Haunting Paris by Mamta Chaudhry

Author:Mamta Chaudhry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-18T04:00:00+00:00

I have often thought how little it would take…a nudge, a whisper, a well-timed warning…to change the course of events. To turn the very tide of history, even. But that little is denied to the restless dead.

Across the barrier of time, this is what we have in common: doomed to witness catastrophe, not prevent it. It’s the iron law of our twilight existence, against which there is no appeal. Yet it does not lessen our burden, the guilt of the word not spoken, the gesture not made.

Once on a day filled with rain, Pierre Curie, his mind teeming with great discoveries, looked across the street and thought he saw his old teacher Jean-Gustave Bourbuze. “Cher maître,” he called out, and stepped eagerly off the sidewalk, paying no heed to the sound of hooves. A heavily laden cart with its runaway horses thundered into the intersection and it would have been the work of an instant to grab his sleeve, to pull him to safety. But his mentor’s ghost could not do it, could only gaze in horror at what happened next. The cart rolled right over his brilliant student, the front wheel missing him by millimeters. And then the back wheel crushed his skull.

When they took the body in to his young widow, all she could think was that her husband was dead, but the wildflowers he had picked for her the day before were still alive. From that day on, Marie Curie’s pale face turned away from the sun, finding comfort only in the gray skies that had covered Paris the day Pierre Curie was killed.

The endless tragedy of her life. And if we were capable of acting, we could have prevented it—the endless tragedy of ours.

I turn away as Sylvie pushes back her chair, gathers her belongings. Suddenly there is a commotion. As the musician squeezes out the final bars of the melody, Coco solemnly rises on his hind legs and dances round and round. And he does what I cannot, he changes the course of events.

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