Pont Marie: A Novel

By Al Stotts

Metempsychosis refers to the passing of the soul at death into another body, either human or animal. At its most basic, it refers to reincarnation, but the theory of past lives can have overwhelming consequences especially when memories of these past lives seep into the life we currently live. Just ask a modern day, middle-aged New Mexico gentleman whose dreams threaten his reality.

According to his dreams, this unassuming man was once a printer in seventeenth century Paris and then a United States senator. Prior to both of these lives, he was an Anasazi sun priest in the eleventh century. At first, it was easy to ignore his dreams. However, thanks to their persistence, this man must come to terms with the ramifications of his past lives and how they may affect the life he currently struggles to lead.

Set above the backdrop of an ancient bridge in Paris, Pont Marie is the narrative of places, people, and things once forgotten but enlivened in one mans mind. How can he thrive in his current life when the past permeates his present? How can he hold together relationships, when ancient relationships still haunt? Will his quest for closure leave him cleansed or perhaps insane?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462006144

Al Stotts

Al Stotts lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the author of four previous novels: Pont Marie (2011), No Angels in Montmartre (2013), Oligarch Games (2016), and Mountain Road (2019).

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Copyright © 2011 Al Stotts

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-0612-0 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-0613-7 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-0614-4 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011904271

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 5/11/2011

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

—Gertrude Stein, Paris France

For the four Graces and ten Muses

with gratitude to my editors:

Melissa Howard in Albuquerque and Eric Hajas in Paris

Contents

Prologue

Metempsychosis

Book I

Pont Marie

Book II

Late a Senator

Book III

Chetro Ketl

Epilogue

The Metempsychosis of Love

Prologue

Metempsychosis

Lily as Carhait Cover Cropped 300.jpg

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

Somnia fallaci ludunt temeraria nocte,

Et pavidas mentes falsa timere jubent.

(Dreams, in deceiving night, make sport of us,

troubling our souls with non-existent terrors.)

—Catullus

The roar of water, the noise of stone and timber colliding, and the sound of my body’s impact against an unyielding object preceded a sudden silence and the shock of immersion in black, icy water. I surfaced briefly. I was gasping, hallucinating. I saw a white cat and a bridge.

I was completely disoriented. Then there was a sudden blow to my head. My vision and my thoughts became as black as the water that flowed over me. I woke up gasping for air, fighting the scrambled sheets and blankets that bound my legs and arms and defeated my efforts to pull away, to distance myself from another iteration of the nightmare I had been experiencing over and over for weeks.

As frightening and disturbing as these dreams were, they had served to unlock less dramatic but no less intense images, scenarios, people and events that filled my mind in waking and sleeping hours. They were all elements of a puzzle that was beginning to piece itself together—not as dreams or imaginings, but as memories. Dreams and memories are intensely personal and should not be taken lightly. I am reluctant to reveal mine, but I really have no choice.

The Pont Marie in Paris is the backdrop for most of what you will read in this story. As you may know, the Pont Marie is a seventeenth-century bridge with five arches of varying widths built on wooden piles. It was the first bridge to connect the Ile Saint-Louis with the Right Bank of the Seine. Construction was begun in 1614 when King Louis XIII laid the first stone. Engineer Christophe Marie had spent years trying to get permission to build the bridge as part of his contract to develop the Ile Saint-Louis and its quais. The bridge finally opened for traffic twenty-one years later.

Like other old bridges of Paris, the Pont Marie originally supported two rows of four-story houses. The first level was for retail businesses and the other stories consisted of one-room apartments. In 1658 about sixty residents of the bridge died when flood waters and chunks of ice from a spring thaw swept over the bridge. The rushing water took out the two arches closest to Ile Saint-Louis along with the twenty houses supported by those arches. Another flood in 1740 finally convinced authorities that all houses should be removed from Pont Marie and from the other bridges across the Seine.

The Pont Marie had been an idée fixe in my brain since I first got a good look at her three years ago. I had seen her in the distance on previous visits to Paris, but while intrigued by her shape I was too busy exploring other arrondissements, mostly on the Left Bank, to give her any serious attention. However, I thought about her from time to time and she sometimes appeared to me in dreams.

My girlfriend at the time had the good sense to suggest that on our next trip we should rent an apartment on Ile Saint-Louis facing the Right Bank. After settling into the top-floor apartment at 29 Quai de Bourbon, which looked out onto the nineteenth-century Pont Louis Philippe, my girlfriend took a nap and I went out for a walk. I quickly headed east on Quai de Bourbon and there she stood, the elegant and beguiling bridge of my dreams.

If Marie were a woman, she would have soon filed a complaint against me for stalking her and groping her. I can’t stay away from her and I can’t stop thinking about her. Thanks to the miracle of digital photography, I have taken hundreds, on my way to thousands, of photos of her from every possible angle both day and night and in different seasons of the year.

