In 1818, someone calling himself Peter Stuart Ney arrived by sailing ship at Charleston, South Carolina. He became a wandering schoolteacher and in the 1840s moved to Davidson, North Carolina, home of the newly founded Davidson College. He designed a seal for the college that is still used today. Peter Stuart Ney had extensive knowledge of Napoleon’s campaigns and was said to have been much affected by the news of Napoleon’s death in 1821. On his own deathbed in 1846 Peter Stuart Ney claimed to his doctor that he was in fact Marshal Michel Ney, that his execution had been faked, and that he had escaped with the help of some of his former comrades in Napoleon’s army who were Freemasons, like himself. The story gained believers. Over the years, a number of articles and books that seemed to be well researched were published. Some contained accounts from former soldiers in Napoleon’s army who claimed to have seen Peter Stuart Ney in the Carolinas and had recognized him as the real Marshal Michel Ney. The Davidson library holds a rather large archive of papers and publications concerning this historical “mystery.” However, in the 1950s, a man named William Henry Hoyt found various documents in France that described Ney’s execution in detail and contained verified proof that the corpse that lay on the ground in front of the firing squad was that of Marshal Michel Ney.
So Peter Stuart Ney’s story was a hoax after all. He was a precursor to later frauds, such as Brushy Bill Roberts of Hico, Texas, who claimed to be Billy the Kid in the years before he died in 1950. Or J. Frank Dalton of Granbury, Texas, who died in 1951, claiming he was Jesse James. Or the various men and women over the years who have claimed to be surviving members of Russia’s royal Romanov family who had escaped execution by the Bolsheviks in 1918. I mention all this because, while living in Paris, especially during my first stay, in 2014, I have sometimes felt like an impostor myself, as if I had simply disappeared from my former life and reappeared in Paris under the same name but as a different person who is leading a different life and does not have a past. That I knew no one in Paris, and that I spoke French and not English with the people I encountered, only intensified this feeling of deception, if deception is what it was. Perhaps Peter Stuart Ney, having moved to a different country, where he had to speak a different language, invented his story because he had similar feelings of having a new but isolated life without any past. He had never tried to profit from his story during his lifetime. He revealed it only as he was dying, perhaps to give his anonymous life without any past some meaning.
Once the Boulevard de Port-Royal changes to the Boulevard du Montparnasse, it becomes more interesting. There are restaurants of various kinds that in the evenings seemed to do a steady but modest business, except for two cafés not far apart that were always completely filled, every seat at every table taken, and no one there over twenty-five. There is the very intellectual bookshop Tschann, which dates to 1929, which was just after Hemingway’s era: he lived in Paris from 1921 to 1928. One day in Tschann I saw a translation of Larry McMurtry’s Duane’s Depressed, one of his finest novels, with the title Duane est dépressif. Nearby is a noodle house where, through a window, I could see the immense, fat, almost perfectly round Chinese chef standing by a heavy wooden table where he repeatedly pulled and folded noodle dough in a blizzard of white flour that he sprinkled on the wooden table, the dough, and everywhere else. Farther west along the Boulevard du Montparnasse are La Coupole, Le Dôme, and La Rotonde, more reminders of Hemingway’s Paris. La Coupole still looks elegant, and it’s not a bad place for a glass of wine in the afternoon. But it has become notorious as a place where young men go to attach themselves to older women.
At Le Dôme, which remains an appealing establishment, the Boulevard du Montparnasse is intersected by the Boulevard Raspail. I turned left here. The school was just thirty yards or so south. There was a kiosk on this corner, where I stopped each day to look at the headlines and the magazine covers. The man who ran it was a popular neighborhood character. He had various cronies. I would see him surrounded by some businessmen in suits and the route man who delivered the piles of newspapers. They arrived armed with jokes, which they told each other under their breath, then bursting into laughter. When elderly widows arrived to buy their Le Monde or Paris Match, he would come out from behind his counter to kiss them on the cheek and pay extravagant compliments on their dress or their hair.
