Pixie de la Légion d’Honneur

Up out of the Métro at Javel-André Citroën and I am bemused. Who but the Parisians would name a subway stop for both the neighborhood where household bleach was invented and the celebrated inventor of the double helical gear? The tiles along the platform are no whiter than any tiles in other Métro stations, and any homage to gears or cars is too subtle for me to notice.

And anyway, I am confused. After the Métro, I walked over le pont Mirabeau into the 16th Arrondissement thinking of going to the Musée Le Corbusier, but straight lines do not exist in the topography of Paris or in my own mind. Wandering according to distractions is better, and a couple of interesting buildings turned me this way, that way, and finally around, so I’m not sure where I am. My confusion must be visible at ten metres because a smallish plump man, past seventy, I guess, smiles benignly as he walks up and, at a safe enough distance, says, Vous êtes perdu. It is a statement, not a question. Yes, I tell him, I am lost or rather merely disoriented. He asks me where I want to go, hesitates a moment when I tell him, and says he thinks he knows, but then produces a pocket map and a magnifying glass and, with triumph all over his face, tells me his thoughts were correct and here is how I will get there.

How strange, but how helpful—and precise, as if it is his duty to give directions and get them right. I also notice, as we say merci-je vous-en prie-au’voir-au’voir that he is wearing the Légion d’Honneur, the bright red threads sewn into the lapel of his coat with a black rosette—sometimes called an asterisk—in the center. This is serious business: he is an officier de la Légion. There can be a hundred thirteen thousand chevaliers of the Legion, but only about ten thousand officers—even if the present number is more than twenty-two thousand. I want to ask the question famously put to an important-seeming gentleman by Theodore Hook about two hundred years ago: “I beg your pardon, sir, but, pray, may I ask, are you anyone in particular?” I lose my nerve and, besides, he has been voluntarily kind to me.

So I am bemused again and decide that my date with Le Corbu will have to wait for another day. This was too much fun, and stirring in the greatness of the great architect just wouldn’t be right today. I cross the same bridge, the Mirabeau, a great Victorian (or Troisième République) iron beauty with allegorical statues, and head back to the same Métro stop with the idea of doing something I hadn’t planned—which turns out to be riding subway Line 10, the one I came here on, the other way to the end of the line, la gare d’Austerlitz.

Austerlitz is being renovated, but it is still another lovely example of Victorian (or Bourbon Restoration, in this case) architecture which in France generally means rather beaux-arts than gothic in subtext, and broad and expansive rather than tall and narrow. Under rehabilitation and in need of a scrub, it’s still a beauty. It’s also a treat to see it because this is another part of the city where I have spent little time—and for good reason.

The Thirteenth Arrondissement is not the most dismal or glum part of Paris, but it’s mixed, with some fine streets here and there and others closing in fast on shabbiness. The French spend a fortune keeping Paris pretty and shiny, but I have calculated over the years that the farther you get from the center of the First Arrondissement, around the Louvre where the first coil of the snail’s shell that defines Parisian geography begins, the less money is spent, with the obvious exception of the twee and toney Sixteenth.

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to come here, but L’Hôpital La Pitié-Salpêtrière isn’t far, and a hospital called Pity and Saltpeter (meaning gunpowder) commands attention. It is going to get mine, and I start heading south. But I am as distrait and curious about this or that as I was earlier and take turnings here, there, here, there, and find that I can’t find myself—or at least my way.

And there he is—astonishing, but smiling benignly at me. Again, from a safe distance, he tells me I am lost, and again I confess to confusion. There is no sign of recognition on his face, no conspiracy of the lost and the rescuer, but it is the same plump older man with the red threads and the asterisk sewn into his lapel. He asks where I desire to go, produces his map and glass, beams in triumph that he knew the way all along, and tells me what I need to know. Again, we say merci-je vous-en prie-au’voir-au’voir, and off he goes. No one else is paying any attention to me, no one seems to have seen a ghost, the sky has not opened and rained down frogs. I find a café and sit.

I wish now that I had asked if he was anyone in particular: I bet he would have told me. But he is gone, and I wonder if I started asking for a little elderly man with la Légion on his lapel, people would say, Of course, they’re everywhere—half of France has it and the other half expects to get it some time soon. But that is not so, and besides he is the only légionnaire I have seen in a week. Giving up that wonder, I try another.

Why did he win his honor? What service has he done the Republic? A great writer, a couturier, a solider, a statesman? I don’t know, but I can guess, and my guess, my hunch, my little glimmering clue is that he is not the ordinarily extraordinary member of the Légion—that is to say, a great man—but something else, one-of-a kind: he is the directions pixie, le lutin de renseignements, who materializes for the bewildered, the mapless, the bemused, the hapless. Of course he never appeared to me before, and no one I know who has spent any time at all in Paris, including people whose sense of direction is not challenged, but non-existent, has ever mentioned a plump légionnaire with kindness and a map.

Is it possible that I somehow conjured him today when I crossed the Mirabeau Bridge over the Seine? I had remembered Apollinaire’s famous poem, Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine, and the refrain that flows through the poem as the river flows under the bridge.

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure.

“Let the night come, the hour strike, the days go off, I remain.” The poem is about lost love, and maybe he lost love and was left behind to contemplate his loss or to make up for it by being kind, even loving, to strangers. Had my thinking about the poem released him from his invisibility and unhappiness? He could live under the bridge and be released by simple remembrance of the poem. He could fasten on to one person and take the same Métro, looking for someone as lost as he. He could be atoning for a love he was responsible for losing, a broken heart, a suicide. He could be a cosmic prankster, playing an enormously complicated game for an audience of one, me, the wanderer nobody looks at. He could not be a coincidence.

Like the days in Apollinaire’s poem, I go off—to my home stop on the train without incident. I know the way, and it must show. The légionnaire does not appear though I do not look around as I normally would. No left, no right, but straight ahead to the gate of the building, through the locked door, and up the elevator without a turn of the head or a swivel of the eyes. Out the window, the street is empty. He was someone in particular, and I should have asked. He might have said pixie and left it at that. It would have been enough.

© Joseph Lestrange