Vagabondes: Women, Walking

-What do you like about living in Paris?

-That it’s feminine.

-Feminine?

-It has curves. It’s slow. Buildings are close to the ground. You can wander. You can’t wander in Manhattan.

-Conversation with Cyndi, who moved to Paris last year from New York

The French language offers a wealth of words for walking, a dictionary list, long and imagistic, of ways of moving through the space. While we stride and amble along the glittery cement of American cities with “skyscraper wallpaper,” to use Jim Carroll’s description in The Basketball Diaries, the French are apt to se promener or errer, along the cracks and crevices of cobblestone, amidst marble façades that stretch up only a few stories.

I contemplate cobblestone: maybe that is what slows them, eases the pace of “walking” into “wandering.” Its uneven edges, its dips and drop-offs, remind you to slacken your step for fear of stumbling, to look around as the land shifts endlessly beneath your feet and you realign your stride.

Of all the words for Parisian peregrinations, vagabonder is my favorite, perhaps because it calls to mind Cosette. As a writer, divorcée, and cabaret performer, she often matches her character Renée in La Vagabonde, a self-described dame seule, re-envisioning her existence after parting ways with her partner. Both women seem shared between the desire to settle into stability with someone else and an equal longing to revel in the terrifying freedom of singularity.

People say Paris is a great city for couples, but I think Paris is a great place to be alone.

It was a statement made by one of my first friends here, each of us in some ways like Renée, each of us realigning our strides as the land shifted. As she suggested, when you are alone, you look both outward and inward. You notice more. When coupled, you look at one another. John Donne had said it best in “The Good Morrow”:

For love all love of other sights controls

And makes one little room an everywhere

Cyndi had commented on the curves. A popular saying, quoted on Parisian post cards reads: Ajouter deux lettres à Paris, c’est le paradis. (Add two letters to Paris and it’s paradise.), but the city’s concentric circles might remind the errant traveler of Dante’s rings of hell. Descend to his innermost circle, the ninth ring reserved for traitors, and you will rub shoulders with Mordred, Cain, Judas Iscariot, and Satan, himself, frozen in a lake called Cocytus. But if you spiral into the center of Paris, you’ll find the first circle, point zéro, a copper-colored stud on the parvis in front of Notre Dame from which all distances are measured. It’s as if Paris is a pinwheel of an art project, expanded, glittered and glued, cut and crafted, by 2,000 years’ worth of city dwellers, and the creation is all held together by a tiny golden brad.

Dante’s inner ring promises perpetual punishment; Paris’s, perpetual pleasure.

Point zéro is a wishing stone, but no two wishes are the same, nor are the ways of wishing. Some days, as I’ve watched, people toss coins onto it, a price paid, even if a pittance, for what’s wanted. Other days, they touch their toes to the middle, close their eyes. Still other times, they tiptoe over it. Once, I saw several people, one after another, step into point zéro and spin around, as if you really had to spiral into the center of something in order to know which direction to take, which one would one would wind you outwards toward your wish.

Many walking tours begin in the center. Many times, even if I begin on this outskirts, I walk almost subconsciously towards it, submitting to the city’s centripetal pull.

There’s a literary archetype in French literature, le flâneur, that arose from another word for walking. Flâner is a verb that describes a leisurely, aimless stroll, defined as se promener sans but, au hasard, pour le plaisir de regarder or “to walk without aim, haphazardly, for the pleasure of looking” (Larousse’s online dictionary). I think of it as the exact opposite in time, aim, and gait, of a power walk. In the nineteenth century, as Baron Haussmann revised the city’s geography, expanded streets and cleaned up the infect sewage of boue, walking became easier and more pleasant. People, and personages took to the streets. Masculine ones, that is.

