Paris Nocturne Read Online Free

must have been a student. But he worked in a travel agency. He was Madagascan and later I came across his name and a telephone number on a card, among a pile of old papers I was throwing out. His name was Katz-Kreutzer.I know nothing about him. There were other details… They were always to do with people I’d come across, barely glimpsed, and who would remain as mysteries in my mind. Places too…A little restaurant I would occasionally go to with my father, near the top of Avenue Foch, on the left. I searched in vain for it sometime later when I happened to be passing though the neighbourhood. Or had I dreamed it? Along with country houses belonging to people whose names I could no longer recall, near villages I would not be able to point out on a map, a certain Évelyne I had known one night on a train. I even started compiling a list, with approximate dates, of all these lost faces and places, of all those abandoned projects, like the time I decided to enrol at the faculty of medicine, but I didn’t see it through. My attempts to catalogue all those plans which never saw the light of day and which remained forever on hold, a way of searching for a breach, for vanishing points. Because I’m reaching the age at which, little by little, life begins to close in on itself.
    I’m trying to recall the colours and the mood of the period when I lived near Porte d’Orléans. Shades of grey and black, a mood that seems stifling in retrospect, perpetual autumns and winters. Was it just a coincidence that Iended up in the area where I had met my father for the last time? Seven o’clock sharp in the morning at La Rotonde café, at the bottom of one of those tall blocks of brick buildings that mark the edge of Paris. Beyond lay Montrouge and a section of the ring road that had just been completed. We didn’t have much to say and I knew then that we wouldn’t see each other again. We got up and, without shaking hands, left La Rotonde. I was taken aback as I watched him wander off in his navy-blue overcoat towards the ring road. I still wonder which distant suburb he was heading for. Yes, this coincidence is striking now: to have lived for a period in the neighbourhood where our last meetings took place. But at the time, I didn’t give it a second thought. I had other things on my mind.

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 doctortitle. 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