Paris, June
The day final exams finished in London, Neil took the Eurostar to Paris with Professor Piot and the other research assistants. Professor Piot made them squeeze in around a little table in the family section and sent someone to the café car for champagne, and pretty soon they knew all about the Chunnel as an illustration of free-market versus socialized political economy. (“Imagine the embarrassment of the queen, who is on board, when this train doubles its speed as it arrives in France on its maiden voyage, suggesting that Britain’s private investors cannot be relied upon to fix the tracks . . .”) They heard grim stories of the World War One battlefields they passed. (“The mud was so permeated with human fragments that during the great rains of 1915 whole arms and legs would sometimes slide out of the walls of the trenches . . .”) Professor Piot promised dinner at Maxim’s to anyone who could name the genius whose idea was behind the fast-moving panzer tank divisions that crossed the Belgian border into France in May 1940. (“Himmler?” somebody guessed. “G?ring?” “Aha!” Professor Piot said. “While the French generals built their Maginot line, Hitler read a pamphlet by a certain young colonel named Charles de Gaulle and used these ideas to plan the Blitzkrieg!”)
As they got nearer to Paris, Professor Piot opened a second bottle and told them about the project they’d be working on, which had been pretty vague up until that point because he was still ironing out the details with the Musée du Patrimoine. They would be preparing an exhibition on the old church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. Built by butchers and torn down by revolutionaries, only its sixteenth-century bell tower was still intact, “a fine example of the flamboyant Gothic style,” Professor Piot said. The tower was being restored, and the work was costing the City of Paris a lot of money. Professor Piot had been hired to help prove that it was worth it. “We must make a good story for the schoolchildren,” he said.
“Perhaps we begin with the Paris of ancient times—” Professor Piot was a hand talker and there were five of them in four seats, which meant he hit either Neil or Loren, the other American, each time he made a point. “It is the dawn of the Christian faith in France, the city takes up only the space of ?le de la Cité. Today this is where the tourists go for ice cream. But then we are in Roman times. There are barbarian invasions, the city is behind stone walls. And already economic life is outgrowing them. The dirty professions, the infected trades, they call them—the tanners, the furriers, the butchers—are kept outside. And so on the banks opposite the city a great market grows up—you have heard of Les Halles? Now it is an empty shopping mall, a catastrophe of urban planning, but for centuries it is the larder, the very pungent ventre, the gut, we can say, of the city—the history of Paris begins some seventeen centuries before refrigeration. And the butchers of this quarter, these men in bloodstained aprons, must rise very early each day, must work through the night even, but at dusk the gates to the city are locked. They cannot attend Mass, you see? Performing each day the most biblical, perhaps, of professions—this butchering of meat—they cannot even pray. And so these men set out to build their own church outside the city walls—” Professor Piot poured a little more into each of their glasses. “From its first days, this is a church of Paris. In this church the basins of holy water must be refreshed each hour because so many hands are dipping in covered with the blood of the slaughterhouse, the lye from the tanning shops, the soot and filth of the life of the city—” The train shot through a tunnel, the pressure made everyone’s ears pop.
It was in medieval times that the butchers named their church for Saint Jacques, patron saint of laborers and pilgrims, who brought the Christian faith to Spain, was beheaded by Herod, and, so the story went, assisted posthumously in the Crusades. The journey to his burial place in Spain had been one of the most important pilgrimages of the Middle Ages, Professor Piot said. The old pilgrim maps looked like nets spanning the length of the known world, with the butchers’ church as the pilgrims’ Paris starting point. “In this churchyard penitents from all over Europe are swapping boots, coughing on one another and spreading disease. Monks from Lille are speaking in Latin to friars from Cork. Rumors are spread of miracles, philosophies are interchanged, as well as recipes of poultices for blisters . . .” Neil tried to find a more comfortable way to be sitting on the armrest. Beth was taking notes and didn’t notice that Jean-Claude was drinking out of her glass.
The church had been destroyed in the spasms of anticlericalism that followed the French Revolution: “Torn stone from stone in the name of the new Republic and used—who knows? To pave the streets? To replace the cobblestones that had themselves been hurled from barricades?” Professor Piot loved that kind of thing, and his hands were flying all over the place. Neil pressed his head flat against the back of the seat, but still he got hit in the nose. Today, all that was left of the church was its bell tower, from which Pascal had supposedly studied the impossibility of a vacuum and quantified the weight of air, and where, even to this day, meteorological equipment monitored pollution levels at the corner of rue Saint-Martin and rue de Rivoli.
Professor Piot sent Jean-Claude to get another bottle and then with a flourish—Neil and Loren ducked—he gave them their research assignments. Jean-Claude, whose French was, obviously, the best, would be the liaison to the reconstruction crew, making sure that details of archaeological and architectural relevance were preserved. (“The very dirt on the walls is of interest to us,” Professor Piot said. “If the walls are clean then we must ask why there is no dirt, and that too is of interest.”) Professor Piot himself would concentrate on the medieval era, Loren would cover the Revolution, and Beth, who was getting a Ph.D. in architectural history, would be responsible for the renovations that had been made since Baron Haussmann decided to spare the church’s remaining belfry—now called the Tour Saint-Jacques—as he went about razing and reshaping Paris into a modern city. Neil’s job would be to track down anything that linked the church to the pilgrimage to Spain. “Okay, so bonne chasse,” Professor Piot said, raising his glass. “And remember—a church of the butchers. Find for me a history a little bit au jus, okay?”
By the time they got to Paris, Neil and the others were so dizzy from all that champagne that they barely made it off the train, but Professor Piot did a little soft shoe to the “Marseillaise” as soon as he touched the marble floors of the station. “We meet tomorrow at the Archives nationales, nine o’clock,” he said.