to include the chateau, its new furnishings, as well as a walk about the park. The date was the second Friday of May. One could reserve a seat on the tour bus by simply calling the number listed. The bus would leave from Sainte-Chapelle, promptly at eight that morning. I tore out the number, glanced through a few more articles, then dropped the paper in a nearby waste drum. I decided that I would sign up for this événement. Besides, Mme. Gibert had captivated my interest, and being in her presence again would be exciting and pleasurable. Her eyes had searched my own so invitingly, her glances at once flirtatious and monitorial, seductive and remonstrative. I would have to be prepared.Prepared or not for Mme. Gibert, I was unprepared for what erupted upon my return to the pension.
“Another robbery!” shrilled the French, red-haired woman, who had scolded her daughter the night before. “Will it be murder next?” she all but shouted in Madame Dufavre’s face.
“Please, Madame, control yourself. I have called the police. They will be here soon.”
I could have sworn I saw a man in the Madame’s apartment. He had slunk behind the door the instant I looked his way. He had been slipping into his coat, as if to depart. I knew what Angleterre would conclude.
“My jewelry, Francine’s, a watch, and my money—all, all are gone!”
“Ah, Professor Clarke, you are always so calm!” Dufavre addressed me, as if that mantra would bring solace to the woman.
“How does that help?” wailed the young French mother. “We shall have to move if it can’t be found.”
Dufavre looked away with grim intensity. Suddenly, Angleterre appeared with a torn pillow slip in her hands. “I found this on your balcony. It was caught on the inside window latch. Money and jewelry are still in it.” She handed it to Dufavre, to verify her discovery.
“That’s mine!” said the woman, snatching it from the proprietress’s hand. “Thank God! What a hell of a place! What a way to start the day! At least, the bastard dropped it!” She immediately looked inside to see if anything was missing.
The man in Dufavre’s apartment had still not come out. If he had been the thief, then how did he get off the balcony? Had he simply walked out through the woman’s room? No! The pillow slip got caught in the window. He must have exited that way. We heard a siren in the street. The gendarmes would soon be in the hall. I went back to the stairwell, climbed the steps to the fourth floor, and returned to my room. I would forego breakfast, study awhile, and take a walk. It was difficult, however, to concentrate on my work. Pascal was a thousand miles removed from my thoughts, as were Rousseau, Baudelaire, Descartes and Kant. Fighting distraction, I picked up a book of Rainer Rilke’s poems and began reading. Like Baudelaire, Rilke had a way of inserting his consciousness into the objects of his lyrical observations. He brought a whole other way of lifting his subjects into the reader’s awareness, and therefore of providing a shocking venue for an immediate self-consciousness and knowledge of the world. His way of knowing, his epistemological methodology, defied definition. Was it something I should use in my own book? It was more gestalt than logical, an all-at-once assault, a comprehension that revealed the truth, while concealing the miracle of how. Husserl attempted to “bracket the truth,” but the phenomenological character of Rilke’s approach inspired my interests. Nowhere was this more transparent than in his poem, “The Panther.” After consulting my German dictionary for words like allerkleinsten and angespannt, I translated his work as follows:
The Panther
From ever gazing through the endless bars
his sight, now dazed, has lost its focal power;
before him looms a thousand tedious bars;
behind him, a caged-in world retires.
The soft gait of his strong and supple stride
turns on the circle of the tightest point;
like a ballet dancer poised at center stage,
his mighty will stares back, stupefied.
Sometimes his pupils’ membranes blink
enough to let an image in;
it glides along his tense and quivering limbs
and dies unrecognized in his heart.
That kind of philosophy unnerved me. Yet it spoke the truth; it struck the limpid chords of my mind with somber reality. Yes! This is life. We know it in our head and in our soul. Life is dying in our hearts. Silent and stupefied, we gaze from our cage, like Rilke’s panther, our wills petrified. Our outer frame remains, but our limbs do not respond. Heidegger would label this way of knowing personal. His famous definition of Dasein, or of being, hinged on the realization that the beingness of being is always personal, mine, my own, and that it equally includes the future, my future, and all its possibilities. The Panther had no future, because he had no possibilities of choice, no place to step, save in his endless path behind the iron bars.
Such knowing requires rigorous self-analysis and unflinching self-consciousness. From this epistemological basis, Heidegger would go on to characterize human life as a troika of stringent facts: that our Dasein, or our beingness, occurs at a particular time and place, within the context of a particular culture, language, and history. He called this its facticity, which we must own and cannot deny. Second is existence. It entails the recognition that we are accountable for our lives and what we make of them. To that extent, moods of guilt and remorse are not our enemies, but our friends. They represent choices that have run amuck but which can be rectified. Lastly, comes fallenness, or forfeiture. If we do not seize upon our existence, take accountability for its past and future, and acknowledge the facticity of our time and place—that we are here and not somewhere else—then we will fall into inauthenticity and forfeit our Dasein. “The Panther” was Rilke’s symbol of fractured Dasein, long before Heidegger had taken up his pen.
It was all so clear on paper, in Heidegger’s books and mind. But how could I tell that to Madame Angleterre, or Madame Cueillier, the waitress, or Charlene, the dishwasher, or even Odette Dufavre? “Listen, all of you. Cast off your forfeiture! Come down, dear waitress from the servants’ floor; descend those steps, dishwasher girl; abandon that attic where you mold for a brighter world! And who will give you that brighter world? Why, of course, you and you alone! Yes! You, yourself. Who else did you think would give it to you?” Already their choices were compromised, their facticity defined by dishes and towels, by their failure to qualify for the école normale supérieure. Now they were faced with a thousand unyielding bars. Yet, Heidegger was right. At what point does the Panther’s blink stop sinking in its heart, forcing its fangs to bear and its lips to snarl? I walked to the windows and looked out again. A topaz sky beckoned me to come into the streets, to find reprieve from the madness of learned tomes, and to experience existence through my own feelings and moods, my own sensory preceptors and psychosphere.
Bright sunshine filled the Garden of Luxembourg’s aisles. Their flower beds and blossoming plants welcomed the radiant sun. A lemon hue bathed the refection pools and statues in languorous light. I wandered down past the central basin, where little boys skipped about the lake and watched their boats sail across the water. I found a bench in a quiet corner by the Medici Fountain. As I listened to its restful cascades, a chapel hymn from seminary days drifted through my mind:
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose
