The Past N’est Jamais Passé Simple

Hûrl Flower

The night was thick with a rain that didn’t quite know whether to fall or hang in the air, like the unspoken words between lovers who never quite get around to saying what matters.

The streets of Paris had the kind of gloom that clung to your skin, seeping into your bones, a perfect reflection of the souls that walked them. My name is Maigret, and I work as a gumshoe at the Academy of Moral Sciences — though I don’t suppose anyone would call me a saint. In a city like this, you stop pretending you’re a good man after the first few cases. The kind of cases where you start finding more shadows than answers.

I’d been sitting in my office for hours, nursing the last dregs of a tisane that had never been poured for the right reasons. The door creaked open, and the last person I wanted to see walked in like she owned the place.

Odette de Crécy.

Older, of course, but not yet betrayed by what would, by the dessication or fructification of the flesh that was today still in bloom, become the ultimate form, immutable and already predestined, of the autumnal seed. The eye follows with delight a nose like a wavelet that deliciously ripples the surface of the water at daybreak, and seems motionless, capturable by pencil, because the sea is so calm that one does not notice its tidal flow.

I recognized her the moment she stepped in — her scent, a mix of lavender and cigarettes, hit me like a slap. It wasn’t the unspeakable perfume she wore; it was the one she used to wear. But this wasn’t the time to get nostalgic. The game was always played on the edge of a memory, and you never knew which one would come to haunt you.

“Jules,” she said, insisting on tutoying me and using the prénom I detested, her voice like velvet dragged over steel. “I need ton aide.”

“Odette,” I muttered, leaning back in my chair. “Funny, I was just thinking about you.”

Her lips curled into something between a smile and a grimace. “I doubt that, considering how we left things.”

Yeah, I doubted it, too. In my line of work, you don’t get to look back. The past is a place for ghosts, and the only thing I cared about was the next step forward. But that was before she walked in.

“I don’t suppose you’re here for a friendly chat,” I said. “No one comes to me for that. Mais if that’s what you want, try the SPCA.”

Her eyes flickered, a brief glimmer of something behind them. “Non, pas un Minou. I need you to find something for me. Someone.”

“Who?” Whom would have been preferable, but she’d caught me on a dismal mercredi when I was feeling a tad subjonctif about the plus-que-parfait passé intérieur, to be parfaitly indicative with you. A kind of austerity of taste which I had, a kind of determination to write nothing of which I could not say that it was mellow, which had made people for so many years regard me as a precious and sterile sleuth-hound, a chiseller of trifles, was on the contrary the secret of my strength as a detective, for habit forms the style of the shamus just as much as the character of the man, and the snoop who has more than once been content to attain, in the expression of his thoughts, to a certain kind of attractiveness, in so doing lays down unalterably the boundaries of his talent, just as, in succumbing too often to pleasure, to laziness, to the fear of being put to trouble, one traces for oneself, on a character which it will finally be impossible to retouch, the lineaments of one’s vices and the limits of one’s vir ...

“Swann,” she said, and for a second, it was like the entire room went silent. “Sorry, you were saying all that fey gibberish out loud and I passed out for a minute. I need you to find Swann.”

Charles Swann. The name alone could send ripples through the smooth surface of the city. His name had the weight of old money and faded aristocracy, a man who once turned heads at all the right salons and was now as much a fixture of Parisian legend as of its decay. He had been a lover, a liar, and a fool — though, unlike most men, he did it with style.

But Swann wasn’t a man you found in the papers or in the back rooms of a café. He was a phantom, like a memory you couldn’t quite place, but when it lingered, it had a habit of reappearing in the worst ways.

“Swann’s been dead for years,” I said, but I could tell by the look on Odette’s face that this was a different kind of problem.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Not if you follow the trail.”

I leaned forward, the light from the desk lamp catching the dull sheen of her wet, drowning-victim hair. She wasn’t here on a whim.

“Why now, Odette? What makes you think Swann’s back? He left his mark on you years ago — don’t tell me you’re still chasing him.”

“I didn’t leave him, Jules,” she said, voice soft but edged with something dangerous. “He left me. He disappeared into thin air, and I’ve spent every waking moment since wondering why. What happened to him? What really happened to him?”

I lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke into the stale air. “People disappear. It’s this  city’s specialty.”

She shook her head, and I could see the cracks in the mask she wore. “No. Not like this. It’s something else.”

I looked up at her, measuring the sincerity in her eyes and involuntarily assessing her mask as a CeraVe Ultra-Light Moisturizing Gel Deep Hydration number of the sort favoured by the Duchesse de Guermantes, whose plain, simple, homely, homespun, workaday, undistinguished, horsey, nondescript, colourless, commonplace, humdrum, mundane, House of Windsor-like physical manifestation had so disappointed me after all the literary buildup and hoohah. Odette wasn’t a woman who dealt in cheap facial creams or half-truths. Non, cette femme savait mentir. She wanted something — something from me. The price was never clear, but I always knew it was high.

“D’accord,” I said, flicking the ash into the tray. “I’ll bite. But you’d better start talking. Répète après moi: Je n’ai pas la plume de ma tante … le petit bébé est un peu malade … where is Brian? Brian is in the kitchen … oncle mani padme hum.”

Odette sank into the chair opposite me, her coat dripping relentlessly onto the floor like the inexorable flow of the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole as when Mme Swann would allow the servants to carry away the tea-things, as who should say “Time, please gentlemen.” How Nick Auf der Maur, mon vieux, hated those words.

“It started with a letter, Jules. A letter from Swann. But it wasn’t the kind of letter you'd expect from a man who had vanished. It was a plea for help —an apology, of sorts.”

Conforming to a journalistic cliché, I raised a single sourcil. “Swann apologizing? Now I’m interested.”

“Not pour moi,” she said, her voice hardening. “For someone else.”

I paused. Quelqu’un d’autre? That wasn’t the kind of thing you dropped without a reason. Or person. “Who?”

Whom?

“Madeleine,” she said, and I felt a chill run down my spine. “Madeleine Verdurin.”

Madeleine Verdurin. The name was as sharp and inevitable as a knife wound. She had been Swann’s lover, once upon a time, a woman of sharp intellect and cruel beauty. More importantly, she was a woman whose ambition and endless, intolerable parties could make a mille hommes s’effrondent.

There was a baking joke in there somewhere. But in the toile complexe of Parisian society, there was no one more dangerous than someone who wanted something and wasn’t afraid to make it happen.

I leaned back in my chair, trying to make sense of the puzzle but unable to take notes because my aunt had popped in to reclaim her pen. “You want me to find Madeleine? What makes you think je peux?”

Je le peux? J’y peux? J’en peux? Zut alors (a mild imprecation that always sounded a little trop baguettish to me), I never could make up my mind on these things fast enough to pass the force’s examen oral de français.

“Not Madeleine,” she said, her voice almost a whisper now. “Swann. Madeleine’s the key, Jules. She has him, or at least, she knows what happened to him. She’s been hiding him, keeping him hidden from the world.”

I was about to light another Gauloise, to which le grand Nick had introduced me a very long time ago at Grumpys, when the door to my office slammed open, and in walked a man who looked like he had just stepped out of a coffin. Thin, pale, monocled and wearing a coat too fine for anyone who didn’t have something to hide. It was Baron de Charlus — Swann’s old frenemy and frustrated paramour, depending on which side of the gossip you believed.

“Odette,” he said, his voice low and insistent. “I told you not to come here.”

“De Charlus,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “What’s your stake in this, old man? And how did you slam open my door? In conventional English, one slams a door shut but not ...”

The Baron’s lips curled into a thin smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “This is between Odette and me, not you, Jules. You’ve been paid to do a job, but trust me, this is not your fight.”

Mon Dieu, I hated it when anyone called me Jules. N’importe qui. N’importe quwhom? Esti de câlice de tabarnouche!

“Not my fight?” I said, the corners of my mouth twitching. “In this town, every fight is my fight. And I’m not the kind of man who backs down from a case, no matter how deep the hole is.”

De Charlus took a step closer, and I could smell the sharpness of his cologne mixed with something older, something bitter. “Then find Swann, Jules. But be warned — he’s not the man you think he is. He never was.”

I knew it was pure folie to take this on. As the French like to say, Swann, Swann, Swann, vous’ve been gone so long.

And I don’t like friskin’ stiffs. Les Deux Magots was two blocks down on Place Saint-Germain des Prés. I should have turned to Odette and said, “Take your flunkie and buy yourself some dessoit.”

But the thing about Paris is, every man and woman has their ghosts. And when you start digging, you don’t always know what’s going to crawl out from the depths.

As Odette and de Charlus locked eyes, the clock on the wall ticked louder, marking the slow unravelling of things better left forgotten. I knew a thing or two about that. And I realized, as the rain tapped against the windows, that the only thing left to do was to cherchez la Swann, that old cliché of detective fiction.

Cherchez la Swann, pardieu! cherchez la Swann!

In a city like this, the past doesn’t die. It waits for you. Sac à papier! Quelqu’un a vu mes clés?

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die. Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. I’d still been working on that cup when Odette breezed in.

Well, I guess you know the rest about my otiose existence. I tracked down Madeleine via Tik Parle, sucked on son bras gauche for a bit and it all came back to me.

Back like a decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me in lieu of her pen (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy). And immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike.

Down these mean streets a man must go in search of lost crime.