The Bells of Saint Sulpice

Constance Debré, Paris, and power

“In life it’s either beauty or power,” writes Constance Debré in her latest work of autofiction. “Power is for those who lack the courage to be beautiful.“ Name is the last in a trilogy of books tracking Debré’s public divorce and custody dispute, sapphic sexual explorations, and, most relevant to this edition, the death of her father. The narrator (the books closely track Debré’s own life, though she has refused words like “autobiography” or “memoir”) is at turns melancholic and outraged, independent yet in constant seeking of validation, not so much apolitical as fervently antipolitical. The books read as an embrace of sexual selfhood and rejection of liberal society, most urgently the nuclear family. The narrator urgently demands an end to identity and self while living individualistically, fleeting between Parisian flats of sex partners while intermittently caring for her ailing father, while refusing the scars of his addiction and codependent marriage to her late mother:

I think that what has happened doesn't matter. Thing that happen in childhood have nothing to do with childhood. The slightly bitter taste like the taste of blood in the mouth has nothing to do with the things that happen. Its just the taste of childhood. That's how I see things. 1 never think about childhood. That is, I never think about the taste of blood in the mouth that came to me long before anything happened, that came with childhood itself. Children detest childhood, that's all. We have to remember that when we become adults, when it's left us, when we've finally freed ourselves, how lucky we are. To no longer taste blood.

She certainly doesn’t seem to seek out power, which depends on things like connection and community and memory and growth, and her definition of beauty rejects the very notion of a beholder. “I look at my body my face my tattoos,” says the narrator who, like Debré, keeps a closely shaved head and decidedly masculine fashion sense. “I would never be able to keep going without all that. Being beautiful has nothing to do with women, it’s not about other people. I am beautiful for the same reason they do push-ups in prison, for the sake of honor.“

I read Name in its entirety sitting at a cafe outside the Église Saint-Sulpice, the largest church in Paris. I stumbled across the church and the cafe without really looking for either, true to how I explored Paris throughout a recent 10-day stay. I made few plans outside some timed entries to museums, a few lunch dates, and morning runs along the Seine between the Bastille and Pont Neuf. Endless, aimless walks in the Paris streets have a rich intellectual tradition—from Rousseau to Baudelaire to Benjamin to Baldwin to DeBord—which helped me give great meaning to the experience of mostly wasting my time, fumbling through conversational French, getting lost and snapping photos of plaques, statues, architectural features, glances of sunlight across monuments and sculptures. What would strike me as a rather nondescript street of apartment blocks would, upon closer inspection, turn out to be the home to intense levels of history—Gertrude Stein’s salon, memorial to deportees of the Nazi and Vichy regime, the building where Simone du Beauvoir wrote The Mandarins and The Second Sex.

After booking my trip online, targeted ads promised me paid private tours of “must-see” sites or audio guides to help me “make the most” of what was supposed to be a vacation away from musts, making, doing. But try as I might, I felt a constant compulsion throughout the trip to have a mission, keep moving, walking from street to park to street up to 8 miles a day (in addition to the morning runs) with only brief stops to drink water and stave off blisters. This isn’t incredibly different than how I behave on any off day in DC, itself walkable though not as richly so as Paris. But after a point, it became clear how discordant this was with the way most others around me were spending their time in the many, many cafes and restaurants I idly passed by.

An American cafe is basically a workplace. Few people in a coffeehouse in Washington, D.C. are not on a laptop or poring over textbooks, perhaps seeking respite from the distractions of roommates or family. A Parisian cafe, by contrast, is more like a theater box with the street itself an endless show. It’s strange, at first, to walk past a cafe with dozens of tables arranged outside and patrons staring not at each other but outward, rendering every pedestrian a player in some avant-garde performance. The denizens of a Paris cafe are not producing but observing, smoking, consuming the sights and sounds of the city as slowly and mindfully as they sip espresso out of ceramic thimbles (so practiced and delicate compared to the single-use plastic thermos of iced coffee I’m used to lugging around in DC).

For reasons that aren’t clear to me, I resisted joining them—I’m quite able to sit alone at a cafe or in a park in DC, certainly with a book in hand if not a laptop open to a mass of emails. I’m deep enough into my thirties and distant enough from my last relationship that being a single woman in public is well-practiced. What I struggled to do, however, was stop. Part of this was simply being in Paris for the first time, fabulously lost in a new place and as seemingly free of memory or identity as Debré’s narrator. But after a week of it I came to realize why the endless scroll of shops and sites and people and spectacle felt so familiar to my aging and distracted Millennial mind, as if this ancient city were simply another app on my phone and each step forward was another swipe of my thumb.

