Every once in a while we get glimpses, or that’s what I call them, anyway. Glimpses of human nature or of the hidden workings of society, glimpses of how the world actually operates. One of these glimpses came my way courtesy of the French Secret Service. In the summer of 1981 I was a college kid bumming around Europe. I ended up in Chartres on the day the president of France was coming there to enjoy a concert. It was to be the Berlioz Requiem Mass performed in the fabulous medieval cathedral. That afternoon I walked through town with an American from the youth hostel. On one long avenue a few people gathered here and there to wave to the presidential motorcade. My buddy and I paused to check it out.
Soon, in the distance, we spotted the motorcade moving at highway speeds into the center of Chartres. François Mitterand travelled in style, with six motorcycles in front, then three or four sharp black limousines, and another peppy squad of motorcycles right behind. On the cycles little flags flapped and lights flashed and the darkened windows of the cars masked the president’s location. My buddy opened his backpack and pulled out an immaculate white gym sock that sagged with the weight of something mysterious within. The motorcade was nearly upon us, and if you had asked me, I would have said we were alone on our stretch of sidewalk.
But before my acquaintance could slip his hand down into the white sock for the thing that was hiding there, from out of nowhere two sturdy men in street clothes appeared and muscled him by the arms while a third man grabbed the sock. I could see the lump more clearly now—something the size and shape of an apple, perhaps, or a hand grenade. The third secret service man reached into the sock and extracted a silvery-gray object. It was the fellow’s fancy little camera.
In those few seconds, the motorcade zipped by and disappeared down the road. The camera was back in the hands of my youth hostel buddy, too late to use, and by the time he turned to me and said “What was that?” the secret service men had vanished. In 1981, a year marred by terrorism, this was my glimpse into the workings of the world. But that night in the cathedral, I considered the little bomb that could have been lurking in the sock. I thought, also, of two US Marines I had seen guarding the American embassy in Paris, each man as serious as the machine gun he held in his hands. There was a magical passage in the Berlioz music that night where four brass bands join the orchestra and the symphonic choir, each playing from different parts of the cathedral, different points of the compass, and all the layers of music weaving together in the air. The composer’s meditation on human frailty, the fine stonework soaring above us, the patient apprenticeship of all those musicians, the attentive hearts of the audience members, the heavy weapons and the will to use them, the secret service, the dead who bore witness beneath the cathedral floor, the kaleidoscopic glass that filtered sunlight each morning into the shapes that speak of God: No single one of these was enough to explain the thing I glimpsed that day or heard that evening. We were, all of us under the stone arches, all of us under the arc of moon and sun, we were all of us meaner and richer than any name I could have given.