Paris Nocturne

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DR BOUVIÈRE IS another one of those fugitive faces from this period. I wonder if he’s still alive. Perhaps under another name, in some provincial town, he has found new disciples. Last night, the memory of this man brought on a nervous laugh which I struggled to contain. Had he really existed? Was he not a mirage provoked by lack of sleep, a habit of skipping meals and taking bad drugs? Not at all. There were too many details, too many connections that proved well and truly that a Dr Bouvière, during that time, conducted his meetings from cafés in the fourteenth arrondissement.

Our paths had crossed a few months before the accident. And I must admit that at the Hôtel-Dieu, as they put the black muzzle over my face to administer ether and send me to sleep, I had thought of Bouvière because of his doctor title. I don’t know what the title meant, whether it was one of his university ranks or if he was recognised as having completed medical studies. I think Bouvière played on this ambiguity to suggest that his ‘learning’ covered vast spheres, medicine included.

The first time I saw him, it was not in Montparnasse at one of his meetings, but on the other side of Paris, on the Right Bank, right on the corner of Rue Pigalle and Rue de Douai, in a café called Le Sans Souci. I have to point out what I was doing there, even if I have to come back to it again in more detail one day. Following the example of a French writer known as the ‘nocturnal spectator’, I frequented certain neighbourhoods in Paris. In the streets at night, I had the impression I was living another life, a more captivating one, or quite simply, that I was dreaming another life.

It was around eight o’clock in the evening, in winter, and there were not many people in the café. My attention was drawn to a couple sitting at one of the tables: he had short silver hair, was around forty, with a bony face and pale eyes. He’d kept his overcoat on. She was a blonde woman of about the same age. Her complexion was translucent, but her features were severe. She spoke to him in a deep, almost masculine voice, and the words I heard sounded like they were being read out, so clear was her articulation. But there was something about her that fitted perfectly with the Pigalle district at that time. Indeed, at first I thought they were the proprietors of one of the nightclubs in the area. Or probably just her, I thought. The man would have stayed behind the scenes. He listened to her as she spoke. He took out a cigarette holder and I was struck by his affectation, a slight movement of the chin, as he put it in his mouth. After a while, the woman stood up and in her smooth voice, articulating each syllable, she said to him, ‘Next time, you won’t forget my refills, will you,’ and this phrase intrigued me. She said it in a dry, almost contemptuous tone and he nodded his head docilely. Then, with an air of confidence, she strode out of the café, without turning back, leaving him looking annoyed.

I watched her leave. She wore a fur-lined raincoat. She walked down Rue Victor-Massé on the left-hand side of the street and I wondered if she would go into the Tabarin. But she didn’t. She disappeared. Perhaps into the hotel, further down the street? After all, she was just as likely to be the proprietor of a hotel as of a cabaret or a perfumery. He remained sitting at the table, his head lowered, pensive, the cigarette holder dangling from the corner of his mouth, as if he’d just taken a punch. Under the neon light, his face was veiled in a film of sweat and a kind of grey grease that I’ve noticed on the faces of men made to suffer by women. Then he got up, too. He was tall, his back slightly stooped. Through the glass, I saw him walk down Rue Pigalle, moving like a sleepwalker.

That was my first encounter with Dr Bouvière. The second was about a fortnight later, in another café, near Denfert-Rochereau. Paris is a big city, but I think you can meet the same person several times and often in places where it would seem most unlikely: in the metro, on the boulevards…Once, twice, three times, you could almost say that fate — or chance — had a hand in it, and was willing a certain meeting or steering your life in a new direction, but you seldom heed its call. You let the face go, and it remains forever unknown, and you feel relief, but also remorse.

I went into the café to buy cigarettes and there was a queue at the counter. The clock on the far wall was showing seven o’clock in the evening. At a table beneath it, in the middle of the red moleskin banquette, I recognised Bouvière. There were a few people with him, but they were sitting on chairs. Bouvière was sitting on the banquette by himself, as if the more comfortable spot was his by right. The grey grease and sweat had disappeared from his face, and the cigarette holder was no longer dangling from the corner of his mouth. He was barely the same man. This time he was talking; he even seemed to be delivering a lecture while the others listened in rapture. One of them was scribbling in a large school exercise book. Girls as well as boys. I don’t know why I was so curious, perhaps that evening it was the need to answer the question I was asking myself: how could a man transform so dramatically depending on whether he’s in Pigalle or Denfert-Rochereau? I had always been very sensitive to the mysteries of Paris.

