If we were not so young and beautiful as we’d been in those years before the babies, at least we were beginning to look less tired. It was summer but cool enough in our second-story flat over the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and the babies were not really babies anymore. Probably—yes—we were still young and beautiful.
I woke up earlier than usual that morning, before the thrushes started in, unsettled by a rumbling sound from the fringe of my dreams. Still trembling, I wrapped my scarf at the window’s edge and made my way tenderly down the creaky steps.
Trouve avant de chercher. Paul Valéry had scribbled this in the margins of one of his notebooks. Find before seeking. A Zen aphorism. It’s all there, waiting for you. And don’t try too hard for it. In the powdery glow of the rue des Hospitalières Saint-Gervaise, it was the most natural thing to observe without desiring. To believe that somewhere in those climbing vines over Chez Marianne, or pouring like water from the tête de bœuf fountains, or in the cobbled sheen of the rue des Rosiers, something waited for me.
I smelled it first—sentir avant de voir—and it was always a revelation to stand before the Korsarcz bakery window, breathing the sweetness of the baguettes, those golden sculptures of the Marais. I placed my coins in the old woman’s hand and swifted my treasure home. My wife was already feeding the little ones oatmeal and berries at the arched window. We kissed and tore off steaming bits of the bread, and I poured two glasses of breakfast wine—a rosé, tingly and cold—and all of this was something found.
Rolling the double stroller out of the courtyard, past shuttered falafel houses and Hebrew bookshops, warm with wine, we stopped before the old wooden doors of the Hôtel Amelot de Bisseuil to admire the Gorgons—coiled, writhing in oak, with their bloated tongues—but we must have lingered there too long, because the sweet, smiling faces of our children turned to seashells.
We marched on, too skeptical to be petrified at a glance by Medusa. Only when the sunlight of the rue de Rivoli warmed their cheeks did laughter bubble up once again from the carriage. As the Oise limestone thawed in the rose-gold light, the right-bank Parisians took the stage, trim, tailored, elegant as so many boutique mannequins. We picked our way through them over the Seine, past the Conciergerie, its reflected turrets etched in copper, and we tramped the Saint Michel.
At the side entrance to the Luxembourg gardens, a green-bronze flower child waited for us, one foot kicked up in celebration, smiling behind his flute. “Le Faune dansant,” by Lequesne. It had been inspired by a similar sculpture found in the ruins of Pompeii, dancing among the bodies entombed in ash. On our approach, a bird piped into a two-note aria, and the children were overcome, for it was exactly as if the faun were playing.
We were young enough to believe in magic, old enough to trust the inanimacy of bronze. Still, in the shadow of the statue of the Greek actor, a husky voice seemed to ask of us, “Où aller ensuite?” And by the pond, as my wife unclipped the stroller belts, Minerva whispered, “You’re free, you’re free.”
Over gravel paths, under tree tunnels, up stone stairways, we followed the little ones, like keepers of clumsy elves, hunting them through patches of shade and sun. When they settled back into the stroller, their faces were pink as Maremma marble.
If we were tempted by the smell of coffee breezing from the brasserie Guynemer, neither of us mentioned it. Motion was the thing now, the soothing flow of rue Vavin, the gentle yaw and pitch of the morning stroll, along with the breath of lavender and jasmine, the sweet tobacco tinge of Gauloises, and the macarons spinning like sugared jewels in the windows. The children clutched their milks over the busy Raspail, humming and purring, and by the time we reached the Montparnasse, both had fallen asleep.
Possibly we would still be there, even now—at that quiet café on the Montparnasse, enjoying espressos, jambon-beurres, and a demi-carafe of Bordeaux at the proper speed, the children sleeping like the cherubs of D’Orsay—had the clouds not slipped over the buildings and a cold wind stirred them back to life.
On the walk home there was little to find, only the flaps and zippers of the stroller tarp, the dullness in our heads after the meal, and the smell of Paris in the rain: wet charcoal, marjoram, burnt butter. The square of the Hôtel de Ville had been partitioned off for an exhibition, and we were threading a walkway between a chain-link fence and the grand façade when we heard the shouting up ahead.
The umbrellas all dropped at once, and the crowd parted down the middle like a school of fish cut through by a shark. I saw the white truck tearing toward us, pitching people aside. Time stalled. Even the raindrops ceased to fall—they hovered in the air as a filigree of lucent beads.
I wanted to escape, to heave the stroller over the low wall, to save the children. But I was frozen. As if in a lucid dream or a hallucination, I watched as the stonework of the Hôtel de Ville crawled at the edges. The statue of Voltaire smiled, peered around a pillar toward the oncoming truck. The Ville de Paris squirmed on her throne, in preparation for impact. D’alembert, his mouth agape like a Gorgon’s, slid one foot forward.
A beast had been let loose on the ballroom floor. We, the dancers, had been caught mid-step. Fragile sculptures, not stone-hewn, but delicate as tinted glass, we assumed our positions, performed our graceful gestures. As if by accident, we had found ourselves in Paris, and we would remain there eternally, young, beautiful, cast in place. Like unwitting fauns. Or those at Pompeii.
Dan Reiter‘s recent experiments with short-form fiction have been published by The Kenyon Review, Tin House, The Florida Review, McSweeney’s, Hobart, and other journals. His last name derives from the Germanic word for horseman. The proper pronunciation is ‘writer,’ though people often vocalize it as ‘reader.’ Dan does not correct them. He lives and surfs in Cocoa Beach, Florida. You can find more of his stories at www.dan-reiter.com.