About This Work

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