Reader’s Digest International — August 2017

August• 2017 | 103

READER’S DIGEST

whose essays on artifice and perfor-

mance made me fall in love with the

idea of aville spectacle. His sphinxlike

tomb at the Père Lachaise cemetery is

behind glass: so many admirers have

kissed it that its surface has begun to

decay.

As tourists arrive, leave flowers,

and depart, I spy a young woman, in

black, who remains behind. I watch

as she sits, sketches, looks up at the

tomb. I take note of her dark glasses,

her copper-red lipstick, the way she

sighs with relief when each passing

tour group departs.

When I get up to go, she stops me.

“Madame!” Her English is halting.

“I love your dress.” She nods to the

grave. “I feel sure he would have loved

it, too.”

Only then do I look down at her

sketchbook. There, next to her rendi-

tion of Oscar Wilde’s tomb, I see a

portrait of me.

of the patrician woman from Le Bon
Marché. Her outfit is identical to what
she wore the day before, with the ad-
dition of a shining silver bracelet. She
catches James’s eye, and for a moment
I think she smiles.

ONE OF BAUDELAIRE’Smost famous
poems is ‘To a Passerby’. It is about
a momentary connection with a
woman he spots and then soon loses
in the crowd. “I know not where you
fled, you know not where I go, O you
whom I would have loved, O you who
knew it!”
As I continue wandering the streets
of Paris, Baudelaire’s refrain haunts
me. I find myself entering a world not
of Balzac or Zola novels but of unfin-
ished fragments, encountering char-
acters whose beginnings and endings
I will never know.
On my final day, I visit the resting
place of one of my idols, Oscar Wilde,

PANTS ON FIRE

A Miami defence attorney felt the heat after his trousers

caught fire as he delivered closing arguments in an arson case

in April. Stephen Gutierrez was fiddling in his pocket

while addressing jurors when smoke started billowing from his

pants. Ironically, he was arguing at the time that his client’s car

spontaneously combusted and wasn’t intentionally set

on fire. Gutierrez claimed afterwards that an e-cigarette battery

had exploded in his pocket.SOURCE: NBCNEWYORK.COM

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