Brian could see that I wasn’t easy in my mind. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘it would help if we took a little break.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘We could go to Paris for a few days or a week. How about it?’
‘I guess I could get a week off.’
‘Good. As soon as you give me the word I’ll book us on Eurostar and into a hotel.’
So I talked to Karl and Georg and the following Monday we were on the train and there was that little travel-thrill to take my mind off my troubles. London zipped past, then Kent, then came the darkness of the tunnel, then France.
When we pulled into the Gare du Nord I felt as if we were really away from what we’d left behind. The sounds and echoes were full of farawayness; the roman numerals on the old clock told a different time. We queued for a taxi with smiling patience, no hurry. ‘De Fleurie Hôtel,’ Brian said to the driver. To me he said, ‘I think you’ll like it. It’s in St Germain des Près, the Latin Quarter. For your first time in Paris, the Left Bank is a good place to start.’
‘Have you stayed at this hotel before?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘but I Googled very carefully and looked at photos.’ It was a sunny day and Paris was delightful as it went past the taxi windows. The three-star hotel was as charming as advertised and from our window we could look across the river to the Eiffel Tower. We had champagne with our dinner and the whole thing felt a little like trying too hard but I was willing to try.
Brian made a big effort — we went to a lot of places and did a lot of things but most of it was lost on me in my current frame of mind. In any case I’m not good tourist material; I tend to fasten on one thing and let everything else pass me by. It was the gargoyles of Notre Dame that got to me. We earned a close view of them by a long weary climb up hundreds of steps, even as far as the great bells. Then out into the air with all Paris spread below and the gargoyles looking out on their domain. For me they are the true soul of Notre Dame, these stone creatures that seem to hold in themselves all the sorrow and cruelty of life and the world. Also the sorrow and cruelty of God, maybe, who put into human minds the idea of these animals and demons, especially the one who’s eating a human victim like a banana while others brood and think their stone thoughts high above their city.
We climbed up to Sacre Coeur, we rode down the Seine in a bateau mouche, we walked in the Tuileries and the Luxembourg Gardens. We dined at charming little restaurants and drank a lot of wine, some of it in the Place de Vosges with bags of pistachio nuts. We visited the Jeu de Paume, the Musée Rodin (I liked Camille Claudel’s work better than his), the Musée Carnavalet and the Musée d’Orsay. We went to the Louvre but only to the bookshop — the rest of it was too crowded. In the Musée d’Orsay there’s a large Daumier sketch of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza encountering a dead ass.
‘Daumier!’ said Brian, ‘there’s nobody like him. His Quixote paintings are his best work. There’s an oil sketch in a book I have at home, Quixote and Sancho on Rosinante and Dapple — it’s nothing but light and shadow. The gridwork Daumier used for transferring his sketches is clearly visible, and the Don and Rosinante are leaning through it as if moving into the fourth dimension. It’s absolutely a metaphysical painting. We’ll visit his tomb when we go to Père Lachaise. And while we’re there you can also put flowers in Victor Noir’s hat and rub his boots and crotch for luck.’
‘Who’s Victor Noir?’
‘He was a young journalist shot in 1870 by Pierre Bonaparte. The story (unauthenticated) is that he was caught with Bonaparte’s wife.’
‘Why would I rub his boots and his crotch for luck?’
‘Thousands do — you’ll see when we’re at his tomb.’
The next day after lunch at a brasserie we took the Metro to Père Lachaise and walked down the Boulevard Ménilmontant to the entrance where Brian bought a map of the cemetery and I bought a yellow rose.
‘Have you got someone in mind for that?’ he said.
‘I don’t know yet.’
The morning had been sunny but the sky had become grey and overcast; an air of gentle melancholy pervaded the place and I found it very comfortable.
‘“He that dies this year is quit for the next,”’ quoted Brian. ‘Everyone here is a fully paid-up mortal. They died peacefully or violently, publicly or privately, famously or obscurely, and here they lie, each with a name and number on the map. But not all who died here have names and numbers: for some there’s only a wall, the Mur des Fédérés: hundreds of members of the Paris Commune were stood up against it in 1871 and shot in batches. I read in Frommer’s that a handful survived and lived in the vaults like wild animals for years. They’d come out at night to forage for food in Paris. Frommer’s doesn’t say what happened to their bodies when they died.’
‘They must be ghosts now,’ I said, ‘and probably they’re known by name to the other ghosts: Héloïse and Abelard,’ I read, ‘Chopin, Jane Avril but no Toulouse-Lautrec. Here’s Daumier next to Corot at vingt-quatrième’.
‘Jim Morrison is here too,’ said Brian. ‘He pulls the most visitors.’
‘He’s probably the life of the party after midnight.’
‘More like all night; I’m sure they rock around the clock. Look at the names on the map — it’s a pretty wild crowd here.’
We made our way up Avenue Saint-Morys, did a right, and there was the flat grey slab that said:
DAUMIER
Honoré Victorin
N. Marseilles Fevrier 26 1808
M. Valmondois Fevrier 10 1879
Madame DAUMIER
Née Marie Alexandrine
DASSY
N. Paris Fevrier 2 1822
M. Paris Janvier 11 1895
‘Bonjour, Monsieur, Madame,’ said Brian. ‘Tout va bien?’ He brushed off the slab with his hand and took a notebook from his pocket. He wrote in it, tore off the page, put it on the tomb and weighted it with a pebble. ‘Thank you note,’ he said. À bientôt’, he said to the Daumiers as we left. ‘Victor Noir next.’
We turned right on to Avenue Transversale No. 1, took a left into Avenue Greffulhe, and there was Victor flat on his back with a bullet hole in his chest and a bulge in his trousers. ‘Died with a hard-on,’ said Brian. ‘Tough one, Vic’. To me he said, ‘Perhaps you’d like a few minutes alone with him?’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I would.’ Brian withdrew and I stood looking down at the life-size bronze figure. It was a little startling at first, as if he had been shot only a moment ago. His coat and jacket were opened, his shirt was unbuttoned, exposing the bullet-hole, his trousers had been loosened, and his crotch and boots were well burnished by the hands of female visitors. His top hat lay by his right side with roses and cards in it. There was a bouquet by his left hand. I kissed my yellow rose and put it in his hat. I rubbed his erection and his boot, said, ‘Anything you can do, Victor,’ blew him a kiss and joined Brian.
‘Père Lachaise is a good pick-up place,’ he said. ‘You can find whatever kind of woman you’re looking for here.’
‘Live ones?’
‘Very.’
‘Have you picked up any?’
‘Not lately. Is there anyone else here you’d like to drop in on?’
I thought of Jane Avril with her long face and her high-kicking leg in the Lautrec poster but I decided to keep that image in my mind rather than her tomb so we headed back to the Boulevard Ménilmontant. The cemetery was full of trees and shadows. I recognised the yew and the rowan, not the others. The sun came out and the monuments went pale.