CHAPTER 10
SATURDAY 27TH OCTOBER
When Meredith woke next morning, light was streaming through the window.
She leapt out of bed. She ran a brush through her black hair, tied it back in a ponytail, and pulled on blue jeans, a green sweater and her jacket. She checked she’d got all she needed in her bag – wallet, map, notebook, sunglasses, camera – then, feeling good about the day ahead, was out of the door, taking the stairs two at a time down to the lobby.
It was a perfect fall day, bright and sunny and fresh. Meredith headed for the brasserie opposite for breakfast. Rows of round tables with faux marble tops, pretty though, were set out on the sidewalk to catch the best of the morning sun. Inside, all was lacquered brown wood. A long zinc counter ran the length of the room and two middle-aged waiters in black and white were moving with astonishing speed through the crowded restaurant.
Meredith got the last free table outside, next to a group of four guys in vests and tight leather pants. They were all smoking and drinking espressos and glasses of water. To her right, two thin and immaculately dressed women sipped café noisette from tiny white cups. She ordered the petit-déjeuner complet – juice, baguette with butter and jelly, pastries and café au lait – then pulled out her notebook, a replica of Hemingway’s famous moleskin jotters. She was already on number three of a pack of six, bought on special offer from Barnes & Noble for this trip. She wrote everything down, however small or insignificant. Later, she transferred the notes she thought significant to her laptop.
She planned to spend the day visiting the private locations important to Debussy, as opposed to the big public spaces and concert halls. She’d take a few photos, see how far she got. If it turned out to be a waste of time, she’d think again, but it seemed a sensible a way to organise her time.
Debussy had been born in St-Germain-en-Laye on 22nd August 1862, in what was now commuter belt. But he was a Parisian through and through and spent pretty much all his fifty-five years in the capital, from his childhood home in the rue de Berlin to the house at 80 Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, where he’d died on 25th March 1918, four days after the German long-range bombardment of Paris had begun. The last stop on her itinerary, maybe when she came back at the end of the week, would be the Cimetière de Passy in the 16th arrondissement where Debussy was buried.
Meredith took a deep breath. She felt right at home in Paris, in Debussy’s city. Everything had been so crazy leading up to her departure, she could hardly believe she was actually here. She sat still a moment, just enjoying the scene and being right at the heart of things. Then she got out her map and spread it out on the table. The corners draped and crackled over the edge like a colourful cloth.
She tucked a few strands of hair that had come loose back behind her ears and perused the map. The first address on her list was the rue de Berlin, where Debussy had lived with his parents and siblings from the early 1860s until he was twenty-nine years old. It was just around the block from the apartment of the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, where Debussy had attended the famous Tuesday afternoon salons. After World War I, like many French streets with German names, it had been renamed and was now the rue de Liège.
Meredith followed the line with her finger to the rue de Londres, where Debussy had taken a furnished apartment with his lover Gaby Dupont in January 1892. Next came an apartment in the tiny rue Gustave-Doré in the 17th, then just around the corner to the rue Cardinet, where they lived until Gaby walked out on him New Year’s Day 1899. Debussy remained at the same address for the next five years with his first wife, Lilly, before that relationship too broke down.
In terms of distances and planning, Paris was pretty manageable. Everything was within walking distance, helped by the fact that Debussy had spent his life within a relatively small area, a star-like quartet of streets around the Place d’Europe on the boundary of the 8th and 9th arrondissements , overlooking the Gare Saint-Lazare.
Meredith ringed each of the locations on the map with black marker pen, looked at the pattern a moment, then decided she’d start at the furthest point and work her way back in the direction of the hotel.
She packed up, struggling to get the map to fold in the right place. She finished her coffee, brushed the buttery flakes of croissant from her sweater and licked her fingers one by one, resisting the temptation to order anything else. Despite her slim and lithe appearance, Meredith loved food. Pastries, bread, cookies, all the stuff that nobody was supposed to eat any more. She left a ten-euro note to cover the check, adding a handful of small change for a tip, then set off.
It took her just short of fifteen minutes to reach the Place de la Concorde. From there she turned north, up past the Palais de la Madeleine, an extraordinary church designed like a Roman temple, then along the Boulevard Malesherbes. After about five minutes she turned left into the Avenue Velasquez towards the Parc Monceau. After the roar of traffic on the main thoroughfare, the imposing dead-end street seemed eerily silent. Plane trees with variegated bark, mottled like the back of an old man’s hand, lined the sidewalk. Many of the trunks were tagged with graffiti. Meredith glanced up at the white embassy buildings, impassive and somehow disdainful, overlooking the gardens. She stopped and took a couple of photos, just in case she didn’t remember the layout later.
A sign on the entrance into the Parc Monceau announced winter and summer opening and closing hours. Meredith walked through black wrought-iron gates into the wide green space, immediately finding it easy to imagine Lilly or Gaby or even Debussy himself, hand in hand with his daughter, strolling along the generous pathways. Long white summer dresses swirling in the dust or ladies sitting beneath brimmed hats on one of the green metal benches set all along the edges of the lawns. Retired generals in military uniform, and the dark-eyed children of diplomats rolling wooden hoops under the watchful gaze of their governesses. Through the trees, she glimpsed the columns of a folly in the style of a Greek temple. A little further away there was a stone pyramid icehouse, fenced off from the public, and marble statues of The Muses. Across the park, tawny ponies roped in a line carried excited children up and down the gravel.
