Paris, October 2018
I’m standing at the intersection of rue du Temple and rue Notre-Dame du Nazareth, near the northern edge of the Marais District in the 2nd arrondissement. Just a stone’s throw away is the bustling Place de la Republique, one of those vast public squares that dot the city of Paris. Once a busy traffic roundabout ruled by the car, it underwent a radical transformation a few years ago into a pedestrian plaza with a café and an array of wooden seating platforms, which the skateboarders make enthusiastic use of. Looming over the plaza is an enormous bronze statue of “Marianne,” the national symbol of the French Republic, surrounded by representations of the guiding spirits of the 1789 revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité. Marianne and her companion statues weren’t here, of course, when Marie-Angelique died in a nearby apartment, more than a decade before the revolution.
Somewhere on this spot, where rue du Temple meets rue Notre-Dame du Nazareth, is the place Marie-Angelique lived out her final years, after she’d become an independently wealthy woman. There are rows of three- and four-storey apartment buildings on both sides of the street. They don’t look that old, but in Paris, it’s hard to tell. On the north side of the street is an iron gate with a decorative stone arch that looks like it could have been here in 1775. But either way, I know I’m near the patch of planet Earth where the Wild Girl lived and died.
Marie-Angelique was here.
I don’t have the same degree of certainty about the other address I’m going to check out. Which is surprising, because it’s noted very specifically in the historical record. In James Burnett’s preface to the 1768 English translation of Mme. Hequet’s biography of La Fille Sauvage, he announced her co-ordinates for all the world to see: “For the satisfaction of any readers of this pamphlet who may happen to be in Paris, and have the curiosity of paying a visit to Mademoiselle LeBlanc, I here give her address in the year 1765: Rue St. Antoine vis à vis la rue vielle du Temple sur la troisieme etage sur le Devant [‘St. Antoine Street nearly opposite Old Temple Street on the third floor in the front’].” You’d think it couldn’t get more precise than that, but there’s a problem – rue St. Antoine doesn’t intersect with rue du vielle Temple, at least it doesn’t nowadays. I suspect it might have something to do with changing street names over the centuries, which also leads me to wonder whether “rue du vielle Temple” is the same as the one now called “rue vielle du Temple.” I figure the best thing to do is to head south on rue du vielle Temple, toward the river. It’s an unseasonably warm October afternoon, so I stop at the Café des Philosophes for an espresso, sipping it at an outside table where a nearby busker is playing “Hello Dolly” on a trumpet. I continue south, and shortly before reaching the river I cross rue de Rivoli, a wide street lined with boutiques. I note on the map that a few blocks to the west, the name of Rivoli changes to St. Antoine.
In the past few days, Alec and I have re-visited Songy and Chalons-en-Champagne, watching from the train as we pass vast fields of canola, beets, and éoliennes. It turns out that, economically, things might be looking up for the region: Chalons is getting a brand-new jail, which is expected to create quite a few new jobs. But as we learn from the Phelizons, it was a tough year for winemakers: As a result of a summer-long drought, the grapes are too sweet, and will have to be mixed with juice from previous vintages. To my taste, the champagne they serve us at lunch is as exquisite as ever.
Of course, I have a swim in the moat, and we walk across the field to the l’Ile de la Fille Sauvage, which seems even more eerily silent than I remember. When we were last here, there was talk of building a proper walkway with signage from the entrance of the winery to the Ile. But there’s been no movement on that front, largely due to the further deterioration of relations between the Phelizons and the mayor. Eric and Marie-Ange recount with indignation Mayor Passinhas’ recent efforts to trademark the phrase La Fille Sauvage for tourism purposes. I have to admit that the idea sounds pretty ridiculous. I don’t know anything about French law, but surely one can’t claim ownership of a string of words in common use. And we agree that the Wild Girl’s story should be considered part of the common heritage of the area, not the property of a single village. Two things are clear. There is still no flood of tourists, not even a trickle, to Songy. And the rivalry between le vigneron and le maire isn’t going to end any time soon.
