Vanished Smile Read Free

Age and lethargy were job requirements. Only retired noncommissioned officers of the French army could apply to be guards at the Musée duLouvre. The country they had served allowed them one final tour of duty before relegating them to permanent pasture and probable penury. This was their last shuffle, and ambitions rarely if ever strayed beyond a good meal, an afternoon nap, or perhaps a few moments with a grandchild.
    The guard shifted his substantial weight on the insubstantial stool and repressed a belch, regretting his choice of cassoulet, a dinner suitable for a winter Sunday, not the doldrums of August. The afternoon meandered in half-time. By four o'clock, when the bell clanged signaling the museum's closing, the “macaroni” and the young Goethe had disappeared.
    Paupardin picked up the oleander and folded his stool. The Grande and Petite Galeries emptied, footsteps echoing, the many doors banging shut. Outside the Louvre, Paris shimmered in the glaze of heat. In the Tuileries Gardens just beyond, a halfhearted game of boule was ending.
    Summer is not a popular season in Paris. Average August temperatures chase rich and poor to the vineyards of the Loire valley and the cooling beaches of Normandy. This August was the worst that Parisians forced by one circumstance or another to remain in town could remember in a dozen years. The heat wave had hung on for weeks. Less than one millimeter of rain had fallen in Paris during the entire month, and in a single day, four people had collapsed with sunstroke. At six o'clock, it was still ninety-one degrees. The cafés of Pigalle were deserted. The Seine stood still. Along its banks, the sheltering plane trees and chestnut trees drooped.
    Night like liquid velvet settled over the mansard roofs, innocent, if a night is ever innocent. A night is young but never innocent, and as Sunday merged with Monday and the city awakened to a new day, the game that would stun Paris and astound the world was afoot.
    No one would notice for more than twenty-four hours.
3
    THE FIRST GULP or Tuesday, August 22, was as unsurprising as a glass
oivin ordinaire
. Water carts washed the cobbled streets. Workers in blue overalls swept the quais with faggot brooms. Under the girders and skylights at Les Halles, what Emile Zola called the belly of Paris, horses and workers performed the morning ballet, mongers shouting their products and prices through the central market. The bells of nearby St-Eustache tolled.
    Louis Béroud followed the narrow Seine channel along Quai Saint-Michel. At the point where the Boulevard Saint-Michel disgorged, he crossed and continued along the Quai des Grands Augustins, perhaps stopping to look at the steeple of Sainte-Chapelle rising out of the cluster of government buildings that comprise the judicial heart of Paris, housing courtrooms, jail cells, and the office of the chief of the Paris police. Béroud may have stood once in the upper chapel, with sunlight fiery through the finest glass in Paris, and thought of God. The river was languid, the water level so low that the color had concentrated to a murky ocher. He decided not to cross at Pont Neuf, still called the “new bridge” though now it was the oldest in Paris, and he continued on to the Pont des Arts.
    Paris saunters through history in the present tense, neither extolling its past nor rushing to embrace its future. If the analogy were extended to other capitals, Athens would exist in the past perfect, Rome in the past imperfect, New York in the future imperative. Perhaps because Paris was never the seat of empire, never the center of the world like Athens and Rome, its past is not preserved as a glorious ruin but incorporated into the present. At the same time, a bedrock conservatismprevents the avant-garde from being quickly accepted and instantly absorbed. New York, where nothing remains new for long, is a work in progress, a process as much as a place. There the new is seized and swallowed whole. But Paris