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The only time I’ve ever done anything at all similar to a pilgrimage was when I lived in Saigon, in 2009, and made use of the public holiday known as Têt to make what I called a “literary pilgrimage” down to Sadec, where Marguerite Duras had lived as a young girl with her mother, a school teacher, in what was then called Indochina. This is where she, at “fifteen and a half,” began an affair with the Chinese man almost twice her age whom she later wrote about in The Lover. The line I remember best from The Lover: “Very early in my life it was too late.”

I hope our similarities are not total (even if I, at twenty-two and a half, with great dramatic flair felt certain they were) but it still feels significant somehow that today, as I begin what is in every sense a real, legit, on-foot pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, I accidentally passed her grave on the impromptu walk I decided to take instead of catching the metro the last bit from Denfert-Rochereau to Gare Montparnasse. I’d thought of my hour-and-a-half stopover in Paris as a nuisance, something to get through, but the sun was out and the birds were singing and before I knew it I was surrounded by death and magic and greatness. Simone de Beauvoir’s grave (which she shares with Jean-Paul Sartre) was covered in metro tickets, but ol’ Margie seemed to favour a more practical offering (see story) and so I gave her my favourite pen, one of two I brought for six weeks of walking. Hope you like it, mademoiselle. (at Cimetière du Montparnasse) https://www.instagram.com/p/CiFb1LJILvm/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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