A Student Settles In

If you enjoy my memories of when I struck out on my own to France to attend medical school — an innocent abroad — you might want to read other entries on my Facebook page.

In this episode, after arriving in the small city of Amiens, I finally make it to the quartier de la rue Leon Blum where I would lodge.

I had my little map of the city. It was one of the first ads I had answered in the newspaper, and I came out to visit.

It wasn’t very far out at all. Just a block from the main street of town. In a densely populated area. I felt it would be near-impossible to be alone or lonely here.

I didn’t obsess over it. I knew I would move to a better place soon, perhaps nearer the hospital, when they started paying me minimum wage for my clinical, medical school work.

It took me a while to realize that by moving into the rue Leon Blum I was moving back in time a bit.

From my window, I saw the cobblestone streets, the marketplace, the restaurant across the street.

In the center of the marketplace, there was something they called a “beffroi.” I did what a rarely did — I ran for my dictionary, for it was a new word.

“Beffroi” meant “Bell-tower,” but even the oldest people in the quarter did not remember when a bell had last rung there. I actually couldn’t understand it. I walked up to it, through the large parking lot that surrounded it. I could see through the shattered eaves, there was no bell.

Years later, back in the states, I likened it to the archetypal George Washington’s axe with which he allegedly cut down a cherry tree. The head had worn out and been replaced and of course it had many wooden handles in the course of its life.

Every marketplace had silently metamorphosed into a parking lot on non-market days, a kind-of real market on Thursdays and Saturdays and maybe a few booths around the edges on a Monday.

I did not realize this was pretty much a French, maybe even European phenomenon until I tried to visit the marketplace at Reims where Joan of Arc had allegedly been burned at the stake. They had no equivalent of even a ragged beffroi. It was just a parking lot.

In the days when there was a bell, the original beffroi had probably been built sometime in the Middle Ages.

I remember figuring out in some early prep school history class that everyone had been so bored then that they could not have done much except stage a Renaissance.

Feudalism: the beffroi (or its concept) had to date from when the whole city was a feudal estate and the bells had to tell people to go to work and to eat and to sleep.

I could only wonder if they were trying to exterminate Jews yet.