Читать книгу Satori in Paris and Pic - Jack Kerouac - Страница 9

FIRST THINGS FIRST.

The altar in La Madelaine is a gigantic marble sculpt of her (Mary Magdalena) as big as a city block and surrounded by angels and archangels. She holds out her hands in a gesture Michelangeloesque. The angels have huge wings dripping. The place is a whole city block long. It’s a long narrow building of a church, one of the strangest. No spires, no Gothic, but I suppose Greek temple style. (Why on earth would you, or did you, expect me to go see the Eiffel Tower made of Bucky Buckmaster’s steel ribs and ozone? How dull can you get riding an elevator and getting the mumps from being a quarter mile in the air? I already done that orf the Hempire State Building at night in the mist with my editor.)

The taxi took me to the hotel which was a Swiss pension I guess but the nightclerk was an Etrus can (same thing) and the maid was sore at me because I kept my door and suitcase locked. The lady who ran the hotel was not pleased when I inaugurated my first evening with a wild sexball with a woman my age (43). I cant give her real name but it’s one of the oldest names in French history, aye back before Charlemagne, and he was a Pippin. (Prince of the Franks.) (Descended from Arnulf, L’Évêsque of Metz.) (Imagine having to fight Frisians, Alemanni, Bavarians and Moors.) (Grandson of Plectrude.) Well this old gal was the wildest lay imaginable. How can I go into such detail about toilet matters. She really made me blush at one point. I shoulda told her to stick her head in the “poizette” but of course (that’s Old French for toilette) she was too delightful for words. I met her in an afterhours Montparnasse gangster bar with no gangsters around. She took me over. She also wants to marry me, naturally, as I am a great natural bed mate and nice guy. I gave her $120 for her son’s education, or some new-old parochial shoes. She really done my budget in. I still had enough money the next day to go on and buy William Makepeace Thackeray’s Livres des Snobs at Gare St.-Lazare. It isnt a question of money but of souls having a good time. In the old church of St.-Germain-des-Pres that following afternoon I saw several Parisian Frenchwomen practically weeping as they prayed under an old bloodstained and rainroiled wall. I said “Ah ha, les femmes de Paris” and I saw the greatness of Paris that it can weep for the follies of the Revolution and at the same time rejoice they got rid of all those long nosed nobles, of which I am a descendant (Princes of Brittany).