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Carol worked in La Bibliothèque Historique all day every day now, because she could plug in her laptop at any worktable, whereas at the Fornay, only two small tables had sockets, and those tables of course were always occupied. La Bibliothèque Historique also had a lobby with six chairs. People were free to eat their lunch there, a nice feature when it rained. Or in winter, which was going to arrive too soon. Carol dreaded November, when in Paris it felt as though someone had their hand on the dimmer switch and turned the light down fast. It just got darker and darker, until one was crazy for light, wasn’t one?
But now it was summer, and on clear days she sat in the garden around the corner from the library, off of Rue de Francs Bourgeois. There she had struck up a relationship with a pigeon that had a club foot. When no other pigeons were near, she would feed him scraps.
That morning, another email saying no to her work had arrived. She looked up at the library’s ancient beams, gilded in green, gold, and gray, and wondered if the artists who had gilded them had ever suffered rejection as an artist.
She was banging her head against these ancient Parisian stone walls, she thought. What was she doing? Why?
She packed up her laptop quietly. She worked here in order to be around people, but the young man next to her studying architectural drawings on his laptop screen had sniffed every thirty seconds for the last hour. She couldn’t take it, or the rejections, anymore. She headed out and wandered the streets.
She passed the Pompidou Centre, its plumbing and air ducts outside the building and painted in bright colors. Such a modern eyesore among the elegant white Paris buildings.
She kept wandering until she felt that she’d like to sit down. It seemed to her that the café owners had conspired with the city government to keep park benches away. A person had to either sit at a café and pay, or sit on the pavement.
But here was Saint-Merri. What was living in Paris for but the occasional visit to a Gothic church?
Inside, the vaulted ceiling of the side aisle was breathtakingly high. But then she moved to the center of the church and the ceiling was much higher. How glorious, she thought.
She sat in one of the chairs fastened to its neighbors so they wouldn’t get hodgepodge. These cathedrals didn’t used to have chairs, she mused. People used to do backbreaking work all week and then stand on the freezing cold stone floors for the whole service and listen to everything in Latin, a language foreign to them. What a tough breed people were back then.
She sighed as she lowered her backpack, weighed down with her laptop, onto the chair next to her. She thought, I was thinking about money as I banged out every word of the Naomi and Phoebe script. Even though I gave it a happy ending—that in the end Naomi sees herself as a success because she helped an elderly woman in her hour of need—nobody’s buying it. Evidently it has no legs.
I can’t help needing money—not immediately, but soon. As a motive for writing, however, it’s not helpful.
She was distracted momentarily by the sight of a young man stepping up behind a carved wooden wall. She could just see the top of his dark head. What was he doing? Oh, well, none of her business.
What was her business? To think about what Philippe had said about her critiques. It seemed that he thought the way she was going about it was shattering to people. She remembered the crystal elephant hitting Gregoire’s glass cabinet and shards of glass flying everywhere.
That certainly was a shattering critique of Gregoire, she thought. I certainly do want to create sparks. But not shards. I need to be more careful. But then again, why should I try to change? What’s my motive?
She sat still and waited for an answer. A thought came to her. Do unto others as you’d have them do to you. She thought, I prefer balanced critiques, that mention what I did right, myself. So be it.
What had Philippe said about motive? That her chief aim, the aim of all mankind, ought to be to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
She wasn’t there yet.
She remembered sitting in a theater while a film she’d written was playing. She loved to hear the audience laugh. She’d just loved her audience, wanted to take them away from their troubles for two hours, wanted to put some magic in their lives.
Maybe if she wrote out of love for the people who would be in her audience, out of love for stories and the magic and pleasure they gave people, it would make her writing a gift to people, to affirm humane values, rather than something that she used to try to extract money from them.
She jumped with a huge start as the church began resounding with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. In the pauses that Bach wrote between sections of the piece, she counted that the sound reverberated among the stone columns, ceilings, and floors for a full five seconds.
Maybe the music was a sign from God that he approved her ideas. That thought was uncomfortable, and she shifted her butt.
The young man’s head behind the carved wooden wall was swaying with the music. Ah, he was the organist. Such a young one in such an old church, Carol mused. How many organists had worked here in succession over hundreds of years, a few dozen generations’ worth? She felt the time, the ages, the weight of history in Paris.
She listened to the brilliant sound as it bounced around the stone cathedral and rushed to embrace her. I’ll put some Bach on my laptop and listen with earbuds in the library. Then I won’t hear people sniff.
And maybe I could start trying to write out of love for human beings. That was my first impulse—love of values and affirming humanity. Time to do that again.
