Leper Tango

I've renamed my novel "Leper Tango". That's the dance that is being played daily in the second arrondissement, perched as it is above the old Cimetière des Innocents, which I'll show in a moment. Paris is an invitation, a promise which will never be delivered upon, but it is made with such brazen disregard for your credulity, that you buy into it, caring little whether it is true or not. The whole point is to take the bait, to believe, and being suckered, as men have been suckered for three millenia, is to form part of a wanton underclass with its own form of privileges. It's like signing up for the Iraqi police force, or betting that maybe, just this once, an inside straight will come through.

I'll be returning tomorrow to the scene of the crime, the Graveyard of the Innocents, where I'll be lurking, trying to decode the puzzle of the main character to my current manuscript. And, with Paris, there are only two choices. You're either done with the place, and you never return, or you drag yourself back on any pretext, and wonder how you managed to con yourself into believing it would be any different.

Left: a lithograph of the old cemetery, circa 1756.

During the plague of 1348, 500 bodies per day were buried in les innocents. In the plague of 1451, 50,000 more were inhumated. An old Paris legend had it that the soil was so infect that a body disintegrated within 9 days, which had everybody signing up for burial.

One fine day in 1757 or so, the south wall caved in, and a few dozen people were asphyxiated. So, the decision was finally taken to exhumate the entire cemetery, and 2 million bodies were taken out. The French have no qualms about exhumating bodies. Since Professor Guillotine, and the Reign of Terror, the attitude to meat, human or otherwise, has been most casual. Not even mad cow's disease can shake the French. It's the spirit of Les Innocents. Everyone being equal before death, there is a gallows humour which pervades the entire quarter, and it is considered very bad form to complain about meat, the very raison d'être of les Halles. Les Halles remains carniverous to this day, and the streets still stink of the slaughterhouse. On a good evening, you can see chic 16th arrondissement students, drinking champagne with butchers and slaughterhouse men, still wearing their blood-soaked aprons after a night's carnage.