Baguette Rhymes with Dead || ONC 2024 | ✔

Chapter 6: Passing Through

Those dead could stay here, build an afterlife for themselves and perhaps their loved ones in this city as best they could. They could have that for all eternity, or get out by throwing it all away, venturing into the cemetery and choosing a painful leap into the unknown.

Even if this Paris seemed a lovely place to be, my skin crawled at the thought.

"But the Père-Lachaise gateway–" Luc began, but I cut him off quickly.

"Sorry, we didn't know that yet," I told the librarian, sending her a smile that wouldn't look as effortless as Luc's if I tried. "Terrible news, really. Sucks to be us. But we'll be off to find our book now, so thanks again for all your kindness and help!"

Not like the woman had been that kind and helpful; this was the sort of situation in which my father would walk away muttering drop dead, cunt under his breath. But while part of me wanted to emulate him, I also understood that phrase would be a bit redundant here. I hesitated for a split second, but finally took the liberty of grabbing Luc's sleeve and pulling him through the turnstiles with me.

"Woah." Luc let out a whistle. "Why the hurry, boss?"

"That woman didn't realise we're alive," I whisper-hissed once the librarian was out of earshot and we were making our way up the stairs. "But then you just had to mention the cemetery gateway and now she's definitely going to put two and two together."

Luc smiled sheepishly, though he did tense up with guilt. "What of it, though? What can she do? She'll probably just get back to reading her book and that'll be the end of this."

It was possible I was just being paranoid, but this still didn't sit well with me. I sighed, scouring the walls for arrows pointing in the direction of the main reading room. "Yeah, probably... Let's just get that information on Abelard and Heloise and be on our way again fast."

~~

The Sorbonne library's main reading room wasn't filled to the brim with books, but still managed to be the average bookworm's wet dream.

The hall stretching on in front of us wouldn't have looked out of place in the Palace of Versailles, with huge windows and intricate decorative patterns on soft blue walls, contrasting wonderfully with the white ceiling. Paintings, busts and bookshelves lined aforementioned walls; the middle of the room was dominated by horizontal rows of long wooden tables, outfitted with lamps for reading and plenty of chairs. Chairs that unfortunately didn't look too comfortable, but I supposed you just couldn't have it all.

I instantly fell in love with the sight of this space.

We hadn't come during rush hour: the room could probably accommodate over two hundred people, but I counted some twenty readers scattered about the tables at most. Silence hung in the air, only broken by the occasional cough or page flip, so Luc and I kept our voices down. While I checked bookshelves, hunting for the history section, Luc briefly interrogated the closest and least threatening reader about his uncle. When he shuffled back to me wrapped in a cloud of despondency and helped me search, I knew he still hadn't had any luck.

As much as it hurt my pride, it was Luc who first grabbed a useful book off a shelf. But he'd been speaking and reading French all his life, the bastard, and I told myself I'd have been faster if I'd had the same ability.

"Une brève histoire de l'Europe au Moyen Âge," Luc read his tome's title. "Short history of medieval Europe. That's bound to have some information."

"Check the index for Abelard and Heloise," I advised, wanting to be helpful even if I couldn't read much of this book at all. And though the work called itself short, it must've had around four hundred pages regardless. "You'll find it faster that way."

Luc did as he was bid, smirking when his finger reached the names we were looking for on the page. "Jackpot. In the 'great scholars' section of the chapter on the twelfth century."

Luc worked on finding the right pages, about four of them dedicated to the medieval couple, and my interest increased. As Luc's eyes flitted across the text, I waited in a state of impatience, hoping he'd be able to share the gist of what he read with me soon.

"This is some salacious scandal, man." Luc whistled again.

"So don't keep me waiting any longer!"

"Alright, alright, I'll paraphrase." Luc cleared his throat. "So this guy Peter Abelard, he's one of the leading scholars on philosophy and theology in his time. And with how boring all that is, it's not surprising he's mostly remembered for his love affair with Heloise d'Argenteuil. Heloise was one of his students, educated and brilliant as hell, and that's especially impressive considering we're talking about a woman in the Middle Ages. Anyway, it was a pretty forbidden love. Heloise lived with her uncle and he wasn't exactly supportive of the relationship."

"What did he do?"

"Nothing at first, because he didn't know. But there was, like, this whole secret marriage, and even a whole secret son. Whom Heloise named 'Astrolabe', by the way, after some scientific instrument, and is it just me or is that oddly similar to Elon Musk naming his kid an obscure string of letters?"

"That's not just you. Go on."

"Tensions between Heloise and her uncle keep rising, so Abelard sends her to the convent she grew up in to protect her. Uncle isn't very supportive of that either, so he sends a bunch of guys to–ouch–castrate Abelard. At that point, the best option for both him and Heloise was to turn to monastic life, so that's what they did. Their affair ended physically speaking, but they were still an intellectual match, loved each other a lot and kept corresponding. That correspondence is one of the reasons they're famous and why we know all this." Luc studied a few more lines, impressed. "Heloise actually became real powerful in the monastery industry. Bishop-level powerful."

That was pretty powerful, indeed.

"Damn. Interesting." I frowned. "But... I'm not seeing anything in there that would make them worth watching out for, though."

"Me neither. Based on all this, Abelard and Heloise were just a nerdy medieval power couple who died unremarkably in their sixties. Not very scary." Luc chuckled as his eyes fell on another section of the page. "Here, how about this? Abelard was apparently such an awesome teacher, he had students following him around wherever he went. Poor guy couldn't escape them if he tried."

"Your book is quite right on that count." A startling, unfamiliar male voice broke through the quiet in the reading room. "Hilariously, the same thing still happens in my afterlife."

My blood froze in my veins.