Haunting Paris

by Mamta Chaudhry

  Strange nuptials in which the Huguenot groom plays no part, kneeling outside Notre Dame while the Catholic ceremony is conducted within. Their union is meant to end the wars of religion tearing the country apart, and Henri knows that his marriage to Margot is strictly business; for pleasure he must look to his mistresses. Evergreen gallant, people call him, and nudge one another as Margot emerges from the cathedral, dousing her handkerchief with a perfume specially blended for her by Renato the Florentine before she embraces le vert galant, who smells like the goats from his native Navarre. With the knot safely tied between the “heretic” prince and his Catholic bride, all Paris dances in the street. Peace, at last!

  But in less than a week the old hatreds erupt again, and on St. Barthélemy’s Day the Seine runs sluggish with blood, bodies stack up like firewood in the streets. Huguenot or Catholic, they decompose at the same swift rate under the merciless August sun, and not all the perfumes Renato the Florentine has brought with him can disguise that stench.

  Everyone knows of course how the bridegroom escapes and returns years later as a newly Catholic king: “Paris is worth a mass,” he says, and people laugh at his flippancy, but he is in deadly earnest. He is hell-bent on ending the religious persecution which threatens to destroy France. It is not the only bargain Henri IV makes for his kingdom; he annuls his marriage to childless Margot to wed a clinking purse of a woman, Marie of the Medicis, who obligingly disburses several legitimate heirs to secure the Bourbon line. And as for his many bastards, Henri laughs, he is only a king, not a saint.

  Forever in love with some woman or the other, the only thing that excites Henri more than flesh and blood is mortar and stones. This island captured his heart when it was just a set of architectural drawings presented for his approval. No monarch loved building more; under Henri, all Paris is scaffolded, the dust barely settles in one quarter before it rises in another. I see him prepare to leap across an unfinished span of the Pont Neuf. Some boatmen below call out a warning, but he shrugs it off. “I might flounder but will not sink,” he says, and they laugh, delighted that His Majesty knows the motto of their guild, fluctuat nec mergitur.

  That is the state of things when a shabby man hurries past, muttering to himself. People turn and stare, thinking him mad, but it is not madness but treason. He makes his way purposefully toward the king. An overturned hay cart blocks the royal carriage on rue de la Ferronnerie, and while people struggle to clear the path, the king tugs at his earring, filled with strange presentiments. But why? He leads a charmed life, his heirs are healthy, his mistress comely, and his city flourishing. No one can deny his edicts have brought peace, peace has brought prosperity. A sudden gust of wind ripples his cloak and he turns and sees a specter visible only to him, his brother-in-law, Margot’s brother, who unexpectedly gained the throne as Henri III, and just as unexpectedly lost it when he was killed by an assassin’s dagger. Henri IV’s eyes widen as he realizes what his predecessor is trying to tell him: Regicide! But before he can form the word, the shabby man jumps on the wheel, his knife glinting in the sun and Henri falls back, no longer a king but only a bloodied and silent corpse.

  But the lives of cities do not end with the lives of men. The island finally rises like a mirage from the water, and when I look at what Henri did not live to see, his grand vision turned from parchment to stone, how strange it seems that this island should be named not for Henri IV, but like all Henri’s descendants to wear the crown, for his distant ancestor, Louis the Saint.

  I hold no brief for kings, but how much greater he seems to me, the far-from-saintly Henri, when I compare him to his sainted ancestor. One tried to bind up the raveling threads of the country with his edict on religious tolerance, the other broke “heretics” on an inquisitor’s wheel. Louis IX had a dream that all Jews would be branded with yellow badges and cast out of the land; Henri IV had a vision of a France held together by bonds whose harmony neither man nor God could disrupt. Though the island is called Île Saint-Louis, there’s no question whose vision it embodies.

