The Paris Exposition Story
‘The Paris Exposition story’ used to be a thing you could refer to and everyone would know what you meant, you wouldn’t even have to call it that, or call it anything. Maybe it still is known to some like the backs of their hands, but I am going to tell it to you anyway, just in case you have forgettories as full as my own.
A woman and her mother check into a hotel; the mother lies down in their shared room to rest, and the daughter goes out to see what she might see at the Paris Exposition. Hours later she comes back. The room is empty.
Her mother’s suitcase is gone. Her mother’s things are gone. Her own things are still there, it cannot be the wrong room. Is her mother hiding behind the curtains? Her mother would not hide behind the curtains, not in a foreign country. Her mother could not have run from her own daughter, she never runs anywhere, and skirts are hobbled this year. Who would flee her own child? Does the orange tree flinge from the oranges? Does the oak fear the acorns? Does the wolf attend the Paris Exposition all alone, without her cub to read the placards to her and demand that the people make way, make way for her aged wolf mother, who is hard of hearing in one ear and must be brought a glass of water? Preposterous! All of this is preposterous.
The woman makes with all speed to the reception desk. They will not dare to be preposterous to her at the reception desk, she has brought her Passport. Where is my Mother! The clerk is embarrassed. Am I thy Mother’s keeper? Let me consult the enregistrements; if your mother was here she certainly signed in. Ah—she did not sign in. Your own name is here in your own hand and it is alone. There is no mystery, mademoiselle, you are only mistaken; that is all. Either you do not have a mother, which is a misfortune or an unmentionable, or you mislaid her some years previously and only noticed today, and such is your forgetfulness that I wonder you are not ashamed to mention it. In fact, we have never heard of mothers at this hotel, and I am only pretending to know what this thing is you have lost, to humor you. If you could explain in French, the language of your hosts, I might help you better? Ah—I joke, I expect too much from les touristes. Go and inquire of la pharmacie if they sell the object you seek, you may whisper it in back if you are ashamed, but they are professionals and will not be shocked. Or better yet, go out and skip across the Pont Alexandre III, go and frolic in our Water Castle, enter into the Gallery of Machines and ask our proudest architect to design a Mother for you, if he can spare the time.
That is the Paris Exposition Story, the basis for THE WHEEL SPINS (aka THE LADY VANISHES), for PHANTOM LADY, for BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING. That is the foundation of it, which is: I had a woman, or I saw a woman, and she is gone, and I need her back, and nobody but me will admit she existed; or: Something happened, and I was there, and I saw it, but nobody else saw it, and what is not witnessed by two pairs of eyes has not happened, and two-out-of-three are the chances I am a woman myself telling the tale, and that means Doomed and Disbelieved. But to give in and accept what they tell me is doom as well, and worse, because that would be doom of character as well as circumstance. Doom is anywhere you look, everyone is a conspirator against you, and your choice is to be their victim or save yourself by becoming a co-conspirator against yourself, no salvation without self-betrayal.
(Do you know the bit in THE SILVER CHAIR when the lady in the green kirtle tells our friends that there is no Sun? that their tales of the Sun are amusing, like all children’s stories, but a fantasy is a fantasy and to go on believing in fantasy when storytime is over is a sin, and moreover, in bad taste? This is a deformed Paris Exposition Story, because it is one against many (as is proper) but the Many are on the side of truth, and the One all alone, the woman invaded in her home, is the liar, and liars never prosper when the fight is fixed against them. So it it is all backwards and it cheats, as a Paris Exposition story, although it is not trying very hard to be one.
The other difference between a C.S. Lewis and an Evelyn Piper/Merriam Modell—there are only two differences, as you see—is that the faith-smarm defense is not allowable to the true Paris Exposition victim, since to use it will bring her nowhere she wants to go. What if Blanche Lake does pull a Puddleglum and says to the police Well, I don’t care; you say having a daughter who disappeared and nobody ever heard of her or cared to look for her is a story for babies, that’s all right, it’s a BEAUTIFUL story for babies and I intend to go on believing it, for I would rather live in a world where I had a daughter who is lost and every face is turned against me than live in a world where I took a funny turn and had an episode of imagination and everything is all right except I need a rest cure, and no bad things have happened to anyone.
you see at once how this doesn’t work at all. The woman who is Paris Exposed finds no comfort in being a solitary believer, martyred and tormented by a vicious world. She would rather be wrong, as the visitors to the Sunless Lands would not; she would be perfectly happy visiting the Thermal Hotel Visegrád Superior in Budapest to take the galvanic waters and receive some Interference Therapy to remove the delusion and the trouble, as that would mean that no-one is harmed, no-one is in danger, no-one’s life hangs on her action or inaction.
(Interference Therapy is nothing like so wonderful as it sounds. if it was what it sounds like I would retrain to be an Interference tech, I am great at interfering. no, it is just more pleasant electricity. but in 1900 perhaps electricity, whose Currents you and I may regard with the contempt borne of familiarity, was as much a wonder of the world as interfering, which is eternal.)
I had a Paris Exposition story happen to me in, of all places, Paris, in the year 2001, which is awfully suspicious. I was there on a study abroad program run by a woman hired by my university; there were only five of us so accommodations were individual, unequal, and, to me — who had at that time not dealt with any private landlords at all and was unprepared to have French landlords be my first — terrifying. I moved to a tiny studio midway through the year, when another student left and I was freed at last from my erstwhile roommate, an older grad student who did some angry sautéing but no talking (and me who says it! Nowadays I am silent as the tomb some days but voluble as a squirrel warning another squirrel off its acorn hoard on alternating days, and you cannot know which day you will get me, I take good care of my mysteries so that no-one should know. But back then I was only silent as the tomb all the time, knowing no other way to be.)
Any how, this woman sharing my first apartment barricaded herself in her room at most hours, falling asleep to Françoise Hardy in the small hours, which meant keeping me awake to Françoise Hardy in the small hours. I like Françoise Hardy, now, but it took years to get over this imprinting. So I was thrilled to be going to look at this potential upgrade, and was planning to take it if I could no matter what it looked like, for to live alone in a room the size of my thumb and smoke cigarettes out the window facing the Musee Carnavalet through the rain instead of going to Sorbonne lectures on Le Grand Meaulnes was all my desire and shortly to be all my delight.
and when I came back to take possession, all was as it had been, everything the same, except when I got in the elevator, the floors were different. I had gone to see it on the fourth floor. They told me to get off on the fourth floor; I did; they met me there, they conducted me to the apartment, I looked it over, I sat on the bed, we spoke, we agreed, we planned, I departed.
then I came back, and it was on the third floor.
and for the rest of my time in Paris, it stayed on the third floor, though every day I went out and came back, sometimes at different times, to see if I could catch it making its daily rounds from here to there.
and—yes—this is not completely right for the Story, because the apartment was not lost and gone, and nobody denied that it did exist, which they should have, to make it correct. But it had moved down a floor, and they did deny that. It was the same apartment, it was not some simple thing of having shown me a sample unit and contracted me for another identical one directly below. No! I thought of that! It was not a question of the French numbering their étages differently and me becoming confused. No! I thought of that too! The same studio had been rented to helpless American undergraduates for years and years, and the owners of it owned just that single solitary one in that building, and no other. This happened, it was really real, and while it fails in many ways to be a true Paris Exposition story, yet it has the buried kernel, for nobody will ever believe it.