The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, May 8, 2025

Diary: It isn’t just smell or sound that can provoke a shock of memory. I was reading George Simenon’s Maigret’s First Case, where Simenon sends his peripatetic hero (I have been wanting to use that peripatetic for months, but doing so in a news story might’ve gotten my house firebombed) all over Paris’s wealthier neighborhoods on the trail of a nasty rich family’s secrets, one of which could harbor a murder, and a murderer. The story is set in 1913 Paris (the peripatetic is not just geographic, with Simenon.) I came across these lines: “—Is he married? Maigret wasn’t sure, because he didn’t dare push his questionnaire too hard, but he had the impression that Dédé was a rather special type of gentleman and that, if he had a companion, it was on the sidewalk, between l’Etoile and Place des Ternes, that he would have the best chance of meeting her.” The emphasis is mine, because it was walking out of the metro station at Charles de Gaulle-Etoile through a lugubriously long tunnel, as I was walking on my way back to where we were staying near the Place des Ternes that July in 1978, that it happened: my first conscious encounter with outright predation. I say conscious, because as a little boy attending Jesuit school in Lebanon I have equally little doubt that either the Jesuit nuns or the more priestly predatory male priests among them violated me a few times. But I have no conscious memories of that. Certainly not as conscious as their more overt physical abuse. And I don’t want to be too prejudicial here: one of my Arabic tutors, who was Muslim as I recall (I don’t know whether Sunni or Shiite, not that either makes a difference) was somewhat too free with his hand on my shorts a time or two–I was maybe 7 or 8–before he was felled by a heart attack in way too frightening proximity to his attempted molestations, and my prayers. It is I think the only time my Catholic prayers were answered so explicitly, so viciously (enough to make you a disbeliever in that bunk), though I’m not so sure if it’s the tutoring in a language I despised at the time (I despise it no longer, but I could never master it) or the molesting that bothered me most. At that age the two felt equally terrorizing. At any rate: back to Paris. That July–specifically, late July and early August 1978–I had just left Lebanon for the first time in my life. My mother and two brothers and I were on our way to Kingsport, Tenn., for the summer, before we three boys were to be shuffled off to boarding school in Canterbury, in England (at the King’s School). France’s air traffic controllers were on strike. So we were stuck in Paris for a couple of weeks–to my great joy. A Parisian friend and I would spend our days in the metro, on a single metro ticket. It fascinated my hick self, as did anything western. Little did I know. On one of those daylong romps underground I was returning home by myself. The friends who’d put us up had left town, and left their house, in Paris’s posh 17th Arrondissement, to us. It was in a narrow cobble-stoned little street off either Place des Ternes or the Avenue des Ternes, I don’t remember. It was a long walk from the subway stop at L’Etoile–that is, the roundabout with the Arc de Triomphe at its center. As I was walking through that tunnel, a lanky nobody seemed to have mistaken himself for my shadow. I could not get free of him. There he walked, too close, but not so close to touch. I finally looked at him inquisitively, as in: what the fuck do you want with me? (The what the fuck is today’s embellishment, it’s what I wish I had told him. At the time, though I was 12, I did not know those words. A 12 year old from a bourgeois Lebanese Christian family was the same as a suburban American 6 year old. I had been raised by nuns and my saintly mother, remember? My father was dead two years by then.) What really happened was that I must’ve just looked at him with frightened eyes, unable, or too ashamed, to run, or even edge myself away more speedily, as I would learn to do in the New York subway at the mere hint of danger. He looked at me, and these words are exactly what he said, because I remember them as horribly as I wish I didn’t, and not too loud for anyone else to hear–it was evening rush hour–but distinctly enough that he obviously had practice: Tu veux que’j’te’l suce? Or without the patois spelling, Tu veux que je te le suce? Or, in English: Do you want me to suck it? I had never heard the line before, I had never heard the line before, intellectually I did not know what it meant, I would have never imagined a man capable, or willing, or depraved enough to carry out the act suggested by the word, even though there was no question in my mind what he meant by le, by it. But But Locke was wrong. We’re not entirely clean slates, free of innate memory or instinct. Sometimes, certain things hit you with total instinctive awareness no matter how foreign they may be. Maybe my Jesuit violations were gasping to alert my synapses. I don’t known. This was one of those times. I didn’t know what he was saying, and I knew exactly what he was saying. The words had a physical, visceral effect–and not just in my viscera. I remember something like what a mild lightning bolt would have felt like, a repulsive current of fright zapping me, almost immobilizing me, except that it may have kicked in the adrenaline I needed to begin formulating an escape, but not before my next shame, even more powerful than my fright.  As repulsed as I was (I’m not sure I even knew what a pederastic act was at the time, let alone child predation: I really was terribly innocent), I replied! I told him: “Non.” Just “No.” But the kind of “No” you say to someone offering you, say, a glass of lemonade. My only saving grace is that I did not say what I had been taught to say, on pain of death if I didn’t say it all, politely, which was non, merci. I just said non, which tells me that I had at least a tiny shred of knowing outrage, or defense, working in me, maybe better than I knew, because somehow the fucker didn’t insist, or maybe someone walked up close to us, spooking him, or maybe I walked faster. What I do know is that once I was overground, once I was clear of Napoleon’s ghastly memorial, I ran back to the Avenue des Ternes and whatever little street we were staying at until I hit the door. I don’t remember who among my family members was there. Only that I said nothing. I was terrified, and would be scared to go back out to that metro station alone for the rest of our stay in Paris, finding every possible way to be accompanied. It was a nothing moment in retrospect, an encounter no more assaultive than a flasher, and maybe no less, though the effect was crushing, and the memory is not yet undisturbing. It makes actual, physical predation, the act itself, unimaginably cruel in its power to demolish a young person, and of course not just their safety. It takes nothing to do it, and heaven knows I routinely hear the most violent cases of predation in court. I got lucky: the predator was a stranger, vanished with my safeguarding fright. It isn’t them who do the most damage. Luckier for me, the home I was returning to was safe, as have been the intervening years in that regard. I had not thought of that memory for years. Until Maigret’s First Case.

—P.T.

 

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  Not all Europeans remained as enamored of Napoleon for as long as the genius of Weimar. In Vienna, Beethoven composed a symphony, the Eroica, for Napoleon-then, disillusioned with the worldly arrogance of his hero as demonstrated by the coronation of 1804, canceled his dedication. “Is he then also nothing more than an ordinary human being?” he lamented to his friend Ferdinand Ries. “Now he too will trample on all the rights of men and indulge only in his ambition. He will exalt himself above all the others and become a tyrant.” A remarkable prediction; Beethoven then went to the table, took hold of the title page of the Eroica by the top, tore it in two, and threw it on the floor. . What he really felt about the new emperor was perhaps better demonstrated in his impassioned one-and-only opera, Fidelio. A hymn to freedom, fidelity, hope, and courage under imprisonment, it first played to empty houses in Vienna, in November 1805, then occupied by the French. Was a disillusioned Beethoven thinking of Napoleon, and possibly of the brutal execution of d’Enghien that March? Meanwhile, in France that same year, one of Napoleon’s chief supporters among the intelligentsia, Chateaubriand, had also resigned in anger after the murder of the duke-then emigrated, and joined forces with Madame de Staël in opposition to Napoleon. In consequence, Napoleon would never bewitch liberal intellectuals at home with anything like the same degree of success that he had had with their counterparts abroad.   

–From Alistair Horn’s The Age of Napoleon (2006).

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