Paris Scenes in the Novel
In the middle of Ipswich, Mon Amour, is a long chapter set in in France, with many scenes in Paris. It begins with Nora Mahoney arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport and taking the RAR into the City of Lights. She’s visiting France for the first time, and she’s filled with the sense of wonder and excitement we all have when setting foot in a new place.
I remember how it was for me on my initial trip to Paris. I wandered through the Latin Quarter and gazed up at the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral. Unlike Nora, I didn’t speak French, only English and some high-school German.
Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, as seen from the Left Bank
On my second visit to Europe, my plan was to spend a few months traveling through a handful of countries by rail. I began with a couple of days in Paris, enough time to adjust to the time change and sketch out my itinerary.
In those 48 hours, I ran into the same communication frustrations I had on my first visit. They caused me to change my plan. Rather than getting brief glimpses of different countries, I would stay in Paris, get to know the city and learn French. Not just enough for simple interactions at a café or restaurant, but sufficient to really grasp the language and the French culture.
Île Saint-Louis in the Center of Paris
The first thing I had to do was find a place to live. It was pre-internet days, so I picked up a paper copy of the International Herald Tribune. One of the classified ads listed a studio for rent on Île Saint-Louis, one of the two tiny islands located in the center of Paris. The woman who showed me the place said it belonged to an American opera singer who was touring the world for a year.
Île Saint-Louis, a hidden gem of an island in the middle of the Seine
The studio had a small central room with stucco walls, recessed lighting, exposed ceiling beams, and a stone floor. The only window was in the entrance hallway. It was made of stained glass and opened onto the building’s courtyard. The overall effect was to give the place a cave-like feel.
The furniture was minimal—a round oak table with two chairs, and a short sofa that converted to a bed. To a detail, this is the Île Saint-Louis vacation rental that Nora Mahoney finds on her arrival in Paris, down to the address: 14 Rue le Regrattier.
L’Alliance française de Paris
The day after moving in, I signed up for a class at L’Alliance française de Paris. It was an intensive beginner course that met five days a week, four hours a day. After a month and a half, I moved to an intensive intermediate course.
Many of the students in both classes came from a variety of countries, not just English-speaking ones, so the instructors spoke exclusively in French. This is how we all learn our first language as children, I realized. It was so much better than how I studied German in high school.
Outside of class, I spent time with people who were mostly American, British or Australian, which meant speaking English when I was hanging out with them. But I made an effort to put myself in situations where I’d be using the French I was learning.
L’Alliance française de Paris on Boulevard Raspail
Thinking and Dreaming in French
It was a deep immersion in a new language and culture. There were times when I was speaking French for hours at a stretch. I felt the sort of language fatigue that I’d heard about before from foreigners in America. Then there was one afternoon when I was walking through the web of narrow streets in the sixth arrondissement and considering my plans for that evening. I noticed that was I was thinking in French, absentmindedly talking to myself in a second language. I’d never had that experience with German or the little Spanish I’d learned. Later, I also dreamed in French, which seemed so cool.
Those two things stopped happening on my return to America, sadly, but I was able to use both the schooling and the language immersion in depicting Nora Mahoney’s time in Paris. The institute where she improves her French pronunciation is essentially L’Alliance française. Even the details about the teacher and the student from Brazil were plucked from my intermediate-level class.
Another shared experience involves the Catacombs. They’re a series of underground tunnels holding millions of skulls and bones relocated from Paris cemeteries in the late 1700s and 1800s. I heard about them after being in Paris for a while and decided to visit the underground spectacle.
L’Empire de la Mort (The World of Death)
It was a strange world to explore, as described in Ipswich, Mon Amour. Seeing so many bones and skulls piled up in one tunnel after another, I had the sense of walking through a graveyard, a sacred place that needed to be treated with utmost respect.
Called L’Empire de la Mort, or The World of Death, the Paris Catacombs are open to visitors
At some point, that notion of sanctity began to fall away. I felt a connection with all those skeletons. A sense of otherness changed to one of kinship. The bones were from countless people who had been, on a fundamental level, just like me—human. What was left of them would be all that remains of me eventually. It was only time that separated our shared fates.
Nora has a more heightened experience. It allows her, in a way, to bring people back to life and communicate with them about their earthly journeys, from triumphs to tragedies. She has an ability to stand on the thresholds between past and present, the living and the dead, and to reach from her world into the one beyond.
Along with the studio on Île Saint-Louis, the language school and the Catacombs, there are more place in the novel where I used my time in Paris to inform Nora’s narrative. They’re more passing connections, though, like her visit to the Palace of Versailles, Notre-Dame and various cafés and shops.
One place she notices on her first morning in the city is Shakespeare and Company. She never enters the bookstore, and it’s not mentioned again in the novel. But I did end up living there for a month on later visit to Paris in 1991. I talk about that wonderful experience in this post.
The South of France in Ipswich, Mon Amour
The Benedictine abbey of Saint-Hilaire is the setting for important backstory in Ipswich, Mon Amour
When the story moves south to the towns of Limoux and Saint-Hilaire, it also moves beyond my direct experience. On my first trip to Europe, though, I spent a couple of months cycling through Spain and southern France. I stayed at youth hostels in Toulouse, Carcassonne and Perpignan, all within the same area. So, I was at least able to capture the general flavor of the region.
If you’d like to read more about the research and writing of Ipswich, Mon Amour, then check out these other posts:
Death and Mythology in the Novel
Limb Loss in Ipswich Mon Amour
Photo Credits
Paris bridge at night by by Léonard Cotte on Unsplash
Notre-Dame Cathedral by Sebastien on Unsplash
Île Saint-Louis by golero on iStock
The Catacombs by Les Catacombes de Paris