In France, bees, symbolizing immortality, were once an emblem of the sovereigns. Napoleon Bonaparte wore them embroidered into his regal garments and they ornamented many of his possessions. Surely the idea of kingdoms originates in nature with the bees. Surely the kingdom of poetry is not so different from that of a beehive.
Some poets are like the Brother Adam bees (named after the Benedictine monk who bred them) that are kept in a hive on the roof of the sacristy of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, on the Île de la Cité. They are productive, resistant to parasites, and gentler than most, soft and brown. Each day, these bees visit seven hundred flowers, helping the plants within three kilometers of the Gothic cathedral to realize themselves fully. Other poets, like me, are solitary creatures and more like the rougher bees in the wild, which are short tongued and carry their pollen snugly under their abdomens or attached firmly to their hind legs. Sometimes, when I hear bees buzzing, I think, “What else could love be but lots of buzzing, or hate?”
Part XI
WHY AM I WRITING all this down, dear reader? The answer is because I don’t want to conceal anything, or be surreptitious. Instead, I want to reveal something—everyday myths, fables, and allegories—that might otherwise remain dormant behind the intense beauty of Paris. Recently, I watched the 1939 film made from Victor Hugo’s immortal classic The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which is set at the end of the fifteenth century. The cast includes the English actor Charles Laughton as the kind, pitiable, but misunderstood Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer of the Notre-Dame Cathedral, who saves Esmeralda (played by Maureen O’Hara), the Roma street dancer (or Gypsy, as she refers to herself ), who is framed for a murder. With her goat, Esmeralda charms everyone but feels that because of her race she has been denied security, happiness, a good home, and prosperity. The film asserts soberly that we are all born in a womb and end up in a tomb. The Middle Ages have come to a close, and France is ravaged by a hundred years of war, but there is still hope among its citizens. Unfortunately, there is superstition, too, about a new form of expression and thought known as Gutenberg’s printing press, but, happily, King Louis XI is not superstitious. “Out there . . . all over France, in every city, there stand cathedrals like this one, triumphal monuments of the past . . . a book in stone,” he says, pointing to Notre-Dame. He tells us that cathedrals are “the handwriting of the past,” but “the printing press is of our time.”
This theme of the new versus the old is a recurring one in the film, in which we are told, in verse: “The old can never last. / The new is claiming its place. / It’s foolish to cling to the past. / Believe in the future’s face.” I loved many things in the movie, like when a character says, “Being a poet I’m already a vagabond, and I can learn quickly to be a thief.” Later, he adds, “The poet doesn’t believe in force. I told you I could save you without force.” I was very moved when the barely verbal Quasimodo, overcome with longing for pretty Esmeralda, says to an ugly cathedral gargoyle, “Why was I not made of stone like thee?” As always, the book is darker than the film, and Esmeralda is not saved on her way to the gallows but hanged instead. She is entombed, and years later, a hunchbacked skeleton is found entangled with hers.
LIGHT PENETRATING the colored glass of cathedral windows was once thought to be God’s most beautiful presence among us. “I never realized until now how ugly I am because you are so beautiful,” Quasimodo (who was abandoned as an infant on the steps of Notre-Dame) says mournfully to Esmeralda, who gives him a drink of water and a little pity. We have a devilish fascination with his ugliness—we shrink from it but want to look, too. I come to Paris, in part, because of its beauty. The call of life is too strong for me to resist, and this gives me a sense of emotional well-being, but is this an evolutionary feeling? Does it help me to survive? “Beauty,” as a noun meaning “physical attractiveness,” comes from the early fourteenth-century Anglo-French beute, and as a word connoting “a beautiful woman” it originates later in the century. “Beautician” is first recorded in American English in 1924 (in the Cleveland, Ohio, telephone directory). “Ugly,” as an adjective describing a “frightful or horrible” appearance, is older. It has a Scandinavian origin, probably from the Old Norse uggligr, meaning “dreadful, fearful.” In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s daring sonnet “Pied Beauty,” he defines beauty as “all things counter, original, spare, strange,” which seems perfect, allowing us to praise chestnuts, cattle, trout, finches, and plotted fields.
THIS MORNING I OBSERVED a beautiful sleeping chipmunk. Animals—like humans—seek a safe, sheltered place to sleep. Deer make a bed out of unmown grass, rodents burrow in the soil, and apes create a pallet of leaves. In Paris, I sleep alone on a thick foam mattress. Because my dreams are incoherent, I lose any