I have floated under her in bateaux mouches, looking up her dress as it were, contemplating the beauty of her superstructure. From the banks of the Seine I have pressed my body up against the portions of her arches that can be reached, running my hands over her masonry and touching the side of my face to her beautiful façade—seeking to be held to her loving breast, to be nourished by her tenderness, to paraphrase a Paul Simon lyric.

Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for Marie. Some describe her as a boring imitation of the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris and number two on my own list of favorites. But whereas Neuf’s sides have rows of friezes of grotesque heads adorning it, Marie has triangular stone piers topped by roofed, columned Renaissance niches along her façade. The niches, some of which are now quite weathered, were designed to contain statues, but none were ever added, which is good. Without them the façade remains simple and elegant and beautiful as it slopes gently to each side of the river between the island and the Right Bank.

It perplexes me that Marie has not figured more prominently in French literature, art or architectural history. I was pleased, however, to find two Eugene Atget photos of Pont Marie, one from 1912 and another from 1926, in an exhibition of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century photos of Paris at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Marie rates a mention in the opening pages of Émile Zola’s 1886 novel The Masterpiece. Zola describes his character Christine finding herself abandoned by a carriage driver on a rainy night on the Ile Saint-Louis: What startled her most of all, however, was the hollow of the stream, the deep gap in which the Seine flowed, black and turgid, from the heavy piles of the Pont Marie to the light arches of the new Pont Louis Philippe.

My overwhelming attraction to this antique and unique masonry bridge goes beyond the beauty of her shape, the sensuality of her stone and the romance of her connection to the wonderful Ile Saint-Louis to the south and the medieval Marais neighborhood to the north. I am now aware that I once lived on, loved on and lost my life on that bridge.

Call it reincarnation or a spiritual memory of another existence, or just a desperate need to be linked to this simple yet powerful Parisian landmark; however I may explain it, the bridge has come to possess me. As I have interacted with her, my long-ago experience with Marie has come to dominate my dreams and my waking thoughts. I am compelled to describe, in my twenty-first-century American English, these seventeenth-century memories.

This remembered life is not remarkable and it begins simply enough, though it will grow in complexity if you choose to follow this journal to the end. It is not the life of a famous or wealthy person who accomplished noteworthy things. There is no mystery to speak of, except the reason I have come to believe I lived this life. It’s the story of an intellectually average, physically mediocre, well intentioned and decent seventeenth-century Frenchman who coped with life as he knew it; who experienced love and the lack of it; who was reasonably intelligent and articulate; who held political and philosophical opinions; and who passed from the world relatively unnoticed, except of course by me.

* * * *

Book I

Pont Marie

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Stumbling over words as over paving stones,

Colliding at times with lines dreamed of long ago.

—Charles Baudelaire, The Sun

Believe me, a life of love is an exception to the laws of the earth; all flowers fade, great joys and emotions have a morrow of evil—if a morrow at all.

—Honoré de Balzac, Lily of the Valley

Given the person I know myself to be, it is only fitting that my initial memory of the person I was in the seventeenth-century took place on a summer evening rendezvous underneath the Pont Marie by the Ile Saint-Louis with a lovely, passionate and yielding young woman. Her name was Elodie Fleury.

She was twenty-five-years-old, about five feet, four inches tall with long, partially braided chestnut hair that elegantly framed a beautifully shaped face, which was distinguished by prominent cheek bones, a nicely rounded nose, small ears and creamy white skin. She had a small dark mole on the lower left side of her face, which made her seem more exotic to me. Her lips were full and her eyebrows were thin, forming arches over her round green eyes. Her shoulders were broad like an athlete’s and her breasts, droit, séparé, rond et dur, were clearly outlined against her white hemp-cloth blouse.

The lights from the houses on the street above, reflected in the Seine, allowed me to see her form. The scooped neck of her blouse focused my eyes on her simple beaded necklace. Her upper body tapered elegantly to her waist and her hips flowed out with gentle feminine curves. My hands told me that beneath her blue linen skirt she had a round, muscular derrière and equally toned legs, the result, no doubt, of walking everywhere she went in Paris. She was exquisite and exciting. All of these observations would be confirmed for me the first time we had the opportunity to shed our clothes and spend some unhurried time making love.

But in the meantime, we stood in the semi-dark under the bridge, her body sandwiched between me and the curve of Marie’s arch. We kissed, fondled, smiled, laughed, sighed and spoke alternately with the passion and the sweetness of newly discovered attraction. Her braids and her blouse came undone. I rested my head on her partially uncovered right breast, which seemed to me to be the best and safest place in all of Paris.

Self-consciously and a little defensively, she whispered to me that her right breast was larger than her left breast. She obviously wanted to disclose this perceived imperfection before I had a chance to observe it for myself. I cupped both breasts in my hands and kissed them through her blouse, then kissed her lips. I told her she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen and that I could not imagine a more compelling specimen of feminine beauty anywhere.

Why this beautiful woman would be attracted to me was a mystery. I was the one, I said, who should feel embarrassed about a host of flaws ranging from uneven arm and leg lengths to a rather sharp nose and large ears. Most men, I said, seem to feel physically gifted while women fret over the slightest blemish. She needn’t have worried about my response to her. My physical and emotional desire for her never abated during the time we were together. Indeed, it has survived centuries. It is proof to me that love and desire can survive death.