  And it’s equally strange how stubbornly the vision has resisted time’s transformations. Today this exclusive quarter is desirable not for what it offers but for what it lacks: no metro, no cinema, no fine museums, no grand monuments, not even a bureau de poste—people used to deposit their letters at the ironmonger’s till a post office opened recently on the street connecting the isle to the mainland and to modernity. Even now, when I leave the bustling main streets with their restaurants and boutiques for the slumbering quays where stone and water do not change with the times, I feel I have stepped back several centuries. That is the appeal of this place, so close to everything and yet so far from it all.

  It was certainly exclusive enough for the Cheroiseys when they installed themselves there in the postwar years. Though the judge grumbles that now the place is being taken over by Arab sheiks and movie stars—not the sort of people whose company one frequented—it’s still the best address in town. And Sylvie’s renters might not be fréquentables, either, but he enjoys engaging them in conversation, the young man’s French is quite passable and he speaks of French wines with the reverence they deserve. Feeling expansive after one of their discussions in the courtyard, the judge invites Will down to his cave to see some remarkable vintages he has laid down. Léonie de Cheroisey says, another day, nounours, you can see they’re going out. The endearment teddy bear draws a fierce scowl from her husband.

  Will is flattered by the judge’s invitation, even though it’s only to the wine cellar, but Alice takes his arm. “Another time,” she says. “We’re headed to the bistro across the bridge.”

  The judge shrugs. “Passable, quite passable, but not the grand cuisine of France.”

  “Georges-Henri is from Normandy,” his wife says, as if that explains everything. “Me, I find the bistro perfectly fine, but not le top, obviously.”

  At the word “top,” Will glances at Sylvie’s window. He thought he had seen her looking down at them but he can’t be sure, and he wishes he had asked her to join them for dinner, instead of eating by herself.

  The Taylors cross over to the Right Bank and find the bistro abuzz with conversations, all in French. A good sign, no tourists. But the room is thick with smoke, so they seat themselves on the terrasse, which is nothing fancier than a couple of tables set up on the sidewalk. A busy waitress, her hands full of dishes, calls out from the doorway, “J’arrive.” There are no menus, the day’s offerings scrawled on a blackboard: a main course of guinea hen and cherry clafoutis for dessert. Will orders a bottle of Sancerre, and the waitress looks surprised, Americans drink un coca even with dinner, n’est-ce pas? Will replies with feigned meekness that indeed some people consider Coke le vin américain, and Alice, who has just heard him speak knowingly of vintages with the judge, turns away to hide her amusement.

  The dinner is simple but delicious, they must remember to report back to Ana Carvalho. Alice and Will stroll back toward the island, but the evening is fine, and instead of taking Pont Louis-Philippe, they continue to the next bridge, where they pause to look at the imposing Hôtel de Ville behind them, Île de la Cité ahead. A bateau-mouche comes down the river with couples dancing on deck, and the music floats up to the bridge, then fades away as the boat chugs toward Pont Notre Dame. They walk toward the familiar silhouette of the cathedral, the open square in front packed with tourists and the motley band of those who make a living off them, jugglers, musicians, fire-eaters blowing flames of kerosene into the sky.

  Curious about the crowd streaming into Notre Dame, Will pulls Alice into the crush and they are swept inside to press against other latecomers, the church filled to capacity for a concert of sacred music by Vivaldi. A heavily perfumed woman next to them fans herself with a program, dispersing the scent of violets into the air. The low murmur of voices around them rises to the vaulted ceiling like a swarm of bees. Behind the altar a simple unadorned cross is illumina
ted with such skill that its substance seems not wood or stone but pure light; before it, the orchestra is already in place, and an expectant hush descends as the soloists and chorus enter in their flowing robes.

  Alice enjoys the bright opening with strings and trumpet, but when the choir starts the Gloria, her attention flags. The air in the cathedral is stuffy and the wine from dinner is making her drowsy, but sandwiched as they are, there’s no hope of escape until the concert is over. Her gaze wanders over the chandeliers casting a golden glow, the gleaming pipes of the organ, the black and white flagstones that innumerable believers have worn smooth with their footsteps.

