Paris Twilight Read Online Free PDF Page A

We don’t die of
l’amour
, anyway, Daniel, as I told you, as you know, as we both know, love dies of us.
    At any rate, I don’t have the attention span required for proper dissolution, or even for proper indulgence, can never remember the name of the dish that was so divine last night, or the vintage of an excellent wine. If, as the master said, Parisian life is dominated by two passions, for ideas and for fornication, my Paris was dominated by only the first. My affection was not for the voluptuary’s city, but for a harder and lighter one—of music on the one hand and science on the other, Gabriel Fauré to Marie Curie,
Tannhäuser
(second version) to the Observatoire, a city of cosmic order strung together by endless miles of cold stone streets that could be walked as beautifully on an inclement day as any. Which is good, since I love to walk, though on this day I gave up, finally, and took a coward’s refuge in the Métro. I changed trains at Concorde and rode four stops, slipping beneath the angry river, and exited at Sèvres-Babylone.
    The escalator carried me to a place where I’d never been. A vast intersection, a busy bend around a park lined with Beaux Arts façades—it struck me at once as not only un-Parisian but oddly un-itself. Its grand expanses lacked grandeur, and its grandeurs—those façades—lacked the conspiratorial confidentiality that makes impressive Paris enticing as well. I’d been in the
quartiers
that lay to either side of here, rue du Bac and Saint-Sulpice, tourist places, retail places, sure, but nevertheless as intricate in texture as this strange place was bald. Its baldness wasn’t ugly so much as deadpan, undistinguished, interchangeable. Unlike any Paris I’d ever seen, this spot could be anywhere, or at least in any of many elsewheres: Buenos Aires or Beirut, Dupont Circle, Astor Place. There was one exception to the elevated drab: the nouveau-deco face of the (according to its neon tiara) Hôtel Lutetia. Rouchard’s instructions directed me quickly down boulevard Raspail away from the square and into a warren of narrow and narrower streets, where I walked until I found myself at the dead end of an impasse, facing a giant gray door.
    Press in the code, leap the transom; I spun in the center of a cobblestoned courtyard for a moment, an umbrella ballet—Pas de Deux with Bumbershoot—searching for a resident, a concierge, a stray deliveryman, anyone who could direct me. No one was about. The atelier windows lining the ground floor were dark, and most of them shuttered, and so I headed through the only door that seemed a likely bet, in the corner farthest from the street. It admitted me into a little oval alcove at the foot of a narrow spiral staircase. The stairs curved up steeply for five or six stories, hugging the silo wall. All this felt like a rear exit to some establishment, not a main entrance, but it was what I had, so I went up. Top floor, Rouchard had said, and I climbed until I couldn’t anymore and the ascent leveled out into a short, brutish stub of a hallway. The hallway had three doors. One door sported a ceramic tile decorated with a blue amphora and a Greek surname, another emitted the hollow plink of a slow drip into a water tank—the WC, I surmised—and the third was distinguished only by a coir mat reading (was it the exclamation point that made it seem sarcastic?)
Bienvenue, Mes Amis!
I smoothed my dress and turned the key in the lock.
    The door cracked open, and I staggered back a step. A breath of air had splurged out, and what an evil breath it was, corrosive, mephitic. My eyes smarted, and I turned my head as I stepped inside as though to evade the brunt of something. “Anyone here?” I called. No answer, no echo; the place was neither occupied nor empty. “Hello?” I felt the wall for a light switch, found none. Clasping the bandanna against my mouth, I stepped