Yet, in the wider world of Wild Girl aficionados, things appear to be settling down. The Exposition has been displayed in a number of French towns in the past year-and-a-half, but its final booking is coming up soon, though Isabelle Guyon still has hopes that it might travel outside France. Last year Julia Douthwaite published an intriguing piece in a collection of French essays. “La Jeune Fille Sauvage Mis a Jour et Quelques Avenues pour l’Avenir” expanded on her previous work, exploring the role of racism and colonialism in creating the “legend” of the Wild Girl. In 2018, though, Douthwaite retired from her academic post at the University of Notre Dame, took her married surname, and moved back to her hometown, Seattle, where she started an online business, Honey Girl Books and Gifts. As for Franck Rolin, aka Serge Aroles, he too appears to have withdrawn from the Marie-Angelique universe, at least for the moment. He is continuing his medical relief work in Ethiopia, where he now lives full-time with a new wife and son.
As I’ve said throughout this book, my own relationship to Marie-Angelique has undergone a transition. Since I decided to put aside the play I was writing about her, she is no longer “my” character. I’ve come back to Paris to make a kind of pilgrimage, to honor the fact that she was a living person who walked these streets and breathed the air of Paris. I have one more stop on my itinerary, though, and my feelings about this one are complicated.
The Empire of Death
Among the many crimes committed against Indigenous peoples by their colonial usurpers was the theft of their art and sacred objects. In Canada, the holdings of prominent institutions like the Royal Ontario Museum and the Glenbow Museum are full of artifacts taken from Indigenous nations over the centuries. Here and elsewhere, the idea of “repatriation,” the practice of returning these artifacts to their original owners, has gained currency as an acknowledgement of Europeans’ historic role in the erasure of Indigenous heritage. And the practice doesn’t only apply to artifacts; in some cases, it even includes human remains of individuals who, like Marie-Angelique, were stolen from their communities of origin.
Take the famous case of Abraham Ulrikab, who in 1880 was taken to Europe along with seven other Labrador Inuit, where they were exhibited in so-called Human Zoos. A year later they were all dead from smallpox, which they had not been vaccinated against. In 2010, a Quebec researcher named France Rivet set out to locate Ulrikab’s remains, which she finally traced to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. The museum agreed to return Ulrikab’s remains to Labrador, and the Inuit are currently in discussions with French authorities as to how this repatriation will be carried out.
According to Serge Aroles, Marie-Angelique was buried on the grounds of the Church of St. Nicholas-des-Champs, which according to the historical record was one of the cemeteries that was dug up and moved to the catacombs. I assumed that this meant that physical repatriation would not be an option for her remains, but now I wonder. Was that really the case? I knew almost nothing about the catacombs, other than the fact that the remains of an estimated six million Parisians were down there. That’s an awful lot of bones, but how were they situated? Were they just in random piles? I decided I had to look into it further.
By the late eighteenth-century, the cemeteries of the growing city were bursting at the seams. A great many of the bodies hadn’t been buried properly and were spreading disease. Parisian officials decided to condemn the city’s burial grounds and move the remains they contained elsewhere, turning to the city’s maze of underground quarries. Over several decades they were able to organize the movement of bodies from previously existing graveyards, transporting the dead via carts to the underground quarries. Today the more than six million deceased Parisians in the catacombs include figures like Robespierre and Danton, who were guillotined during the revolution. Although the ossuary comprises only a small section of the underground network of tunnels, Parisians commonly refer to the entire tunnel network as Les Catacombes.
