After all the excitement of the last few weeks, I was engulfed by a wonderful, sublime sense of perfect calm. I took a deep breath, and a single sentence filled my whole mind: Now everything will be all right. The sky began to change color and the whole of Paris was transformed into a magic lavender-colored place that seemed to be hovering a few yards above the ground.
At the very moment the lamps came on, seeming to shine on the bridge like little white moons, I saw her. An hour too early, she was coming along the bridge in a summery dress, and she seemed to be in no hurry. She was wearing red ballet flats, had draped a little cardigan over her shoulders, and with every step the hem of her dress fluttered around her legs. She was walking on the side where I was leaning on the parapet, but she was so lost in her own thoughts that she noticed me only when she was standing almost directly in front of me. “Alain!” she said. Surprise produced a dear little smile on her face, and she tucked her hair behind her ear in that little gesture I knew so well. “What are you doing here so early?”
“Waiting for you,” I said huskily. All the fine words I’d intended to say when we met were forgotten; the roses lying on the parapet behind me were forgotten. I saw her eyes, which were red from crying, and her cheeks, which were suffused with a delicate blush. I saw her trembling lips, and my heart was almost torn apart with joy and excitement and relief and happiness. “You’re the only one I’m waiting for!”
In the twinkling of an eye, we were in each other’s arms, crying, laughing. Our lips met without the need for words. We kissed, and the seconds became years, and the years became a piece of eternity. We kissed beneath an old lantern that hung over us like a moon among moons. We were kissing on one of the loveliest bridges in Paris, which at that moment belonged to us alone. We flew up into the sky, higher and higher, and Paris became a star among the stars.
We went on standing there for a long time, overwhelmed with happiness, two time travelers who had finally reached their desired destination, looking at the reflection of the lights in the river. We leaned on the parapet and our fingers entwined as they had done that first time.
“Why didn’t you just come to the Cinéma Paradis at the time?” I asked softly. “You only had to trust me.”
“I was afraid,” she said, and her dark eyes shimmered. “I was so afraid of losing you that I preferred to give you up for lost of my own accord.”
I took her back in my arms. “Oh, Mélanie…” I said softly, burying my face in her hair, which smelled of vanilla and orange blossom. I held her very tight, trying to contain the wave of tenderness that washed over me. “You’ll never lose me. I promise you that,” I said. “You’ll never get rid of me. You’ll see.”
She nodded and laughed and wiped a tear from her cheek. And then she said exactly what I’d been thinking as I stood on the bridge. “Now everything will be all right.”
There was a shuffling sound behind us. We turned around and, to our amazement, saw the old man slouching across the bridge in his slippers. He was bent over as he walked and every now and again thrust his fist into the air.
“Everything here’s a total rip-off!” he gasped angrily. “A total rip-off!”
We looked at each other and laughed.
When we walked over the pont Alexandre arm in arm a moment later to get to the other bank of the Seine and the Café de l’Esplanade, it was eight thirty.
At the spot where we’d just been kissing, a forgotten bouquet of roses lay on a stone parapet, evidence that even wise old men can occasionally be wrong.
“We’d actually arranged to meet half an hour from now,” I said. “Why were you on the bridge so early?”
“I just wanted to be here.” Mélanie shrugged in embarrassment. “I know it sounds a bit odd, but at quarter to eight I suddenly had the feeling that I absolutely must go to the pont Alexandre. I thought I could just as well wait on the bridge until we met in the café. And then suddenly you were there, too.” She looked at me and shook her head, laughing. “I suppose we both just had the same idea!”
“Yes,” I said, and smiled, too. “Looks like it!” We reached the end of the bridge, and Robert’s words came back to me. He’d been right: Life isn’t a movie where two people meet and then lose each other, only to meet by chance a few weeks later at the Trevi Fountain because they’ve both simultaneously had the idea of throwing a coin into the fountain and making a wish.
But sometimes, inexplicably, it is.
Epilogue
A year later, the premiere of Tender Thoughts of Paris was held in the Cinéma Paradis. The movie became one of the most successful Allan Wood had ever made.
In the months in between, a lot had happened.
First of all, I’d gotten my cell phone back. The professor had taken it to the cinema for me the next evening, but fortunately I wasn’t there. I was at Mélanie’s, and we had forgotten the world around us.
When the filming was over, Allan Wood had flown to New York with his daughter, Méla, to show her his favorite places and then to go fishing in the Hamptons—his latest passion.
