The Bridge of Change

The bridge barely curved that connects the terrible with the tender. —Rilke 1 The children play at the Luxembourg fountain. Their small ships catch wind and sail out and come round again. 2 Sometime between 250 and 200 B.C. fishermen and boatmen of the tribe Parisii discovered and built their huts on the largest island in the River Seine. Celtic Lutetia, “Town surround- ed by water,” thus was born there. The island is shaped like a boat— and this figure became a part of the capital’s coat-of-arms. So this was the start of the City first named for its engulfing water (on whose economy it depended), then after the people themselves: members of the tribe of Paris. We listen to these water folk and know they hear us, for we are born out of boats and out of water. The first sound we hear is the heart knocking quiet as a boat docks: and we all dissolve to island, earth and tears later. 3 And into air and fire! Once in the Latin Quarter in a space formed for him by waves of bright loiterers near the shortest street named for the Cat Who Catches Fish— or who (with slight inflection) “sins”— I watched a dark young man, naked to his thin waist, push long plumes of flame into the air above our awed faces raised there. From the sharp heat inside and out, his head and chest glowed in the night with an aura of oil or sweat. Thirsting, he drank again from a sponge of kerosene and breathed out long strings of fire and smoke into the Street of the Harp. Dark ash dropped back upon his face and cap, which lay open on the cobbled road waiting for coins from all who guessed at the mystery in what he’d done. He built a vast pillar of fire as if to guide us, then suddenly stopped, walked across the space, and kissed a reaching child (to bless and heal that amazed head), waved gratefully to us who now filled his cap with alms, and, smiling and burned (I saw scars beneath his raised arm), he sailed up that narrowing street in a wildly bal- looning white shirt we had watched him casually don to cover his vestment of skin. 4 For centuries that old City ended its west boundary in a small archipelago separated from the main island by the Seine’s two arms. It was on one of these small islets that Philip the Fair about the year 1314 had raised up a stake for the grand master, Order of Templars, whom he condemned, then from the palace window watched him burn. These little islands, quickened with their ghost victim’s screams, were joined in the sixteenth century by the decree of Henry Third (and by a great engineering feat Faust could envy) to the main island of the City. This new western tip was given the name of a park, “Vert Galant,” nickname of Henry Fourth: “The Gay old Spark.” Near there I watched in a loud street a white-haired man stand with one foot on the curb, the other in the cobbled street, and play an old mandolin. He was dressed in a black and frayed tuxedo and played with intense passion, sadly, but this desperate, dignified man, transformed by his art and by poverty (his case kept open for money), could not play the mandolin. —He just strummed the same chord again and again and again ... 5 It was also Philip the Fair who created an aristocratic prison air by building the blocks-long Gothic Conciergerie. The best view is from the Right Bank: The Slaughter House Quay (which now is a market for pets). You can see the four recently cleaned towers reflect- ed in the Seine. (At the Seine in fall, beneath the red and gold leaves, you see the rust, mahogany and beige boats gently jostle together at the shore and wait.) On the right: the crenelated Bonbec Tower stays. Bonbec means “babbler,” for this place was used through the centuries as a torture chamber. The right one of the twin towers, Argent, held treasure. Still the gorgeous Horloge Tower on the left corner of the ancient building across from the Bridge of Change houses the giant clock which gave its name to that quay: in its field of blue the many great gold fleurs-de-lys and the two life-sized mythical women, one with a fascicle of wheat, one with a balanced scale raised high in the clock, whose silver chime used to toll the hours for the monarch. (This was melted down in those days when Terror struck.) In this turreted place we have shaved the graceful neck and head of Marie Antoinette, ripped her white, ruffled collar wide and wrapped the cuff of rope about her hands behind her back. We made her face the casual knitting women and men making fists sitting on steps in the “May Court” (where a fresh tree was placed each spring by the lawyers’ clerks!) on her way to the guillotine. Its blade was heavy as primeval stone: she, the chemist Lavoisier, Charlotte Corday, poet and brother André Chénier, Madame du Barry—all 2600 who died, having said their last farewells in the Women‘s Courtyard, twelve per day underneath the blade! and some were disemboweled beside. Was there sometimes an image of beauty in their minds at the last? Perhaps on white sands beside the blue-black sea a matched pair of roan horses galloping together in the bright spume, riderless. Or a nude young man and woman lying together touching in a field of flowers? 6 Nearby on this Island the gargoyles of Notre Dame gawk in ancient horror and some forever gnaw on stone rabbits in the parapets or wail in winged, formal misery outside the set limits of the orthodox Church— all glory happening within the walls where they squat: so hunched, so beaked, so horrorstruck. 7 A wing of the May Courtyard where the condemned waited “Monsieur de Paris” as executioners were named now adjoins the building of glass and light, with no walls, it seems, jewel of Sainte Chapelle, its windows of rose and blue, gold, green, yellow, purple, rising fifty feet: its spire piercing the foliate, layered, many-colored egg of the vault of heaven, showering all the primal hues and shadows given— bright as the truth reflected in a drop of fresh blood or the colors of the body’s inner organs hid- den before the sure explosion of light that hits them at the moment of violent death. —This is a time like that of the sun that once a year, just at the dawn of winter solstice, lights up an ancient Celtic stone grave, striking the bones spread on shelves with all the colors of the flesh. 8 Who can stand these juxtapositions of person and place and time? I walk across the Bridge of Change where I have so often watched by the towers of the Conciergerie. Now, water laves a little higher up the stair from the River to the Quay, hiding some of the steps from me. Boats nudge at the edge. I walk along the Boulevard past the great gold and blue corner clock, the ornate wrought-iron gate and fence of the Place of Justice (its name changed from the time of kings), past the shadow and spire of Sainte Chapelle. I cross the Bridge of Saint Michel into the Latin Quarter. But I do not look for the Street of the Cat Who Fishes or the Street of the Harp. I turn right, wandering a bit, and suddenly, as if by chance, find myself at this street, and here I will wait, for it is our street,Rue Gît le Coeur: Here Lies the Heart. for Roger Aplon—1975