Paris Nocturne Read Online Free Page B

that they were all drinking coffee, so I ordered one, too. None of them paid me any attention. Bouvière didn’t even pause when I knocked the table. I had stumbled over the foot of the table and fallen next to him on the banquette. I listened attentively, but didn’t fully understand what he was saying. Certain words didn’t have the same meaning when he used them as they do in normal life. I was amazed at how gripped his audience was. They lapped up his words and the fellow with the exercise book didn’t pause for a moment from his shorthandscribbling. Bouvière made them laugh from time to time with obscure references that he must have often uttered, like code words. If I have the strength, I will try to remember some of the most characteristic phrases from his lectures. I wasn’t receptive to the words he used. They had no resonance, no glimmer of meaning for me. In my memory they are like thin, bleak notes played on an old harpsichord. And besides, without Bouvière’s voice to animate them, all that is left are the empty words, whose meaning I can’t quite capture. I think Bouvière took them, more or less, from psychoanalysis and far eastern philosophy, but I am reluctant to venture into territory I know little about.
    Eventually he turned to me and acknowledged my presence. At first, he didn’t see me, and then he asked his audience a question, something like, ‘Do you see what I mean?’ while staring straight at me. At that moment, I felt like I was melting into the group, and I wondered if, for Bouvière, there was any difference between me and the others. I was certain that in this café, around the same table, his audiences would come and go and, even if there were a handful of loyal followers—an inner circle—different groups would no doubt gather here every evening of the week. He confuses all the faces, all the groups, I said to myself. Onemore, one less. And every so often he seemed to be talking to himself, like an actor reciting a monologue before a faceless audience. As he felt the attention on him reach its peak, he would draw on his cigarette holder so hard his cheeks became sunken and, without exhaling, he would pause a few seconds to make sure we were all hanging on his every word.
    That first night, I arrived towards the end of the meeting. After a quarter of an hour, he stopped speaking, placed a slim, black briefcase on his knees, an elegant model—like the ones in the large leatherwear stores in the Saint-Honoré neighbourhood. He took out a diary bound in red leather. He leafed through it. He said to the person sitting closest to him, a young man with a hawkish face, ‘Next Friday at Zeyer at eight o’clock.’ And the man jotted it down in a notebook. He appeared to be his secretary and I assumed he was responsible for sending out announcements for meetings. Bouvière stood up, and turned to me again. He smiled warmly, as if to encourage me to keep attending their meetings. As a kind of observer? The others stood up together. I followed suit.
    Outside, in Place Denfert-Rochereau, he stood in the middle of the group, exchanging a few words with oneand then another, like those slightly bohemian philosophy professors who develop the habit of going for a drink with their more interesting students after class and late into the night. And I was part of the group. They walked with him to his car. A young blonde woman, whose thin, severe face I had noticed earlier, walked beside him. He seemed to be on more intimate terms with her than with the others. She wore a waterproof jacket the same colour as that of the woman in Pigalle, but hers wasn’t lined with fur. And it was cold that evening.
    At some point he took her arm, which didn’t seem to surprise anyone. At the car they exchanged a few more words. I stood a short distance from the rest of the group. The way he put his cigarette holder in his mouth didn’t have