In a book review of Catherine Nesci’s academic work devoted to the subject of flânerie (Les Flâneurs et les flâneuses: Les femmes et la ville à l’époque romantique) Denise Davidson comments on the qualities of the flâneur:

“ . . . The classic flâneur of the early and mid nineteenth century symbolized the transformations of modern, urban life. In Baudelaire’s writings of the 1860s, [ . . . ] the flâneur is associated with bohemian Paris. He was an artist and an intellectual, an upper-class man of leisure, a dandy and a connoisseur of the pleasures of the city. In Le Flâneur et les flâneuses, Catherine Nesci focuses on an earlier period, when the flâneur took a slightly different form, and was more an observer and chronicler of all that he saw than an artist transforming it through his creative impulses.” (H France Review Vol. 8 September 2008 121)

In literature of the same period, women walking often translated to promiscuity, real or perceived. Women, who flânent unchaperoned, are seen as a softer version of street walkers. How funny that our euphemisms in English and in French still suggest a connection between women’s walking and loose morals. The term faire du trottoir or, literally, “to do some sidewalk” means to sell one’s body, offer it up to the public for more than viewing pleasure. Balzac’s novel Ferragus, le chef des dévorants commences with the premise that every Parisian street has a character, and certain streets are so notorious that simply being seen on them can ruin a woman’s reputation.

Oui donc, il est des rues, ou des fins de rue, il est certaines maisons, inconnues pour la plupart aux personnes du grand monde, dans lesquelles une femme appartenant à ce monde ne saurait aller sans faire penser d’elle les choses les plus cruellement blessantes

Yes, there are streets or ends of streets, there are certain houses unknown to the majority of people in the wider world in which a woman who belongs to this world would know to not go into without having people think the most cruelly injurious things of her.

Yet, women want to walk, to move about, uncorseted, to stretch and stroll and claim the space. Some of Dumas’s characters in The Queen’s Necklace, Oliva and Jeanne de la Motte, sneak out of their towers for witching hour walks. The author George Sand, who adopted a male pseudonym for the purposes of publication, cross-dressed to be able to circulate freely.

She writes in Histoire de ma vie, “La découverte jubilatoire du monde par la flâneuse travestie donne ainsi naissance à la creation artistique: la ville se fait paysage et espace de la rêverie.” (The cross-dressing flâneuse’s jubilatory discovery of the world gives birth to artistic creation: the city transforms into a landscape and space for reverie.)

Perhaps, because it was once denied us, we desire to vagabonder on broad avenues and cramped alleys. Maybe that is why people like Cyndi, like me, like so many other women I’ve met take such pleasure in the slow discovery of self and city that occurs on winding walks though Paris’s curves.

-What did you do on your last night in Paris? I asked Liz, who left this morning.

-I went on a walk.

Sometimes, as a woman, it is still dangerous to walk alone. I have encountered women who will never walk unaccompanied, who imagine danger waiting in every shadow. In college, my first-year roommate called a male chaperone for the three-block walk between the bookstore where she worked until nine and our dorm. She was always safe, but what sadness I saw in that safety. What willingness to relinquish freedom.

As I have written before, I have been attacked in my apartment, in broad daylight, on a Sunday afternoon, with all of the neighbors nearby, at a time and in a place where I felt perfectly safe. I have been scared into submission, physically overpowered. I have wondered briefly and powerfully if I was about to die and how. I still jump if someone startles me on the sidewalk. I still, on occasion, have nightmares.

And I still walk myself home.

Paris: Well Worth a (Hot) Messe

Paris vaut bien une messe. (Paris is well worth a mass.)

-Words of Henri IV, the first Bourbon king, in reference to his conversion to Catholicism in order to assume the French throne

Boulevard Henri IV radiates out from place de la Bastille, just a cobblestone’s throw from where I live. The big boulevard, named after the first Bourbon monarch, geographically links the storied king to the once-was prison, the stones of which bolstered barricades during the Revolution.

For some believers, religion, like the Bastille, is a sort of invisible prison, with its creeds and rules, its prescriptions for interactions with God. But Henri IV refused to be locked into anyone else’s God logic. Any die-hard denominational Christian might consider him a fair-weather worshipper. He had already converted from Protestantism to Catholicism to avoid death in the massacre de la Saint Barthélemy then returned to Catholicism once his coronation depended upon it, pinballing between two faiths all of his life since his parents differed in confession.