  A man across the aisle ogles her openly, and Alice turns away. It takes getting used to, the admiring stares, the hand-kissing, the fulsome compliments which strike her as hypocritical, clearly the French are as prejudiced as anyone else. She can’t get over the fact that not a single woman is buried at the Panthéon, not even Marie Curie. It’s more than an academic question for Alice, she’s had her share of being patronized as a scientist, a researcher, a professor up for tenure. But at least in America attitudes are starting to change, there’s a woman on the Supreme Court, finally. A chance to compete on level ground, it doesn’t seem too much to ask, not as if women are demanding to be put on a pedestal. And it’s funny that the Statue of Liberty, the one woman Americans willingly placed on a pedestal, was a gift from France!

  Stifling a yawn, Alice looks at her watch. The Gloria ends to a burst of sustained applause, and the audience disperses, still under the spell of the music. Out in the open, Alice’s head clears, and she breathes the night air gratefully as they cross the footbridge to the Île Saint-Louis.

  Though headed in the same direction, I linger by the ancient willow at the island’s tip, strangely disturbed. “As prejudiced as anyone else.” How I long to contradict Alice, to point out, as any Frenchman would, the three glorious words—Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité—carved in stone all around the city.

  But even as I mouth the words, the memory of Clara’s reproachful eyes stops me in my tracks, and I think of what Voltaire said, “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead only the truth.” Very well, then, here’s the truth: Men hungry for power will sell their souls to get it, and do even worse to keep it. There’s the rub. Equality is too grand an idea to entrust to little men with a lot to lose.

  Ashamed that I have tried to defend the indefensible, I say the words that come hard to French lips: “I am sorry.” For those like Clara sent to their deaths because we betrayed our own ideals, how meager seems the apology, but I say it again: “Désolé.”

  A lone skater zigzags on the deserted bridge as I gaze at the willow weeping into the river, where reflections of the illuminated city shimmer in the dark like so many will-o’-the-wisps, those capricious lights we call feux follets.

  Lying awake in bed, Sylvie struggles to make sense of the contents of the envelope. She has done what she can about the mysterious bank account, but what of the rest? A photograph, a note, the names of a nearby street and a far-flung neighborhood. If she had found them separately, she would have lingered over Clara’s photograph, wept at Julien’s handwriting, thrown away the unknown card. But they’ve been placed together in an envelope, surely they are somehow connected. Julien was not a sentimental man, he had no use for keepsakes. So why hoard these particular things? And why hide them away?

  Belleville is too large, too overwhelming, she would have no idea what to look for, or where to begin. In any case, she is convinced the road to the mystery runs through rue Elzévir. She pores through the street listings in l’Indispensable until she finds what she is looking for: Éluard, Élysée, Elzévir. She’ll go there in the morning, not out of idle curiosity, but because it’s what Julien would have wanted. Isn’t that so, mon amour?

  Julien does not reassure her and Sylvie feels she has lost him a second time, not just to death, but to silence.

  Instead of continuing with my habitual round, I remain by the willow, overcome by painful memories as green as the park before which I stand. Its locked gates do not deter me, and slowly I descend the steep, narrow stairway into another world. Instead of a city of light, I find myself in a triangular well of darkness.

  This site once housed the morgue, where bodies were laid out on display behind curtains and glass, a titillating spectacle of corpses—dragged pregnant from the river, perhaps, or found hanging from a balcony, or frozen in the unforgiving streets—attracting sightseers from far and wide. But it is long gone, the morgue where Parisians came to identify and claim their dead. In its place is a cenotaph for those whose bodies can never be claimed.

  Other memorials soar to the sky; this one sinks into the earth. A low portcullis bars the water; jagged sculptures lacerate the sky. No exit, say these iron spikes; no hope, say these concrete walls.

  Through tomblike portals, I enter a crypt. Encrusted with two hundred thousand beads of light, a narrow corridor leads to the tomb of the unknown deportee, a single unadorned tomb to keep alive the memory of the two hundred thousand French who were forcibly deported during the Occupation, “lost in the night and fog, exterminated in Nazi camps.” Those glowing lights are like the unwinking gaze of history, before which I lower my eyes, ashamed that so many of my countrymen thought a moral reckoning with our own culpability would tear us apart and chose amnesia instead. But some resisted, working tirelessly to unearth from “the night and fog” the individual names of the disappeared, to provide evidence of their collective fate through films and books and archives which would make it impossible to deny knowledge, to disclaim responsibility, to whitewash this stain on our history.

