The Cathedral Thief
Of Metal, Glass and Smoke
The Gare Saint-Lazare was a cathedral of metal, glass and smoke. It was also, incidentally, the very first Parisian building that I saw. And the largest I had ever seen. The small station where we had boarded the train, at the start of a journey that had gotten us through nearly half of France, certainly couldn’t be compared to that.
We had arrived in Paris at half past ten, on the morning of the first of November of the year 1909. It was my first visit to the city. The train had entered the station almost at full speed, a steaming fury of steel, and I had initially thought that it wouldn’t manage to stop. It would somehow crash against something, in a terrible entanglement of metal and bodies. It was never going to stop on time. Bu it did stop, and when it finally stood still, all we had to do was to grab the suitcases and disembark, unscathed, unharmed. When we stepped out onto the quay, it was like a wave of hesitation submerged the three of us for a moment. What we saw was different from what life had been before. For a moment we just stood there, Irene – my mother, freshly widowed and not quite ready to embrace the world again -, Chat – Masha, my sister, an eight-year-old girl as vivacious and curious as the cat she got her nickname from – and I.
All around us, there were people rushing about. It was the first time that I found myself in a place so busy, so full of noise and full of life. There was nothing, in the small provincial town where we came from, that could stand the comparison. There was nothing at all, in my whole life, that could stand the comparison with that first glimpse of Parisian life that the station offered me. But then, of course… I was only fifteen, and I knew nothing about the world, life, or love yet. It soon would change, but as I set my eyes on that very first bit of Paris that was before me, everything seemed new and exciting, and scary too, in a certain way. It was completely different from what I was used to, and I was looking at everything with eyes that were wide in astonishment as well as in apprehension.
“Well,” my mother said after a moment, in a voice that was so quiet that I could hardly make out any words because of the din, “we’d better go now. No good in staying here.” She looked at Chat and I, sighed, and then pulled back her shoulders, and with a defiant look she charged through the crowd, a suitcase in each hand. “Sophie,” she called without casting so much as a glance over her shoulder, “take your sister by the hand. And hurry up, will you.”
There was something about the confidence that my mother was showing that forced me to believe that all the stories that she had fed us with, during the ride to Paris, were true. Everything was going to be alright here. Life would get better. Father’s death, though expected, had been rough on us. But here in Paris, things would sort themselves out. We would start anew, and things couldn’t do anything but get better.
So, I did what I was told, grabbed Chat by the hand, and dragged her through the crowd in our mother’s wake.
We had arrived in Paris at half past ten, on the morning of the first of November of the year 1909. It was my first visit to the city. The train had entered the station almost at full speed, a steaming fury of steel, and I had initially thought that it wouldn’t manage to stop. It would somehow crash against something, in a terrible entanglement of metal and bodies. It was never going to stop on time. Bu it did stop, and when it finally stood still, all we had to do was to grab the suitcases and disembark, unscathed, unharmed. When we stepped out onto the quay, it was like a wave of hesitation submerged the three of us for a moment. What we saw was different from what life had been before. For a moment we just stood there, Irene – my mother, freshly widowed and not quite ready to embrace the world again -, Chat – Masha, my sister, an eight-year-old girl as vivacious and curious as the cat she got her nickname from – and I.
All around us, there were people rushing about. It was the first time that I found myself in a place so busy, so full of noise and full of life. There was nothing, in the small provincial town where we came from, that could stand the comparison. There was nothing at all, in my whole life, that could stand the comparison with that first glimpse of Parisian life that the station offered me. But then, of course… I was only fifteen, and I knew nothing about the world, life, or love yet. It soon would change, but as I set my eyes on that very first bit of Paris that was before me, everything seemed new and exciting, and scary too, in a certain way. It was completely different from what I was used to, and I was looking at everything with eyes that were wide in astonishment as well as in apprehension.
“Well,” my mother said after a moment, in a voice that was so quiet that I could hardly make out any words because of the din, “we’d better go now. No good in staying here.” She looked at Chat and I, sighed, and then pulled back her shoulders, and with a defiant look she charged through the crowd, a suitcase in each hand. “Sophie,” she called without casting so much as a glance over her shoulder, “take your sister by the hand. And hurry up, will you.”
There was something about the confidence that my mother was showing that forced me to believe that all the stories that she had fed us with, during the ride to Paris, were true. Everything was going to be alright here. Life would get better. Father’s death, though expected, had been rough on us. But here in Paris, things would sort themselves out. We would start anew, and things couldn’t do anything but get better.
So, I did what I was told, grabbed Chat by the hand, and dragged her through the crowd in our mother’s wake.