In May of 1961, a Columbia sophomore with the improbable name of Paul Rimbaud flies from New York to Paris with no plan beyond the name of a cheap hotel and a place in a Sorbonne summer course in French for étrangers. He finds a Paris recovering from an attempted putsch by elements of the French Army, tanks and soldiers in the streets, and frequent bombings by the underground Algerian independence movement and clandestine French Army elements known as the OAS (Organization armée secrète).
This was not the world he’d grown up in. Within a few weeks, Paul buys a used motorcycle, sees an Algerian FLN official shot to death three feet from him in a café, sees an American he’d just met beaten to the ground and arrested by French police outside a café where another murder has just been committed, and finds himself shoved against a wall and harshly interrogated by a French Army colonel and two of his soldiers, who throw Paul’s Algerian friends into the back of a truck and cart them off to oblivion.
Paul is later taken by an uncle to a meeting in a Paris park with a high-powered couple from Morningside Heights – a famous Columbia professor and a writer of best-selling spy novels. Back in New York and at Columbia, they in turn involve Paul with a woman and her daughter who are oddly connected to the American arrested in Paris who, it seems, is a person of strong interest to Paul’s uncle, a man with a mysterious past and present. Paul returns to France the following summer as an intern for a prominent art gallery. He is introduced to the owner of a gallery in Paris who is from an old Aquitanian family with lands and vineyards in southwestern France and a tradition of military service. She takes him under her wing and introduces him to her brother, a serving colonel in the French army who turns out to be the officer encountered by Paul the summer before. Paul finds himself on a life-changing path at once confusing and clarifying in ways he could not have imagined. Paul’s story continues in OSCAR’S COLD WAR and THE LAST DAYS OF PAUL RIMBAUD to be published by 340 Press.
