Left Bank

The Left Bank of the Seine is the geographical and symbolic heart of Jean-Baptiste Clamence's former life in Paris, the setting for his most cherished performances of virtue and the site of the traumatic event that destroyed his self-image. It is the landscape of his remembered happiness and the origin of his exile.

Identity and the Stage of Virtue

For Clamence, the Left Bank was the stage on which he enacted the role of the generous, righteous man. He recalls walking up the quays of the Left Bank toward the Pont des Arts on a fine autumn evening, enjoying the return of silence and the emptiness of Paris after a day that included helping a blind man, securing a reduced sentence for a client, and giving alms. This was the territory of his habitual good deeds: he loved to help blind people cross streets, rushing forward from as far away as he could see a cane hesitating on the edge of a sidewalk to snatch the blind person from any solicitude but his own. The Left Bank was where he could scale the heights and light conspicuous fires, taking pleasure in life and his own excellence. He preferred the bus to the subway, open carriages to taxis, and terraces to closed-in places, always seeking to be above, and the Left Bank's quays and bridges offered the lofty perspective he craved.

The Fall on the Pont des Arts

The Left Bank is most decisively the location of Clamence's fall. On that same evening, after walking up the quays, he went up on the Pont des Arts, deserted at that hour, to look at the river. Facing the statue of the Vert-Galant, he dominated the island and felt a vast feeling of power and completion. At that very moment, a laugh burst out behind him. He wheeled around but found no one. The laughter, a good, hearty, almost friendly sound, seemed to come from nowhere unless from the water. This inexplicable laugh, which he heard again under his windows later that night, marked the beginning of the end of his successful life. It was the first crack in his edifice of self-regard, a sound that would eventually lead him to realize that his reflection in the mirror was smiling with a double smile.

The Scene of Unanswered Guilt

The Left Bank is also the site of Clamence's most profound moral failure, a memory that returns to haunt him. He recalls a particular night in November, two or three years before the laugh on the Pont des Arts, when he was returning to the Left Bank and his home by way of the Pont Royal. On the bridge he passed behind a slim young woman dressed in black, leaning over the railing. He hesitated but went on. After he had gone some fifty yards, he heard the sound of a body striking the water, followed by a cry repeated several times that suddenly ceased. He stood motionless, felt an irresistible weakness, and then slowly, under the rain, he went away. He informed no one. This act of omission, of refusing to intervene to save a life, becomes the central, unconfessed crime of his existence, the secret that the laugh on the Pont des Arts forces him to confront. The Left Bank, therefore, is not merely a backdrop but the very ground of his guilt, the place where he failed the ultimate test of his humanity.

The Lost Paradise and the Exile

Clamence's departure from the Left Bank marks his exile from his former self. After the laugh and the return of his memory, he closed his law office, left Paris, and traveled, eventually settling in Amsterdam. The Left Bank becomes a lost paradise, a place of remembered beauty and irretrievable innocence. He recalls Paris's twilights, the dry and rustling evening falling over roofs blue with smoke, the city rumbling, the river seeming to flow backward. He remembers wandering in the streets, but now he knows what the solitary creature is like as he wanders in big cities. The Left Bank is the place he can no longer inhabit, the site of a life he can no longer live, and the source of the cry that he now hears everywhere, carried by the river to the waters of the Channel and across the ocean, waiting for him until the day he encountered it again on a ship. It is the bitter water of his baptism, from which he can never be cleansed.

The Mirror of the Self

The Left Bank ultimately functions as a mirror for Clamence's self-deception. It was where he could feel like a king's son, marked out for a long and uninterrupted success. It was where he could dominate the island and feel complete. But it was also where he heard the laugh that revealed the duplicity of his being. The Left Bank is the place where his portrait of himself as a virtuous man was painted, and where it was first defaced. In his Amsterdam exile, he constructs a new portrait, a mask that is the image of all and of no one, and holds it out to his contemporaries as a mirror. But the original, shattered mirror was the Left Bank of the Seine, where he first saw his own double smile and heard the laughter that would never cease to echo through his nights.