In the 5th arrondissement of Paris, next to the street of the cat that fishes, is an old 16th century building from the depths of which people can sometimes hear music. It seems almost like a surreal tableau or a real manifestation of an underground Biblical hell, with hundreds of people, half drunk, dancing late at night to orchestral jazz in a stone cellar. There is a balding middle-aged bartender, wearing skull rings, serving cocktails and flirting with customers. Back in the 1500s, the building used to be a meeting place for Templars and Freemasons and it is possible to fall asleep, with a grenadine drink in hand, on one of the stairs under the eyes of stone cherubs to the rhythmic silence of the mad rush while dreaming about Dom Perlet, a fishmonger from the 1600s whose black cat could catch fish swiftly from the Seine.
At or after midnight, beyond the smell of old urine and sound of scurrying rats, one can still see something like the shadow of a cat on the ancient green water of the Seine. Time, like water, runs forward and back. I am sometimes in the 21st and sometimes in the 15th century. What does it all mean? Nothing except that we don’t know anything.
Rue du chat qui pêche
