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= Woman in the Moon =

Mona Lisa Novel, or: Nocturne in Paris

by John Argo

Page 7.

One day about a week after returning from the USA, on a Sunday afternoon, she was waiting for Yves to finish a recording gig and pick her up in his cool wheels at one of her favorite spots: the little green park Square de René Viviani within a softball’s throw of the famous Shakespeare & Company bookstore in the 5th Arrondissement (relocated from its 1922 origin in the 6th). She had gotten a cup of takeout coffee from the bookstore’s café, and sat enjoying a sunny moment with a light breeze. She had found a seat on a little park bench on the south side, with the church of St. Julian the Poor (St. Julien le Pauvre) at her back. The square (a borrowed English word, meaning tiny pocket-parks in Paris) had at its center a picturesque slightly sunken octagon area with steps and flowers and a fountain in the center. The square was surrounded by an iron fence and tall bushes, and served as a peaceful spot in the bustle of the major Quai de Montebello directly north, over which loomed the twin towers of Notre Dame de Paris.

It was one of her favorite places in the world, an oasis of peace. Being a bit of an egghead, Hannah often liked to sit in the Shakespeare & Company Bookstore on the Rue de la Bûcherie. She read on many topics, and one of her avid interests lay in the history of Paris itself. From the Square de Rene Viviani, where she sat in the little park, you walked out the wrought-iron gate onto the sidewalk, hung a left, and walked about thirty feet to a tiny cobblestone street (Rue Saint Julien le Pauvre, named for a nearby church). You crossed over a pedestrian zone no more than about six feet across, the width of a standard ancient Roman post road (this was the heart of ancient Roman Paris, the Latin Quarter). At that point, a little street dog-legged off the Quai de Montebello in this old Medieval church quarter. The little street, also cobblestone, was the Rue de la Bûcherie, supposedly named for workshops centuries ago, where logs (des bûches) were brought into the city on the Seine, to a port des bûches near here, then carried to the workshops on this little street, and cut up for building purposes in the ever-growing city. Having read that it was also a place, centuries ago, where spoiled meat was brought to be boiled and salted to feed the poor, she thought you had to wonder if the name did not almost as likely come from bouche, mouth; an idle thought, she groused; another fork in reality and alternate worlds. She shook her head to clear it and drive away an odd moment of déjà vu.

As she was sipping coffee, enjoying the breeze and sunshine in a little reverie while awaiting Yves to pull up at the curb outside the park, she heard a faint rustling sound beside her on the bench. Startled, because she thought she was alone, she turned and saw something she had not noticed until that moment. Beside her on the bench lay a brochure in English.

She glanced around. Had someone walked by? Had the wind blown it beside her, making that slight sound, because she could swear the brochure was not there when she sat down.

Idly, holding her coffee to one side, she picked up the brochure with her free hand, and glanced through its folded pages (it was a single large sheet). Oddly, for just a moment, she got a shiver up and down her spine. There was almost a moment in which the sunlight darkened and then lightened again, as if an angel had passed by, dropped this beside her for a reason, and moved on to disappear into the bright light and busy traffic on the frontage road Quai de Montebello.

Before stuffing the brochure into her purse to read later, she noticed it was from the Louvre, specifically about the wing in which hung Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa—the most famous and expensive painting in the world, as the brochure proudly related. The painting was valued for insurance purposes at nearly one billion euros. Someone had placed a stray red crayon mark (why?) on the last page, at a footnote dedicated to the long-ago research of one Professor Benjamin Wandrous. Before being deported and murdered at Auschwitz by the Nazis in 1944, this man was researching the secrets of Leonardo da Vinci, who spent his final years in France. The Renaissance genius from Florence had been brought north by his final patron, an appreciative King François I in 1516, to perform some projects (not the Mona Lisa, which Leonardo worked on passionately at no pay for the last decade or so of his life). Leonardo lived and worked at the Château d'Amboise in the Loire Valley until his death in 1519 at age 67 (most likely from stroke and other cardiovascular conditions). So he was a French painter in his last years, rather than Italian; and his famous Mona Lisa became property of the French king. What was the secret of Leonardo’s passion for the mysteriously smoky (sfumato) painting and its subject, a sweet but rather average-looking, almost plump young housewife who lived in downtown Renaissance Florence with her wealthy husband? What was the secret of that slight, otherworldly smile that the world has admired and puzzled about for centuries? Lisa Gherardini’s smile had become the most famous and mysterious in the world. And her image was insured for the highest price of any painting in history—upward of a billion euros.

Hannah shrugged, stuffed the brochure away, and forgot all about it.

For the moment.

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