There is one other thing that is clear to me now. My twenty-first-century memory has personified the beautiful Elodie in the bridge Marie, the place where we first shared the joy of romantic affection. Marie has bridged not only shores of the Seine but time as well. She has become the story starter for reclaiming the part of me that existed in Paris nearly three hundred fifty years ago.

* * * *

In my seventeenth-century life I was Xavier Jacquet, born in 1622 in Carhaix, an ancient Roman village in central Brittany. To put 1622 in some context, it was, for instance, the year the Gregorian calendar changed the first day of the year from March 25 to January 1. In March of 1622 the Algonquian Indians in the New World killed three hundred forty-seven English settlers around Jamestown, Virginia. Construction was begun on the church of Saint-Louis-en-l’lle on Ile Saint-Louis. Also that year, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known a couple of decades later as the playwright Molière, was born. Louis XIII was the twenty-one-year-old king of France.

I was the youngest of four children. The other three were boys as well: Paule, Charles and Claude. We lived in a rectangular house made of granite stones that we had to share with farm animals. My parents, Didier and Geneviève, were Huguenot farmers. My mother was born a Catholic but became a Protestant to accommodate my father and his family, which in turn alienated her from her own family. Becoming a Protestant was a daring thing for Geneviève to do, whether she knew it or not. Huguenots had been leaving France for decades because of persistent persecution by the Catholic majority. My brothers and I worked on the farm as soon as we could hoe and lift, but I had no aptitude for or interest in agriculture. My mother had higher ambitions for me anyway.

Didier Jacquet was strict and impatient. He parented his maize crops with more affection than his sons. He was thin, grim and strong, and the veins of his arms, hands and neck popped out when he worked and when he yelled at us, which was often.

If my mother and father loved each other, it was not obvious to me as a child. It seemed to me he treated her like a hired servant. An adherent of Calvin’s theological point of view, he constantly reminded us that it was the will of God for wives and children to be subjugated to the authority of the husband and father.

Geneviève Jacquet was a lovely woman. Everyone said so. Her build was slight and delicate, but she could work for hours in the house or in the field, keeping pace with her sons and her husband. As hard as my father worked, at least he only had one job. My mother, on the other hand, was responsible for cooking, cleaning, caring for all of us and the house, and she also helped to plant and harvest crops. She never failed to help when other women, Catholic or Protestant, needed assistance with child birth or illness. She was smart and loving.

Somehow my mother persuaded my father that I should be sent to Paris to live with his older brother Jules, a merchant in the Marais neighborhood, who needed help because his wife was seriously ill. What she didn’t tell my father was that she wanted me to go to school in Paris or at least learn a trade other than farming.

So at age ten I left Carhaix and moved in with Uncle Jules and Aunt Madeleine. On the way to Paris my mother told me that Madeleine probably didn’t have long to live. Jules and Madeleine had survived into their mid-forties despite plagues, insurrections and crime in Paris, but Aunt Madeleine was crippled when a wagon delivering goods to their shop struck her as she crossed the busy rue Saint-Antoine on her way to visit a friend. At the time Uncle Jules was in the shop. He heard the terrible sounds of the accident—the neigh and whinny of a horse, the shouts of people in the street, the crunching of wood and metal and cobblestone and the scream of a woman.

Jules ran outside and saw Aunt Madeleine crumpled and seemingly lifeless on the street. Thinking her dead already, he looked up at the overturned wagon and saw its driver struggling to his feet. Uncle Jules rushed to him and in a rage nearly beat him to death with his fists. People on the street finally pulled him away from the bloodied man and told him his wife was still alive, but seriously injured.

She did survive, of course, but she was left unable to walk and in a constant fight with infections and respiratory problems. Her internal organs were no doubt damaged beyond the ability of doctors to diagnose or treat. Her general health deteriorated along with her legs and right arm. That’s why Uncle Jules would even consider taking me in. He and Aunt Madeleine were childless, so he needed help with her and with the shop.

My mother spent three months with them until Aunt Madeleine was stable enough for Uncle Jules to be her primary care giver. Before leaving she apparently offered to send me to Paris to help out.

Uncle Jules was lean, muscular, uneducated and determined. Like me, he decided early in life that he would not be a farmer. As a teenager, he fled Carhaix in the middle of an autumn evening and traveled, mostly on foot, to Paris, where he spent years as a market porter at Les Halles, the centuries-old central marketplace for Ile de France. The work was as physically demanding as farming, but it was work of his own choosing. Jules went to work at three a.m. to meet the long train of wagons, carts and drays from farms in the surrounding countryside that brought Paris its food. Each day he helped to move heaps of cabbages, piles of lettuce and other vegetables, crates of fruit and flowers, hampers of fowl, carcasses of lambs and calves, quarters of beef and baskets full of animal feet, heads, livers and kidneys.