The catacombs have been open for public visitation since the late-nineteenth century, and since then an entire mythology has sprung up around what’s been called the “Empire of Death.” The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables’ Jean Valjean both haunted these tunnels. During World War II, the invading Nazi army occupied a bunker in the tunnels below the 6th arrondisement. Striking students descended into the catacombs during the 1968 student uprising. In 2004, an entire cinema was discovered sixty feet beneath the city, including a bar, lounge, and a screening area where twenty seats had been carved into the stone. Officials chalked the finding up to a clandestine group of “cataphiles,” daredevils and urban explorers who delight in the forbidden; in breaking the rules. There’s even a group of outlaw swimmers who take occasional dips in the tunnels’ underground pools. (Yes, I was tempted. But I didn’t manage to make contact with the group. I did, however, connect with a Facebook group called Paris Wild Swimming, and joined a few of them for an outlaw swim in the Canal de l’Ourcq. I like to think that Marie-Angelique would have approved.)
In their first years, the catacombs were a disorganized bone repository. In the early-nineteenth century, Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, director of Mines Inspection, oversaw extensive renovations that transformed the underground caverns into a veritable mausoleum, with thousands of skulls and femurs arranged in patterns on the walls and in the walkways, an arrangement that survives to this day. So, the ossuaries in the catacombs were not random, but organized in some fashion. Still, I wanted to know more.
I turned to – where else? – Google, which offered up a slew of amateur videos of walks through the catacombs. Most were short, but I found the motherlode in a video that had amassed nearly 200,000 views. The video, posted by a user who goes by the moniker “Lättsmält,” begins with a walk through a long tunnel – so long that after a minute or so, Lättsmält thoughtfully fast-forwards through to the ossuaries. As the camera wends its way through the tunnels the viewer periodically encounters signage indicating the origin of each collection of bones. Frustratingly, Lättsmält didn’t pause long enough at any one sign to allow me to read the text. Until, remarkably, at the twelve-minute mark, the camera lingers on one of the signs just long enough to allow me to make out the writing, though I need a magnifying glass to do it. (I’ve said before that this search for the Wild Girl had elements of a detective story, which was now becoming literally true.)
“Ossemens du Cimitiere St. Nicholas des Champs. Le 24 Août 1804.”
The date was right. It seemed almost too perfect. There on the screen I saw row upon row of neatly-stacked bones with a layer of skulls on top. Could it be that somewhere in that very stack were the bones of the Wild Girl? Was it possible that I could go into the catacombs myself, find my way to this section, and stand within inches of her physical remains?
It was another of those moments that I’d had since I’d begun working on this book. At every point, it seemed, I’d found just the information I needed. At times it felt like I was being led by something outside myself, that the pieces were coming to me unbidden – almost as if I was being summoned by… what? The spirit of Marie-Angelique herself? Once again, it was time to cue the Twilight Zone theme music…
When I had been planning the trip to Paris, I’d had every intention of making the trek through the catacombs, to see if I could locate the Ossemens du Cimitiere St. Nicholas des Champs.
But as the time grew closer, I found myself questioning the whole idea. Why did I want to do this? Was it a respectful thing to do? For Indigenous people, the burial grounds of their ancestors are sacred places that should not be disturbed. In North America, Native people raise objections when land developers and archeologists plan to dig up known burial sites, and increasingly these objections are being honored and accommodated by various levels of government. But a mass grave that doubles as a tourist attraction? The more I thought about it, it was hard to imagine a situation more at odds with the Meskwaki world-view. When I’d spoken to Johnathan Buffalo about the catacombs, he’d displayed little discernable reaction. I began to wonder what he would think of my plan to visit what was the likely repository of Marie-Angelique’s bones.
In the end, the decision was made for me. It turned out the one day I’d set aside for my Paris walkabout was a Monday, and on Mondays the catacombs were closed to the public. I was relieved, actually. I realized I wasn’t at all eager to venture down into the Empire of Death. But I still wanted to do something to pay my respects. Since an ossuary is basically a cemetery without headstones, I decided that going to the entrance to the catacombs would be the equivalent of visiting a gravesite in a cemetery.
