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Page 7.
Chapter 2
 Marc Fontbleu, secretly alias the poet Léopold Montblé, was mowing lawns one day around the Paris I Sorbonne, more specifically around the College de Navarre off the Rue Descartes. That is in the Pantheon-Sorbonne area on the Left Bank in the 5th Arrondissement, where in recent months he had been crashing nights with some guys he knew from the bar scene. Not to be coy about it, he was a year from having his degree in Literature at the University in Créteil, and he was already a minor published poet if you counted school literary magazines. He had earned the praise of students and professors alike, but they knew nothing of his secret deeds and ambitions.
He had a great fondness for music and poetry, which he combined in the subtle rhythms of his free verse. Or again, that would be the verse of one Léopold Montblé, poet in exile. So he would soon be explaining to a rapt Emma Delors once he met her.
He had qualified to attend Paris XII, and was hoping to finish one day through the prestigious main campus in this area near the Jardin de Luxembourg. He loved the old buildings here, smothered in trees and ornamentation, versus the ostentatious and timeless somewhat-Gothic or wishfully modern glass cubes around his home town of Créteil.
The seasons in the Île-de-France region are extreme and final statements. It was spring—and talk about April showers. Gone were Chaucer’s deep snows of February, and the agues of March. Like water dripping in a pot through tendered tea leaves, a gentle April rain sieved itself through the newly bright-green trees. The brown earth was soaked, and the first tender grass sprouted in thin, tall clumps over the tea-like deposits. The very air seemed to glow bright green, and was fragrant with emerging blossoms.
Across the rooftops, high up over the banked tree crowns newly dense with fresh leaves, reared the dome of the Pantheon. Even with the roar of motors and a faint haze of exhaust fumes, the air was redolent with spring. It was a sodden air, silvered with a fine mist of rain that wetted rather than soaked one’s clothes.
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