As morning approached, more and more people jammed in between the mounds of food to buy and sell and trade, filling the air with thousands of competing voices. Jules was oblivious to the sounds and to the miasma of decaying produce and dead animals. He worked late into the day, exhausting himself and leaving time only to sleep.

Despite the back-breaking work and long hours, the only thing he missed about his former life in Carhaix was the pleasure he had found in outdoor activities like hunting, riding horses and hiking through the Breton terrain. He vowed to himself that he would make a life that would allow for that in the future. He put aside as much money as he could, determined to open a shop some day that would provide services other than sweat and blood for the central market of Paris.

Aunt Madeleine, who was short and a little plump, was the only child of a Les Halles merchant-broker who sold vegetables, fruits, meats, fish and other products to a variety of customers including the French Army and aristocratic households. Unlike Jules, Madeleine had learned to read and write and was good at math, which made her valuable to her father’s business. She and Jules were attracted to each other from the first time their eyes met at the market, but neither had time or opportunity to meet formally, so it was more than a year before they first spoke to one another.

Late one evening Jules passed by Madeleine as he left the market. She put a hand on his shoulder to stop him, which startled Jules. They looked at each other for a moment, then Madeleine told him her name and said she felt she knew him because they had seen each other every day for so long. Jules didn’t know what to say or even if he should say anything, fearing he could get in trouble for talking to a merchant’s daughter.

With his eyes focused on his feet, he smiled meekly and in a low voice told her his name was Jules. She said she was on her way to L’église Saint-Eustache, a large Gothic church with Renaissance features that had been under construction for almost a hundred years. It provided a dramatic architectural backdrop to the open-air marketplace. Madeleine invited him to join her, but he declined. Clearly disappointed, Madeleine said she had wanted to meet him for a long time and maybe they could just sit and talk briefly. He agreed. She talked, he stole glances at her and mumbled words he could not remember after they parted. But in the following months they made sure to meet as often as possible outside Saint-Eustache, even if just for a few minutes.

Madeleine admired Jules’ dedication to work as well as his physique, but as a common laborer he was not what her merchant-class parents had in mind as a son-in-law. When her father died suddenly of a heart attack, Madeleine, who had more expertise than her mother with the business, took over daily operations. Her mother had never been very healthy and she declined further from depression and heartache. A dependable helper was needed for the business, so Madeleine hired Jules, but her real motivation was to have him near her every day. Their love flourished along with the business and they married. Her mother still regarded Jules as socially inferior, but did not object, particularly when Madeleine said they would marry with or without her consent.

After the death of Madeleine’s mother, the hard-working couple left the frenetic pace of Les Halles and relocated the business to the rue Saint-Antoine in the Marais. They lived in the floors above the store, which was on the west side of the street, just south of the elegant Hôtel Sully and north of the eight massive towers of the medieval Bastille, at what is today number 34, rue Saint-Antoine.

Within a year of my arrival Aunt Madeleine died and was buried at the nearby Cemetery of the Innocents. At first Uncle Jules visited her grave almost daily, but after a few months he stopped going there altogether and told me I should not go either. It was not hard for me to obey. The cemetery was a frightening place with its Danse Macabre mural on the south wall that depicted the dead and the living dancing together. And even though Paris had a variety of strong odors to contend with, the stench of the cemetery was especially hard to take. After each visit the smell of the place lingered in my nostrils for days. I worried that the odor would cling to me forever, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak of this fear. It was not until after my mother died years later in Carhaix that I would understand why Madeleine’s gravesite had become prohibited.

Because my uncle could not read, he made sure I went to school. He intended that I would take over the business from him someday. But like farming, the life of a merchant was not particularly appealing to me. I worked hard for my uncle and learned the business as well as I could, but as I grew older I longed for more education and envisioned life as a philosopher, teacher and writer.

Uncle Jules had been a Huguenot like me and all the other Jacquets, but Madeleine was a Catholic, so he converted—a counterpoint to the experience of my mother. Besides, it was better for business to be a Catholic in Paris. My uncle did not involve himself directly in politics any more than he did in his new religion, but he was a great admirer of Henri IV, the founder of the Bourbon dynasty who was king during Jules’ formative years. Until the day of his own death my uncle grieved over the death of Henri, who was assassinated by a fanatical Jesuit monk in 1610. Uncle Jules felt a kinship with Henri because the king was also a Protestant who converted to Catholicism out of political necessity rather than religious epiphany.

Henri was a great and good king, my uncle would remind me every day, pointing to a woodcut print on the back wall of the shop that depicted the inauguration of Henri’s equestrian statue at Pont Neuf. "He was a real man who had a sense of humor and compassion, not an effeminate and cruel royal pretender like his idiot son Louis XIII. And now we have that Spanish Princess Anne running the country for the child Louis XIV. Explain to me how Louis XIII made a baby in the first place since everyone knows Louis and Anne were strangers to the conjugal bed. God knows what XIV will turn out to be like. But Henri, the Vert Galant, he was what France needed and still needs: a soldier and a statesman in one. He and Cardinal Sully ruled France firmly and wisely.

