Adrien Bosc - Constellation

I studied in Chicago, then at Columbia University. I became a psychiatrist, specializing in childhood and adolescent trauma. I practiced for a long time in New York City, then we moved to Pittsburgh .

My father was a truly good man, very loving. What’s funny is that he enjoyed sports, boxing especially. So you can imagine, for Marcel to be on the same plane … I’m still working at the age of seventy-three, I love my job .

[I ask him if he thinks there’s any link between his work and the tragedy.]

Yes, of course, I’ve always wanted to help children overcome their traumas, my rapport with children comes from this event. And it was very strange to get your e-mail, coming out of nowhere …

I also want to say that we were very surprised at the time when Air France sent us some money by way of compensation. It was an absurdly small amount, I don’t remember how much, but it was truly ridiculous .

[I speak of the lawsuit brought by the Hennessy family, which was thrown out of court on appeal.]

Oh yes, I remember that, I read about it in the papers. No, really, it was ridiculous .

I thanked him and hung up.

I thought about us, our memories. About the singer Emile Latimer, whom we saw in a Nina Simone concert video. From our shared pleasure in coincidences and our attraction to public figures who have faded away came the idea for a book that we would coauthor. We called the project Red Circles . We discussed several of the portraits — a degree candidate in a book by Pierre Sudreau, a photograph by Roy DeCarava of John Coltrane and Ben Webster, Jackson C. Frank and his song “Blues Run the Game.” We talked about Ginette Neveu.

After the stop in Morocco, the Liberator cargo plane makes straight for Orly Airport’s annex in Cormeilles-en-Vexin. Below the fuselage, the Moroccan coast scrolls past, Rabat, Kenitra, Tangiers, the Mediterranean basin with its outlet at Gibraltar, Málaga, Granada, Saragossa, the Pyrenees and their smugglers’ trail, then Toulouse, Limoges, Orléans, nine hours on a colonial diagonal from one continent to another. Early evening and the Liberator, piloted by Roger Loubry, is making its approach. Clearance comes from the control tower to land on runway number four, not far from the SATI buildings. Once taxiing, the airplane is directed toward the company’s hangars, far from the reporters clustered in the reception hall of the airport.

Behind closed doors, shielded from sight, the coffins are extracted one by one from the aircraft’s rear and lined up side by side; outside, a fleet of hearses awaits them. Grouped by church, the thirty-three casualties are distributed among the convoys to Saint-Augustin, Père-Lachaise, Saint-Jean, and the provinces. Didier Daurat is there: a friend of Jean Mermoz, the aviator, and of Saint-Exupéry, immortalized as Rivière in the latter’s Night Flight and now the director of Air France’s operating center. The undisputed master of the mails, Daurat recognized Saint-Exupéry’s talent and named him dispatch manager on the Saharan coast. Valuing steadiness over stunt flying, he initially assigned Mermoz to cleaning engines, saying, “What I need are not circus performers but bus drivers. We’ll train you.” Right now, the bus he is looking at is a grisly one.

The final convoy of F-BAZN passengers sets out at 9:00 p.m., the hearses, accompanied by the national motorcycle police, cross the tarmac and roar toward Paris at breakneck speed.

At the exact same moment, on this night of November 8, 1949, and for the first time in Paris, the English singer Kathleen Ferrier gives a recital at the Salle Gaveau. The incomparable voice of “Klever Kaff” reverberates in the concert hall as though it were a requiem mass. Synchronic magic, two women prodigies, one a violinist, the other a contralto, joined by the coincidence of a date, communicating to each other de profundis . The simultaneous occurrence of these two events, joined by no causal link, the arrival of the mortal remains from Constellation F-BAZN in Paris and the recital by the British singer that same night at the same hour, forms one of the many pervasive objective chances , invisible to us until they are brought together, in many ways like those stars that twinkle in the night sky and are clumped into constellations by the eye and the mind. The numbered and linked points in a coloring book. A strained coincidence or the workings of fate, who is to say, and yet the game of temporal co-occurrences yields the most astonishing associations. In a famous case of Carl Jung’s, a patient is in the act of describing a dream about a golden scarab when a scarab beetle bumps into the window — a june bug, opening the door to doubt.

Kathleen Ferrier and Ginette Neveu, two sisters in fate, two exceptional and truncated careers, two shooting stars. They had met two months earlier at the Edinburgh Festival, where they performed on the same stage. At the dinner afterward, they were happy to note that they would both be touring the United States at the same time, and as they said good-bye they promised to see each other in New York no matter what. This plan was to remain a dead letter. Three days after the crash in the Azores, Kathleen Ferrier wrote to a friend in Wisconsin, Benita Cress:

London

October 31, 1949

My dear Benita ,

There were two lovely letters waiting for me when I arrived home yesterday — I am so glad you are happy about the concert — my gosh I hope I don’t let you down!

It will be lovely to stay with you — please can I go to bed in the afternoon? — just so’s I don’t talk too much, and clear mi old brain with a bit of sleep. I wonder how long it will take to get to New Mexico — Santa Fe — by train? I don’t want to fly in January — I hate it any time. Have just been staggered by the death of Ginette Neveu in a plane crash to the USA — she was one of the finest fiddlers in the world and just 30! Just can’t think why that should have had to happen — also her brother killed at the same time — isn’t it a waste!..

Bless you, love, we’re fine for everything — we’ve managed at last to get a 2nd-hand ice-box, so life’s a lot easier, and our nylons will last until I get to America again — we don’t have them here at all but I stocked up well last trip!

Kathleen

Ginette and Kathleen had a friend in common, the conductor John Barbirolli. Could he have imagined that he would survive them both and deliver both their funeral orations? “I count my joys,” Kathleen Ferrier once wrote, and Barbirolli knew two of them, the greatest female musicians of the postwar era, brought together by the force of destiny, on November 8, 1949, in Paris.

Montreal, August 1949, Guy Jasmin and his mother sail on the Empress of France . It is the same boat on which Roger Lemelin arrived back in Canada a week earlier, wreathed in success for his novel Au pied de la pente douce ( The Town Below ), just published in France by Flammarion. The Pente-Douce, the working-class district Guy likes to explore. Executive editor of Le Canada , devoted son and confirmed bachelor, he accepts an invitation from the French commissariat general for the lead-up to the Holy Year of 1950, wanting to make his mother’s dream of visiting the Catholic pilgrimage sites come true. Guy Jasmin chose a career in journalism early in life, working for Olivar Asselin, his guide and mentor. During the 1930s in Montreal, he and his friend Willie Chevalier worked their way up the chain of command at the big Quebec newspapers. Before long, one of them was at Le Canada , and the other at Le Soleil . During World War II, Guy volunteered for an aid organization that helped French refugees. He discovered France through the stories of the expatriates. Someday, he would go there. In December 1948, he met a young Frenchman who taught at the Collège Stanislas, a certain Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Guy told him of his upcoming trip in August, and they agreed to meet in Paris. In the summer of 1949, his reportage on preparations for the Holy Year would take him to Lisieux, Lourdes, Italy and the Vatican, and on a side trip to the Côte d’Azur. His mother had been a musician, and they planned to attend a performance of Nabucco at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome and a big farewell concert that Ginette Neveu was giving at the Salle Pleyel in Paris just a week before their scheduled return to Canada.