Satori in Paris

The Bibliothèque Nationale and the Mazarine

Kerouac landed in Paris on 1 June 1965. In the book he goes looking in the libraries. At the Bibliothèque Nationale on the rue de Richelieu he asked for the list of officers in Montcalm's army in Quebec in 1756. He also went through the old reference works of Louis Moréri and Père Anselme, looking for anything on the royal house of Brittany. There was nothing there either.

He did not enjoy the Bibliothèque Nationale. He complains that you cannot smoke there, even in the toilets. He also complains that the librarians seem to admire fine handwriting more than anything a scholar writes. He knew big libraries well, he says, from the New York Public Library. Here he felt he was being watched with suspicion, an aging man who smelled of drink.

Then he tried the Bibliothèque Mazarine. There the head librarian, Madame Oury, patiently explained that all the archives had been bombed and burned by the Nazis in 1944. Kerouac admits he had forgotten this in his excitement. Penguin's account of the trip adds that he also read in the French archives, and found only dead ends.

Bars, Brest and a bookseller called Le Bris

Between the libraries Kerouac wanders around Paris, drinking in bars and talking all night with strangers. Then he heads west to Brest, the naval port at the far western tip of Brittany, in Finistère. Finistère means "where the land ends".

In Brest he shares cognac and stories with a bookseller named Le Bris, supposedly a distant cousin. The cousin turns out to be another false lead.

Pauline Bock, writing for Penguin, says there is hardly a page on which Kerouac fails to mention that his family came from France and was called de Kerouac. She says the book reads like dazed travel notes. Kerouac himself called it a novel.

The taxi to Orly

The book ends in a Paris taxi. The driver is Raymond Baillet, and Kerouac gives his real name. Baillet drives him to Orly airport on the day he flies home. Kerouac wonders whether his satori was handed to him by this taxi driver.

Grove Press, which still publishes the book, calls it a pivotal cab ride. Not every reader agreed. Andrew Sarris, then the editor of Cahiers du Cinéma in English, reviewed the book for The New York Times in February 1967. He complained that the illumination came at the end of a long, rambling story, and that Kerouac grew sentimental over a Paris cab driver's straightforwardness.

Sarris thought Kerouac was too much at the center of his own travel book. In his view the author kept drinking, brawling and singing when he should have been watching. He called the Kerouac of this book more of a Babbitt than a beatnik. Babbitt is Sinclair Lewis's self-satisfied small-town businessman.

Written at once, and the ancestor found in 1999

Kerouac wrote the book soon after he got home. On 2 October 1965 he wrote to his old friend Ed White from St. Petersburg, Florida: "Yes I went to Paris, came back all excited and wrote a novel about it." He added that a publisher had rejected it so far. Grove Press brought it out in New York the next year, a short book of 118 pages.

Kerouac never made the second trip to Brittany he planned. He died on 21 October 1969. The puzzle took another three decades. In 1999 the historian Patricia Dagier and the journalist Hervé Quéméner published a book that solved it.

The ancestor was not a nobleman. He was Urbain-François Le Bihan de Kervoac, the son of a notary in Huelgoat, in western Brittany. Around 1720, after a scandal over accusations of theft, he disappeared from the Breton records and sailed for Canada. In Quebec he traded furs and married under a false, grander name. Huelgoat now has a plaque to him.

Satori à Paris

Gallimard published the book in Paris in 1971 as Satori à Paris, in its series of foreign literature, Du monde entier. Jean Autret translated it. In 2007 Gallimard brought out a bilingual paperback in its Folio bilingue series. Yann Yvinec revised Autret's translation and added an introduction and notes.