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Page 8.
 Marc Fontbleu stopped, turned off his evilly smoking lawnmower, and took off his rain-damp baseball cap to wipe off sweat. He was twenty-three, and employed by the university in this manual capacity. Owing to his ongoing studies in Literature—interrupted by a semester here or there writing poetry, tending bar, or slumming around the Continent’s other historic cities—someone in the Sorbonne employment offices had promised him this job as a starter, pending some more important and interesting assignment. Could he put up with the drudgery of mowing lawns for that long? Sure, he told them, what the hell—it was better than no job at all. Besides, being so close to his degree, he relished the thought of some relaxed summer time ahead, innocently spent mowing lawns. He dared not think of his prospects ahead—should he continue to a higher degree, or simply move into (oh God no) the business world and start earning a living? What would become of music and poetry and Léopold Montblé then?
He was tired from years of school, and not sure he wanted to continue in English. Through much of his undergraduate time he had faked it, reading few of the assigned materials, and writing (like running) for his life. He knew there were holes in his understanding of the standard Great Authors. He had preferred to read less well-known but more modern poets and writers of his choice—the cool jazz of writing, blue beats unknown in the bleach of academe; in whose tone and modality he wrote his own verse (free in more senses than one) that could connect with no safe, mediocre publisher. He hoped to have time, living in his rented room in Hamden not far from Lake Whitney—where, a hundred years earlier, the famed inventor had toiled in a small red factory that still stood there on an island amid moss-colored, marbled waters—to read all the authors and works he should have read for courses.
Meanwhile, he wrote poetry under the nom de plume of Léopold Montblé. He’d published a few scattered items. Fame, however, was not yet at hand, and should it come, he would relegate it to the mysterious Léopold Montblé, since he felt he should never succumb to some emboldening and inflated public image of himself. He preferred the freshness and early morning innocence of being forever an outsider; every day was thus a fresh beginning full of idealism and dreams. Confident in the eventual success of Léopold Montblé, Marc Fontbleu wiped his forehead and continued to mow university lawns with his blue-smoking lawn mower in the tinged and tea-dripping green half-light of a spring day in the ancient and medieval Latin Quarter.
He was on his own here, and he relished his independence, which fit him perfectly, even in this menial occupation. In the early mornings, a truck took the members of the lawn-mowing team around to their various work spots. Thus left to himself, Marc Fontbleu took a craftsmanlike, artisan pride in conquering the upstart legions of newly sprouting grass. He had worked his way around a small park in a courtyard this morning, and estimated with simple craftsmanlike satisfaction, that he could report to his supervisor he’d be able to finish the greenery around this building. He paused to wipe sweat from under his cap.
Then and there, that was the moment in his life when he saw Emma Delors for the first time.
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