"Never forget, Xavier, that it was Henri who issued the Edict of Nantes to stop the Catholics from persecuting the Huguenots. Henri himself barely survived the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre when three thousand Huguenots were slaughtered in the streets of Paris. They say the waters of the Seine ran red that day with the blood of those poor souls. But when Henri finally became king he did not take retribution against the perpetrators. He wanted to unify Paris and France. That’s why he became a Catholic. He had courage, wisdom and compassion. He made France a real nation and he saved Paris from the neglect of kings before him. He was as great as Emperor Charlemagne. Real Frenchmen are still sad over his loss. Never forget these things, Xavier. Never forget Henri."

Uncle Jules’ political socialization techniques were effective, if not a little confusing for me as a kid. He was a Huguenot in Catholic clothing who ranted against the absolutist monarchy of the Bourbon dynasty but adored the king who founded it. He was, in other words, very French. I am an heir to that kind of illogic, having my own philosophical contradictions to contend with. Even though Uncle Jules couldn’t read or write, he could think and talk, and he loved to talk about more than just business. His long discourses covered everything from the joys and injustices of life to art, science, sports, religion and, of course, politics.

He talked constantly to me and to his customers. He infuriated some of them with his opinions, but they always came back because he was honest and hard working and he provided what they needed. If he had been an educated man his broad-ranging curiosity about the world would have made him an excellent teacher in a Jesuit school, but I could never say such a thing to him. He didn’t care too much for teachers and he hated the Jesuits because one of them—never mind he was mentally disturbed—had murdered Henri.

It was obvious to me that after Aunt Madeleine’s death the number of women who frequented the shop increased dramatically. Uncle Jules was aging, but unlike so many of his contemporaries he was in good shape. His dark brown hair was graying, but he still had plenty of it. He looked very distinguished and he had a successful business. Women of a variety of ages noticed. Uncle Jules flirted with them and occasionally cooked for some of them or went places with them. But he told me he had no interest in taking another wife and he never did.

Jules was more of a father to me than my father, whom I saw only occasionally. Didier Jacquet died in Carhaix just after I turned eighteen. Trying to maintain and support a family on a French farm in the first half of the seventeenth-century was tough because of poor harvests and because the Thirty Years War and the ongoing war with Spain brought undisciplined armies to rural areas where they lived off the local economy, a strategy otherwise known as plundering. It was a confrontation with one such undisciplined soldier that ended my father’s life. The soldier died as well, my uncle told me.

We went to Carhaix for the funeral. Uncle Jules comforted my mother and helped her review the financial status of the farm, which my brothers seemed to resent. They also resented me. We were by then worlds apart in appearance, in life styles and in our perspectives on life. They seemed bitter and tired—not unlike the image I had of my father. It disturbed me that they showed so little respect for my mother and talked so glowingly about my father. I was glad to leave Carhaix.

My mother died a year later from pneumonia. Uncle Jules took the news as hard as I did. She had been to see us just a month before her death. She was pale, unenergetic and had a persistent cough, so Uncle Jules urged her to stay and see his doctor. We pleaded with her to let us take care of her, but she insisted that my brothers needed her back at the farm.

So we made the trip to Carhaix again for my mother’s burial in the village cemetery next to my father. Many more people came to her funeral than to his. Because my father was so hard on the people around him he didn’t make lasting relationships, but my mother was admired and respected by everyone who knew her, particularly because she endured life with my father. She was known as a pious woman who worshipped regularly with the small Carhaix Huguenot community.

Uncle Jules told me I was fortunate to have been born to a woman of such grace, tenderness, patience and intelligence. Forgive me for saying this, Xavier, he said. Geneviève’s only fault was that she had poor taste in men.

He also told me that when he died he would like to be buried in the Carhaix cemetery with my parents rather than in Paris. That surprised me. But don’t you want to be buried in the Cemetery of the Innocents with Aunt Madeleine? I asked.

No, Xavier, he said. Your aunt was buried there, but her remains are no longer there. It’s not really a permanent resting place for the dead. It is so worm-laden that bodies are consumed very quickly. The cemetery’s workers claim that worms can ‘manger son cadaver en neuf jours,’ that is, eat a cadaver in nine days. There is such demand for burial space that bones are pulled out and graves are dug again in the same spot. Then the bones of the previously buried are piled inside and along the walls of the charnel-houses that were built to contain them. If I had been thinking more rationally when Madeleine died, I would have had her buried at her parents’ gravesite. But I didn’t like her parents because they looked down on me. So I guess I’m telling you that I would like a more dignified resting place than I provided for your aunt. I hope you’re not shocked. That’s just one of the many sins I’ve committed that you don’t know about.

Before we left Carhaix, Uncle Jules arranged for a burial plot in the village cemetery. Actually, he purchased two. The additional one was for me so we could all be together in the same place. A provision of the Edict of Nantes mandated that communities had to provide burial places for both Catholics and Huguenots. Local officials didn’t know that Uncle Jules and I had become Catholic. Since we were Jacquets, the assumption was that we were Protestants. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have looked favorably on mixing us in with my Huguenot mother and father.