At the school, I had a preliminary interview with a woman who just wanted to be sure I had my visa, my certificate of preregistration, and the means to pay the tuition. I showed her my passport and—once again—my most recent bank statement. Then I was told to sit in a white plastic chair at the end of a row of identical chairs, all occupied by registering students. This row turned out to snake around the edges of two rooms, so there were perhaps fifty chairs in all. When someone was called from the end of the row, everyone moved down one chair. Meanwhile, as we waited, everyone, including me, was eyeing everyone else, all of whom were presumably in the course. There were probably twice as many women as men. Although some of the students might have been as young as eighteen, the majority seemed to be in their early twenties. And then there was a sprinkling of older oddities, like me. I later found out that there were about seven thousand students at the school.
I kept moving down the chairs one by one until it was my turn. The nice young woman sitting behind a desk asked if I wanted to speak French or English. I said English. “So you’re sure you understand,” she said, and I said yes. She checked my visa, verified my preregistration, and then ran my credit card to pay the tuition. At 1,880 euros, around $2,500, it was not especially expensive for twenty hours of instruction a week for four months. She took my photo, and in a few seconds handed me an official Sorbonne student ID.
Now it was time for the tests that would determine what class I would be put in. Along with fifty or sixty others, I was ushered into two adjoining classrooms and handed a test by a very efficient, almost severe woman. All her instructions were in French, and I was a little unclear how long this test would take. The first page had sentences with blanks to be filled in by a verb in the proper tense. The questions were increasingly difficult, and a few I didn’t understand at all. When I came to those parts of the test, I had no idea what question they were asking or what answer they were looking for. Then there was a paragraph in French to read, followed by questions. This was not too difficult, since, as in similar tests in the United States, the questions are in the order in which the answers appear in the text. The crafty student soon learns to read the questions first, then skim through the text to find the answers. Then we listened to a recording twice and had to answer six questions on what we had just heard. I had not understood the recording at all. I just guessed on the questions. I’m sure I missed them all. On the last page of the test, we were asked to write about a sport we participate in. I wrote about riding horses. Then we took our tests and formed another line, waiting for our private interviews. I had a sweet middle-aged woman who asked me why I was taking the course. I said that learning French had been a dream all my life. Also, I wrote books that often required research in French. She asked about my books, and then where I lived. She told me that in a few days I’d get an e-mail with my schedule, and that was that. I was home by two-fifteen. I left feeling as if the round Chinese chef had been pulling and folding my brain. In fact, I’m certain now that I did even worse than I might have imagined. The first classes would begin two weeks later. During the interim, the school would grade the tests, determine each student’s level, and constitute the classes.
I had two weeks to kill. I didn’t know anyone, so they were two weeks to kill alone. I supposed that I would revisit the famous museums, but I decided to save that for later. The next day was bright and clear, and I set out to find the Arènes de Lutèce, a Roman coliseum that, improbable as this seems, is still preserved in the middle of Paris. I found the Arènes on the blue-and-yellow Michelin map that I had bought almost twenty-two years before, on my first visit to Paris with
Tracy.
I walked north up the rue Monge, looking for a hotel near the Place Monge where Tracy and I had stayed during our last trip to Paris together, in 2005. I couldn’t remember the name, but I was certain that I would know it if I saw it. And I did. It was the Hôtel Saint Christophe on the corner of the rue Monge and the rue Lacépède. We had stayed there because it was in a part of Paris we had never seen. It was early spring, and we slept with the windows open. There was some noise from the street, but we made a pact not to let it bother us, and it didn’t.
How was it that we didn’t find the Arènes on that trip? The amphitheater is in a large park just a block north of the hotel. We must have always gone in other directions. Though we nearly always left with a purpose and seldom spent long wandering, one afternoon, while she was resting, I did go north over a slight hill and found a record store across the street from the park, but I didn’t venture farther. It was the best jazz record shop I’d ever been in. I told Tracy how hard it had been not to buy anything. We didn’t have room in our luggage.