I imagine his last conversion as a sort of a quick and dirty ceremony, at the basilique Saint-Denis, on the way into Paris. Henri, throwing up his hands and bellowing, “Oh, what the enfer! If this is what it takes to be king, pourquoi pas? It’s not like I haven’t done it before.”

In the past two weeks, I’ve attended mass twice, and each time it’s been, well, messe-y. I have always been clumsy at church, despite having grown up in one. I fumble a little in prayer, drop the hymnal, twist and fidget in the pew, never know how many hands to shake during the passing of the peace.

Another recent example of this confessional clumsiness? Last week, I stopped into l’église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis in the Marais for the specific purpose of praying before a statue of my favorite saint, Joan of Arc, and spent half an hour jabbering away to the wrong martyr before realizing that my beloved Joan statue was actually about 75 feet behind me.

There’s a phrase from a song by the Avett Brothers, whom I first heard singing in the fellowship hall of the small Methodist church where we grew up, that sums up this rough-around-the-edges desire to be good:

And I don’t know if my soul is saved

Sometimes I use curse words when I pray

You see, when you grow up in rural North Carolina, you hear a lot of talk about “being saved,” and it can really jar you into believing that if you haven’t had a particular kind of come-to-Jesus moment, you might have wandered off the path, taken an accidental detour to a place Christians might describe as a “hot mess.”

“Hot mess” is an expression I first encountered when I moved to Louisiana. A grad student from Lafayette had applied it to the bureaucracy at LSU. Culturally, it makes sense. No matter what kind of mess you’re in in Louisiana, it’s always worse when it’s ninety degrees and you’re sweat-streaked, hair all frizzed from the humidity.

How do you say “hot mess” in French? I’d translate it as C’est le bordel, which literally means, “It’s the whorehouse,” but can generally be applied to any crazy or disorganized situation.

In an attempt to practice churchgoing, and maybe get better at it, I decided to attend mass at Notre Dame this morning. Instead of being one of those tourists who shuffled through the herd to gawk at the rose windows while being pick-pocketed, I’d continue my experiment of trying to have non-touristy experiences in touristy places. And believe me, it DOES feel very strange to have people flashing photos of you in your pew, praying, or up at the front, receiving communion.

Last week, after a trip to the American Cathedral of Paris, I’d made the mistake of calling the “flesh” component of the Eucharist “the wafer” a couple of times. “The HOST,” my upstairs neighbor, who invited me, corrected. (Apparently, “wafer” connotes “Nilla” rather than “body of Christ.”) She said the proper way to take communion was to let the host melt on your tongue.

So, imagine my surprise this morning when the priest bit off a piece of the wafer, (um, host) which was, afterall, the size of a silver dollar, then put the rest in his mouth and visibly chewed it. It was actually a relief to see him, up there in front of hundreds of people, nibble off a piece of the host like he was snacking on a Ritz cracker instead of experiencing transubstantiation. If he can take communion that casually in one of the most celebrated cathedrals in the world, maybe there’s more than one way to be good. Another line from the song comes to mind . . .

I don't doubt that the good book is true

But what's right for me might not be right for you

The service, which involved Gregorian chants and readings from Hebrews and Luke, lifted my spirits, though post-communion I wondered if I’d committed a terrible sin by receiving the sacrament without being Catholic.

On my way out, I stopped by another statue of Joan of Arc and said a few prayers for the people I loved. Since my friends John and Emily would be getting married a few hours later and I wouldn’t make it across the Atlantic in time, I asked for a blessing for them. As I prayed, I remembered the overheard words of a woman on a cell phone behind the cash register of the cathedral’s gift shop a few days prior.

Tu demandes à Dieu.

Tu lui demandes rien, il va rien faire!

Ask God.

If you don’t ask him for anything, he won’t do anything!