I sat on the banquette at the table next to theirs, so I could be close to Bouvière. I noticed that they were all drinking coffee, so I ordered one, too. None of them paid me any attention. Bouvière didn’t even pause when I knocked the table. I had stumbled over the foot of the table and fallen next to him on the banquette. I listened attentively, but didn’t fully understand what he was saying. Certain words didn’t have the same meaning when he used them as they do in normal life. I was amazed at how gripped his audience was. They lapped up his words and the fellow with the exercise book didn’t pause for a moment from his shorthand scribbling. Bouvière made them laugh from time to time with obscure references that he must have often uttered, like code words. If I have the strength, I will try to remember some of the most characteristic phrases from his lectures. I wasn’t receptive to the words he used. They had no resonance, no glimmer of meaning for me. In my memory they are like thin, bleak notes played on an old harpsichord. And besides, without Bouvière’s voice to animate them, all that is left are the empty words, whose meaning I can’t quite capture. I think Bouvière took them, more or less, from psychoanalysis and far eastern philosophy, but I am reluctant to venture into territory I know little about.

Eventually he turned to me and acknowledged my presence. At first, he didn’t see me, and then he asked his audience a question, something like, ‘Do you see what I mean?’ while staring straight at me. At that moment, I felt like I was melting into the group, and I wondered if, for Bouvière, there was any difference between me and the others. I was certain that in this café, around the same table, his audiences would come and go and, even if there were a handful of loyal followers — an inner circle — different groups would no doubt gather here every evening of the week. He confuses all the faces, all the groups, I said to myself. One more, one less. And every so often he seemed to be talking to himself, like an actor reciting a monologue before a faceless audience. As he felt the attention on him reach its peak, he would draw on his cigarette holder so hard his cheeks became sunken and, without exhaling, he would pause a few seconds to make sure we were all hanging on his every word.

That first night, I arrived towards the end of the meeting. After a quarter of an hour, he stopped speaking, placed a slim, black briefcase on his knees, an elegant model — like the ones in the large leatherwear stores in the Saint-Honoré neighbourhood. He took out a diary bound in red leather. He leafed through it. He said to the person sitting closest to him, a young man with a hawkish face, ‘Next Friday at Zeyer at eight o’clock.’ And the man jotted it down in a notebook. He appeared to be his secretary and I assumed he was responsible for sending out announcements for meetings. Bouvière stood up, and turned to me again. He smiled warmly, as if to encourage me to keep attending their meetings. As a kind of observer? The others stood up together. I followed suit.

Outside, in Place Denfert-Rochereau, he stood in the middle of the group, exchanging a few words with one and then another, like those slightly bohemian philosophy professors who develop the habit of going for a drink with their more interesting students after class and late into the night. And I was part of the group. They walked with him to his car. A young blonde woman, whose thin, severe face I had noticed earlier, walked beside him. He seemed to be on more intimate terms with her than with the others. She wore a waterproof jacket the same colour as that of the woman in Pigalle, but hers wasn’t lined with fur. And it was cold that evening.

At some point he took her arm, which didn’t seem to surprise anyone. At the car they exchanged a few more words. I stood a short distance from the rest of the group. The way he put his cigarette holder in his mouth didn’t have the same affectation that had struck me in Pigalle. On the contrary, the cigarette holder now had something military about it. He was surrounded by his officers and was issuing his latest orders. The blonde girl was standing so close to him their shoulders were touching. Her face became more and more severe, as if she wanted to keep the others at a distance and demonstrate her pride of place.

He got into the car with the girl, who slammed the door shut. He leaned out of the window and waved goodbye to the group, but at that moment he stared directly at me, so that I imagined the gesture was intended just for me. I was on the edge of the pavement and I leaned towards him. The girl looked at me with a sulky expression. He was getting ready to start the engine. I was gripped by vertigo. The phrase had so intrigued me the other night in Pigalle that I wanted to knock on the window and say to Bouvière, ‘You haven’t forgotten the refills?’ I was saddened by the thought that this phrase would remain a mystery, one among so many other words and faces captured in a moment and which continue to shine in your memory with the glimmer of a distant star, before being erased forever, on the day of your death, without ever revealing their secrets.

I stayed there on the pavement, in the middle of the group. I was embarrassed. I didn’t know what to say to them. I ended up smiling at the fellow with the hawkish face. Perhaps he knew more than the others. I asked him, a little abruptly, the name of the girl who had just left in the car with Bouvière. He replied, nonplussed, in a soft, deep voice, that her name was Geneviève. Geneviève Dalame.