The Arènes was built in the first century and abandoned in the fourth. After that, it became a cemetery and was completely filled in when an adjacent fortified wall was built, about 1200. The amphitheater was rediscovered only in 1869, when Baron Haussmann was cutting a swath through the neighborhood, destroying any building in his way, to create the rue Monge. The Paris Municipal Council, which had become annoyed that this ancient structure was in the way of development, would have destroyed the Arènes, except for an impassioned letter that Victor Hugo wrote in 1883.
The round floor is surrounded by rising rows of stones laid as seats. Below the grandstands are large cages that held wild beasts that were released for the gladiators to fight. Sometimes the spectators watched as a condemned man was executed by being turned out into the arena with ferocious animals that had not been fed for several days. The arena was large enough for seventeen thousand spectators to witness the spectacle. Plays were performed there as well, during which benches were brought onto the floor. A canopy supported by cables protected at least some of the amphitheater from sun and rain.
Today, though, activity on the floor is considerably more benign than it was in Roman times. Usually, there are a few elderly men playing boules, and groups of kids kicking soccer balls back and forth. I return there by myself from time to time and always take visitors to see it. During nice weather, it’s a good place to relax quietly with a sandwich and a bottle of wine while sitting on the stone bleachers in the warm sunshine. And the jazz record store is still there—right across the street.
During the first two centuries of Roman rule, when their legions had beaten menacing German tribes back across the Rhine, Paris was a peaceful place. The growing villages on the islands in the Seine and along the left bank of the river didn’t have walls until the third century, when Roman power had waned. But even during the Roman era, these small settlements along the Seine had qualities that we associate with Paris today. One is a deeply embedded classicism, present in art and in literature but most visible in Parisian architecture. The Parisii, the Gallic people for whom the city is named, believed that the goddess Athena had saved Paris, son of the king of Troy, when the Greeks sacked the city. She brought him and a few followers to the Seine. So, in the minds of the Parisii, they were the direct descendants of the first classical civilization. The Romans who faced the Parisii also thought their city had been founded by a member of Trojan royalty, Aeneas, who also escaped the doomed city and made his way to the Tiber. So, in the minds of the Romans, they, too, were descended from that first classical civilization. The Roman ruins that remain in Paris, especially the Arènes and the Thermes de Cluny, are classically inspired, as are most of the public buildings in Paris built before the twentieth century. The National Assembly is only one example. And, just as today’s Paris does, Roman Paris contained many impressive shops, especially on the Île de la Cité. Boats of various descriptions brought grains, meats, and fish from the countryside down the river, as well as cheeses and fine wines. Paris had its luxurious and sensual appeal from the beginning.
* * *
. . .
I left the Arènes and continued my wandering. I began to climb an attractive double staircase on the rue Monge. A few steps up, I found a fountain from the seventeenth century that had once been connected to a Roman aqueduct that brought water to this then peripheral neighborhood of Paris. From there, the staircase rose about two stories to the rue Rollin. It was peaceful but dull, and hardly worth the climb, although I did find a marker on one building that said Descartes had lived there.
For the next quarter-hour, I walked along mostly empty streets. On a corner of the rue Lhomond, I was pondering which way to go next when an elderly gentleman stopped to ask me if I was visiting this “quartier.” I said yes, and he told me I should visit the church just down the street, at number 30. When I peered down the empty street, I saw no sign of a church. “Oh yes, it’s there,” he said. “Just ring the bell and say hello to the old woman on your right, and go into the chapel.” Then he added, in a jovial but odd way, “It’s not a Roman Catholic church, but we are all Roman Catholics.” With a jaunty wave he moved on.
