I was happy to learn on Friday that the crime author Lalie Walker was acquitted of all charges in the trial that pitted her against the owners of the Marché Saint Pierre. The management at the tissue store had accused her of harming the image of the shop, simply because she had set one of her stories, 'Au malheur de dames', in the establishment and had not changed its name.Earlier this year, I had walked past the store with the author Cara Black and mentioned the case to her. She was intruigued because she too had set a scene here. In her story, 'Murder in Montmartre', the heroine Aimée Leduc manages to escape from her pursuers by diving into the delivery chute of the shop. The chute (see Cara Black's picture above) was just an interesting feature that she had noticed when researching the story, and which she had been keen to incorporate into the novel.
If the outcome of this trial had been different, would she have had to become more careful about using such features in the future? The President of the Communist group on the Paris City council had an interesting reaction after the announcement of the verdict, declaring that there had been a "risque d'une privatisation de l'imaginaire tout à fait inacceptable" (a completely unacceptable risk of privatising imagination).
Is the subject so clear cut though? The worlds of the imaginary and the real in cities often seem to overlap, and sometimes the fictional seems more relevant than the factual. We all know where Sherlock Holmes lived, but do we know where Arthur Conan Doyle lived? Paris is no different, and walking tours 'in the footsteps of the Inspector Maigret' are common, giving you the opportunity to see where he lived (it has no front door!), eat the sandwiches he ate and drink the same beer.
The idea of experiencing a city at once in its physical and fictional state is one that fascinates me. Authors have cast magic before us, telling stories from stones, bringing life back to the dead, and perhaps transforming cities forever. The imaginary may well therefore have more power, but this certainly does not mean that we should restrict its use. The right conclusion was written here in a court in Paris, and the only losers are the owners of the Marche Saint Pierre. They had demanded 2 million euros in damages, but ended up having to pay the author 3,000 euros themselves!
8 comments:
Kudos to the Paris courts and judges for getting this right!
Glad to hear it, Adam and great post!
Cara
The trial itself seems out of a good mystery, by Cara Black or Lalie Walker. Cheers on the win.
It seems that the store would benefit from the publicity, unless it is cast in a negative light. I would hesitate to voice an opinion without knowing how the store was portrayed.
Wow, good to hear about the verdict. Great post. As a fiction writer who uses places both real and imagined, it's good to know the courts can't yet legislate imagination.
Je n'ai pas très bien compris la position pour ou contre la décision du "President of the Communist group on the Paris City council". Ce n'est pas grave. J'imagine que le marché St Pierre va passer à la postérité pour avoir été dans des romans de même que le pont neuf, le génie de la Bastille etc etc...
Il n'est qu'à voir la publicité que le Da Vinci Code a procuré à certains lieux même s'il n'est pas toujours d'une exactitude historique irréprochable.
(Ou le pendule de Foucault d'Umberto Eco pour le Musée des arts et métiers)
Most readers can distinguish between the Paris of fiction and the Paris of real life. But some cannot. Just consider the people who come to Paris to find the bits that Dan Brown wrote about in the "Da Vinci Code." For them, what is written in a book -- even a novel -- is quite real. This is the difficulty of fundamentalism. Fundamentalists think that if it is written in a sacred book, it is real (not a myth, or allegory, or parable). The judge has applied good French Cartesian reason to this case. But others may not see it the same way, because Cartesian logic is not how they see the world. You have raised an important and difficult dilemma in the 21st century.
Philippa - I thought about the Da Vinci Code and the curiously still popular walking tours in the city, but decided that it was different. In that book, Dan Brown just took some of the most well known sites and spun a fairy tale between them. You get the feeling that he has never even visited the city in his life.
A more interesting example perhaps is Victor Hugo's 'Notre Dame de Paris'. It is said that his story - which made the cathedral popular once more with the people of Paris - saved the building from a planned demolition.
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