The Lucky Frown

In death, we are all equals.

But I lost this consolation, too—lost it on the grounds of Cemitaire du Pere Lachaise on a spooky, wind-swept Paris afternoon.

H.L. Mencken once defined a cynic as “a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a funeral.” But I swear there was something infinitely more cynical in the movements of this wandering tourist who, in desperate search for a funeral, began to look around for flowers.

My cemetery map had proven to be useless, you understand, and so I quickly realized that I had no other recourse but to find my favorite graves by their flowers. That is how I found Chopin and Moliere. That is how I all-too-quickly found Jim Morrison of The Doors, who lay under a pile of grandiose red roses.

Balzac, Proust, and Wilde were much less decorated—and more elusive.

Oh, but Wilde—the poorest of them all! Only a few defeated tulips lay by his gravestone. The inscription had all but faded, along with its meaning. I read out loud: “And alien tears will fill for him / Pity’s long broken urn / For his mourners will be outcast men / And outcasts always mourn.” These outcasts, they should mourn with flowers, I thought.

Hours I spent in the cemetery, and afternoon swelled into evening, but I felt so unfulfilled by my visit, so disappointed and humiliated by the flowers game.

I attempted to dissolve my humiliation in a cup of coffee at the historic Hotel des Beaux Arts. I sat on a sofa next to a bookshelf, and admired the old volumes of literature that were assembled there. Then I noticed the two framed photographs. The first was of a middle-aged Oscar Wilde; he had died at this hotel in 1900. The second was of a young Argentine boy who would grow to be Jorge Luis Borges, the great man of myths and letters whose imagination these very alcoves had once unleashed.

Two women sitting nearby noticed my interest in the photographs.

“Are you a writer?” the brunette asked in English.

I looked at her for the first time and noticed she was young and beautiful.

“Yes,” I said.

“How nice,” said the blonde, equally beautiful. “We are here with a writer, too.”

“Who?” I asked.

“He’s very famous here,” the blonde said.

“What does he write?” I asked, wondering if they were going to sleep with him.

“Trash,” the brunette said, laughing mischievously.

“Cocaine and parties,” the blonde clarified—meaning, probably, yes.

And in walked the tall, bearded man of maybe forty, sat down, yelled out for drinks, and turned his attention onto me.

“Thank you for entertaining the girls,” he said sincerely. “Ahh, women. Beautiful and painful. Don’t you agree?”

“I agree,” I said, “but you must find more beauty than pain.”

“Now they are beautiful; later they will be painful,” he said, and I told him those were wonderful words and that I would like to use them.

We spoke of Camus and swimming pools and all sorts of things (except cabbages and kings) and, at the end of it, we scribbled our identities in notepads, and promised to read each other.

I was in a softer mood now and, outside, so were the winds. I walked down toward St. Germain, past the cozy cafés where Sartre once sat, and past the brasserie where once Hemingway had a serving of some very inspirational potato salad. I was happier with Paris now.

And I expressed my happiness that night to my Parisian friend. I sat at his kitchen table and told him about my day and the flowers and the kind, quick-witted man I met at the Hotel des Beaux Arts.

“What was his name?” my friend asked.

I pulled out my notepad, flipped it to the seventy-third page, and handed it over.

My friend drew a grand smile.

He shouted: “You met F—!”

“I did.” I said. “But who is he?”

“He’s very, very famous,” my friend said. “He’s a novelist. He’s been in movies.” My friend drew another smile. This time there was a trace of envy. I smiled, too, marveling in my unexpected literary moment, until my friend continued to speak.

“But I hate him,” my friend announced.

“Why?” I asked, almost defensively.

And here my friend fell back into form and went on and on, pretending he had never smiled, saying how that man F— was a shallow, womanizing fraud, a pretender, a bourgeois-boheme, and how that line about women and beauty and pain, it wasn’t even his—F— had stolen it!

“From whom?” I asked sorrowfully.

“Baudelaire, of course!” my friend said, smiling again.

“Right,” I said, and I began to wonder how many flowers Baudelaire had on his grave.