I wondered what he could have meant, and was curious enough to walk down the forbidding, empty rue Lhomond to number 30, where I found two heavy wooden doors firmly closed. On the stone wall to the right was a small brass marker that read “Congrégation du Saint-Esprit.” A heavy iron knocker hung on one door, but, sure enough, there was a button in the mounting of the knocker. When I pushed it, a bell rang and the door opened onto a featureless hallway. There was indeed an old woman, in an office behind a window on my right. She pointed me toward a door. Behind it, I found myself alone in a small domed, arched, rococo chapel with beautiful stained glass. Along the walls stood full-sized statues of saints. Every transom held a painting, and behind the altar, surrounded by sculpted clouds, was a statue of Mary holding the baby Jesus on her hip. Both she and her child were wearing onion-shaped gold crowns. The chapel wasn’t kitsch, although a more jaded eye might think that it was. To me there was an absolute sincerity behind all the ornamentation that made it mysterious and moving. I found out later that the members of the Congrégation du Saint-Esprit were known as Spiritains. They are indeed Roman Catholic, but Catholics with an evangelical purpose among the poor in the undeveloped world, especially in Africa. There are about twenty-six hundred professed adherents worldwide, including about three hundred in France. But more people than that attend the services. Unfortunately, some of their missionaries have lately been accused of sexual abuse.
As I left, I opened a door that I thought led out but that in fact led into the office of the old woman. She recoiled immediately and pushed her chair away from me. “Oh non,” she said. “Non, non, non.” She was shaking and white with terror. Apologizing, I retreated and went out another door to the street. I was a little shaken myself. I had never ignited such fear in anyone. And why didn’t she recognize me? I had entered just ten minutes or so before. Perhaps she had been lost in some reverie, and I was a sudden, startling apparition just inside her door.
After that, I walked back and forth across the rue Mouffetard, where Tracy and I had wandered on our last night together in Paris. I walked down narrow streets that have survived since medieval times, climbing uphill past raucous cafés, crêperies, bakeries, butcher shops, cheese vendors, and produce stands. Sometimes, along the second stories, there were still signs in the ancient plaster for taverns that disappeared centuries ago. In one house, during a renovation in the 1930s, the workers found a cache of several thousand gold coins from the era of Louis XV.
At the foot of the rue Mouffetard, I turned onto the rue Broca. It goes under the Boulevard de Port-Royal and on to the Boulevard Arago, which is very wide and lined with tall chestnut trees. There I found the Cité Fleurie. The gate was locked, but I peered through the bars. Now it’s a nationally
protected monument, but in the late 1890s it was cheap housing where Gauguin, Modigliani, Picasso, and other artists lived. Farther down the boulevard, I saw the thick, hulking, featureless walls of La Santé Prison, which had just closed for renovation. Occasionally, there were plaques on the walls honoring the Jewish schoolchildren or the resistance fighters who were executed there during the Occupation. In 1986, a woman named Nadine Vaujour landed a helicopter on the roof of one of the buildings. Her husband, Michel Vaujour, climbed aboard, and the two flew off. He wasn’t recaptured until several months later. The only remaining pissoir (public urinal) in Paris stands on the sidewalk beside the prison. It’s all rusted and has fallen in on itself. The two ugliest sites in Paris can be captured in a single photograph.
The Boulevard Arago runs along a fenced park on the southern side of the Paris Observatory. Feral cats, a lot of them, all black and white, crouched under foliage and stared out at me suspiciously; a few feline generations ago, there must have been a huge, dominant black-and-white male. Along the rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, which runs between two major hospitals, I saw small coveys of nuns out for a walk, many of them African, talking serenely among themselves, apart from the world. When at last I arrived back at my apartment, I had been gone more than five hours.
That night, a strange event occurred. As I lay in my bed, almost asleep, I heard Tracy’s voice calling to me: “Greg. Greg.” I opened my eyes and pushed myself up off my pillow. I saw her sitting at the end of the bed. She was wearing a filmy white gown. She didn’t speak again. She sat slightly sideways to me, leaning back a little on her right arm, her head turned so she could look directly at me. I looked directly at her. Our eyes met, and I could see into them, just as if she were alive. It was really her. Her face glowed a little, but she was not moving at all. It was not frightening. I reached toward her, and she disappeared.
Paris Without Her Page 14