Satori in Paris and Pic. Jack Kerouac

Army 1756 Quebec, and also Louis Moréri’s dictionary, and Pêre Anselme etc., all the information about the royal house of Brittany, and it aint even there and finally in the Mazarine Library old sweet Madame Oury the head librarian patiently explains to me that the Nazis done bombed and burned all their French papers in 1944, something which I’d forgotten in my zeal. Still I smell that there’s something fishy in Brittany—Surely de Kérouack should be recorded in France if it’s already recorded in the British Museum in London?—I tell her that—

      You cant smoke even in the toilet in the Bibliothèque Nationale and you cant get a word in edgewise with the secretaries and there’s a national pride about “scholars” all sitting there copying outa books and they wouldnt even let John Montgomery in (John Montgomery who forgot his sleeping bag on the climb to Matterhorn and is America’s best librarian and scholar and is English)—

      Meanwhile I have to go back and see how the gentle ladies are doing. My cabdriver is Roland Ste. Jeanne d’Arc de la Pucelle who tells me that all Bretons are “corpulent” like me. The ladies are kissing me on both cheeks French style. A Breton called Goulet is getting drunk with me, young, 21, blue eyes, black hair, and suddenly grabs Blondie and scares her (with the other fellows joining in), almost a rape, which me and the other Jean, Tassart, put a stop to: “Awright!” “Arrète!”—

      “Cool it,” I add.

      She is just too beautiful for words. I said to her “Tu passe toutes la journée dans maudite beauty parlor?” (You spend all day in the damn beauty parlor?)

       “Oui.”

      Meanwhile I go down to the famous cafes on the boulevard and sit there watching Paris go by, such hepcats the young men, motorcycles, visiting firemen from Iowa.

       8.

      THE ARAB GIRL GOES OUT WITH ME, I INVITE HER TO see and hear a performance of Mozart’s Requiem in old St.-Germain-des-Prés church, which I knew about from an earlier visit and saw the poster announcing it. It’s full of people, crowded, we pay at the door and walk into surely the most distingué gathering in Paris that night, and as I say it’s misting outside, and her soft little hook nose has under it rose lips.

      I teach her Christianity.

      We neck a little later and she goes home to her parents. She wants me to take her to the beach at Tunis, I’m wondering if I shall be stabbed by Arabs jealous on the Bikini beach and that week Boumedienne deposed and dis-posed of Ben Bella and that woulda been a fine kettle of fish, and also I didnt have the money now and I wonder why she wanted that:’ I’ve been told where to get off on the beaches of Morocco.

      I just dont know.

      Methinks women love me and then they realize I’m drunk for all the world and this makes them realize I cant concentrate on them alone, for long, makes them jealous, and I’m a fool in Love With God. Yes.

      Besides, lechery’s not my meat and makes me blush:– depends on the Lady. She was not my style. The French blonde was, but too young for me.

      In times to come I’ll be known as the fool who rode outa Mongolia on a pony: Genghiz Khan, or the Mongolian Idiot, one. Well I’m not an idiot, and I like ladies, and I’m polite, but impolitic, like Ippolit my cousin from Russia. An old hitch hiker in San Francisco, called Joe Ihnat, announced that mine was an ancient Russian name meaning “Love.” Kerouac. I said “Then they went to Scotland?”

      “Yes, then Ireland, then Cornwall, Wales, and Brittany, then you know the rest.”

      “Rooshian?”

      “Means Love.”

      “You’re kidding.”

      —Oh, and then I realized, “of course, outa Mongolia and the Khans, and before that, Eskimos of Canada and Siberia. All goes back around the world, not to mention Perish-the-Thought Persia.” (Aryans).

      Anyhow me and the Breton Goulet went to an evil bar where a hundred assorted Parisians were eagerly listening to a big argument between a white man and a black man. I got outa there quick and left him to his own devices, met him back at La Gentilhommière, some fight musta spilled out, or, not, I wasnt there.

      Paris is a tough town.

       9.

      THE FACT OF THE MATTER IS, HOW CAN YOU BE AN Aryan when you’re an Eskimo or a Mongol? That old Joe Ihnat was full of little brown turds, unless he means Russia. Old Joe Tolstoy we shoulda picked up.

      Why keep talking about such things? Because my grammar school teacher was Miss Dineen, who is now Sister Mary of St. James in New Mexico (James was a son of Mary, like Jude), and she wrote: “Jack and his sister Carolyn (Ti Nin) I remember well as friendly, cooperative children with unusual charm. We were told that their folks came from France, and that the name was de Kerouac. I always felt that they had the dignity and refinement of aristocracy.”

      I mention this to show that there can be such a thing as manners.

      My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet. As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.

      I’m a Wretch.

      But I love love.

      (Strange Chapter) 10.

      NOT ONLY THAT BUT YOU CANT GET A NIGHT’S sleep in France, they’re so lousy and noisy at 8 A.M. screaming over fresh bread it would make Abomination weep. Buy that. Their strong hot coffee and croissants and crackling French bread and Breton butter, Gad, where’s my Alsatian beer?

      While looking for the library, incidentally, a gendarme in the Place de la Concorde told me that Rue de Richelieu (street of the National Library) was thataway, pointing, and because he was an officer I was afraid to say “What? . . NO!” because I knew it was in the opposite direction somewhere—Here he is some kind of sergeant or other who certainly oughta know the streets of Paris giving an American tourist a bum steer. (Or did he believe I was a wise-guy Frenchman pulling his leg? since my French is French)—But no, he points in the direction of one of de Gaulle’s security buildings and sends me there maybe thinking “That’s the National Library alright, ha ha ha” (“maybe they’ll shoot down that Quebec rat”)—Who knows? Any Parisian middle-aged gendarme oughta know where Rue de Richelieu is—But thinking he may be right and I’d made a mistake studying the Paris map back home I do go in the direction he points, afraid to go any other, and go down the upper spate of Champs-Elysées then cut across the damp green park and across Rue Gabriel to the back of an important government building of some kind where suddenly I see a sentry box and out of it steps a guard with bayonet in full Republican Guard regalia (like Napoleon with a cockatoo hat) and he snaps to attention and holds up his bayonet at Present Arms but it’s not for me really, it’s for a sudden black limousine full of bodyguards and guys in black suits who receive a salute from the other sentry men and zip on by—I stroll past the sentry bayonet and take out my plastic Camel cigarette container to light a butt—Immediately two strolling gendarmes are passing me in the opposite direction watching every move I make—It turns out I’m only lighting a butt but how can they tell? plastic and all that—And that is the marvelous tight security around big old de Gaulle’s very palace which is a few blocks away.

      I go down to the corner bar to have a cognac alone at a cool table by the open door.

      The bartender in there is very polite and tells me exactly how to get to the library: right down St.-Honoré then across la Place de la Concorde and then Rue Rivoli right at the Louvre and left on Richelieu to the Library dingblast it.

      So how can an American tourist who doesnt speak French get around at all? Let alone me?

      To know the name of the street of the sentry box itself I’d have to order a map from the C.I.A.

       11.