Exclusive Excerpt: “Paris Lost & Found – A Memoir of Love”

Following his hilarious memoir French Like Moi, Secrets of Paris contributor Scott Dominic Carpenter has a second memoir coming out this month, Paris Lost & Found – A Memoir of Love

This time, though, the story starts with sorrow as Carpenter’s wife struggles with dementia.

“Humor may be the best medicine, but even the antics of a vandal in their building can’t cement the tiles of her memory for long. Before he expects it, the author finds himself alone in a capital that is also blighted by the pandemic. From bizarre encounters on the Metro to comical clashes with authority figures, and even a quixotic battle against a flock of migrant parrots, Paris Lost and Found unveils sides of the great city that are as quirky as they are authentic. With his unique blend of wit, insight, and wistfulness, Carpenter charts a path through his new labyrinth of solitude—only to emerge on the other side, squinting into the bright light of hope and new beginnings.”

Here is an exclusive excerpt from one of my favorite chapters, “Le Turd”:

Excerpt: Le Turd

In the Midwest, if a tornado rips through town at a weird time of year, people scratch their head, trying to figure out if it’s an isolated incident or the start of a new trend—just bad weather or climate change. That was the question in our apartment building in Paris the day the concierge found a human turd in the garbage area. Was it a one-off, or was this the new normal?

Let me explain. Our building is an eight-story affair located on the rue Bobillot in the thirteenth arrondissement. It’s a 1930s structure with a vibe of Art Deco done on the cheap. The place is low-security by Parisian standards, but you do have to pass through two code-locked doors to make it into the hallway. That means we are rarely surprised by what we encounter on the premises. I once found a copy of Robinson Crusoe abandoned on the radiator by the stairs, and occasionally Madame Estevès, the concierge, leaves a mop in a corner. But outsiders can’t easily dump leftover furniture or dead bodies here. As for defecation, the human variety has traditionally been restricted to private areas. (Some years ago there’d been an issue with the canine variant, but the infamous woman of the fifth floor, la dame du cinquième, had since moved away.)

But then came the day I found Danielle and Madame Estevès in a heated discussion in French, and I learned that someone had taken a dump in the room where we keep the building’s garbage cans. The two women were outraged. Who had ever heard of such a thing? This was beyond the pale!

“Are you sure it’s real?” I asked.

They gaped at me. Mme Estevès mostly speaks Portuguese, so I figured she hadn’t understood. As for Danielle, her hearing isn’t what it used to be. But then they looked at each other and rolled their eyes in unison, and I could practically hear their shared thought: stupid American. Danielle dragged me to the doorway of the garbage room—known as the local poubelles—and pointed. I conducted my inspection from a distance. It was the real McCoy all right. Not coiled, the way they make the fake ones, but long and dark, with a banana-like curve to it. I’m not sure what the standard measurements are for these things, but I pegged it as an XL.

What were we going to do about it, that’s what Danielle wanted to know.

“Maybe throw it away?” I suggested. After all, the garbage cans were right there.

But she was more inclined toward a declaration of war.

Danielle is the only member of our building committee who’s retired, so even though she’s not the one we elected president, everyone knows she’s really in charge, rather like Dick Cheney during the Bush years.

Her finger drove into the air. “I shall call a meeting.”

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Our building contains some fifty units, including the shops on the ground floor. We work with a management company run by the eagle-eyed Madame Lesur, but actual decisions are made by the conseil syndical, which sounds prestigious, like the Council of Trent, but is really just six of the condo owners—the ones who failed to step backward when volunteers were sought at the assemblée générale, or annual meeting. We used to gather regularly to ponder the building’s welfare, but since the completion of some of the larger projects, we mostly wait for Danielle to send out the bat signal.

Danielle lives just down the hallway, and her two-room apartment reminds me of the “tiny house” movement in the US, filled as it is with doll-sized furniture and clever, space-saving contraptions. But because her father was a sculptor, the place also serves as a miniature museum, one displaying more amorphous, nude women than you typically expect to encounter in someone’s living room.

