The Rue De Buci Encounter
•Notes From Elsewhere•
It happened one clear afternoon on Rue de Buci, that short street in the 6th arrondissement which feels perpetually staged for film. The light, the market chatter, the waiters in their white shirts -- everything is mise en scene, as though Paris itself expects to be watched.
I had just turned the corner when a well-dressed woman in her sixties came toward me with the unmistakable urgency of recognition. She was elegant -- tailored jacket, silk scarf, a small leather bag -- accompanied by a younger woman I later learned was her niece. The older woman stopped, opened her arms, and said in French, “Where have you been? Why haven’t you written?” Her voice trembled with feeling, but also with reproach.
For perhaps thirty seconds I was mute. Silence seemed the safest course, though it made me appear exactly what she accused me of being -- a man pretending not to know her. The crowd flowed around us. I felt that peculiar stillness that descends when a private misunderstanding becomes public spectacle.
When I finally spoke, it was in my natural American English. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.” The words struck her like a blow. She brought her hand to her mouth in horror, tears welling in her eyes. Her expression said everything: You have even perfected an American accent -- and you would be so cruel as to use it to deny me.
The niece stepped forward, translating with embarrassment: “My aunt thinks you’re pretending not to know her.”
It was only then I noticed the niece’s eyes -- clear, cautious, observant. She was studying me with quiet intelligence, searching for any flicker of deceit. I could feel her deciding: I wasn’t playing a part. She herself plainly didn’t recognize me; I was no figure from recent family dinners, no vanished guest suddenly resurfaced in daylight. She touched her aunt’s arm, speaking softly, trying to ease her distress.
Still I half-expected a trick. Rue de Buci has its share of ring-drops, counterfeit antiques, and stories that end in the exchange of Euros. I waited for the prop to appear -- a parcel to be dropped and broken, a demand for repayment, some small confidence game unfolding. But none came.
The niece urged her aunt away, and together they retreated into the flow of pedestrians. No apology, no revelation -- only the residue of emotion left hanging in the street. The onlookers -- true Parisians -- had paused to watch, perhaps ready to intervene. Parisians are quick to sense a grift; they dislike the disruption of civility even more than visitors do. It occurred to me later that, if this had been a con, it might have been aborted once the performance drew too many witnesses. The crowd itself became a form of civic immunity -- the city rejecting an infection.
I stood there a moment longer, trying to understand what had happened.
It was as if two separate memories briefly overlapped in physical space -- a cross-fade between psychic reels. Whether or not any mystical doubling occurred, the experience partakes of the same symbolic structure as the Doppelganger myth: mistaken identity charged with unresolved emotion.
Freud would have recognized the signature: the double not as reflection but as the return of the repressed -- some lost fragment of the self breaking through another person’s life. Yet here the current reversed: she was haunted, and I was merely the host body for her apparition.
Otto Rank might have called it a shadow of the ego, the fear of mortality projected onto the living. Jung would see the encounter as an anima-projection -- the mind’s image of the beloved, suddenly embodied in a stranger. For my part, it felt more architectural, as if the street itself had folded in on another dimension of time and sentiment.
I think of that scene in Inception:
Ariadne asks why the passers-by are turning toward her.
Cobb answers, “Because you’re changing things. My subconscious feels someone else is creating the world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections converge.”
“Converge?” she asks.
“They feel the foreign nature of the dreamer and attack -- like white blood cells fighting an infection.”
That was Rue de Buci.
The onlookers were not merely curious; they were antibodies. The city’s subconscious had recognized an anomaly -- a foreign element in its dream.
For half a minute I had inhabited another man’s role -- perhaps dead, perhaps simply absent. When language revealed I wasn’t him, the illusion collapsed. The double dissolved. The crowd dispersed. Only the echo of the scene remained, like a film still exposed to too much light -- proof that, for a moment, Paris had mistaken me for someone it missed.
—RHS