In fact, it was Neil’s theory that stories like the one about the body covered in seashells—as opposed to the more standard miracles—had helped to make Saint Jacques’s the most popular medieval pilgrimage after the ones to the holy cities of Rome and Jerusalem. Neil didn’t have enough evidence yet to present his idea, but it seemed like the kind of thing Professor Piot himself might come up with. Neil could almost hear him describing to his students how the world might have looked to a pilgrim like the monk from Rouen, who couldn’t raise his eyes to heaven as the church demanded without first seeing that the world around him was full to the pores with rot and disease. The image of a body held together in defiance of decomposition had attracted wanderers from all over Europe; it might have been enough to draw a monk away from his prayers. Neil opened his notebook and added looking for miracles? under Monk from Rouen.
He had just enough time to look up the actual edict from the Vendôme abbot forbidding pilgrimages in the Patrologia Latina, a collection of medieval texts that the archives staff kept in the reference room. But he could still remember the feeling of Magdalena’s fingers brushing his forehead as they sat at the café table, and he was afraid that if he thought about anything else for too long the memory would fade. And when it did he would lose forever the exact sensation of her fingertips, the way she’d looked at him and smiled so that he’d felt his whole body change temperature, but hadn’t been sure if it was to hot or cold. Neil put the papers back in their carton and gathered his notes.
Most days after he finished work, Neil liked to walk through the old streets near the archives where the buildings leaned in overhead on either side as if they had important things to say to one another that they didn’t want the passersby to overhear. Then he usually got a beer and a bucket of peanuts at his zinc, which was the same divey bar with duct tape on the bar stools that Professor Piot had gone to when he was a research assistant at the National Archives, and where Neil and the bartender discussed, of all things, the shifting fortunes of the New York Yankees. The bartender, whose name was Émile, watched every single Yankees game when it came on at one in the morning while he was closing down the bar, which meant that Neil had to do actual research to keep up his end of the conversation. Neil’s team was really the Rockies, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell this to Émile, who thought that all Americans were from New York. They usually talked in French, and Neil, whose brain was already in knots after hours of translating administrative documents with archaic past tenses, had to contort his mind still further to figure out how you’d say grounded out and deep fly ball. Still, it was nice to talk to a real person after a day spent looking at bits of old parchment that no one else had bothered with for centuries.
But today Neil didn’t feel like discussing Joba Chamberlain’s string of perfect seventh innings, even though he’d read the AP story on his computer for just that purpose. He started walking toward the river, thinking he’d just go home, but the afternoon was so bright and his little apartment was so dark—it was student housing, literally in the shadow of the Sorbonne—and he hated the feeling of being shut up inside, having to turn on the light to read while the rest of the world was out in the sun.
He crossed the river behind Notre Dame and stopped to listen as a man with a beat-up guitar sang “Summer of ’69” for a group of tourists. Radio stations were required to play a certain percentage of songs in French, but Neil had noticed that the street musicians in Paris generally stuck to the American classics, the same songs that were probably right then being played with half the right lyrics on sidewalks all over the world. Wa-wa wa wa-wa-wa, I knew that wa-wa now or never, those were the best days of my life. Professor Piot would have drawn some lesson from that about gaps in the historical record, pointing out that Radio France archived every single broadcast, but the buskers working for coins gave a much more accurate indication of popular tastes, and they were never recorded.
Neil turned around and went back across the river. The last thing he wanted to do was go home and sit around eating Pim’s while his imagination followed Magdalena’s bus as it got farther and farther away, wondering if the best days of his life were somehow already happening without him really noticing.
He walked down rue de Rivoli and decided he might as well have a look at the Tour Saint-Jacques. It was something he did less often than one might expect, considering he was spending his entire summer researching it. The restoration wouldn’t be done for a month or two and the park around it was fenced off. Along the tower’s southeast side a group of bums slept on the warmth of the metro grates at night and moved into the shade of a chestnut tree in the afternoons. They drank jugs of wine and read old paperbacks, rewrapped their swollen feet and fought each other, and Neil found them more interesting than the tower itself, which, still covered in scaffolding with its gargoyles poking out the top, reminded Neil of an old man with the sheets pulled up to his chin. Neil imagined making friends with the Saint-Jacques bums, finding out the things they knew about that spot that no one else did, like what happened underneath the grates, which dropped down at least three or four stories into the heart of the Châtelet metro station, or whether they thought it was ironic that Nicolas Flamel, a fourteenth-century alchemist famous for having discovered the secret to immortality, had been buried in their churchyard.
That day the bums were busy unpacking. A few of them were gathered around an old suitcase, taking out shirts and underwear that clearly did not belong to them. One tried to trade his socks for better ones, but they were too small. Another had found a rose in one of those plastic sheaths and was emptying a can of beer to use as a vase.
Neil walked around the fenced-off tower, looking up. At the top of each of the four corners of the belfry were statues of the Tétramorphe, the Four Evangelists as beasts: an angel for Saint Matthew, a lion for Mark, an eagle for John, and what was supposed to be a cow for Saint Luke but looked more like a dog—and in front of the eagle was Saint Jacques himself, a relatively modern addition to the tower. He held a pilgrim’s staff and scallop shell, but his back was turned to Spain, as if he had already gotten what he’d gone there for and was on his way home.
