Au-dessus de mon corps mort

Our visit to Ste. Chapelle got rescheduled for today, and I have to admit that after a weekend of oohing and aahing at cathedrals even I get a little weary of it. Especially when I have 5 chapters of Descartes to read for class the next day. And I forget my camera.

The thing about Ste. Chapelle is that it is located inside the Palais de Justice, for some reason that was probably explained to me when I wasn’t paying attention. This sucks, because it means you have to go through a huge security thing to make sure that you’re just an innocent tourist and not a bomb-wielding enemy of freedom. So I dutifully lined up with my classmates, reading the quatri-lingual signs advising us on what NOT to do, complete with helpful clip-art illustrations of what was verboten. Including, to my dismay, a fork.

“Do you think they really won’t let you bring a fork in?” I asked a friend.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a pitchfork. Why, do you have a fork?”

I did, in fact, have a fork. A. Fork. Being a brokeass foreign student, I have but one set of cutlery that has to last me until December, and my fork was currently in my bag, resting after its arduous midday task of helping me eat lunch. I would not part with this, my only fork.

“No. Stop talking about it.” I rearranged the contents of my bag so that my water bottle was kind of lying on top of the aforementioned potential weapon, the reasoning being that the x-ray vision of the machine would only see metal bottle and no deadly tines.

I acted all cool through the metal detector, and was just putting my coat back on as one of the comically-uniformed TSA-wannabes tapped my bag.

“Mademoiselle? Vous avez une fourchette dedans?”

Merde. I opened the bag and produced the offending utensil. It looked pathetic, with its crummy bent-up tines and the fuzzy smear where I hadn’t quite managed to rip off the price tag, but God help me if I was going to let them take it.

“C’est ma seule fourchette,” I explained. My only fork. Don’t you see, you miserable Gallic public servant?! I attempted to look winsome and forlorn.

“You can…come back…after? And get eet,” he said in English. Why people think I will understand their crappy English more easily when I have just demonstrated that I speak French is a constant mystery in this country.

“But it is just a fork. My only fork. Without it I can’t eat dinner tonight,” I replied in French.

“Come back,” he said, giving a small shrug. I narrowed my eyes in as dignified a way as one can, when fighting for the right to take a rather blunt scrap of metal into a 700-year-old cathedral, and left to follow my group. I spent the entire tour fuming (often out loud) about the cruelty and irrationality of dooming a simple schoolgirl to eat all her leftover spaghetti with a spoon and making mental lists of things I could have damaged with said fork had it been permitted inside. The carefully-restored fleur-de-lys on the walls? I’d’ve scratched the fuck out of them.

After the tour was over, a mere skabillion hours later, I refused to buy any postcards, just out of spite, and went back to the security zone. I imagined the guards gossiping about me on their afternoon gauloise break. “T’as vu l’américaine grande avec sa maudite fourchette? Merde!” they would say, honh-honhing heartily in their stupid blue hats.

“Excuse me? I was just here a while ago…I left a fork?” Words I thought I’d never say. The securityman produced my blessed implement.

“Voilà, mademoiselle.”

“Merci bien,” I said, mentally adding “FOR NOTHING! Jesus, suck it up and retire at 62, you unionized layabouts.” But aloud, I said nothing else, just scurried out a special side door, fork in hand and never to return again.

In conclusion: Eating stir fry tonight was possible. And I am going to be buried with this fork.