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23.5 Degrees: Tripping the Tesseract Tango
By Stella Maris
August 16, 2008
Fractal Breasts
© Alamy
By the time I made my way out of Chartres' Crypt of the Underground Mary and back to Le Café Serpente, Soph was totally freaking out. I had been gone for well over an hour and, after several circuits around the cathedral, she was beginning to get seriously concerned about my unexplained disappearance. To say nothing of the valuable shopping time that had been wasted.
So I placated her with a somewhat embellished version of how the twirling telluric currents in the Crypt had enticed me into a mysterious liaison with a handsome stranger who had left me a secret squirrel letter-drop in a candlelit medieval chapel.
Yeah right, and I'm a direct descendent of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Soph scoffed, not even missing a beat.
By then I was starving, so we traded increasingly imaginative insults while heading back to the Grand Monarch, where I promised to order the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu for dinner as compensation for the trauma I had caused.
However, while cutting through the rue du Cheval Blanc, I became unexpectedly mesmerized by the strains of 1940s jazz refrains wafting through the twilight in between the pauses in Soph's diatribe. The music sounded so hauntingly familiar, it was like being transported back in time...
Following the source, we arrived at the doorway of an enchanting local restaurant called Le Pichet, which advertized "thick steacks" and "lamp chops" in a quaint attempt to ensnare the occasional English tourist.
Obviously, between the bewitching bebop flashbacks and the offer of enlightenment on a plate, there was no other option than for us eschew the gourmet delights of the Grand Monarch and dine at the more prosaic Le Pichet instead, much to Soph's dismay.
Ordering the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu inevitably got the attention of the restaurant owner, who came over to personally decant it for us and take our order. Chatting amiably, he explained that the music was a genuine recording of an underground radio broadcast of a subversive big-band performance, as jazz had been banned by the Nazis in Occupied France during the 40s. The program had been secretly recorded by his aunt's best friend's grandmother's dog, or some equally convoluted method, and passed down through the family, to be copied onto a cassette tape years later.
Encouraged by the proprietor's genial proclivity towards exchanging old war stories, I pulled the mysterious Jean Moulin leaflet out of my rucksack to see what the owner would make of it, figuring that he would at least be able to translate it for me.
But as I unfolded the vintage document with a theatrical flourish, the restaurateur immediately became visibly agitated as Soph glared at me in astonishment, as though I had been instantaneously transformed into an alien before her very eyes, while Edith Piaf concertedly warbled on about nothing in the background...
Newton Coordinate: The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, August 15th, Gamma Virginis, 1º31' East of the Greenwich Meridian.
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