Walt Whitman, ‘A Winter Day on the Sea-Beach’, 1882

Or seen that film.

8

So far I had carried out my enquiries in England, either by telephone or by visiting people such as the coroner or the private detective. It was obvious that I would have to return to France to continue my search. It was beginning to be a more serious investigation. I decided to concentrate my initial researches on finding any mention of the death of Maurice in the local papers for the northern coastal region. It seemed to me that the death of a thirteen-year-old by drowning was worthy of either a small article or a notification of bereavement. Like the births, deaths and marriages sections in The Times, people pay to include details of the passing of their loved ones, and I thought the death of a much-loved child might well have merited one of the black-bordered notices that are common throughout most of Europe even though they are almost unknown in the United Kingdom.

The best way to search for these notices, I was assured by several librarians and archivists, was to visit the Bibliothèque nationale de France based in Paris. There I would find all the regional journals and newspapers and would be able to narrow down my search accurately.

It was August 2003 and Europe was roasting in the hottest summer on record. Throughout France, the elderly were dying in their apartments. Later the French press would blame the younger generation for abandoning their old relations to spend the summer by the sea. During the first two weeks of the month 15,000 deaths above the usual level of mortality were recorded. Paris felt empty, broiled and alien. The strangeness of the city added to the feeling that now that I had left my own country my quest was entering a more significant stage.

The library is one of François Mitterrand’s ‘grands projets’ and is situated in the 13th arrondissement, an area where abandoned warehouses are being converted for other use or knocked down. It sits in the midst of its own sea of sun-broiled ipê decking, a Brazilian hardwood. There is no shelter or shade on the approaches to the building – the small bushy trees on the edges of the decking are encased in wire grilles, to prevent birds from building nests that would ruin the architectural lines. A library leaflet claims it is the emptiness – ‘le vide’– that arrests the attention and the vast sweep of space around the library is indeed impressive in its sterility. An insect trying to crawl across the decking would have fried within seconds. Later I was told that summer was the best season to visit the library, for when it rains the surface is lethally slippery and in winter the open space between the towers is transformed into a bleak and hostile wind tunnel. Signs showing falling stick figures warn against the treacherous nature of all the access routes, decking and moving escalators.

There are four glass towers, designed to represent four open books, linking sky and soil. The architect, Gilles Perrault, saw them as silos, ‘whose grains will be the books summoned downwards to meet their readers’. They are evocatively named – Time, Laws, Letters and Numbers – with the restricted-access collection of pornography called l’Enfer, Hell. The architect intended the glass of the towers to be photochromatic, but the budget ran out, and when, belatedly, it occurred to someone that glass was not the most suitable material to protect light-sensitive books, shutters were added. The resulting impression is that of a derelict office block.