Talking Location With author Pascale Petit – PARIS

23rd September 2024

#TalkingLocationWith… Pascale Petit, author of My Hummingbird Father – Paris

Let me tell you how I fell in love with my birth city when I was forty, and it’s all about doing research for my novel. I’m a nature lover and hated Paris as a child. My grandmother, who brought me up in Wales, would threaten me with ‘you’ll be sent back to Paris if you’re naughty!’ – so it was a place of punishment. But something called me back.

In my debut novel My Hummingbird Father, artist Dominique returns to her birth city, Paris, to meet her estranged father, and falls in love with the city she once hated. She starts to explore the Latin Quarter where her father lives, where she discovers Amazonian animals in the zoo, including a beautiful black jaguar. She has travelled in the Venezuelan Amazon, and imagines its fauna and flora in the streets, to change how she feels about her difficult childhood and her father’s absence until now.

This novel is based on my own life, but is fictionalised. Paris is where I lived until I was seven, and that childhood is a dark story, so I never went back. Like Dominique, I returned because I was summoned by my father who had vanished for thirty-five years. Over a period of two years, I visited him in his cramped apartment in the Latin Quarter. But in the mornings, when he was too ill for visitors, as he had terminal emphysema, I’d slip into the Jardin des Plantes, and wander into my favourite place, the Fauverie – the big cat house in the Ménagerie, to watch a black jaguar called Pataud.

After two years of going back and forth on Eurostar, my father died, and I stopped going as it reminded me of those strained hours spent with him. Ten years passed, then I decided to return to write about the extraordinary two years I’d spent getting to know a father I thought I’d never meet again. And that was how My Hummingbird Father began.

Like Dominique, I was living in London at the time, so I’d rent a room in the Latin Quarter, within easy walking distance of Notre-Dame cathedral and the Jardin des Plantes. Those month-long writing retreats glow in my mind like the pink champagne my father drank to celebrate our reunion. It was there that I started writing my novel, but I also published several poetry collections centred on Paris and the Amazon rainforest. When I saw my father, I found that going to the zoo and watching jaguars, macaws, king vultures and hummingbirds, gave me a way to write about him that was not only bearable, but fun.

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There were indeed dark memories to unearth in this urban jungle, but its denizens were riches for the imagination. I’d recently travelled in the Venezuelan Amazon and had seen a giant anteater in the wild, just by Mount Roraima. Now there are two at Vincennes Zoo on the outskirts of Paris. Later in the writing of My Hummingbird Father I also went to the lowland forests of the Peruvian Amazon, where I saw king vultures in their home, harpy eagles, howler monkeys, and a jaguar drying his coat on the banks of a river. To see one in the wild was magical.

Aramis the black jaguar

Meanwhile, a new jaguar had arrived in the Ménagerie, a huge young melanistic male called Aramis. I’d visit him every day. He’s still there, in the larger Vincennes zoo now, with his mate Simara, and they’ve had cubs. He is the dark heart of the City of Light. His coat is the night sky where stars flower. All the streets of the Latin Quarter lead to him.

I’d stay in Paris for one or two months at a time, usually holed up on the seventh floor, my table dragged in front of the window with a rooftop view. When my writing stalled, off I went to watch Aramis and his companions the snow leopards, clouded leopards and North Chinese leopards. I’d arrive late in the afternoon for the spectacle of feeding-time, when the big cats sprang to life and were lured into the octagonal interior of the Fauverie to be fed.

Notre-Dame chimera 1

As well as the Fauverie, I was drawn to Notre-Dame. You might wonder how the cathedral fits into this city bestiary – like Dominique, I climbed the four hundred steps of the south tower to step out onto the high gallery of chimeras and gargoyles that encircle the top, the petrified zoo of the Paris sky. Notre-Dame is closed for now because of the fire, so you’ll have to imagine these monsters of the balcony, leaning over to peer down into the medieval streets where my father lived – they had been watching him all those years as he lodged in the Notre-Dame Hôtel.

Notre-Dame chimera 2

One particular stone devil looked as if he was about to leap down into the hotel, the expression on his face like a cat watching a mouse. How could stone be so alive? Yet this limestone demon is stuck there in this pose, forever about to pounce, or say something about the humans he watched – those ants milling over the cathedral parvis and along the Petit-Pont, those endless queues waiting to enter the body of the gothic cathedral.

Once, I was up there when the great bourdon bell Emmanuel started clanging, and I recorded that medieval bell’s deep, reverberating notes. I’d listen back as if I was listening to my father’s voice, as if the bell was the voice of Paris calling from a buried childhood, a childhood still locked in a cellar beneath our apartment block just by the Eiffel Tower.

Notre-Dame de Paris at night

Along with the fierce life force a jaguar embodies, Notre-Dame also seems to have animalistic power. Sunlight filters in through the rose windows and clerestories as if they are rosettes on fur. Its smell is pungent, the smoke of censers like a jaguar’s breath at dusk, as he stalks a caiman, dives into the river and captures him underwater with one bite to its nape. Being inside the cathedral is to be immersed in its underwater atmosphere, ruled over by the Virgin Mary. It’s a sacred space, as the Amazon rainforest is a sacred space, thrumming with fertility – for now. An endangered space, Earth’s innocence threatened.

How easy it was to forgive my father for the abuses of his youth when I imagined him as gentle Aramis, because Aramis, like the jaguar in my novel, Adonis, is gentle and lets the girl who comes to feed him kiss him on the muzzle through the mesh. Jaguars kill their prey, but they don’t choose to do this, it’s simply their instinct for survival.

I also found innocence in the Musée de Cluny, in the circular gallery where hang the six tapestries of The Lady and the Unicorn. In My Hummingbird Father, Dominique sits in there, watching the bestiary that surrounds the lady and her unicorn:

      “She thinks the jewel box is Papa’s soul. It is not in his body, his body that she day-dreamed she shrunk to the size of a doll.

     It is here, in the Musée de Cluny. It is a medieval soul surrounded by a medieval zoo. It is guarded by a virgin, a unicorn and a lion. The maid is Lucienne, who washes and feeds Papa, passes him all he needs.

     And this is the beauty of these tapestries. They have different meanings for every visitor.”

The author in Paris

In between visits to her father, Dominique explores Paris as if she is a tourist, constantly entranced. And there is nowhere more radiant than Sainte-Chapelle – the tall holy chapel made almost entirely of stained glass. I remember being there with the August midday sun pouring through the panes, so that everyone was bathed in lozenges of colour. It was like being inside a giant hummingbird as the shot-silk colours of its breast shimmer. To stand inside Sainte-Chapelle is to feel the lift of hummingbird wings, and this is reflected in Dominique’s story. As she battles to forgive her father, she remembers being on the Venezuelan plateau with her guide and his hummingbird spells, how the birds protected them from harm. Finally, as well as these jewels of the Parisian canopy, there is a vast network of cellars, crypts and catacombs – dark as my childhood with my father, which the city balances against the light.

Pascale Petit

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Catch Pascale on Twitter X @pascalepoet and Instagram @pascalepetitpoet  

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