As the group huddled around the doily-covered table that evening, we began with our traditional throat-clearing, where everyone complains about serving on the committee. I grumble along with the rest of them, doing my best to sound irritated. The fact is, though, that I live for the conseil syndical. For someone as enamored as I of petty dramas, this committee is the goose that lays the golden eggs. Every few months a new dilemma would plop out of the cloaca of the conseil syndical, and we’d be charged with figuring out who had made unauthorized modifications, who left personal effects in the common spaces, who was lagging in payment of their fees, and what to do about it all. Each one had the contours of a story.

Danielle recounted the event that caused us to convene, and I chimed in, offering details about position, color, and odor. Around the table, lips curled. Hélène, usually so poised, winced her eyes shut, as though to avoid seeing an object that was not currently there. Madeleine, more unbridled, let fly with a squawk of indignation.

Skinny Cyril is a theater director in real life, but his expression of disgust suggested he had failed to latch onto the dramatic potential of our little whodunit.

“Well,” said Franck, lifting up his beefy palms in a sign of surrender, “I’m the new one here, so I’ll let all of you decide what to do.” He’d moved in just a couple months ago. With his remodeling project underway, he was playing an I’m too busy card.

After the preliminaries, we settled into the investigatory phase, which I thought of as CSI: Bobillot. Problem was—and this is true of so many procedurals early in an episode—we were short on evidence. At this point, the “body” had already been disposed of by the concierge, and we didn’t have so much as a chalk outline of where it had been.

“Well,” I said, “at least we know it was a guy.”

Eyebrows went up around the table.

“I mean,” I began, “I suppose it could have been a woman. I’m just thinking about the… the…” And suddenly I realized I wasn’t sure what term to use for the girth of a turd, in any language. The word that eventually came out of my mouth was gabarit, which is mostly reserved for describing the breadth of a motor vehicle. It made quite an impression.

Still, without the tools to undertake any real forensics, we turned our attention to things that might be considered circumstantial or hypothetical, or possibly speculative.

Some years ago the son of one of the residents had drawn a profile of male genitals on the wall of the elevator. Might he have returned from college to reprise his shenanigans? What if a homeless person had come in and spent the night in the local poubelles?

Then Madeleine stood up at the table and tossed her scarf over her shoulder, commanding our attention. Wasn’t it just possible that the crime had been committed elsewhere, and that the “body” had been moved to the location where we’d found it?

That one blew our minds.

Problem is, nothing made sense. We figured it had to be an outside job, for what resident would come all the way downstairs to lay one out among the garbage cans when they had perfectly functioning facilities right at home? On the other hand, why would anyone creep into our building to do their business there, given that right outside, on the square, there stood the far more appealing public toilet? And on the third hand, how could an outsider even make it through the front doors, secured by those passcodes?

The whole thing reminded me of that Poe story where they discover that an inscrutable murder was committed by an orangutan. I don’t know much about the stools of various primates, but it seemed as likely a solution as anything else we were considering.

All in all, we were left with a cold case, and our little group disbanded without taking any action. Maybe we didn’t need to panic. A single turd does not a trend make. For the moment, it was like that one-off funnel cloud in the Midwest—just weather.

Or was it climate change?

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Our First Secrets of Paris Book Club Event!

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Secrets of Paris this fall, we’ve decided to launch a Book Club focusing on books about Paris,  both old and new, starting with Paris Lost and Found: A Memoir of Love

Scott will be joining us on Zoom to discuss the book on Saturday November 2nd at 7pm Paris time CET (2pm EST, 11am PST). You can purchase the book in the usual online shops or ask for it at your local bookstore. Here in Paris you’ll be able to find it at the Abbey Bookshop (29 Rue de la Parcheminerie, 5th).

This first book club event is open to all Secrets of Paris readers. To join us, RSVP to heather@secretsofparis.com. A Zoom link will be emailed to participants a few days in advance.

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About the Author

Scott Dominic Carpenter teaches French literature and creative writing at Carleton College (MN). Winner of a Mark Twain House Royal Nonesuch Award (2018), he is the author of French Like Moi: A Midwesterner in Paris (winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award), This Jealous Earth: Stories, and Theory of Remainders: A Novel (a Kirkus Best Book of 2013), which is currently under option with a major film production company. Carpenter splits his time between St. Paul and Paris.

Order your copy of “Paris Lost & Found – A Memoir of Love” (official publication date September 17th, 2024).

You can find more of his writing on Secrets of Paris here.