"Metempsychosis" refers to the passing of the soul at death into another body, either human or animal. At its most basic, it refers to reincarnation, but the theory of past lives can have overwhelming consequences- especially when memories of these past lives seep into the life we currently live. Just ask a modern day, middle-aged New Mexico gentleman whose dreams threaten his reality. According to his dreams, this unassuming man was once a printer in seventeenth century Paris and then a United States senator. Prior to both of these lives, he was an Anasazi sun priest in the eleventh century. At first, it was easy to ignore his dreams. However, thanks to their persistence, this man must come to terms with the ramifications of his past lives and how they may affect the life he currently struggles to lead. Set above the backdrop of an ancient bridge in Paris, Pont Marie is the narrative of places, people, and things once forgotten but enlivened in one man's mind. How can he thrive in his current life when the past permeates his present? How can he hold together relationships, when ancient relationships still haunt? Will his quest for closure leave him cleansed or perhaps insane?

Pont Marie

A NovelBy Al Stotts

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Al Stotts
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-0612-0

Chapter One

Book I Pont Marie

Stumbling over words as over paving stones, Colliding at times with lines dreamed of long ago. —Charles Baudelaire, The Sun

Believe me, a life of love is an exception to the laws of the earth; all flowers fade, great joys and emotions have a morrow of evil—if a morrow at all. —Honoré de Balzac, Lily of the Valley

Given the person I know myself to be, it is only fitting that my initial memory of the person I was in the seventeenth-century took place on a summer evening rendezvous underneath the Pont Marie by the Ile Saint-Louis with a lovely, passionate and yielding young woman. Her name was Elodie Fleury.

She was twenty-five-years-old, about five feet, four inches tall with long, partially braided chestnut hair that elegantly framed a beautifully shaped face, which was distinguished by prominent cheek bones, a nicely rounded nose, small ears and creamy white skin. She had a small dark mole on the lower left side of her face, which made her seem more exotic to me. Her lips were full and her eyebrows were thin, forming arches over her round green eyes. Her shoulders were broad like an athlete's and her breasts, droit, séparé, rond et dur, were clearly outlined against her white hemp-cloth blouse.

The lights from the houses on the street above, reflected in the Seine, allowed me to see her form. The scooped neck of her blouse focused my eyes on her simple beaded necklace. Her upper body tapered elegantly to her waist and her hips flowed out with gentle feminine curves. My hands told me that beneath her blue linen skirt she had a round, muscular derrière and equally toned legs, the result, no doubt, of walking everywhere she went in Paris. She was exquisite and exciting. All of these observations would be confirmed for me the first time we had the opportunity to shed our clothes and spend some unhurried time making love.

But in the meantime, we stood in the semi-dark under the bridge, her body sandwiched between me and the curve of Marie's arch. We kissed, fondled, smiled, laughed, sighed and spoke alternately with the passion and the sweetness of newly discovered attraction. Her braids and her blouse came undone. I rested my head on her partially uncovered right breast, which seemed to me to be the best and safest place in all of Paris.

Self-consciously and a little defensively, she whispered to me that her right breast was larger than her left breast. She obviously wanted to disclose this perceived imperfection before I had a chance to observe it for myself. I cupped both breasts in my hands and kissed them through her blouse, then kissed her lips. I told her she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen and that I could not imagine a more compelling specimen of feminine beauty anywhere.

Why this beautiful woman would be attracted to me was a mystery. I was the one, I said, who should feel embarrassed about a host of flaws ranging from uneven arm and leg lengths to a rather sharp nose and large ears. Most men, I said, seem to feel physically gifted while women fret over the slightest blemish. She needn't have worried about my response to her. My physical and emotional desire for her never abated during the time we were together. Indeed, it has survived centuries. It is proof to me that love and desire can survive death.

There is one other thing that is clear to me now. My twenty-first-century memory has personified the beautiful Elodie in the bridge Marie, the place where we first shared the joy of romantic affection. Marie has bridged not only shores of the Seine but time as well. She has become the story starter for reclaiming the part of me that existed in Paris nearly three hundred fifty years ago.

* * *

In my seventeenth-century life I was Xavier Jacquet, born in 1622 in Carhaix, an ancient Roman village in central Brittany. To put 1622 in some context, it was, for instance, the year the Gregorian calendar changed the first day of the year from March 25 to January 1. In March of 1622 the Algonquian Indians in the New World killed three hundred forty-seven English settlers around Jamestown, Virginia. Construction was begun on the church of Saint-Louis-en-l'lle on Ile Saint-Louis. Also that year, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known a couple of decades later as the playwright Molière, was born. Louis XIII was the twenty-one-year-old king of France.

I was the youngest of four children. The other three were boys as well: Paule, Charles and Claude. We lived in a rectangular house made of granite stones that we had to share with farm animals. My parents, Didier and Geneviève, were Huguenot farmers. My mother was born a Catholic but became a Protestant to accommodate my father and his family, which in turn alienated her from her own family. Becoming a Protestant was a daring thing for Geneviève to do, whether she knew it or not. Huguenots had been leaving France for decades because of persistent persecution by the Catholic majority. My brothers and I worked on the farm as soon as we could hoe and lift, but I had no aptitude for or interest in agriculture. My mother had higher ambitions for me anyway.

Didier Jacquet was strict and impatient. He parented his maize crops with more affection than his sons. He was thin, grim and strong, and the veins of his arms, hands and neck popped out when he worked and when he yelled at us, which was often.

If my mother and father loved each other, it was not obvious to me as a child. It seemed to me he treated her like a hired servant. An adherent of Calvin's theological point of view, he constantly reminded us that it was the will of God for wives and children to be subjugated to the authority of the husband and father.

Geneviève Jacquet was a lovely woman. Everyone said so. Her build was slight and delicate, but she could work for hours in the house or in the field, keeping pace with her sons and her husband. As hard as my father worked, at least he only had one job. My mother, on the other hand, was responsible for cooking, cleaning, caring for all of us and the house, and she also helped to plant and harvest crops. She never failed to help when other women, Catholic or Protestant, needed assistance with child birth or illness. She was smart and loving.

Somehow my mother persuaded my father that I should be sent to Paris to live with his older brother Jules, a merchant in the Marais neighborhood, who needed help because his wife was seriously ill. What she didn't tell my father was that she wanted me to go to school in Paris or at least learn a trade other than farming.

So at age ten I left Carhaix and moved in with Uncle Jules and Aunt Madeleine. On the way to Paris my mother told me that Madeleine probably didn't have long to live. Jules and Madeleine had survived into their mid-forties despite plagues, insurrections and crime in Paris, but Aunt Madeleine was crippled when a wagon delivering goods to their shop struck her as she crossed the busy rue Saint-Antoine on her way to visit a friend. At the time Uncle Jules was in the shop. He heard the terrible sounds of the accident—the neigh and whinny of a horse, the shouts of people in the street, the crunching of wood and metal and cobblestone and the scream of a woman.

Jules...