Chronicle

 When I look out the window of my study and tilt my head slightly, like a pigeon, I can see the Eiffel Tower. It looks quite small from this side of the city, so it’s not in my way. I've even grown a little attached to it. As darkness falls, it shines its beacon over us every fifteen seconds, just like a lighthouse. When the tower was new, it was enormously in the way. Guy de Maupassant considered it such an eyesore that he organized a campaign against it. In an Open Letter signed by dozens of prominent writers and artists, he called the tower a gigantic, rickety skeleton and a skinny, ridiculous factory chimney that would forever ruin the distinguished face of Paris. Thanks to the inscrutable ways of French politics, construction continued anyway, and when the rickety skeleton was finished, De Maupassant regularly went to lunch at the restaurant on the first floor. When friends asked in surprise why, he was never short of a bon mot and said that it was the only place in the city where you couldn't see the wretched thing. The tower is now an emblem of Paris, just like Baron Haussmann's Grand Boulevards, which Charles Baudelaire railed against in vain a generation earlier. No one knows exactly what the city looked like before Haussmann demolished large parts and erected his long, somewhat monotonous rows of dignified apartment buildings. It is easier to picture the spot where the Eiffel Tower now stands. It was a muddy piece of land with small vegetable gardens, an eighteenth-century allotment complex. Later, it became a playing field, the Champ de Mars, where young officers of the École Militaire, including Lieutenant Bonaparte, could practice and parade. So, nothing was razed to the ground for the tower; only something very grand was added. When I had just arrived in Paris and did not yet have a study of my own, I often went to the Bibliothèque Mazarine on the Quai de Conti. The library belongs to the Académie française, an illustrious institution that is not hampered by false modesty and calls its most famous members Les immortels . Mortals are also allowed inside and, for €19 a year, make use of the city's most beautiful reading room. When I walked across the Pont des Arts to the metro at the end of the afternoon, I had to slalom around little blankets on which dozens of miniature Eiffel Towers were offered for sale. They were made of plastic or tin and not rusted to an honest brown, like the real tower, but painted gold or silver. Besides old books, the booksellers on both banks of the Seine always have all kinds of images of the tower in their stalls—not only real and fake old engravings, but also drawings and small paintings in all genres of kitsch, right down to neon paint. Anyone visiting Paris can take a trinket home. I have a special souvenir of my own, a memory dating back to long before I had ever been to Paris. In Velsen, I had a neighbor boy whom I looked up to because he was a few years older. He had built a model of the tower out of Meccano. It stood in a corner of the dining room at his home and almost touched the ceiling.

My friend Marie invited me to dinner in La Chapelle, a neighborhood on the north side of the city sandwiched between Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est. It is a Quartier Indien. The ground floor of almost every building is a shop with delicacies that you won't find in any Carrefour , a restaurant, or a temple. Marie knows her way around. She studied Hindi and Sanskrit at the Sorbonne and has been to India many times. We first went to a temple of Ganesh, the god with the head of an elephant. He is the son of Shiva, but Shiva was too busy with his divine work to pay much attention to his family. Years later, when he once again felt a craving for Ganesh’s mother, his son did not recognize him and wanted to stop him, but well, it is better not to try that with Shiva. Shiva chopped off Ganesh’s head. When he realized what he had done, he regretted it and swore that he would give his son the head whomever he came across first. And that turned out to be an elephant. In the Hindu pantheon, Ganesh is one of the most popular gods. He is less arbitrary and violent than Shiva and less boring than Vishnu. He is always depicted with a smile beneath his trunk and sits contentedly with his cozy, plump belly on a lotus flower, surrounded by bowls of delicacies. He is a benevolent god who can help you solve problems in your life. There is a universal need for such a god. Piles of shoes lay on the sidewalk in front of the small temple in La Chapelle, and inside it was packed. According to Marie, it is like this every day. Hindu gods are not symbols, but active participants in human existence. They live, so to speak, and that means they have to eat. Every day. When we had given Ganesh an offering, we went to eat ourselves. The cuisine indienne just as varied and complex as the Chinese and the French. If you walk into an eatery in La Chapelle, you should be prepared for a surprise, but you can't go wrong, provided you are an adventurous eater. Marie ate with her right hand, which is the rule in India, and talked at length about her special interest in the Sadus, an ascetic sect she had first encountered years ago in the Himalayas, on a pilgrimage route to the source of the Ganges. Halfway there, so high and cold that there was already ice on the river, fifteen Sadus lived in a cave. True Sadus are serious ascetics. They only eat if offered something by a passing pilgrim; otherwise, they do not eat. They do not cut their hair; some have a mane that reaches the ground and which they must tie around their waists if they want to walk anywhere. They do not do that often, however. Usually, they sit with crossed legs, staring ahead. Naked, for they consider clothes a despicable luxury. Marie had immersed herself in Indian spirituality and had been trained at the Sorbonne in the ethnographic method known as participant observation. She saw this as a golden opportunity and moved in with the ascetics. She lived in a cave with fifteen naked men for three months and returned to Paris with something rare, a unique story. Letter from Paris 3, published in Dutch in Argus Magazine in September 2026

