the old woman’s shoulders. “Bien sur, I will get thee something,” I murmured. I hurried to a corner market along Saint Michel, grabbed a bottle of citron or lemonade from a kiosk, gave the startled vendor five francs, and walked quickly back to the church’s steps. The old woman was gone. Her outer wrap was still there, but she was gone. Then I spotted her under the portico. Several people had gathered about her. At first, I thought she was dead. “Ah, la pouvre ame!” exclaimed a woman beside her. “They shouldn’t let these people wander about like this.” I pushed my way through the onlookers and knelt beside the woman. “Your water, Madame.” She managed to sit up. I removed the bottle’s cap and assisted her while she gulped a modicum of swallows. She began to aspirate. Her frail body shook with each cough. The spasms wouldn’t stop. I could smell her body odor and horrible breath. I tried thumping her back with the palm of my hand. All was to no avail. The crowd of gawkers increased. “Allez, find a gendarme!” someone said angrily. “Yes, please!” I agreed. The woman’s face turned ashen. A faint trembling vibrated along her body. Her eyes stared up at mine. They were swollen, watery, red. She was trying to say something. “Madame, we are sending for help.” I heard a claxon’s shrill horn somewhere down the street. A small car with two police officers arrived. It was beginning to rain. The taller of the two officers waved us away with his baton. They picked up the woman, carried her to their car, placed her in its backseat, and drove off. I set the bottle at the base of one of the columns and retrieved her abandoned wrap. Some other wretch would claim both soon enough. I pulled the front piece of the poncho over my brow and walked back slowly to the pension, in the rain.
Back in my room, I drew aside the curtains and opened the windows. A steady rain fell on the balcony and dripped onto the street below. It made a pleasant sound, like the patter of a stream over rocks. I drew up my chair to the table and began leafing through Pascal’s Pensées. I wanted to quote and explicate his thoughts in my new book, but I wanted the translation to be my own. I heard a shuffling outside the door; then a knock.
“Oui?”
“C’est moi. It is only me,” called Mme. Angleterre. “I have your tea.”
I let her in and took the tray from her.
“I want to talk, sometime, when you’re not too busy. It can wait,” she smiled, seeing my books and writing tablets on the table.
“That’ll be fine. Maybe tomorrow afternoon, non?”
“Oh, that would be nice. I’ll bring tea for both of us.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
She left the room and I returned to my table. It could not be called a desk but was sufficiently utilitarian to serve as one. It had a drawer, an inlaid leather top, set within a cherry border, and measured about six-feet long.
My attention having been broken, I picked up a chapbook of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and began reading. I sipped on my tea as I read. The Introduction reminded admirers that Baudelaire was the greatest French poet of the nineteenth century. Both modern and iconoclastic, he had burst upon the Paris scene as a “disgusting” representative of an age “that craved lust and all that is sordid.” Born in 1821, he spent his days in “profligacy, debauchery, indulgence, and opium, living as a bohemian, pursuing a nocturnal life that led to bouts with drunkenness and venereal disease.” His “half-caste lovers, mistresses and a bevy of society whores” supported him; still he died in poverty. It would remain for posterity to discover his genius. He had translated some of Poe’s work, but it had not “influenced his own.” The book contained Baudelaire’s earlier Prefaces, which displayed his open contempt for the Parisian aesthetic tastes of the day. He described Paris as a “universal center for radiating stupidity.” Her elegists were “virile scum.” If beauty were to be found anywhere, it would have to be extracted from evil. The dullards of reason had suppressed rapture far too long.
It was the reference to the “half-caste lovers,” however, that caught my eye. Were they as beautiful as Julene? I hoped so. He had dedicated one of his poems to his favorite traveling companion. I scribbled down its translation as I read it:
My child, my sister,
Imagine the pleasure
Of life’s journey together,
Loving each other in scandalous leisure
Embracing life’s joys and forbidden treasures
Free from fear, to the last dark measure.
Why was that appealing? I found it so. Reason demands discrimination, decision, and action. Rapture seizes upon the moment; it requires no dichotomy between the self and the other, the subject and objectivity. One is simply immersed in the course of being, in its ontological waves and rhythms. It is immediate, intense, emotional, subliminal, if not subconscious. As Julene had observed about art, it requires no explanations, nor judges between right and wrong. It is beingness in itself; beauty without evil; ecstasy soaring in flight above the tethers of reason.
I let out a slow, prolonged breath and picked up the Pensées. It was still raining outside; I finished the tea. My mind drifted. We were in Augusta, at a restaurant. Her short, black curly hair possessed all the qualities of a scruffy brillo pad. Her little nose seemed crazily too small for her lovely, rounded face and elongated eyes. A smile of perfect white teeth filled her mouth. Soft, gentle, strapless shoulders sloped away into the shadows and down her arms of pale peach. She slumped in her chair and smiled. Her black, V-neck dress revealed the faintest outline of small breasts. We were in love. Or was it infatuation? We were having an affair, behind her husband’s back. He was the provost; we professors. We were teaching in a small state university, in a modest Georgia town. We had ordered dinner. It had begun to rain. We asked the waitress to box our dinners. We scooted out of our chairs and ran, laughing, across the parking lot to our room in the motel. Our clothes dripped with water. We undressed, dried each other off, and climbed into bed. Her lips met mine with a burning eagerness. We fondled and rolled in each other’s arms. She climbed atop my torso and scooted down about my loins, her eyes fixed on me, smiling all the while. She rose and fell in slow motion, tilting her head downward; her dark eyes sparkled with fire; her tiny breasts bobbed back and forth across my mouth. “Gravity girl!“ I teased her. “How I love you!” I was too enchanted with euphoria to think, or reason, or discriminate between subject and objectivity, good and evil, wisdom or folly. It rained and kept raining. We drove back, passed the campus, to our own places of lodging, in our respective and separate cars. I never knew what she told her husband.
I snapped out of my reverie, carried the tray down to Mme. Angleterre’s cramped office, and knocked at the door. It was my turn to announce: “C’est moi!” There was no answer. I set the tray down and left a note on the pad on her door. Remember, I won’t be here for dinner this evening. M. Clarke. The “monsieur” part was necessary, as even Mme. Angleterre observed those meticulous, formal, and antiquated rules of French propriety—that ritualized world of the petit bourgeois et la Fonction Publique. Civility has its virtue, though, I well knew, as I scrawled the note.
Just then, Mme. Dufavre, the pension’s proprietress, came out of her suite near the dining hall.
“Professeur Clarke, what a coincidence!” She stared down at the tray. Displeasure darted from her eyes. Her tall, slender body, which she held stiffly erect, seemed to corroborate her opinion. “I’ve warned Angleterre. You know it’s not permissible to take tea in your room. What if everyone insisted on egalité?”
“Please, Mme. The fault’s entirely my own. She’s not to blame. I have acquiesced in accepting it. That makes me culpable, too. I trust that that’s all right?”
“Well,
