Most days after he finished work, Neil liked to walk through the old streets near the archives where the buildings leaned in overhead on either side as if they had important things to say to one another that they didn’t want the passersby to overhear. Then he usually got a beer and a bucket of peanuts at his zinc, which was the same divey bar with duct tape on the bar stools that Professor Piot had gone to when he was a research assistant at the National Archives, and where Neil and the bartender discussed, of all things, the shifting fortunes of the New York Yankees. The bartender, whose name was émile, watched every single Yankees game when it came on at one in the morning while he was closing down the bar, which meant that Neil had to do actual research to keep up his end of the conversation. Neil’s team was really the Rockies, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell this to émile, who thought that all Americans were from New York. They usually talked in French, and Neil, whose brain was already in knots after hours of translating administrative documents with archaic past tenses, had to contort his mind still further to figure out how you’d say grounded out and deep fly ball. Still, it was nice to talk to a real person after a day spent looking at bits of old parchment that no one else had bothered with for centuries.
But today Neil didn’t feel like discussing Joba Chamberlain’s string of perfect seventh innings, even though he’d read the AP story on his computer for just that purpose. He started walking toward the river, thinking he’d just go home, but the afternoon was so bright and his little apartment was so dark—it was student housing, literally in the shadow of the Sorbonne—and he hated the feeling of being shut up inside, having to turn on the light to read while the rest of the world was out in the sun.
He crossed the river behind Notre Dame and stopped to listen as a man with a beat-up guitar sang “Summer of ’69” for a group of tourists. Radio stations were required to play a certain percentage of songs in French, but Neil had noticed that the street musicians in Paris generally stuck to the American classics, the same songs that were probably right then being played with half the right lyrics on sidewalks all over the world. Wa-wa wa wa-wa-wa, I knew that wa-wa now or never, those were the best days of my life. Professor Piot would have drawn some lesson from that about gaps in the historical record, pointing out that Radio France archived every single broadcast, but the buskers working for coins gave a much more accurate indication of popular tastes, and they were never recorded.
Neil turned around and went back across the river. The last thing he wanted to do was go home and sit around eating Pim’s while his imagination followed Magdalena’s bus as it got farther and farther away, wondering if the best days of his life were somehow already happening without him really noticing.
He walked down rue de Rivoli and decided he might as well have a look at the Tour Saint-Jacques. It was something he did less often than one might expect, considering he was spending his entire summer researching it. The restoration wouldn’t be done for a month or two and the park around it was fenced off. Along the tower’s southeast side a group of bums slept on the warmth of the metro grates at night and moved into the shade of a chestnut tree in the afternoons. They drank jugs of wine and read old paperbacks, rewrapped their swollen feet and fought each other, and Neil found them more interesting than the tower itself, which, still covered in scaffolding with its gargoyles poking out the top, reminded Neil of an old man with the sheets pulled up to his chin. Neil imagined making friends with the Saint-Jacques bums, finding out the things they knew about that spot that no one else did, like what happened underneath the grates, which dropped down at least three or four stories into the heart of the Chatelet metro station, or whether they thought it was ironic that Nicolas Flamel, a fourteenth-century alchemist famous for having discovered the secret to immortality, had been buried in their churchyard.
That day the bums were busy unpacking. A few of them were gathered around an old suitcase, taking out shirts and underwear that clearly did not belong to them. One tried to trade his socks for better ones, but they were too small. Another had found a rose in one of those plastic sheaths and was emptying a can of beer to use as a vase.
Neil walked around the fenced-off tower, looking up. At the top of each of the four corners of the belfry were statues of the Tétramorphe, the Four Evangelists as beasts: an angel for Saint Matthew, a lion for Mark, an eagle for John, and what was supposed to be a cow for Saint Luke but looked more like a dog—and in front of the eagle was Saint Jacques himself, a relatively modern addition to the tower. He held a pilgrim’s staff and scallop shell, but his back was turned to Spain, as if he had already gotten what he’d gone there for and was on his way home.
It occurred to Neil that the Rouen monk’s account of the pilgrimage was dated 1259, right around the time the cathedral of Saint Jacques in Compostela had begun granting indulgences, which were holy remits of sin written out on slips of paper excusing a pilgrim from some portion of the suffering he or she could expect in Purgatory.
It meant the monk had been traveling at a particularly interesting moment in the history of medieval Christianity. The age of miracles was nearly over. Religious authorities were recording fewer acts of divine intervention on earth and busying themselves instead with what lay beyond. By the mid-1200s they would have been developing the system of indulgences that led to a major increase in pilgrim traffic, as even the poorest peasants gathered what offerings they had and set out for far-off shrines, believing they could buy a lesser stay in Purgatory. Neil got out his notebook and made a note to check the date indulgences were first granted to pilgrims at Santiago de Compostela. Under Monk from Rouen he added indulgences? next to looking for miracles?
Back on the metro grate the bums were laughing. One of them had found a bra in the suitcase and was trying to put it on, but he was having trouble with the clasp. A jug of wine was in danger of being spilled. Neil headed toward them, wondering if he should use tu or vous. He decided the familiar sounded friendlier.
“Not your size?” he said.
“Go fuck yourself,” the bum said, and down went the wine. Neil decided it was best to cross the street.
{RICHARD}
Paris, June
“Ah, yes, you wrote some months ago,” the archivist said as we sat down in her office at the appointed time. “Your mother was a friend of the Comtesse Lucette Labat-Poussin?”