Solène had bought herself a massive apartment near the Eiffel Tower—in order to have, as she said with a twinkle in her eye, a little pied-à-terre in Paris. Mélanie and Solène met up whenever Solène was in the city, and that happened quite often. Sometimes the two sisters also came to the Cinéma Paradis to see an old movie, but Mélanie never sat in row seventeen again.
Madame Clément had gotten herself a little dog. And François had recently found a girlfriend. She often sat beside him in the projection booth, waiting patiently until the show ended.
Monsieur and Madame Petit’s marriage announcement was stuck up on the big bulletin board in my office. They were the two fortunate people who’d fallen in love because there were no more tickets for them.
Melissa had passed her exams summa cum laude and had gone to Cambridge for a postgraduate year.
Robert, somewhat nonplussed, had remained behind, but he soon found his feet again, and a month later he introduced me to a classy dark-haired beauty called Laurence.
The greatest thing, though, was that my apartment had been occupied by a woman for four weeks. Melanie had moved in with me, and the place was full of boxes that had not yet been unpacked. It didn’t bother me. To wake up in the morning with her lovely face as the first thing I saw made my happiness complete.
All the puzzles had been solved, all the questions had been answered. There was only one thing that kept running through my mind: Who was the old man in the slippers? I’d been to the building in the rue de Bourgogne several times with Mélanie, the building with the old chestnut tree in the courtyard. Her friend Linda had invited us to a meal. Linda’s skill as a cook was limited, to say the least, but, on the other hand, she did make wonderful cocktails. I was never to see the old man in the slippers again. Some things remain a mystery forever.
On the evening of the premiere, crowds flocked to the Cinéma Paradis. I saw several well-known faces. Solène Avril was there, of course, because my cinema was more or less her local, and she was the incontestable star of the show. Howard Galloway was lying in his hotel with a virus, feeling at odds with the world. Allan Wood had flown over, as had several members of the film crew—I even saw Carl, who looked totally different, because he’d shaved off his beard and was now running around with a Hemingway mustache. The journalists were already waiting for the stars in the auditorium, and Robert was waiting for me to introduce him to Solène at last. All my friends and acquaintances were there—there were a few more than there had been a year before.
Linda had taken the evening off and was visiting the Cinéma Paradis for the first time, the professor and the Petits were there, and I even found the wrong Mélanie from the building in the rue de Bourgogne in the foyer.
They all wanted to see Tender Thoughts of Paris, and I was also particularly looking forward to it, but seeing all the familiar faces smiling at me kept me thinking of my own story.
Suddenly, Robert
was at my side. “Now introduce her to me at last,” he said. “I’ve specially come on my own.”
I sighed. “You’re evil, Robert, you know that?”
I took him by the sleeve and led him into my office, where Solène, together with Mélanie, Allan Wood, and Carl Sussman, was drinking coffee and waiting for the film to begin. “We’ve even reserved a table in the Brasserie Lipp for afterward,” she said. Solène was superstitious. No toasts until after the show—anything else would bring bad luck.
“Solène, here’s someone who really wants to meet you.” I pushed my friend in through the door. “This is Robert, the incorrigible optimist.… I’ve already told you about him.”
Solène looked at my blond, suntanned friend with his sparkling eyes, and you could see that she liked him. “Ah, Robert!” she said. “Enchanté, enchanté! Why has Alain hidden you away from me for so long? You’re a chemist, aren’t you?”
“An astrophysicist,” Robert replied with a grin as he absorbed the sight of this radiant woman.
“An astrophysicist—that’s so great!” said Solène, and anyone who didn’t know her would have thought that she had been wild about astrophysics all her life. “You must tell me more later on—I love astrophysics!”
And then we went into the auditorium and the show began.
Of course, theater is not the same as the cinema. On the screen, there isn’t the same sense of immediacy that you get from a stage, and the audience doesn’t have the same opportunity to express enthusiasm or displeasure in a way that makes the actors or directors feel it directly. Anyone is free to leave the cinema if they don’t like the film, but public reaction is confined to sold-out houses or empty auditoriums. But anyone who has ever been to a movie premiere, especially if the actors were there, knows that it’s a really unique experience. Cinema also has one incontrovertible advantage compared with the theater; nowhere on any stage in the world is the illusion more perfect, identification closer, and reality more strongly suspended than in a dark cinema looking at a screen. In the theater, people laugh; less frequently, they cry. But the cinema, with its films, is the place where really great emotions are evoked, the place where everything that goes on beyond the dark velvet curtains has, for a while, no meaning at all. It’s the place where dreams become reality.
