Page 36 of Across Time

He's looking at me blankly.

"You must have heard of them?" I ask. But even as I pose the question, it occurs to me they might not have become famous until later. Maybe these were the glory days they’d only recall with fondness years hence, glossing over poverty and hunger and nights without heat.

He scratches his neck. "Hemingway. I just read a book by him not long ago. It was garbage."

"He's one of the most famous writers of all time," I reply. "What book did you read?"

"A Farewell to Arms. Romantic drivel,” he says, his lip turning up into a sneer. “Please tell me you don’t associate Hemingway with Paris too. He’s not even French."

I laugh. "Sorry, mon ami. He’s one of your most famous former citizens.”

"Dieu," he mutters. “I’ve never been so grateful to live in my own time.”

We turn a corner and Notre Dame rises in the distance, just a short walk away. Henri nods at it. “I hope our cathedral is at least as well known as the Eiffel Tower,” he says.

Something perverse in me demands I provide the answer that will bother him most. “They made the book into an animated children’s movie, so that helped get the name out.”

“A children’s movie?” he says. “Everyone dies in the end!”

“Not in our version,” I reply. “It’s super cute.”

He likes my answer about as much as I’d have predicted, but his irritation disappears once we get close. He points to the arching wood at its front. “This was one of the first places in the world to use flying buttresses. They were added after the fact when the upper walls started to crack. The gargoyles and chimeras as well.”

I glance up toward the gutters. “I thought the gargoyles were just some medieval bullshit about protection from demons.”

He laughs begrudgingly. “There’s a little medieval bullshit, as you so charmingly phrase it. I still can’t believe they made The Hunchback of Notre Dame a children’s movie. You know Hugo wrote the entire book to call attention to the cathedral’s gothic architecture? He was disturbed by the way it was being destroyed.”

“And did it work?”

He turns his head back to the flying buttresses. “Those still stand, so I suppose it did, to some extent.”

As we enter the cathedral, Henri begins pointing out things I would not have recognized on my own—all the structural changes they made to free up the space for stained glass, the Romanesque architecture of the tower and nave versus the Gothic elements, the arches and rib vaulting. He is unguarded and enthralled, two adjectives I’d never have used to describe him until now. But he suddenly stops himself.

“Sorry,” he says, with a faltering smile. “I’m telling you far more than you’re interested in hearing, I’m sure.”

"I’m an art history major," I reply. "Architectural history isn’t so different. Why would you think I wouldn’t want to hear it?”

He looks at me for a long moment, before he glances away. “I suppose because the women I know aren’t like you.”

“Right, because I’m unladylike.”

“No,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets and starting forward without me, “because you’re interesting.”

* * *

When we leave Notre Dame, we take a circular path through town, cutting through the Luxembourg Gardens on the way. People stroll, children play, and there are painters everywhere I turn.

"You keep staring at those painters like you know them from home," he quips.

"Because they could be anyone!" I whisper. "I know some of the great artists came here to paint—Picasso, Matisse, Monet—and some of them could actually be here. Right this minute. Some of them not even known yet."

He laughs. "They are all quite famous here. And Monet is quite dead."

I groan. "I know that, but you’re missing the point," I reply. "Imagine you went back 52 years from now? So..."

"1886," he says, before I can do the subtraction.

"You're better at math than I am. Don't get too cocky. A child of five is better at math than I am."