I took the Metro, got off at Denfert-Rochereau station, and looked around. The paper map and Google both indicated that the entrance to the catacombs should be right there, clearly visible. There was some signage, but there was a busy traffic circle opposite the station, making it hard to tell which way the arrows were pointing – at least for someone as directionally challenged as I am. I wandered the area for several minutes and was almost ready to give up when I stopped to ask a man selling roasted chestnuts. I’d barely gotten a word out when he pointed directly across from his corner to a white building surrounded by hoardings. I crossed the street for what was now the fourth time. Sure enough, there it was, the entrance almost completely hidden, with a small sign: Les Catacombes de Paris.
I sat down facing the locked iron gate. After a few moments, I could feel my frustration fading away, replaced by a wave of quiet sadness. The words of Johnathan Buffalo came into my mind.
She is a Meskwaki spirit now.
Swimming under the Bridges
Leaving the catacombs, I boarded the Metro again and got off at St. Michel, so I could walk across the river on my way back to the Marais. I failed to factor in that it was the station closest to Notre-Dame, and soon found myself in the square adjacent to the cathedral, surrounded by a swarm of tourists.
I circled around the crowds and headed for the Pont St. Louis, one of the few pedestrian-only bridges that cross the river in the heart of the city. The bridge was nearly empty, and the quiet was a welcome respite from the bustle of Notre-Dame. I started making my way to the top. Because the Pont St. Louis connects two islands – Ile de la Cité and Ile Saint-Louis – at some points it’s possible to look around and see the grand sweep of bridges on both channels of the river.
I was reminded of my time in Ireland a couple of years earlier, when I took part in the Dublin City Liffey Swim. It’s an open-water swimming event that’s coming up to its 100th year in 2019. (Those who find the thought of swimming in an urban river distasteful, you may want to stop reading here.) The Liffey Swim is a race, but most of the participants do it as a lark, for fun and the satisfaction of finishing the 2-km. course. The year I did it, there were more than 400 swimmers, entering the river from pontoons in separate men’s and women’s heats. The women have a tradition of singing the opening lines of a beloved folk tune as they plunge into the river.
In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty
‘Twas there that I met my sweet Molly Malone
She drove her wheelbarrow through the streets broad and narrow
Singing “cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh.”
I didn’t know any of the women in my heat, but their camaraderie was infectious. What made it truly exhilarating was the sensation of swimming under the Liffey bridges – nine in all – to the cheers of the crowds gathered on both banks of the river. It was one of the most memorable swimming experiences of my life. Now, standing on the Pont St. Louis, I recalled the scene in my play where I’d imagined Marie-Angelique doing the very same thing.
Crowds gathered along the banks of the Seine when a woman was sighted in the river near the Pont Marie. “Look,” they shouted. “Someone has fallen into the water!” But she refused all offers of help or rescue and began to swim downriver. People stood watching on the bridge or ran along the banks, thinking she must surely be mad, or so despondent as to take her own life. A gendarme was alerted and shouted to her to swim over to the right bank where she could be pulled from the water. But she ignored him and kept on swimming toward the Pont Notre-Dame.
People were astounded. They had never seen such behavior in a woman. They kept expecting that she would tire of swimming and slip beneath the surface. But remarkably, her strokes grew stronger and stronger. She passed under the Pont Au Change, and by the time she reached the Pont Neuf, something astonishing occurred. The people standing on each bridge began to cheer her on as she swam underneath. “Keep going!” they cried. “Keep going!”
And so she did. She swam under the Pont Royal and on toward the outskirts of the city. She kept on swimming, and swimming, and swimming. Until she could be seen no more.
During her lifetime, Marie-Angelique never really knew where she came from. When I wrote that passage, I had only a vague idea where she might be going. From Paris the Seine flows northwesterly for 120 miles, where it meets the English Channel and empties into the Atlantic Ocean. It’s an awfully long way to go.
But at least now I know where she’s headed. In my thoughts I cheer her on.
Keep going, lost daughter of the Red Earth People.
Swim home.
Unnamed Meskwaki child, early 20th century
From the collection of Meskwaki Cultural Center and Museum
Used with permission