It was a funny image, God just lazing about, thumb-twiddling, lounging on some futon in heaven, waiting for his pager to buzz, when timid Christians couldn't summon the gumption to ask him for anything. I bet this woman used “tu” instead of “vous” when she prayed. I bet, every once in a while, she let a curse word slip.

Parisian Prison Breaks, Saints, and Sinners

“Sailing past the Conciergerie’s floodlit towers on an evening boat cruise, it is hard to imagine the fear that lurked within its walls during the five centuries it served as a prison. But step inside the gloomy main hall, and the sense of oppression is palpable.” –Fodors’s See It, Paris

Tuesday, I broke into a prison, the front hall of which conveniently resembled a church, and because I’m not good at being bad, I immediately confessed, pleading for a pardon that should have been invalidated by the fact that I was actually delighted to be inside.

Like many sins, it began innocently. On a self-guided stroll, I came to the Conciergerie, a castle of a cell which had once housed Marie Antoinette and other enemies of the Revolution, pre-beheading. Discouraged by the line that snaked along the building, I peered in through a side door, wondered if it was worth it. It was an exit door. Visitors kept bustling out. After the second or third person held it for me, I just slid inside, tiptoed down the stone stairs, and waited vaguely to be arrested. But no one paid me any attention . . . they’d seen worse.

Standing there, under the ribbed vaulting, glancing at the security guard inspecting the bags of everyone who hadn’t stepped in through the out door, in the fashion of a Led Zeppelin album, I remembered what Andrew said. At the close of our Nineteenth-Century Criminal Fictions class, he annotated a class photo of all of us from the last day, saying which characters from Hugo, Dumas, Dickens, and Balzac we most resembled. Of me, his caption read: “Tara=Jeanne de la Motte. She looks so sweet in this picture, but I get the sense she could sly her way around if she needed to.”

Jeanne de la Motte claimed to be a long-lost descendent of the Valois line who won Marie Antoinette’s favor then betrayed her in a scam that involved forgeries, lookalikes, and a diamond necklace originally commissioned for Louis XV’s mistress, and eventually sold for parts, its jewels supposedly scattered across the continent.

Unlike Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, and their children, Jeanne de la Motte evaded la guillotine. Two of the walls of the Conciergerie named all who hadn’t. An expansive plaque reads “Les Guillotinés de la Révolution,” with the bizarre subtitle, “Liste générale et très exacte des 2 780 condamnés à mort à Paris.” I laughed when I read “très exacte.” Who exactly had come along and scoffed, “Why, that’s merely an approximate list!” to be met with such a haughty, passive-aggressive reply?

Of the executed, there were perruquiers (wigmakers), brasseurs (brewers), jardiniers (gardeners), prêtres, (preachers) and many, many ex-nobles. Though the list of condemned might be exact, I have read that the guillotine wasn’t always. That it sometimes took more than once.

I ponder prisons each time I exit my metro stop, Bastille. The building once the dwelling place of Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade, is now only a ghost of an outline, painted on the place, its stones scattered and lost like the rocks in the necklace.

I wonder, how is Paris a prison? Like the Conciergerie, it is also externally breathtaking, but how does it lock one in?

Hmm . . . maybe it locked you into a kind of perpetual tourism. Even when you knew the city, people could treat you as a tourist, insulating you from authenticity by speaking to you in English, for example, even if you persisted in speaking French.

The first time I’d ordered a sandwich jambon-fromage, on that first field trip to France, the practiced phrase echoed through my head for the quarter of an hour I stood in line (Je voudrais un sandwich mixte, s’il vous plaît. Je voudrais un sandwich mixte.) I was met with a dismissive, “Yes. What else?” in a stand-off of textbook language phrases.

I believe in reversal rituals, that you can undo one experience with another, so I decided to choose the most touristy place I could find and vow to have a purely Parisian untouristy experience. Luckily, it didn’t look long. Right outside of the Conciergerie sat a café called “Les doux palais.” Given that the menu was posted in six languages, it clearly catered to out-of-towners. I’d order the most typically touristy thing I could think of (a croque-monsieur) but do it in a place only a local would, (at the counter).