This realization filled me with a familar sense of a guilt and a newfound sense of dread, that capitalism’s algorithmic capture of my life had so sufficiently rewired my brain that even this storied, spiritual indulgence of my inner flaneuse state was simply another excuse to seek out constant indulgence, inattention, and sacrifice of my time and sanity. What I struggled to relate to about the Parisian cafe was the relative stillness, the sense of every pause being earned, or perhaps the abandonment that pause is something that needed to be earned in the first place.

I’ve always struggled not to have a purpose or, at least, the sense of one. At any party I’m the first to ask if the host needs help with the food, the drinks, the table setting, the cleanup, the music, the guests, the pets. I struggle to delegate tasks at work not because I mistrust those who might otherwise take on the task but because I fear my own obsolescence, my own leisure, my own fungibility. Though you’ll hardly find me in the self-help aisle of any bookstore, I often find my reading tastes guided by what will help the next project, the next speech, the next writing, the next conversation or challenge or trial. Even my pop culture tastes seem to serve the purpose of giving me something to talk about that isn’t work, politics, the terror of this perilous moment.

Particularly amid our national crisis, it feels inexcusably decadent to lounge about on a Parisian vacation patting myself on the back with performatively deep thoughts and thin novellas by studly French lesbians. But even that presumes a level of self-importance about my role in that crisis, a spotlight effect that can feel like anxiety but all-too-closely resemble narcissism. To confess my replaceability feels terrifying but necessary. We don’t need heroes astride stallions or main characters in search of a plot. My rush to give my life importance, purpose, or meaning often feels like it runs counter to the shared responsibility that is key to fostering freedom.

When I first read that line from Debré about beauty and power, I looked up from my book and stared across the Place Saint-Sulpice, the footfall of mid-morning pedestrians interrupted only occasionally by buses or the whine of compact EVs. I haven’t been feeling very powerful and thus, to my anxious mind, not very beautiful either. For so much of my life I came to associate value with purpose, importance, prestige. In many ways it’s what drew me to Washington, D.C., wooed by the false assurance of its marble monuments, their golden glow at the end of a long day inflating whatever I had done that day with a sense that it does or, at least, will matter. History will judge, says DC’s stone bricks and eggshell columns. Whatever you’re doing now is what you would have done then. I have not done a lot of work to define beauty for myself outside the glow of other people’s inescapable values and assumptions. I’m not sure who I am without the security of intent.

The noonday bells of the Saint Sulpice pulled me out of my musing. Others at the cafe, with their fluent French and practiced orders, barely looked up to note the metallic tones echoing through this city square. Nibbling at toast covered in cheese and honey, I set down Debré’s book and opened Wikipedia on my phone, hoping to assign some historical value to the bells themselves. The original church in the place of the Saint Sulpice was built in the 14th century with generations adding to its architecture over hundreds of years until it stands towering and massive today, larger in square footage than even the Notre Dame. The church was the baptismal site for both the Marquis de Sade and Charles Baudelaire, and its square is featured in the works of Victor Hugo, Ernest Hemingway, and Djuna Barnes. My phone informed me the very cafe I was sitting at, Cafe de la St. Marie, was famous for hosting the pre-WWII intelligentsia—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus.

I put my phone away and pulled out the lavender lined notebook I bought at the airport but, after five days, had barely paused long enough to write in. My biggest regret as a writer is that I have overindexed on how to think while ignoring the practice it takes to see. In an endless pursuit of purpose, an intentful march from point to point, I amass books and quotations and photographs all while empty journals collect rips and stains at the bottom of my bags. I imagine these pieces of history and argument will add to something true—undeniable and inarguable—and with that truth will come power.

I rarely find it does. I write posts, I give lectures, I have the same twelve conversations about gender over and over. At each I bring with me the beauty others have created—their books, their stories, their selves. Unlike Debre, I associate truth, power, and beauty together—perhaps even dependent upon one another in the same way heat, oxygen, and fuel make a fire. Debré instead positions beauty and power in contestation, at which point my desperation for something like power—influence, inspiration, persuasion—is at odds with anything beautiful. Perhaps my mistake is thinking that beauty is something I should be collecting, storing in photo reels and newsletters, rather than producing in my own life and my own being. I keep hoping beauty will come with purpose and that purpose will save me, my friends, and the people who call me for help. I hold onto their absence and bathe in the sound of bells on concrete, the musical language of these strangers, and the terrifying silence of the midday sun.