Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [130]
“I was humming away to myself when I suddenly noticed a piece of wood lying by the grave. I picked it up and read what was painted on it: HROPOLOGIST.
“Hropologist? And then I realised, and that solved that mystery. Part of the marker had fallen off. No ant lay there.
“HERE LIES AN ANTHROPOLOGIST. What a touching tribute. If I don’t return from these parts, that is all I would wish for. That, and no more.
“Yours aye, Domenica.”
272 Stendhal Syndrom
87. Stendhal Syndrome
Some of the members of the Edinburgh Teenage Orchestra had been to Paris before, while others, including Bertie, had not. In fact, Bertie had been nowhere before, except for the trip he had made to Glasgow with his father, and so to be here in the great city, sitting in a bus on his way to the hotel on the Boulevard Garibaldi, was seventh heaven indeed. And when the bus trundled across a bridge and they found themselves close to that great landmark, the Eiffel Tower, there was an excited buzz of conversation among the young musicians. For a few minutes they were lured out of the cultivated insouciance of adolescence into a state of frank delight, experiencing, for a moment, that thrill which comes when one sees, in the flesh, some great icon; as when one walks into the relevant room of the Uffizi and sees there, before one, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus; or in New York when, from the window of a cab that is indeed painted yellow, driven by a man who is indeed profoundly rude, one sees the approaching skyline of Manhattan; or when, arriving in Venice, one discovers that the streets are subtly different (as was found out by the late Robert Benchley, who then sent a telegram to Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, in the following terms: STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE). Such experiences may become too much – and awaiting those who lay themselves open to cultural epiphany is that curious condition, Stendhal Syndrome. This afflicted Stendhal on his visit to Florence in 1817, and is brought about by seeing great works of art, there before one, and simply being overcome by their beauty. Shortness of breath, tachycardia, and delusions of persecution may result; in other words, a complicated swoon. Bertie was not a candidate for Stendhal Syndrome. He was thrilled to be in Paris, and he stuck his nose to the window of the bus and gazed, open-mouthed, at the streets of the elegant city. But he was in no danger of swooning; he was merely absorbing and filing away in memory that which he saw: the old Citroën Traction parked by a small boulangerie; the white-gloved policeman standing on a traffic island; the buckets of flowers
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outside a florists; the crowded tables of a pavement café; these were all sights that Bertie would remember.
And then they arrived at their hotel. This was one of those typical small Parisian hotels, occupying six narrow floors of a building overlooking a raised portion of the Metro. Bertie was put in a room on the second floor with Max, his companion from the flight, and from the window of this room he could look out onto the Metro track and see the trains rattle past. For Bertie, who had always been interested in trains, it was the best possible view, and, as he sat on the end of his bed, he thought of the immense good fortune that had brought him to this point in his life. Now he glimpsed what he had thought existed but which had always seemed to be out of his reach – a life in which he was not constantly being cajoled by his mother into doing something, but in which he was, to all intents and purposes, his own master. It was a heady feeling.
“What are we going to do now?” he asked Max, who was busy unpacking his suitcase into the small chest of drawers at the end of the room.
“Richard says that we have to meet downstairs in fifteen minutes and go for a rehearsal,” said Max. “That’s all we have to do today. But I’m going to go out tonight.”
274 Stendhal Syndrome
Bertie looked at his shoes. What time would he have to go to bed? he wondered. Would they insist that he went