It occurred to Neil that the Rouen monk’s account of the pilgrimage was dated 1259, right around the time the cathedral of Saint Jacques in Compostela had begun granting indulgences, which were holy remits of sin written out on slips of paper excusing a pilgrim from some portion of the suffering he or she could expect in Purgatory.
It meant the monk had been traveling at a particularly interesting moment in the history of medieval Christianity. The age of miracles was nearly over. Religious authorities were recording fewer acts of divine intervention on earth and busying themselves instead with what lay beyond. By the mid-1200s they would have been developing the system of indulgences that led to a major increase in pilgrim traffic, as even the poorest peasants gathered what offerings they had and set out for far-off shrines, believing they could buy a lesser stay in Purgatory. Neil got out his notebook and made a note to check the date indulgences were first granted to pilgrims at Santiago de Compostela. Under Monk from Rouen he added indulgences? next to looking for miracles?
Back on the metro grate the bums were laughing. One of them had found a bra in the suitcase and was trying to put it on, but he was having trouble with the clasp. A jug of wine was in danger of being spilled. Neil headed toward them, wondering if he should use tu or vous. He decided the familiar sounded friendlier.
“Not your size?” he said.
“Go fuck yourself,” the bum said, and down went the wine. Neil decided it was best to cross the street.
{RICHARD}
Paris, June
“Ah, yes, you wrote some months ago,” the archivist said as we sat down in her office at the appointed time. “Your mother was a friend of the Comtesse Lucette Labat-Poussin?”
“Well, no, not a friend,” I said. I wondered how much the archivist knew about the comtesse. “An acquaintance, if that. She and my mot
her may have known each other socially.”
The archivist looked at the page I’d marked in Bristol’s book and typed something into her computer. “I see,” she said, and if one of her eyebrows lifted higher than the other, it was very slight.
Lucette Labat-Poussin, heir to a copper fortune and comtesse by marriage, was something of a personality in her day. She was a generous patron and unpredictable lover, usually to the same people, and she openly preferred members of her own sex long before such things were done. Her attentions and her money went to dancers and actresses mostly, and though she took an interest in writers too, no one aside from Carter Bristol has ever suggested that one of them was Inga Beart.
I suppose Bristol is only taking his theory of my mother’s psychosis to its logical conclusion when he claims that Inga Beart’s final act of self-destruction was in fact aimed at destroying someone else. He’s done quite a job of gumming up history to make the comtesse play the part, claiming that what Inga Beart did to herself was meant to hurt the comtesse most of all. In my view, there is little evidence to support the idea that Lucette Labat-Poussin and Inga Beart even knew each other very well, let alone that they had the kind of passionate clandestine affair Bristol describes. In all my research I’ve found their names mentioned together just a handful of times, usually as guests at the same party, and Inga Beart didn’t seem to benefit from the kind of financial support that generally accompanied the comtesse’s affections. No other biography of Inga Beart contains more than a passing reference to Labat-Poussin, but this hardly troubled Bristol. According to him, if their relationship was more successfully kept secret than the comtesse’s other exploits, it was only because she was at that time entangled with at least two other younger women and took some pains not to offend a sense of propriety among her society friends.
The archivist handed Bristol’s book back to me and wrote out a card with the call number for the comtesse’s papers. Before I’d had a chance to ask about the medical records from the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, she was motioning for me to follow her out of her office. Clearly our meeting was over.
The archivist pointed me to the main reading room, where I gave my form to the man at the requests counter, then waited until he called my number. The comtesse’s papers were in a cardboard box tied up with strings; almost certainly Carter Bristol had been the last to knot them in a little bow. Inside there was a pile of typewritten papers, some handwritten letters of odd sizes, and a stack of photographs. Naturally I looked at the photographs first. Many were of the Comtesse Labat-Poussin as a young woman.
In his book Bristol explains the supposed relationship between them as one of nostalgia on the part of the comtesse, who saw in Inga Beart a measure of the loveliness she herself had nearly attained in her youth. I had to agree with Bristol that in some of the pictures Lucette Labat-Poussin kept of her young self she does look a bit like my mother, though the resemblance is mostly superficial, in the hairline and the shape of the face. Her light eyes, though similar, are flat and direct, nothing like my mother’s, which from her earliest school pictures appear as twin wells reflecting a colorless sky at their depths.
The comtesse apparently told someone that they had been mistaken for sisters, and it was because of this physical resemblance, Bristol says, that Lucette took an interest in Inga Beart when she arrived in Paris. As a sort of vanity project she tried to stem the psychological as well as physical damage Inga Beart seemed intent on doing to herself with a combination of morphine, barbiturates, and bacchanalian soirées. But, according to Bristol, by the summer of 1954 Inga Beart’s mania had progressed to the paranoiac stage. She was afraid that the comtesse was getting too close, and so she ended the affair in the most effective way she could. By blinding herself she destroyed the very likeness the older woman was trying to preserve.