  At my feet a bronze circle is chiseled with the words: “They went to the end of the earth and they did not return.” It is too dark to decipher an inscription on the wall, written by one who did not return. Yet I would not wish it any brighter, for I know his words by heart: “For me all that remains is to be a shadow among shadows.” By the time I leave this pantheon of shades and turn toward quai d’Anjou, it is almost dawn and Sylvie’s window, like all the rest, is dark.

  The lowering sky at dawn provides Sylvie with an excuse to put off her expedition. She knows it’s not the threatening clouds that give her pause, it’s her ambivalence about finding Marie, whose note Julien kept hidden in a sealed envelope for so long. But now that she has resolved to take action, the hesitations and uncertainty of the last few weeks have fallen away. Moving with a sudden sureness, she hastily swallows her coffee and gathers her belongings: an umbrella, a leash, and the envelope. She hears Ana Carvalho enter the apartment below and hurries down the stairs to avoid her. If she were to tell the concierge she is off to look for an unknown woman at an unnumbered address, Ana Carvalho might think it a recurrence of Sylvie’s old madness.

  As she walks down the narrow streets of the Marais with Coco sniffing the unfamiliar gutters, Sylvie notices how much the area has gentrified in the last few years, home now to trendy restaurants and shops selling ethnic textiles and exotic foods. Only the streets surrounding the Jewish Quarter still look the same, with men going about their business soberly dressed in their black garb and long sidelocks. The fried smell of falafel lingers in the air, reminding Sylvie she should have eaten a decent breakfast before leaving.

  She turns into rue Elzévir, glad it’s only two blocks long; just one street over is rue Vieille du Temple, which seems to go on forever. She mentally eliminates certain buildings, the redbrick school, the stark courtyard of the Hôtel de Donon and the Swedish cultural center next door. No point searching the storefronts displaying cookware and furniture, or the offices into which workers are making their purposeful way, which leaves only a few apartment buildings worth canvassing. As she loiters at the entrance to the closest one, the gate opens and a concierge steps into the street. She eyes Sylvie suspiciously, but evidently something about her appearance—the pearls, the umbrella—reassures her and she
wishes her good morning in a civil enough tone.

  Sylvie hesitates, unsure of what to say. She should have planned it in advance. “I’m looking for someone,” she says, and unclasps her purse to pull out the envelope.

  The concierge stares at it, her face bright with avidity. When Sylvie hands her the scrap of paper, she looks disappointed. Barely glancing at it, she says, “Yes, this is the street, all right. What name did you say?”

  “Marie. That’s all I know.”

  “Oh là là, that’s quite a challenge. This friend of yours…has she come into money?”

  Sylvie hesitates, then nods.

  Now the concierge warms to the task. “The only Marie I have here is Madame Willemin’s daughter, and she’s in school.”

  “No, no, the woman I’m looking for is quite a bit older.”

  “Well, good luck.” The concierge turns away abruptly, wheeling her trash cans back into the courtyard.

  At the next building, Sylvie bends down to study the names on the digicode, none with the initial M, although it’s possible Marie lives with her husband. A car horn beeps irascibly, and she moves out of the way as an elderly gentleman drives in, grumbling about the imbecility of pedestrians.

  Through the open gate, Sylvie glimpses a house with ivy-covered walls. In the front courtyard, an old woman is deadheading flowers, her arthritic fingers moving slowly and painfully among the stone pots. “Em,” he calls out, “Em.” Sylvie stops. Em? M for Marie? She waits for the man to get out, to say something more. He moves toward the woman and reaches for her hands, streaked with dirt. “Ah, Emmeline,” he says, kissing her gnarled fingers, “why won’t you wear gloves?”