There must be a more opportune time to find the woman of your dreams than when you’re on your honeymoon. But that’s when it happened to me.
My new bride and I had been scouring the streets and alleys of Paris all day and the sun was setting low over the City of Light. Shadows lengthened and stretched like yawning cats over the lawns of Montparnasse cemetery. It’s hard to call them lawns, though, because there are more monuments to the dead there than are there is earth, grass, or even a Heaven to accommodate the souls. Le Cimetière du Montparnasse is to mortuary science and its decorative arts what the ice floes of Antarctica are to Emperor Penguins. If you’ve seen one you’ve seen both. And both are incredible.
I was searching for a chiseled sapling in a forest of marble: a cenotaph to a gifted poet named, CB. I had passed his burial place an hour earlier. But his empty tomb was more alluring to me, and it was eluding me. At last I was lost. But that’s when I saw her: leaning headlong into a ramshackle shed speaking with the graveyard’s keeper. She may have had 80 pounds on her body and was wearing as many years on her face. Still, she was captivating! You might tell me that she was wearing rags — & maybe she was — but it was the way that she wore her rags that would’ve turned anyone’s head. It wasn’t purely Parisian. The ensemble had a kind of angular silhouette and an almost boxy, Japanese aesthetic. But her wire-frame figure displayed it perfectly. And it was one of taste, grace and Paris on a piano string. She was absolutely beautiful.
I was a tourist, a visitor in her town and that was not lost on me. I had studied French for a few years and I was anxious to try out my not-so-new, linguistic legs in Paris. They’d worked in Chamonix, and supported me again in Zurich. But Paris is a different animal and so was she.
I knew it as soon as I said it. I had used her language to ask for a map of the cemetery and made a common, grammatical error. You would have thought that I had just kicked her dog! Instantly, she flew into a rage and it was directed at me. She didn’t even have a dog! No. I had done something worse — much worse: I had sinned against her beloved language and she wasn’t going to lie down for that! And I admired her for it! I apologized several times but my vocabulaire was falling on deaf ears. I had passed by Hôtel des Invalides on my way to the cemetery, and I considered that a more prolonged examination of its premises might have been in my immediate future, given the threat I was facing. The woman kept screaming. I assumed a stoic, patient frame of mind. I wanted to see if she’d dismantle her boyfriend’s shack and use its parts to construct a barricade to further advance her point.
The sun didn’t set slowly on the stones there that day. And I never found my sapling. It’s dedicated to a poet who once wrote that, “Beauty in youth is an accident. But Beauty in age is a work of art.” It’s one of Life’s truths. I met the proof.