Tender Thoughts of Paris was that kind of film. It was a bittersweet comedy that hit people where they were most vulnerable: in the heart.
When the last lines had been spoken and the music accompanying the credits had died away, there was, just for a moment, an unusual silence in the auditorium. You could have heard a pin drop. Then applause flooded through the rows of seats. I was sitting beside Mélanie, who had a crumpled handkerchief in her hand and clapped like everyone else. At that moment, I was just one spectator among all the others.
When the director and his star appeared before the audience, they chanted their “Bra-vo! Bra-vo! Bra-vo!” for several minutes—that wonderful sign of the greatest appreciation, which is the same in all languages.
Then I went up front, too. The journalists asked their questions. Photos were taken. Allan Wood said a few words. Solène was delightful, as always. The audience laughed and clapped.
Finally, Solène raised her hand with a smile. “This film is something very special for me, and filming in Paris, most of all in this cinema, is something I will never forget,” she began. “Because I have—as a result of some very strange coincidences that would be too complicated to explain here—rediscovered someone who means a lot to me: my sister.”
She stretched out her hands and Mélanie rose hesitantly from her seat. “She doesn’t like the limelight,” said Solène with a twinkle in her eye, “but this evening she has to make an exception. After all, we were here together as children, watching films.”
Amid applause from the audience, Mélanie came up to the front. Her cheeks were bright red and she gave an embarrassed smile as Solène hugged her. Seeing the two so dissimilar sisters together like that was something that left no one unmoved.
“How can you beat that?” Allan Wood sighed, beaming behind his glasses.
One after another, those in the audience got up from their seats, clapping frenetically. Then I stepped forward, answered a few questions, and said a few words of thanks. The first spectators were already turning to go when there was one more interruption.
“What is your favorite film, Monsieur Bonnard?” shouted one of the journalists.
“My favorite film?” I repeated, and thought for a moment. All of a sudden, silence fell across the whole auditorium. Mélanie was standing beside me, and I took her hand. She looked at me, and in her eyes I saw all my happiness, my whole world. “You’ll never see my favorite film on any screen in the world,” I replied with a smile. “Not even here in the Cinéma Paradis.”
Les Amours au Paradis
THE TWENTY-FIVE LOVE STORIES FROM THE CINÉMA PARADIS
Breathless (A Bout de Souffle)
Before Sunrise
Camille Claudel
Casablanca
César and Rosalie (César et Rosalie)
Cinema Paradiso
Cyrano de Bergerac
The Green Ray (Le Rayon Vert)
The English Patient
The Things of Life (Les Choses de la Vie)
The Girl on the Bridge (La Fille sur le Pont)
The Last Métro (Le Dernier Métro)
The Lovers on the Bridge (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
An American in Paris
A Good Year
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Goethe!
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis)
Orpheus (Orphée)
Design for Living
Pride and Prejudice
Something’s Gotta Give
A Room with a View
Hunting and Gathering (Ensemble, c’est tout)
ALSO BY NICOLAS BARREAU
The Ingredients of Love
About the Author
Nicolas Barreau was born in Paris, the son of a French father and a German mother. He studied Romance languages and literature at the Sorbonne and worked in a bookshop on the Rive Gauche in Paris. He is also the author of The Ingredients of Love.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ONE EVENING IN PARIS. Copyright © 2012 by Nicolas Barreau. English translation copyright © 2014 by Bill McCann. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Christina Krutz Design
Cover photographs: Paris © Axiom/Mauritius Images; girl © Ayal Ardon/Arcangel Images
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Barreau, Nicolas, 1980–
[Abends in Paris. English]
One evening in Paris / Nicolas Barreau.—First U.S. Edition.
p. cm.
First published in Germany by Thiele Verlag under the tittle Eines Abends in Paris—T.p. verso
ISBN 978-1-250-04312-2 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4668-4122-2 (e-book)
1. Theaters—France—Paris—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 3. Dinners and dining—Fiction. 4. Missing persons—Fiction. I. Title.
PT2702.A757A2413 2014
833'.92—dc23
2014000137
e-ISBN 9781466841222
First published as Eines Abends in Paris by Thiele Verlag in Germany
First U.S. Edition: July 2014
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