Uncle Jules went through my mother’s meager belongings. She made all her own clothes and had few adornments. Her prized possession was a small gold fleur de lys on a black silk cord that I remember she wore daily, almost always under a dress or blouse where it could not be seen. My father said the fleur de lys was a symbol of the Catholic monarchy and that it was unseemly for a good Christian woman to make an exhibitionist of herself with jewelry. To him, Catholics were not Christians. Still, my mother never parted with the necklace. Uncle Jules found it in a simple wood box under my parents’ bed. He explained that it was a gift from Aunt Madeleine when she first learned that my mother was pregnant with me. He gave it to me when we returned to Paris.

I had no idea what happened to my three brothers. Several months after my mother’s funeral they sold the family farm, signed on to work on a merchant ship and left, presumably for the Americas or England. I only knew that they never returned. Uncle Jules said French Huguenots had been leaving France since the Wars of Religion. He cursed my brothers for not giving me a share of the money from the sale of our property and for not giving him an opportunity to buy the old family farm himself.

Except for Uncle Jules, my family was gone from my life. My real connection with my father and brothers essentially ended when I left Carhaix. During the first year in Paris I had endured such heartache for my mother that I cried every evening and lived for her infrequent visits. Sometimes I feared that she did not care for me anymore. I know now that she loved me and was willing to part with me so I could have a better life than the hard one she was living with my father and brothers in Carhaix.

My mother treated me differently than she did my brothers, but I believe she loved all four of us in her own fashion. Maybe because I was the youngest she gave me special attention. I remember she often talked about Paris and how she would have liked to live there. Perhaps she wanted me to go to Paris so she would have an excuse to go there more often herself. She seemed confident that my Uncle Jules had the ability to nurture and care for me in her absence.

It took me a few weeks to cry over her death. Uncle Jules told me he was worried that I had not showed any outward signs of grief. I saw him cry, but my own tears just took their time. I was alone in the shop one evening when I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. It didn’t cure my grief, but it helped.

* * * *

Not long after I arrived in Paris Uncle Jules explained that to enroll in school I would have to become a Catholic like him and Henri IV. Adults seemed to understand the differences between Huguenots and Catholics. I just thought of myself as a kid.

I’ve been told that after Henri converted he said that Paris was ‘well worth a mass’ and I suspect that an education is also worth a mass, Uncle Jules said.

My mother was a literate woman and she had given me some instruction in reading and writing in both Breton and French while I was still in Carhaix, although my father thought it was a waste of time, particularly since he had never attended school himself. So, when I started at a Port Royale petite école I at least had some preparation. An important factor in selecting that school was that it was a Jansenist, not a Jesuit institution.

The Jansenist sect of the Catholic Church was similar to the Calvinist Protestants because both believed in the pre-destination of the soul, although the Calvinists at least thought one can do enough good works to earn an entrance to Heaven. For the Jansenists, however, one’s fate in the afterlife was sealed at birth, which was a chilling prospect from my point of view.

At the school I learned to read and write Parisian French, ecclesiastical Latin and a little Greek as well as basic math. We were taught that the history of humanity is written in the Bible, that the final age of humanity began with Christ and the Church some four thousand years after the creation of the world by God. I guess that was also my science curriculum.

If my teachers had thought I was potential priest material I would have learned more Latin, but they correctly assessed my lack of aptitude for a holy life and they weren’t very impressed by my academic skills. Uncle Jules gave me lighter duties in his shop so I could study. As my reading skills increased, I found it pleasurable to read, but not necessarily to study.

After I learned how to read and write, Uncle Jules thought I had enough education and that I should focus on being his apprentice to ensure the survival of the business and to provide me a career. Despite the fact that I wasn’t a star student, becoming literate had a bigger impact on me than I would have guessed. Religious instruction had not made me more religious, but it had stimulated my thinking and given me an intellectual curiosity about philosophy and the condition of mankind, not that I was capable of articulating it that way to myself or anyone else.

I just wanted to know more about controversial thinkers and their ideas, especially when I realized that the Church was very worried about the teachings of people like Copernicus and Galileo and the theory that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our universe. The science of the celestial bodies was compelling to me. When I looked at the day and night skies I could imagine myself as someone who had also existed centuries before, also looking deep into the heavens for direction and wisdom. I was also fascinated by the reclusive and expatriate French genius René Descartes, a life-long devout Jesuit who was somehow able to separate his faith from his devotion to scientific reason.

It didn’t take long for Uncle Jules to understand that it made sense for me to continue going to school. I think that secretly he wished he could have had an education and now he could get one vicariously through me. Sometimes I saw him pick up my school books and run his hands over them as if to transfer the information in them to his brain by way of his touch. He certainly had compensated for his lack of education. He questioned people as much as he talked to them. He wanted to know what they knew and he had a pretty good ear for what was real or imagined or ego-driven.

