I could tear my eyes away from the young woman’s face, as if she had suddenly released me from her spell. On the horizon, the suspended valley was already beginning to disintegrate and gradually metamorphose into a trail of iridescent clouds. In a few moments there would be no trace of it.
We observed this slow transformation in respectful silence until it was complete. Then, fearing above all that the female vision at my side would disappear as quickly as the celestial one, I tried to hold on to her by steering the conversation towards a more down-to-earth subject.
‘My name is Singleton, Andrew Fowler Singleton. It’s a—’
‘You misunderstood me, Mr Singleton. I asked you if you believed in fata Morgana, in the possibility that what we have seen has some kind of meaning.’
‘All I know is that it was an atmospheric phenomenon,’ I replied, both amused by and surprised at her insistence. ‘I know it’s traditionally linked to Morgan le Fay, hence the name, and that the fairy created mirages from Etna, which captivated the people of the Bay of Naples and the residents of Reggio Calabria in the Straits of Messina. They were eager to see portents in these mirages. But I’ve never seen one before and, what’s more, I didn’t know that such an illusion could be produced in the northern waters of the Channel.’
‘I think the people you mention are absolutely right. I’m certain it contains a hidden meaning.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘Do you dream, Mr Singleton?’
‘Yes, very often.’
‘Wonderful! Apparently, there are people who never dream.’
‘They don’t remember, that’s all. Everyone dreams; you can’t help it.’
‘I don’t mean that kind of dream. Do you have real dreams that you can still smell when you wake up, which follow you around throughout the day and which, sometimes, go on for several nights? Dreams which transform you, shape you, improve you?’
‘Ah! If you mean that kind of dream, then no, I must say that I’ve never had one like that.’
‘You will, you will. But let me give you a piece of advice. When it happens, don’t forget to write it down so that it may influence your waking hours.’
‘I will. But, about the mirage we’ve just seen together – and sorry to press the point – what is the hidden meaning you mentioned earlier?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t tell you! All I can say is that it was a message.’
‘A message? Sent by whom?’
‘Elemental spirits! Sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, salamanders …’
Her answer left me deeply perplexed. What did she mean? Was she making fun of me?
The steamer’s foghorn suddenly brought me back to reality. My gaze was irresistibly drawn to the area of the sky where, not so long ago, I had thought I’d seen a majestic landscape. A flight of cormorants now took its place.
I turned to my companion but the ochre and blue chair was empty.
Where had she gone? I scoured the deck in every direction but couldn’t see her golden mane anywhere.
In Calais at the harbour station and later in the Pullman carriages of the Flèche d’Or I looked for her again among the passengers – in vain. It was as if she had disappeared into thin air and I thought it unlikely I would ever see her again.
As the train sped through the French countryside at more than seventy miles an hour, I considered the strange meeting again. By the time the train had stopped at Platform 1 of the Gare du Nord, my memory of the scene had become so uncertain that I wondered if I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Indeed, what if, after all, the young woman herself was a mirage. Fata Morgana!
Notes
2 Gérard de Nerval, le poète et l’homme by Aristide Marie, published by Hachette in 1914. Singleton devoured this biography, the first truly complete account of the French writer’s life. (Publisher’s note)
I walked from the Gare du Nord to the capital’s historical centre. As well as Nerval’s books, I had taken care to slip into my bag a guide to modern and ancient Paris written in the 1920s which I had bought from a second-hand dealer in Boston. In the middle of the book was a very colourful map and every time I consulted it I circled in pen the names of the main roads, bridges, squares and monuments which captured my imagination.
Whistling, I headed down Boulevard de Magenta and then Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis before turning down Rue Réaumur on to Boulevard de Sébastopol. At the top of Rue de Turbigo, I made my way through narrow streets with delightfully evocative names: Rue aux Ours, Rue Quincampoix, Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, Rue Brisemiche, and so on.
At the bend in Rue Saint-Bon, I reached Tour Saint-Jacques, so dear to Nerval. The monument was all that remained of the old church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie whose refurbishment had been paid for by Nicolas Flamel, the famous alchemist.
The tower took pride of place in the middle of a small square filled with trees and flowers. Somewhere in this garden was the spot where the poet had come to hang himself that night in January 1855. Unless it was fifty yards further along where the solemn Théâtre des Nations had since been built3. In Nerval’s time, the area didn’t have the respectable feel it has today. It had been a jumble of dark alleyways and sordid passageways where scoundrels and down-and-outs loitered. That was before Baron Haussmann’s engineers ‘civilised’ Old Paris for ever.
The day after Nerval’s death, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, Roger de Beauvoir and, to a lesser extent, Arsène Houssaye expressed serious doubts about the suicide theory. They thought that their friend had been the victim of one of the local ruffians.
I remember talking one evening, in a pub in Aldgate, to a music hall lighting engineer who had worked in Paris a few years earlier at the Théâtre des Nations. According to him, when work had been carried out in the building’s basement at the beginning of the 1910s, engineers, comparing the city maps with those of sixty years before, had noticed that the bars of the cellar window where Nerval had been found hanged at the end of a thin rope corresponded exactly to the current position of the prompter’s box. What’s more, if the usherettes were to be believed, on some evenings the poet’s ghost wandered between the rows of stalls after the performance. There was even a story that Sarah Bernhardt’s prompter was the ghost in person. However, I suspect that my companion, who was partial to whisky, was trying to pull the wool over my eyes to some extent.
I rested for a few minutes on a bench in Square Saint-Jacques, opposite the tower, and then, as evening began to fall, started looking for a hotel.
Having briefly studied the neighbourhood, I decided on an establishment in Rue de la Verrerie next to the church of Saint-Merri where the writer of the future had been christened, and a stone’s throw from the building in Rue Saint-Martin where he’d been born on 22 May 1808.
I went up to my room to drop off my luggage. The walls and ceiling were crisscrossed with beams and the rustic furniture didn’t seem to have been replaced since the days of Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne.
It was the perfect place for me. Here I could easily immerse myself in the writer’s work, wander where he had wandered at night, try to understand what had been going through his mind and perhaps even establish the exact circumstances of his death.