so set off to begin their new lives of prosperity and delight — the likes of which only America could provide. By the time Germany declared war on France, they were finally settled in a squalid two-room apartment in Manhatine. At night Emilienne and Margaux slept in one bed, Beauregard and Maman in the other, René under the kitchen table, and tiny Pierette in a bureau drawer.