In the Paris Métro last summer, heading to the Chatelet station on my way home after a wayward day, I caught the sound of a saxophone and that familiar melody from decades past, Sidney Bechet’s Petite Fleur. I could tell the music was coming from a source close by, perhaps only a few rows behind me. I froze, not knowing what to do as though I were in the grip of something large and timeless.
Book by FRANCINE PROSE
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It was early September, the air still balmy, the perfect weather for a Venetian escapade. Caterina and Pascal were sitting in a café across a canal divining their future, in a quiet campo off the beaten track, away from the tourists and the film crowd who had invaded the city for the festival. They sipped their frothy iced cappuccinos, basking in the sun, their eyes fixed on its refractions dotting the greenish canal with specks of glitter. They felt that for once things were beginning to look promising for both of them.
A sound I hope to hear no more
than once—faint chime, small ring
produced by a wedding ring, rose-gold, flung
five flights to the cobbles of Rue Valadon
from the closet-sized kitchen where, wrung
dry, come to the end of endurance and all sense
of possibility, I had thrown it out the window.
This is an excerpt from a narrative about the last seventy-four days in the life of Vincent van Gogh. It begins in Paris on the morning of Saturday, May 17, 1890, when Vincent first met his sister-in-law Jo, the wife of his younger brother Theo. It ends in Auvers, northwest of Paris, at one-thirty in the morning of Tuesday, July 29, 1890, when Vincent died after wounding himself in the chest with a pistol.
We had no plans to visit Paris that winter. I was at the end of the second trimester of a difficult first pregnancy, when a few hours away from the comfort of home were all my hundred-pound body could afford. We were living in Salem, Virginia, five thousand miles from all our family in India.
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