He also had a good ear for proper speech. In the first year of his relocation to Paris he had successfully transitioned from his native Breton language to the French of Paris. Being literate was a badge of class and Uncle Jules didn’t want to be perceived as an illiterate tradesman, but he never pretended that he was formally educated. He talked enthusiastically to me about everything I was learning in school.

On several occasions I tried to teach Uncle Jules how to read, but it always ended in frustration for both of us. He said he could not see the letters. When I asked what that meant, he said letters appeared to jump around on the page and reassemble themselves—they wouldn’t stay in place long enough to form words he could learn. I didn’t understand that, but because my uncle was in all other pursuits a very determined man, I took him at his word that something in his vision or his brain was blocking his ability to learn to read.

Uncle Jules liked me to read to him, however. He especially liked the essays of sixteenth-century writer Michel de Montaigne, a friend of Henri IV with whom he found much philosophical common ground, particularly Montaigne’s disgust with the religious conflicts of the time and his belief that experience provided a better education than the learning of abstract knowledge. Uncle Jules also liked me to read aloud from the text of the Edict of Nantes. I read it to him so often that he could recite the entire document from memory.

Henri, by the grace of God king of France and of Navarre, to all to whom these presents come, greeting, Uncle Jules would announce unexpectedly. Among the infinite benefits which it has pleased God to heap upon us, the most signal and precious is his granting us the strength and ability to withstand the fearful disorders and troubles which prevailed on our advent in this kingdom. The realm was so torn by innumerable factions and sects that the most legitimate of all the parties was fewest in numbers. God has given us strength to stand out against this storm; we have finally surmounted the waves and made our port of safety—peace for our state…

He would then offer a summary of the twenty-three points of the perpetual and irrevocable edict. He took great pride in his ability to quote it at will and was always ready to engage anyone in a conversation about Henri’s vision of a France in which people were free to choose their own beliefs.

I repeatedly told him that if he wanted to put any of his thoughts in writing for any reason, I would be happy to be his scribe, but he always refused. I suppose that, too, was a matter of pride.

You know, Xavier, my hope has always been that you would keep alive this business that I inherited from Madeleine and her family, he said one day. I realize that being here was never a matter of your own choice. You have always been very helpful to me without complaint. I love you like a son and I respect the fact that you have other interests besides this business. Your mother would have liked for you to be an educated man. She once told me that she could envision you as a teacher and a scholar. I told her that was no way to make a living, but that mothers have a right to have dreams for their children.

Uncle Jules, I said, I have no desire to disappoint you in any way. Without you I wouldn’t have the good life I have now. I don’t know why, but I am drawn to a life of scholarship and writing. I realize that’s not the most productive avocation, but it’s what stimulates me. However, I want you to understand that I will always do whatever I can to help you.

Just hear me out, Xavier, he said. "For about the last year I’ve been talking to my old friend Roland Martin about buying his business. He’s getting too old to work every day and he doesn’t have any children. He owns a small printing shop located in one of the storefronts on the west side of the Pont Marie next to the Ile Saint-Louis. Since you love the printed word maybe you’d be interested in helping to learn about the craft and help manage the shop.

"You could keep going to school. In fact, I could rent you an apartment in the same building as the print shop and you’d be closer to the university. I will retain Roland’s employees and we could both learn from them about how to work a printing press. Roland says the King’s small cadre of printers gets all the official work that pays well and it’s difficult to get book orders, so he’s left with pamphlets, broadsides and libelles. But I’m a good businessman and I think I can turn that print shop into a real money-maker.

I’ll do this if you’ll join me, but there’s one other condition. If you say yes, I want you to write a book about the reign of Henri IV. I want you to write it for the common people like me who still hold the memory of Henri very dear. We could print it. I won’t be able to read it, but I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing it is written with affection for Henri and that I had a part in its creation. Imagine, me, an illiterate man, owning a business that printed a book. What do you say?

I was stunned, then thrilled. I could never have imagined such an opportunity, so I said yes, of course. Uncle Jules was obviously excited about expanding into a new business venture. I hugged him and thanked him for his generosity. His kindness and understanding amazed me. I guess I expected all adult males to be severe like my father and the fathers of other kids I grew up with.

The idea of writing a history of Henri IV and having it printed—even if by my own uncle’s press—made me a little giddy. The privilege of writing a book of secular history was normally reserved for scholars from the administrative class who could publish as long as what they wrote pleased the Church and the monarch. I was going to write a book to please my humble and illiterate uncle. It didn’t really matter to me that I might be the only person who would ever read it.

I told Uncle Jules that instead of enrolling at the University of Paris I could attend the College Royal, a center of humanities studies that was a kind of alternative to the Sorbonne and located across from it. The College Royal had a faculty of respected scholars but did not confer degrees. I could attend for free and take Greek and math classes. I could enroll later at the College de Montaigu, the Faculty of Arts school of the University of Paris.

At that point I still harbored a desire to become a scholar and professor. A Faculty of Arts student was supposed to study for ten years, including two years of philosophy, to earn a bachelor’s degree. But I soon learned it was possible to receive the baccalaureat in as few as two years and then earn the maitrise des arts within another two years.

