woman who wanted to name her daughter Méloé, that French parents gained a greater degree of autonomy. Today, a registrar is required to accept any name, except one he deems not in a child’s best interest, in which case he will refer the matter to a judge. In recent years, French courts have rejected such names as Nutella, Prince-William, and, for a pair of twins, Joyeux (Happy) and Patriste (a phonetic take on Not Sad). “The names of ‘Joyeux’ and ‘Patriste’ are of a nature, because of their fanciful, even ridiculous, character, to create difficulties and embarrassment for the child,” the opinion read. “It is therefore necessary to confirm the judgment taken with regard to the suppression of these two names, which must be replaced by the first names of ‘Roger’ and ‘Raymond.’ ” We wanted something squarely French, but not, as John F. Kennedy once warned Jackie in advance of a state dinner, “too Frenchy.” Our main criterion, which was also our main problem, was that all our parents needed to be able to pronounce it. This eliminated a frustratingly huge number of options, including our coup de coeur, Valentin, which my people were sure to shorten to Val and associate with cheap chocolates. I loved the name—the way it connoted heart and valor, even the physical shape of it—but I wasn’t entirely sure that I could pull off yelling it down a city block. Explaining to Olivier why Camille wasn’t an ideal option for a Franco-American boy, I thought of a recent episode of “Blackish,” in which Dre, the main character, explodes at Rainbow, his biracial wife, who doesn’t share his affection for the name DeVante: “Rainbow is the name that white people give cocker spaniels!” (Rainbow, incidentally, is the name that Eric Chen’s parents gave his sister.) I knew the Hundred-Year Rule, which holds that it takes a century for a forgotten baby name to make a comeback, but I was struggling to grasp the hidden codes of a culture that was still new to me. Olivier, whose interests tend more toward aviation than amateur sociology, hadn’t given much thought to whether Calixte sounded precious or Côme was too stuck-up. Out of my zone, I haunted francophone baby-name boards; scoured Le Figaro’s social page, Le Carnet du Jour; studied the birth 28
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017
announcements in the window of the local stationery shop. Librairies became purveyors of names, not books. (The British Museum, a few years ago, tried pitching itself as a name trove. “Get your baby something special from the British Museum. A Name,” one advertisement read, boasting of a selection from Abydos to Zenobia.) Even when I liked a name, I could never tell whether I was projecting onto it the same associations that our son’s peers and neighbors were bound to. It wasn’t until a recent story in the magazine Marianne—“BRIGITTE,” the cover read, “the crazy history of a first name that tells the story of France”— that I had any clue that the French public’s affection for Brigitte Macron might have to do with her name, which is apparently both charming and a little cheesy, “evoking irresistibly a prosperous France, sure of herself, optimistic: les trentes Glorieuses, sexual liberation included.” How was I to know that Kevin—a perfectly respectable name, as far as I was concerned— was a national punch line, until I read a notice in Le Gorafi, the French version of the Onion, announcing the death of “the first Kevin,” at thirty-two years of age? Jim, an American I know, abdicated naming privileges to his French wife, Elisabeth, on one condition: that, with the chosen name, their son could play shortstop for the Baltimore Orioles. Jim’s father, a lifelong Orioles fan, was to arbitrate. “Jean-Baptiste?” Elisabeth suggested. “Hairdresser,” Jim’s father replied. “Jean-Baptiste is a hairdresser.” “Christian, then.” “You cannot call him Christian. He is Catholic. We are Catholic. People will think he is a Christian Scientist or a Fundamentalist. If you want to go down that path, just call him Jesus.” The boy was eventually christened Theodore. His French passport has an acute accent, but his American one doesn’t. For us, the clock was ticking. We solicited another friend’s advice on Pierre, and the feedback was not good: “Better to avoid.” “WE HAVE TO PICK SOMETHING NOW,” I texted Olivier, after another fruitless afternoon perusing “Un Bébé, un Prénom,” a book we’d acquired out of desperation. It did
little to spackle the holes in my cultural knowledge, listing as a celebrity Achille “the clown Achille Zavatta.” Olivier, who tends to take a rational approach to problem-solving, came home that night with a spreadsheet. He had input the top two hundred and fifty Parisian boys’ names for 2016, the number of births corresponding to each, and his comments on the entries. Sacha: “Too Russian?” Neil: “Ask Lauren.” Leonardo: “Too DiCaprio.” Ferdinand: “1st World War.” Aurèle: “J’aime bien.” Charlie: “Charlie Hebdo.” Sure enough, next to Kevin he’d written, “Silly.” We went through the list together, filling in the missing cells. “Timothée,” I read out. “Timothée douche,” Olivier said. “What’s Timothée douche?” “A bath gel.” No. 90 was Lenny, one of a number of English names that have recently gained traction with French parents. “You put ‘Why not?’ next to Lenny?” I said. “Have you ever heard of a book called ‘Of Mice and Men’?” Something that our acquaintance with the difficult initials had said kept coming back to me as we went through the list. “I would say that it’s essentially a matter of self-confidence,” he’d concluded, suggesting that any name we chose could go in any direction, depending on how our son embodied it. He was right. We had no idea if the particular individual we were bringing into the world would be sensitive to sticks and stones or schoolyard taunts, if his name could ever hurt or help him. This was especially true when he’d be part one thing and part another, either half inoculated or doubly vulnerable. Your child’s name is what you want to be, but what he is is really up to him. On the two-hundred-and-fifty-first day of my pregnancy, we decided on Louis. Lew-ie. Lou-wee. I never would have guessed that it would be my son’s name, but suddenly I could see myself cooing it into his neck, writing it in his clothes, declining it into a thousand endearments. I put the pillow inside the ottoman, thinking that I might show it to him one day. If he asked me how he got his name, at least he’d have a story. “We just kind of liked it,” I’d say.