Tock . . . Tock . . . Tock . . .
Church of Saint–Sulpice, Paris 5me. July 1994. 2 p.m. 12°C. Afternoon light, tinted an oceanic chartreuse by the stained–glass windows, spotlights the dust, which swirls in a Brownian movement each time it’s agitated anew by the thump of the wooden door admitting yet another tourist. As each new arrival fails to remove his hat or make the sign of the cross, the holy–water fonts, created from two halves of a giant clamshell, evert their silver lips in contempt.
UMBERTO ECO WOULD HAVE APPROVED OF MY DECISION TO MOVE to Paris to join the woman I loved. After all, hadn’t I in a sense just chosen his second option, and instead of writing a novel, run off with a chorus girl?
That was certainly how it appeared to people in Los Angeles. One of the acquaintances I’d made there, more bitter than the rest, growled, “Is this what you do? Come to town, make friends, then leave?” Of my apologetic explanation of a whirlwind romance, which the French call a coup de foudre, “thunderclap,” they were as incredulous as the director’s assistant in Day for Night—François Truffaut’s fable about the tribulations of moviemaking—when she learns that the star’s girlfriend has decamped with a stuntman. “I can see leaving a guy for a movie,” she says, “but leaving a movie for a guy . . . ?”
Though not by intention, Eco also provided another clue to the puzzle of France. In 1988 he published a second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum. I read it in Los Angeles, soon losing myself in its winding byways, its alleys of speculation, its cabinets of mystical curiosities, and its rag–and–bone markets of occult lore. Eco wrote once that “entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains; you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.” I made it to the end of Foucault’s Pendulum, but not without a sense of having conquered a literary Everest.
The novel begins in a vast building in Paris, where a wire, attached high in a dome, supports the pendulum of the title, a weight that swings back and forth ceaselessly above some sort of mystical diagram sunk into the marble floor.
Eco specifies a wire sixty–seven meters long and a pendulum weighing twenty–eight kilograms. Only a cathedral could accommodate something so cumbersome, and even if some archbishop agreed to house it, the chaos among his worshippers could only be imagined; one visualized whole pews full of parishioners mowed down by its swing. And what use would such a device fulfill? In the novel, it somehow proves that the earth rotates. The whole thing was obviously one of the wilder flights of Eco’s imagination.
On one of our first walks around Paris the spring after I arrived, Marie–Dominique and I strolled up to the highest point of the Left Bank. It’s dominated by an enormous building of ecclesiastical character with an imposing Roman–style colonnade.
“What church is that?” I asked.
“It’s not a church,” said Marie–Dominique. “It’s the Panthéon.”
When I looked blank, she continued, “In London, great poets are buried under the floor of Westminster Abbey? Well, this is our version. All sorts of people are buried in the crypt. Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, Dumas, Hugo, the Curies. Even Jean Moulin, the resistance leader—though his body was never found.”
“What did they bury, then?”
“An empty coffin, I suppose. The same with Antoine de Saint–Exupéry. His plane crashed in the sea. The body isn’t the point, it’s the idea . . .” Seeing my interest, she asked, “Do you want to go in?”
“Sure.” (How different everything might have been had I refused. For one thing, you would not be reading this book.) We walked up the steps, through the Corinthian columns with their acanthus–leaf capitals, under the inscription “Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante”—roughly “The homeland is grateful to its great men”—paid our admission, collected a brochure, and entered the vast, domed space.
I should have been admiring the heroic statuary, twice life–size, or the murals celebrating the achievements of France’s past. Instead my eyes fixed on something across the marble floor: a circular diagram, above which lazily swung a golden sphere supported by a wire stretching out of sight overhead.
“It’s the pendulum!”
Marie–Dominique looked puzzled. “Yes. Le pendule de Foucault. So?”
“But I thought . . .”
“What?”
“Never mind.” To confess I believed that Umberto Eco made it up would just add to her doubts as to whether she’d made the right decision about me.
As she left to admire the murals, I rapidly skimmed the brochure.
The Panthéon started life as a cathedral, but because the revolution of 1789 disapproved of religion, it was never consecrated. Instead it became a shrine to the nation’s great thinkers and creators. France could hardly have had a better symbol than a temple dedicated to secular saints. Unlike Rome, Paris was never a sacred city. Almost all its monuments are to intellect and reason, not the soul of man but his mind.
In 1855 a physicist named Léon Foucault, looking for a way to demonstrate visually that the earth rotates, was given permission to fix a pendulum to a swivel in the Panthéon dome. On the floor below, he laid out a 360–degree diagram, like the face of a compass. As the pendulum swung through an unvarying ten–second arc, independent of the earth’s motion, the diagram itself seemed to move, making a complete turn every thirty–two hours.
Foucault’s pendulum in 1851.
Anonymous. Foucault’s Pendulum in 1851. Author’s collection.
In 1633 Galileo, forced by the Inquisition to recant his findings that the earth revolved around the sun, was said to have muttered defiantly, “E pur si muove” (it still moves). Watching Foucault’s experiment, one savant said in satisfaction, “At last Galileo is vindicated!”
To Eco, it said something profound about the French. “The Pendulum told me,” he wrote, “that, as everything moved—earth, solar system, nebulae and black holes, all the children of the great cosmic expansion—one single point stood still: a pivot, bolt, or hook around which the universe could move.”
And that single point was here, in Paris.
Was this what the French believed also? That Paris was the hub around which all else revolved? That their values were somehow cosmic, rooted deep in the actual creation of the universe—values that went so deep and were so stubbornly held that nothing could shake them?
Perhaps the things we found most infuriating about the French—their refusal to accommodate other nations, their insistence on favoring the national good over that of the world, their fidelity to their language and culture—were also those we secretly envied.
Is that what drew us here? Was Paris, in some mystical sense, the perfection to which we all aspired?
I thought of running the idea past Marie–Dominique but decided against it. What if she replied “Of course!”?