It’s March, and I’m sitting with my wife on a bench in Parc Montsouris, a green space in the 14th arrondissement in Paris. We are here ostensibly so I can breathe the air of a novel I reread a few months ago. Written by Léo Malet, The Rats of Montsouris is an installment in a series of cases investigated by private detective Nestor Burma. Published in French beginning in the late 1940s, Malet’s series was hailed in its day as “Les nouveaux mystéres de Paris,” a reference to Eugène Sue’s famous gathering of tales from the 1840s depicting the filthy underbelly of La Ville-Lumière, the City of Light. Each of Malet’s novels is set in a different arrondissement, though I’m not sure he completed a full set of 20 volumes.
The Burma novels were translated into English in the 1990s and published in uniform paperbacks by Pan Books, each cover featuring a moody black-and-white image by the great Parisian photographer Robert Doisneau. The translations are now out of print and some of the titles are remarkably expensive secondhand, though I’ve managed to add seven of them to my library so far.
Of course, the whole world of Paris has changed many times over since Malet first published Les Rats in 1955. A conspicuous measure of that change in Parc Montsouris is the absence of the Palais de Bardo, which Malet mentions, and the weather station that it housed; apparently the Palais fell into disrepair and then was destroyed by fire in 1991. But some of Malet’s other landmarks endure — the obelisk erected in memory of a French expedition to North Africa massacred by the Touaregs in 1881, and the Chalet du Parc, where Nestor Burma and Hélène, his comely office assistant at the Fiat Lux Detective Agency, grab lunch and discuss the case at hand, which involves a burglary ring and murder.
But what did I expect? Inspired by the “hardboiled” American detective fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Malet wrote his books to a market-tested formula: his Nestor Burma is a close relative of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Hammett’s Sam Spade. Perhaps the “reality” that Malet’s novels reflect has less to do with the time and the place in which they are set and more to do with the minds of the readers who devoured them when they were first published. Emerging from the dark days of the German occupation of Paris during World War II — Fiat Lux translates as “let there be light” — Malet created in the character of Nestor Burma a figure committed to restoring some modicum of social order and to seeing that justice is served even as he scuffs some of the finer points of lawful behavior. The popularity of the series and the fact that Burma’s detective work earned Malet prominent prizes for crime fiction (in 1947) and black humor (in 1958) certainly suggest that his hero satisfied some essential need in his readers. Tellingly, the occupation is part of the backstory of The Rats of Montsouris.
So, have I found what I came here looking for? Are my wife and I breathing the rarefied air of Nestor Burma and la belle Hélène? Well, the atmosphere remains just as Malet inscribed it more than 70 years ago: “It was peaceful but melancholy in the Parc Montsouris. We walked towards the lake under the lifeless gaze of the statues on the grass and the indifferent stare of the gardeners watering the flowers.” Plus ça change? Close enough, I guess.
But even closer is the spirit of another literary inscription of the park by Malet’s contemporary, the popular poet Jacques Prévert. (Interestingly, Malet’s Burma claims that he once lived in the same nearby building as the real-life Prévert.)
Many of Prévert’s poems in his most famous volume, Paroles, published in 1947, were translated nicely into English by the legendary San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1958. Curiously, however, Ferlinghetti omitted “Le Jardin,” one of my favorites when I muddled through Paroles in the original French a few years ago. I translated it myself back then and recited it to my wife. Should I admit that Prévert’s poem is the real reason we’re sitting on a bench in Parc Montsouris? I’ll recite it to her again now:
THE GARDEN
Millions and millions of years
Would not suffice
To tell of
The tiny second of eternity
When you kissed me
When I kissed you
One morning in the middle of winter
In Parc Montsouris in Paris
In Paris
On Earth
Earth which is a star.
Thomas O’Grady is distinguished affiliate scholar in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame and scholar-in-residence at Saint Mary’s College.