The Dream Killer of Paris Read Free

drawn to the area of the sky where, not so long ago, I had thought I’d seen a majestic landscape. A flight of cormorants now took its place.
    I turned to my companion but the ochre and blue chair was empty.
    Where had she gone? I scoured the deck in every direction but couldn’t see her golden mane anywhere.
    In Calais at the harbour station and later in the Pullman carriages of the Flèche d’Or I looked for her again among the passengers – in vain. It was as if she had disappeared into thin air and I thought it unlikely I would ever see her again.
    As the train sped through the French countryside at more than seventy miles an hour, I considered the strange meeting again. By the time the train had stopped at Platform 1 of the Gare du Nord, my memory of the scene had become so uncertain that I wondered if I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Indeed, what if, after all, the young woman herself was a mirage. Fata Morgana!
    Notes
    2 Gérard de Nerval, le poète et l’homme by Aristide Marie, published by Hachette in 1914. Singleton devoured this biography, the first truly complete account of the French writer’s life. (Publisher’s note)

II
TOUR SAINT-JACQUES
    I walked from the Gare du Nord to the capital’s historical centre. As well as Nerval’s books, I had taken care to slip into my bag a guide to modern and ancient Paris written in the 1920s which I had bought from a second-hand dealer in Boston. In the middle of the book was a very colourful map and every time I consulted it I circled in pen the names of the main roads, bridges, squares and monuments which captured my imagination.
    Whistling, I headed down Boulevard de Magenta and then Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis before turning down Rue Réaumur on to Boulevard de Sébastopol. At the top of Rue de Turbigo, I made my way through narrow streets with delightfully evocative names: Rue aux Ours, Rue Quincampoix, Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, Rue Brisemiche, and so on.
    At the bend in Rue Saint-Bon, I reached Tour Saint-Jacques, so dear to Nerval. The monument was all that remained of the old church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie whose refurbishment had been paid for by Nicolas Flamel, the famous alchemist.
    The tower took pride of place in the middle of a small square filled with trees and flowers. Somewhere in this garden was the spot where the poet had come to hang himself that night in January 1855. Unless it was fifty yards further along where the solemn Théâtre des Nations had since been built 3 . In Nerval’s time, the area didn’t have the respectable feel it has today. It had been a jumble of dark alleyways and sordid passageways where scoundrels and down-and -outsloitered. That was before Baron Haussmann’s engineers ‘civilised’ Old Paris for ever.
    The day after Nerval’s death, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, Roger de Beauvoir and, to a lesser extent, Arsène Houssaye expressed serious doubts about the suicide theory. They thought that their friend had been the victim of one of the local ruffians.
    I remember talking one evening, in a pub in Aldgate, to a music hall lighting engineer who had worked in Paris a few years earlier at the Théâtre des Nations. According to him, when work had been carried out in the building’s basement at the beginning of the 1910s, engineers, comparing the city maps with those of sixty years before, had noticed that the bars of the cellar window where Nerval had been found hanged at the end of a thin rope corresponded exactly to the current position of the prompter’s box. What’s more, if the usherettes were to be believed, on some evenings the poet’s ghost wandered between the rows of stalls after the performance. There was even a story that Sarah Bernhardt’s prompter was the ghost in person. However, I suspect that my companion, who was partial to whisky, was trying to pull the wool over my eyes to some extent.
    I rested for a few minutes on a bench in Square Saint-Jacques, opposite the tower, and then, as