Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #36*: My Haunted Courtyard in Paris

Ghosts are real. I could see them from my window at the Alliance Française.

THERE WAS A WHOLE WORLD to explore outside the casement windows of my dorm room in Paris, at 101 Boulevard Raspail. The building’s architecture screamed “utilitarian” and “60s” and consequently “boring,” but its ancient footprint recalled vanished worlds that are still contained within the city blocks. 

*But I never met her! Even though we were eating in the same cafeteria, at the Alliance Française!

The early tenements of Paris were built in medieval times and centered around a pump, repeating the pattern from country towns. Back in the rowdy day, these courtyards served as a customer-recruitment zone for prostitutes, as well as a place to dump trash and night-soil buckets. The stink—both moral and organic—must have been incredible. And you shudder to think of the filth their well-buckets were fetching up from a polluted aquifer.

 William Walton, a historian of Paris in the first half of the 20th century, noted that the earliest denizens of these courtyards “were the usual refuge of all…