The Ring 💍 Paris
The Enigma
Kenneth was, once again, waiting for Martine. This time he was waiting in the Latin Quarter at La Maison de Verlaine, with its heavy echoes of decadence and symbolism. He hoped she wouldn’t be late, since he was scheduled to give a lecture in an hour at the Collège de France (just down the street), which had generously kept him on for another year. He was expected back at All Souls in September, with or without Martine.
His lecture was on Essentialism and Probability. He thought to himself jokingly that the probability of Martine coming back with him to England was about the same as the probability of her arriving on time to their rendez-vous at La Maison de Verlaine. It was completely indeterminable: X = X. The namesake of the café-restaurant, Paul Verlaine, perhaps knew a woman like her:
Martine was the best thing, and the most confusing thing, that had happened to him in his two-year stint at the College. On the surface, she and the College were opposites: she was volatile and emotional; the College was solid and rational. And yet she was brilliant and creative, like so many of the professors he’d met, whose studies in everything from bosons to cuneiform boggled his mind. The deeper he got into her thinking, or into the thoughts of his colleagues, the more perplexing things got. Everything started off in a straight line, as in polite conversation. Comment vas-tu? Très bien, merci. Yet everything ended up in circles, wide loops, or tight knots. Mais, je croyais que vous étiez… But, I thought you were… Like a glass menagerie, the structure splintered under the pressure. It started with a clear line of poetry, like a unicorn of rare device, and ended up with accusations and broken horns.
It didn’t matter if it was poetry or particle physics, all the lecturers started with a promise to get at the meaning of things. Yet thirty minutes into their explanations they were (as Byron said of Coleridge) obliged to explain their explanations. It was as if every subject was itself subject to Verlaine’s warning: Je vous dis ce n'est pas ce que l'on pense / I tell you it's not what one thinks. It was as if the will to explain anything was doomed from the start. Yet there they were, in books and on podiums, trying to explain it anyway.
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With Martine you knew right from the start that any attempt to explain would be doomed. Even by the way she looked at you, you knew that it would be impossible to understand what was going on in her head. She didn’t even attempt to explain. Indeed, she made it clear that the more you knew about her, the more you knew you didn’t know. It could have been the College maxim.
Sometimes Ken thought she’d spent so much time reading French philosophy, straining her eyes over the pages of Sartre’s alienation, that she’d become an alien herself. She looked around her as if she were scanning for radioactive traces or vibrations no one else could see. Hmmmm, what are these petty humans up to now? He couldn’t understand her unearthly detachment. Or was she just French?
Martine once said that she was Corsican, and that her grandparents had migrated to the mainland because of some difficulty with another family. He often saw her put her hand into her jacket and look up into the sky, as if she were sending eight battalions to certain death across the Rhine. She commanded the waiters, her professors, the president of the Sorbonne, the mayor of Paris, even the President of the Republic, who was hopelessly in love with her. All of them pretended to have minds of their own, but when she told them to do something, they obeyed. Napoléon avait cinq cent soldats.
Late in the evening, the senators from the Luxembourg Palace admitted that they didn’t know what to do with her. In the nearby bars of Saint-Germain, they stared into the depths of their brandy snifters and confessed that they didn’t expect this sort of thing from a woman. Of course, the next day Martine found out about these comments, and couldn’t stop laughing.
Behind the shuttered windows of the Élysée Palace, the President refused to drink. He needed to stay sober to deal with this level of interference. It seemed that every time he was urged to do something by the President of the European Union, the same thing had been suggested to him a week or two earlier by Martine. He saw her the other day on Place des Ternes having an afternoon coffee with the American first ambassador.
The President refused to drink, until midnight, at which point he sighed, got up from his leather chair, and opened his teak cabinet full of vintage Armagnac.
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