Of course these are only Bristol’s conjectures. Nowhere in all of Inga Beart’s correspondence, in gossip columns, or in the memoirs of their contemporaries is there a single mention of the two of them being seen together outside of social settings. Even on August 10, 1954, no one ever swore to anything. In essence, Bristol has based his entire claim on a bystander’s account that a dark-haired woman who matched the comtesse’s general description was seen bringing Inga Beart to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital the day she lost her eyes.
Still, I’d assumed that Bristol was telling the truth when he wrote in his book that he’d found pictures of my mother among the Labat-Poussin papers, and I was honestly surprised when I got to the end of the comtesse’s stack of photographs without so much as a glimpse of Inga Beart. Most of the rest of the carton was taken up with drafts of the same type-written document—all in French—which seemed to be the comtesse’s memoirs. I looked through it all carefully, scanning each page for my mother’s name, but I never found it. There were no love letters, no mention of the druggist, the falling bricks, or the glass of Pernod. Dispirited, but madder than ever at Bristol for having so clearly fabricated a relationship between the two of them, I packed the carton up again and returned it to the counter, where a man in a heavy apron took it and scanned my card. I thanked him and turned to go, but he said something to me and, seeing that I didn’t understand, he motioned for me to wait. So I waited and he came back with another carton.
“That’s not for me,” I said. “I only had the one.” But the man didn’t understand. He pushed the carton toward me and pointed to the card the archivist had given me.
“Vingt-trois,” he said.
I shook my head. “No, I think you already gave me the right box,” I said.
“Vingt-trois,” he said again. He pointed to the carton I’d just returned. “Un,” he said. He pointed to the new carton on the counter. “Deux.” He pointed to the shelf behind the desk where more cartons were waiting. “Trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, da, da, da, vingt-deux, vingt-trois,” he said, and showed me a list of numbers on the card.
So I took the next carton of the Comtesse Labat-Poussin’s papers. It was similar to the first; I couldn’t find my mother anywhere. The third and fourth were just the same.
It was clear that the comtesse had been a much more prolific patron of the arts and letters than I had gathered from Bristol’s book or from the research I’d been able to do on my own back home. There were dozens of folders labeled with the name of this or that project, and with the help of my little dictionary I got the sense that the comtesse had dabbled in all manner of things, from financing operettas to the rehabilitation of historic sites that had been destroyed during the war. She seemed to have saved everything—train tickets, programs from amateur theaters, letters written in smudged ink on hotel stationary, all of them in little packets bundled together and labeled in the same tilting script. Of course I couldn’t understand most of it. I looked closely at all the photographs and the to and from lines on the letters, but there was no sign of Inga Beart.
I’d promised myself I would make it through carton number ten before I stopped for the day, but by the time I got to the sixth my eyes were having a hard time focusing. I still wanted to see the medical records, but the archivist I’d talked to that morning seemed to have gone home. It was just as well, I thought. I was tired and though I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast what should have been hunger was replaced by a kind of spinning feeling, the same mild vertigo I’ve experienced from time to time ever since that childhood case of scarlet fever locked me in a rocking delirium that the doctors said I was lucky to survive.
On my walk back to my hotel I turned again down the street with the shoe repair shop on it. The shop was still closed, but the man who had helped me clean the chewing gum was standing in front of his gallery, wiping his hands on a rag. I was hardly in the mood to talk, but I couldn’t just walk by without saying hello. I remembered that I’d made a note to find out more about his mother’s injury; I wondered if there might be old newspaper reports about people being hit by bricks falling from the tower. It was hardly a subject to begin a conversation with, but he
seemed to be in a talkative mood, asking me about my trip and what I thought of Paris, and it was easy enough to bring the subject around to family history, since after all that was the reason for my visit.
He seemed politely interested in my project, but before I could find out about the newspaper clippings he was telling me that he too made a hobby of historical research. He had collected a number of pieces of memorabilia from the SS Hirondelle, which, I soon learned, was a luxury ocean liner built in 1914, with a mural by Marc Chagall painted on the ceiling of the dining room and a resident ballet.
“It was not the biggest of the great ships, or the fastest, but for style, it was something incredible,” he said. “There are stories—during the First World War it was made into a hospital ship. The dining room itself was used for this, and you can imagine the soldiers looking up from their cots to the chandelier—the Chagall, of course, was put in later, but the original chandelier was made with some six thousand pieces of crystal brought from Vienna. And these young men—from Provence, from the Massif Central—who would have seen nothing like it before or after, opened their eyes to this sight and believed they had passed over, you see, to heaven.”
“Goodness,” I said.
“Oh yes. The nurses had some trouble to convince them otherwise.”
We were standing outside the gallery. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Perhaps you would like some tea?”
“Thank you,” I said.
He took me through to a little room at the back of the shop, where he quickly arranged a bit of plastic sheeting to cover a canvas in the corner, then cleared a small table for us. “Sit, sit,” he said. He put water on to boil in an electric kettle and served me on an original Hirondelle tea service.
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