Commander au comptoir is the French equivalent of ordering at the bar, except you don’t linger as long since you have to stand. Your reward? A cheaper price. A 4.60 meal instead of one for 6 euros.

I have never seen a French person order a croque monsieur and suspect Americans are only partial to them because they use loaf bread instead of baguettes, but still seem exotic enough with their mix of melted cheese and béchamel on top. Besides, they’re as familiar as foreign food can be. Heavily featured in French I textbooks, they’re the lunchtime equivalent of a croissant. Croissants for breakfast, croque monsieurs for lunch, and escargots for dinner. Wasn’t that what French people ate? How many restaurant-themed skits had I seen my own students perform that featured this simple little sandwich in a starring role?

-Vous désirez, madame?

-Je prends un croque monsieur, s’il vous plaît.

I revealed I was an amateur to counter culture by squeezing into a space too small. The barman gallantly glossed over my gaffe and gestured to my right where a man with a half-drunk cup of café perused Le Parisien. Ici, madame, vous pouvez faire de la gymnastique ! (Here, Madame, you can do gymnastics!)

I strolled over, stretched my arms out in appreciation, claiming the space, and wondered if I should oblige him by cartwheeling down the shiny, silver counter. Last January, when the Saints scored the final touchdown of the Superbowl, a girl at the wings joint in Baton Rouge where friends and I surveyed the spectacle climbed onto the bar and slid into a split, her arms waving over her head like she was in the fast bend of a roller coaster.

New Orleans and Paris intertwine in my mind. An undergraduate in the LSU French department once showed me her tattoo, a scrolly Latin phrase, that wound up her right side. Fluctuat nec mergitur: “Tossed by the waves, she does not sink.”

It’s Paris’s motto, she said, but it reminds me of New Orleans. Of Katrina.

New Orleans, too, has its signature sandwich, the muffaletta. All the tourists made sure to eat one at Central Grocery on Decatur Avenue in the French Quarter. Back in Paris, I ate my sandwich the non-touristy way, with a fork and knife. I people-watched, paid, and left.

In an hour’s time, I’d broken into one prison and out of another.

Unlocked: “Higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide”

I walked to the Pont des Arts and made a list.

I tore the list into a handful of confetti to scatter in the Seine.

I took the lock from my purse.

I kissed it, slid the key in, unfastened it, let it spring open.

I tossed the lock and both keys in the river and walked home a different way.

Lovelocked

“Ce n’est jamais aussi simple que ça en a l’air.” (It’s never as simple as it seems.) - my professor, in reference to life in the Moroccan harems in the 1800s

The locks had become a shade more sinister.

The first sign was the brand names, all in large letters on the front. The most common by far were Abus, Master, and Bull. Each undermined the sweet, simple, sentimental first vision of the lovelocks. Abus means “abuse” in French. Master suggested an inherent imbalance in relationships, the idea that someone is always empowered, while another is enslaved by sentiment. Bull seemed to mock some of the public declarations of love with a crafty little “ha!” in the juxtaposition. Tim and Laura . . . BULL.

What did it mean to symbolize love with a lock?

Looking at the locks, hung from the grating, I could not help but wonder if love imprisoned. In a conversation before things ended, the last person I loved explained his leaving by his uneasiness with the idea of being “locked in.”

It was a sad thought, being the warden of someone’s passions. Pacing the perimeter of the heart, guarding against intruders. Contentment guards against its own intruders, does not need to lock in or be locked in. How many of the lovelocked couples felt locked in? How many had felt pressure to make a public profession of passion?

One of my students from Louisiana, recently wrote to me to request a recommendation letter for a study abroad program in France. I wrote back that I’d gladly write it but was concerned that the fact that I’d be mailing it from France might delay her application. “Oh Madame!” she wrote back. “You are living a life I dream of. No strings!”