After that it might be possible, with the right recommendations, to become a teacher at the college because only its own graduates were ever considered for the faculty. It wasn’t a particularly prestigious career path, however. Lawyers and medical doctors made much more money. The assumption was that only those with less capable minds chose to teach the arts and philosophy.

Uncle Jules reminded me again of his conviction that education is useless without some real-life experience to balance it. He seized the opportunity to recite another of his favorite passages from works I had read to him, this one from the wise Montaigne:

If our souls do not move with a better motion and if we do not have a healthier judgment, then I would just as soon that our pupil should spend his time playing tennis—at least his body would become more agile. But just look at him after he has spent some fifteen or sixteen years studying: nothing could be more unsuited for employment. The only improvement you can see is that his Latin and Greek have made him more conceited and more arrogant than when he left home. He ought to have brought back a fuller soul: he brings back a swollen one; instead of making it weightier he has merely blown wind into it.

I said I would try to develop a soul worthy of his and monsieur Montaigne’s noble expectations. For me, you will always be the best professor, I said. Others can teach me ancient languages, the works of the great scholars or the basics of science. But you, my uncle, have taught me how to be a human being. I am proud to be a graduate of the College Jacquet.

Uncle Jules went straight away to Roland Martin’s printing shop on the Pont Marie and they agreed on a purchase price of fourteen livres, which Roland thought was generous since he had actually been losing money in the last year or two. Uncle Jules had been thrifty his whole life and had inherited money from Madeleine, who had also been a good steward of the money she inherited from her mother and father. Uncle Jules was not rich, but he was in good financial shape, although I never asked for and he never offered any details.

A carved wooden sign was placed outside the print shop that announced the change of ownership: Jacquet et Jacquet Imprimeurs. As it turned out, I ended up spending more time at Jacquet et Jacquet on Pont Marie than I did at the College Royal or the University in the Latin Quarter, but I didn’t drop my academic pursuits altogether.

Fortunately, the book trade in Paris was open to a wide variety of people and social classes. There were three ranks—apprentice, journeyman and master—and promotion from one to the next was easily achieved. I could follow a dual goal of higher education and a printing career.

Uncle Jules was as fascinated by the printing business as I was. Competition was fierce, but he was a charming and persuasive salesman. He worked hard to increase business beyond pamphlets and other street literature, securing orders from booksellers on the rue Saint-Jacques.

Old Roland Martin had done us a favor, too, by employing a master printer who stayed on with us. The quality of his work was well known and Uncle Jules made sure he was paid well enough to want to stay. Roland was himself an excellent printer and he was always willing to offer advice and even assist with large jobs from time to time.

The workshop contained three presses in the middle of the room, all constructed of wood. They were anchored to the floor and to the ceiling by large posts and beams. One press was a rack and pinion type, so-called because it employed a pair of gears to convert rotational motion into linear motion. The second was driven by a screw thread, and the third, called an estanconniere, was only used for printing engravings. Its plate, screw and platen — a flat plate pressed onto the back of paper to cause an impression to be made from the type — were made of iron.

Every bit of space in the shop was in use. Standing against the walls and on the window sills were cases of tiny metal pieces of type with names like St. Augustin, Petit Canon, Cicero and Gros Roman. Drawers were stuffed with two-point letters, numbers, ornamental flowers, music notations, Hebrew letters and open-style initials for use in chapter headings.

The windows onto the street were covered half way up with samples of the shop’s products. The only thing Uncle Jules added was a newly purchased engraving of Henri IV which graced one of the few remaining vacant spots on the back wall.

As promised, Uncle Jules rented the apartment above the shop for me to live in. Then, when all three apartments became available, he rented them all, using the first and second floors for additional work space and storage. So I moved into the third-story apartment. Uncle Jules continued to live above the food brokerage shop on rue Saint-Antoine.

Like all the apartments in my Pont Marie building, mine was one room with a window facing the street to the east and a window on the west side that reminded me that I lived and worked on a bridge above the gray-green water of the Seine. It was pleasant to watch the flow of the normally calm river and its boat traffic.

The quais of Paris constrained the meandering Seine as it passed through the city. The Marais area, for example, was once part of the river’s ancient meander loop. The river flowed around Ile Saint-Louis and Ile de la Cité to its widest point as

Reviews for Pont Marie

[alstotts · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Metempsychosis, or reincarnation, is the unifying mechanism for this historical novel in which a contemporary narrator is confronted with dreams and memories of previous lives as a printer in seventeenth-century Paris, a United States Senator in the early twentieth-century, and an Anasazi sun priest at Chaco Canyon in the eleventh-century. The intensity of the memories, particularly as they relate to an interrupted love affair with a beautiful young Paris woman named Elodie Fleury, emphasizes the emptiness of his present-day life and the lack of a passionate relationship such as his seventeenth-century self experienced with the compelling Elodie. Reinventing or rediscovering Elodie becomes his raison d’etre as he attempts to cope with a life that casts multiple shadows.