Meredith took plenty of photographs. Apart from the clothes and the cell phones, the Parc Monceau seemed hardly changed from the photos she’d seen of a hundred years ago. Everything was so vivid, so clear.
Having spent half an hour wandering in contented circles through the park, she finally made her way out and found herself at the subway station on the north side. The sign MONCEAU LIGNE NO. 2 above the entrance, with its elaborate art nouveau design, looked like it might have been there since Debussy’s day. She took a couple more shots, then crossed the busy intersection and walked into the 17th arrondissement. The neighbourhood seemed drab after the fin de siècle elegance of the park. The stores looked cheap, the buildings unremarkable.
She found the rue Cardinet easily and identified the block where, more than a hundred years ago, Lilly and Debussy had lived. She felt a prick of disappointment. From the outside, it too was plain, nondescript, dull. There was no character to it. In letters, Debussy talked of the modest apartment with affection, describing the watercolours on the walls, the oil paintings.
For a moment she thought of ringing the bell and seeing if she could persuade anyone to let her in to look around. It was here, after all, that Debussy had written the work that had transformed his life, his only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande. It was here that Lilly Debussy had shot herself, days before their fifth wedding anniversary, when she realised Debussy was leaving her for good to set up home with the mother of one of his piano pupils, Emma Bardac. Lilly survived, but the surgeons never got the bullet out. Meredith thought the fact that she had lived the rest of her life with a physical reminder of Debussy lodged inside her was, somehow, the most poignant – although awful – part of the whole story.
She raised her hand to the silver intercom, then checked herself. Meredith believed in the spirit of place. She bought into the idea that, in certain circumstances, a kind of echo of the past might remain. But here in the city, too much time had passed. Even if the bricks and mortar were the same, in a hundred years of bustling human life there’d be too many ghosts. Too many footsteps, too many shadows.
She turned her back on the rue Cardinet. She got out the map, folded it into a neat square, and went in search of the Square Claude Debussy. When she found it, it was, if anything, a bigger let-down. Ugly, brutalist six-storey buildings, with a thrift store on the corner. And there was no one about. The whole place had an air of abandonment.
Thinking of the elegant statues in the Parc Monceau celebrating writers, painters, architects, Meredith felt a spurt of anger that Paris had honoured one of its most famous sons so shabbily.
Meredith headed back to the busy Boulevard des Batignolles. In all the literature she’d read about Paris in the 1890s, Debussy’s Paris, it sounded a pretty dangerous place, away from the grand boulevards and avenues. There were districts – the quartiers perdus – to be avoided.
She continued on into the rue de Londres, where Gaby and Debussy had rented their first apartment in January 1892, wanting to feel something, some nostalgia, some sense of place, but getting nothing. She checked the numbers, coming to a halt where Debussy’s home should have been. Meredith stepped back, pulled out her notebook to confirm she’d got the number right, and then frowned.
Not my day.
In the past hundred years, it looked like the building had been swallowed up by the Gare Saint-Lazare. The station had grown and grown, encroaching on the surrounding streets. There wasn’t anything here to link the old days with the new. There wasn’t even anything worth photographing. Just an absence.
Meredith looked around and saw a small restaurant on the opposite side of the street, Le Petit Chablisien. She needed food. Most of all, she needed a glass of wine.
She crossed the street. The menu was chalked up on a blackboard on an easel on the sidewalk. The large glass windows were modestly covered by lace half-curtains so she couldn’t see inside. She pushed down the old-fashioned handle and a shrill bell jangled and clattered. She stepped inside and was met instantly by an elderly waiter with a crisp white linen apron tied around his waist.
‘Pour manger?’
Meredith nodded and was shown to a table for one in the corner. Paper tablecloths, clunky silver knives and forks, a bottle of water waiting on the table. She ordered the plat du jour and a glass of Fitou.
The meat – a bavette – was perfect, pink in the centre and with a strong black pepper sauce. The Camembert was ripe. While she was eating, Meredith looked at the black and white photographs on the walls. Images of the quartier in days gone by, the staff of the restaurant standing proudly outside, the waiters with black moustaches and crisp white collars and the patron and his matronly wife in the centre in their starched Sunday best. A shot of one of the old trams on the rue d’Amsterdam, another modern one of the famous tower of clocks on the front concourse of the Gare Saint-Lazare.
Best of all, though, was a photograph she recognised. Meredith smiled. Above the door to the kitchens, beside a studio portrait of a woman with a younger man and a girl with a mass of tumbling hair, was a copy of one of the most famous photographs of Debussy. Taken at the Villa Medici in Rome in 1885, when he was only twenty-three years old, he glowered out of the picture with his distinctive, frowning dark expression. His black curly hair was short over his forehead, and with the beginnings of a moustache, the image was immediately recognisable. Meredith was intending to use it as the illustration on the back jacket of her book.
‘He lived in this very street,’ she said to the waiter, while she punched in her PIN code. She gestured at the photo. ‘Claude Debussy. Right here.’
The waiter shrugged, uninterested, until he saw the size of the tip. Then he smiled.