Strings . . . Couldn’t they make you high strung, strung out, strung along? Didn’t you get tangled up in them? Tied down?

Where else did I most often see locks in Paris? On the bouquinistes’s bookstands. Personally, I couldn’t imagine wanting to steal one of the crinkle-paged, yellowed books they sell, afraid it would disintegrate under my fingertips. I liked a durable companion of a book that I could annotate and shuffle around at the bottom of my backpack. But we guard what we value. We assume someone else will value it, too.

The other day, I stopped into the musée du vin in the 15^th. A young man walked in just after I did and asked if he could leave a heavy-bottomed bag of his belongings at the front counter while he toured.

-Is it valuable? the woman at the counter asked.

-No, it’s not valuable. But it’s very important to me.

Later, when he was reunited with the important bag, I asked what was in it.

-My rollerskates, he replied.

Last year I was held up. I had left my door unlocked. Before my robber left, rode off on my bicycle with a backpack of electronics, he shut me in a closet. “Stay in here so you don’t get hurt,” he said in a tone strangely protective for someone who’d had a kitchen knife to my throat a few minutes earlier. My heart hiccoughed when the door closed. He had left it unlocked for me, the way I’d left it unlocked for him.

He had just gotten out of prison, and he knew what it felt like to be locked in.

Symbol Sorting and Sign Language

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Et nos amours

Faut-il que je m’en souviens ?

La joie venait toujours après la peine.

-Apollinaire, “Le pont Mirabeau”

When I think of bridges, of love, of Paris, I cannot help but think of Apollinaire’s poem, “Le pont Mirabeau.” (Find it and a translation at the end of the post.)

The bridge itself, which links the 15^th to the 16^th arrondissement lies much further down the river than the Pont des Arts, which sits in the center, emanating out from the Louvre in the 1^st.

The poem is a bit of a break-up anthem, about layovers of the less lovely variety. About standing still in the space between yesterday and tomorrow for a little longer than you expected to. About knowing that things have begun to shift around you but wanting to fix yourself in the place where you had once been with your love and be still with the souvenir.

I imagine the speaker standing there on the bridge, remembering his beloved at a time when they were there together and the stillness came from the calm of shared things rather than inertia.

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face

Tandis que sous


Le pont de nos bras passe

Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse

For him, in memories, love bridges the two of them, their arms arced, echoing the structure where they’d once stood.

It’s dark and broody and true. If I had tried to study it with my high schoolers when I taught World Literature, some tenth grader would have dismissed it as “so emo.” Maybe the one who slouched in his seat and regularly forgot his homework. Then, one of the girls would look out the window at something that wasn’t there, and return the next day with a few of Apollinaire’s verses written on her binder. Later, you’d remember they used to date. That one day, a couple months ago, she’d been very quiet, her eyes a little red.

There’s a refrain in the poem, a foregone conclusion that metes out the message:

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure

Les jours s'en vont je demeure.

The speaker seems stuck. Perhaps it is the first time he’s been back to the bridge without his chérie, before different memories could crowd out the current connotations. His mind loops back to the same thoughts, the way couples loop back to the same patterns, dynamics, conversations.

Often, at night on the Pont des Arts, a few guitar players and drummers begin a sing-along, the refrain of which is Bob Marley. He’s the artist they always come back to. French people of a certain age and population love him, but they don’t always know the words to his songs. There’s a great French expression for this, the slurred word sing-along style of someone who’s vague on the lyrics, especially in another language. It’s called chanter du yaourt, or “to sing yogurt.” So, the voices fade and wane for stretches, but everyone knows the chorus:

Is this love, is this love, is this love, is this love that I’m feeling? Is this love, is this love, is this love, is this love that I’m feeling?

Though I’ve heard it many times, more times here than elsewhere, and forget much of it, one image sticks:

We’ll share the same room, with a roof right over our heads.

We’ll share the shelter of my single bed.

I had always loved that last phrase and its conjurations of two lovers, their limbs twisted together in a space that verged on cramped but was instead cozy. Don’t many relationships begin in single beds? In dorm rooms?