On the metro you have to pay attention. There are more than three hundred stations, and they all have similar names. They are named after saints, obscure dead politicians (Ledru-Rollin, Jules Ferry), and long-forgotten battles (Eylau, Rivoli). If you are not careful, for example if you are reading a book, you will pass your station right by. That is why I didn't surface again at Place de Clichy, but at Porte de Clichy. I stood amidst the noise of the Boulevard Périphérique and in the shadow of the Tribunal, the courthouse of Paris. It is not an impressive temple to the goddess of justice, like the Palais de Justice on Île de la Cité. It inspires no respect for the wisdom of the law, but awe for large-scale bureaucratic efficiency. Since I was already there anyway and am curious by nature, I went inside. I walked into a random courtroom. The defendant, who lived in the 19th arrondissement, had struck his neighbor on the head with a bottle. The prosecutor made a key point of the fact that it was a glass bottle and therefore practically a murder weapon. The defendant's criminal and social background was thoroughly examined. He was born in Senegal and had lived in France long enough to be sentenced to six months in Bordeaux in 2004 for attempted robbery. He also had a number of thefts to his name. In between he had done regular work most of the time, but since 2015 he was on welfare. His lawyer had little faith in it. He did not deny that his client had made a mistake, but made a big deal of the constantly rising cost of living and the high unemployment, which particularly affected the 19th and 20th arrondissements. He started to recite statistics, but the prosecutor interrupted him and said that unemployment in France was not that bad and that she, too, was suffering from high prices, but that it had never occurred to her to bash her neighbor's head in. The suspect and his victim did not speak themselves, the former probably on the advice of his lawyer and the latter because he was still in the hospital. The three judges of the tribunal also remained silent. You couldn’t say for sure if they were listening attentively, as all three had a computer screen in front of them. They did make a serious impression, however, so I do not think they were playing digital versions of solitaire, gallows, or Battleship. I was curious to see how the verdict would turn out, but the wheels of justice turn slowly. The hearing was adjourned, and the bottle man was escorted away by a stern-looking guard in a dark blue uniform. I walked to the courtroom next door. A group of people came out with in their midst a pityfully weeping woman. Here something serious had happened, but I missed it. The guard at the door stopped me and said that the court was closing. The courthouse hall is large, high, brightly lit, and bare. The floor is sparkling smooth and clean, footsteps sound hollow, and voices are muffled. You feel like a very small little human as you walk toward the exit, and you breathe a sigh of relief when you are back outside. But the tribunal's intimidating radiance does not extend far. On the square in front of the building is a metro entrance. There, just like at all stations on the north side of the city, a few boys are selling duty-free, smuggled cigarettes. Letter from Paris 2, published in Dutch in ARGUS Magazine in August 2026

Père Lachaise worked in education, but he owes his fame to his side job as confessor to Louis XIV. He lived with a pack of Jesuits in a large house on the east side of the city. The revolution not only made short work of the monarchy, but also of the Catholic Church's real estate. Napoleon had the Jesuits' vegetable garden ploughed up and turned it into a public cemetery. It is only a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment, and I pop over there every now and then to visit Proust and Oscar Wilde. If you get lost—and that is a pleasure among the large old trees—you sometimes bump into Chopin, or Modigliani, or Jim Morrison. One afternoon, as I was looking for the exit, it occurred to me that the cemetery is so famous that if you ever want to be buried there yourself, you have to think ahead a bit. I assumed there would be a substantial waiting list and that it was high time to put my name on it. I hoped you would be able to indicate a preference. I could, after my death, live with idea of having Proust or Wilde as a neighbor. Or with Edith Piaf; she’ll probably keep her mouth shut in the evenings now. Preferably not Morrison; I’ve always thought he was a pretentious loudmouth. Most of all, I would like to lie next to the Mur des Fédérés, in a corner of the cemetery, where the last Communards gathered in late May 1871 after their attempt to turn Paris into something socialist had failed. They held out to the last man against the government army. That was heroic, and practical too. They could be buried right there on the spot. The cemetery’s office is on all sides surrounded by gravestones, so you can get used to the idea. And there is no waiting list. At first, I misunderstood that. For a moment, I thought you could just knock on the gate when the time came. That seemed a reassuring thought to me, and of course, it was too good to be true. The official on duty, a friendly man who gave the impression that he often talked with people who think about death, explained that you had to call to ask if there was a spot available. One may only call if one lives in Paris, he said—which seemed quite logical to me at a municipal cemetery—and if one is dead. In French, you can get away with that; “on” is much more versatile than one —so he didn't understand why I had to hold back my laughter. A waiting list, he concluded, would be unfair. Every citizen, rich or poor, famous or obscure, must have the same chance. During our conversation, he received three calls and had to turn people away each time. ‘Do you ever have funerals here?’ I asked. 'Certainly, monsieur ‘,’ said the official proudly. ‘Many families have thought about the future and have a grave with some space left. And sometimes someone who calls gets lucky; that happens too. Moreover, there is always room in our crematorium.’

When we sailed to the Bahamas, the children were eleven and thirteen. They were in school, of course, but in the US education is organized in a unique way. There are no national examinations, there is no Federal oversight or inspection, everything is done at a local level. In addition, there are countless private schools that do not answer to any authority. Nico and Jana attended the public school. On the advice of the principal I called the County Commissioner and told him we were going away for a while. 

In the autumn of 1980 I traveled by train from Holland via Osnabrück and Hanover to East Berlin. I was twenty-six at the time. On the way I read "The Berlin Stories" by the English writer Christopher Isherwood, who was riding the same rails exactly fifty years earlier, when he was twenty-six.