The first time I left France, I left someone I loved very much. To reassure me, he said, “When you come back, we’ll live together.”

-What will our place look like?

-It will be a very big apartment with a very small bed.

It soothed us with what we knew. One evening, several months earlier, I had sat on the edge of his small bed. From across the room, near the door, he looked at me and said he loved me. I said, Moi aussi, je t’aime. He walked over to bed, sat down beside me, took my twenty-one-year-old face in his hands and said, Moi aussi, je t’aime with earnestness equal to mine. I felt confused. Weren’t we even? Wasn’t this getting redundant?

-Wait. What did you just say a minute ago?

-I said I was turning off the lights. J’éteins.

Later, it became our code. Hey . . . I’m turning off the lights. Yeah, I’m turning off the lights, too.

Back to the bridge. The refrain, so far, of these writings. My friend Cathleen and I questioned some teenagers one night. They said the locks weren’t just for couples.

-C’est pour faire un voeu.

-Oh! For wish making? About anything?

-No, he clarified, A wish for someone to love you.

It reminded me of an earlier trip to New Orleans, to the tomb of Marie Laveau, a nineteenth-century creole voodoo priestess of the French Quarter. People traveled to her tomb for the same reason. You knocked, whispered your love wish, scratched three chalk Xs in on the marble exterior, then left her a gift.

Dark chocolate. A string of red beads. Candles stubs. A folded note.

I’m not sure how many native New Orleanians do it, but the teenagers seemed to think the lovelocks or cadenas d’amour on the Pont des Arts were the traces of tourists. You made your wish, or announced your mutual love with a lock, then tossed the key in the Seine. Later, authorities in Paris might come by and remove all of them, as they had in late May.

Who gets that job? What kind of anti-romantic feels good about slashing through all those symbols of love? Maybe it’s the police department’s equivalent of Apollinaire’s speaker. Some guy who just got dumped. The other gendarmes agree, “It’ll be good for him. All he does anymore is stand on that bridge.”

Our conversation about the locks was interrupted when one girl, followed by the group, stormed off to confront a clump of boys on the opposite side who kept shining a laser into her face. Were they trying to flirt in a third-grade kind of way? Like pulling a pigtail or popping a bra strap? It wasn’t working. She was furious.

I watched for a second, as she strode across towards them, her friends behind. Saw their bodies, confrontational, posturing anger. Saw the other boys stand up, followed by some gesturing, but glanced away after a minute. If we couldn’t hear them from here, it couldn’t be too bad.

We’re discussing the profile of the lock placers when they return. Ana says they have to be very young, that it’s just another version of making a big heart on the bathroom wall and filling it with names: Addie and Burleigh 4-ever, Terry + Beth = LOVE. We agree that Parisians must do it less. The grand gesture works better when you don’t have to pass by it daily, after things have gone sour.

-Hey, what happened?

She mumbled something.

-They were drunk?

-Non, pas saouls. Sourds! Not drunk, deaf!

She shrugs. And we don’t know sign language.

I cannot help. I only know the signs for billy goat, Jesus, and popcorn, none of which seem relevant. As I write, there is a woman in the apartment above me screaming in Spanish. In the past, the police have come. Once, there was a broken flowerpot on the sidewalk. I cannot understand her, but I imagine that she’s warring with someone she loves. That the same language doesn’t always make it easier.

Le pont Mirabeau

par Guillaume Apollinaire

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine.

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante
L’amour s’en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l’Espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Mirabeau Bridge

Translated by Richard Wilbur

Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine
Must I recall
Our loves recall how then
After each sorrow joy came back again

Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay

Hands joined and face to face let's stay just so
While underneath
The bridge of our arms shall go
Weary of endless looks the river's flow

Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay

All love goes by as water to the sea
All love goes by
How slow life seems to me
How violent the hope of love can be

Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay

The days the weeks pass by beyond our ken
Neither time past
Nor love comes back again
Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine

Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay