Marie chez les fauves

In the soot-choked twilight of a Paris that never quite existed, Marie—part gamine, part chimera—slips through the gills of the city’s underbelly and fetches up inside a crumbling ménagerie where the beasts wear tattered human faces. The fauves in question are not mere lions or leopards but the forgotten: carnival wrestlers, anarchist clowns, a mime whose silence clangs louder than iron shutters, and a chanteuse whose lungs exhale blue gaslight. Around them, the zoo’s bars corrode into lace; the animals watch the humans with the languid contempt of deposed royalty. Marie, half-pickpocket, half-parable, barters her laughter for scraps of freedom, trading glances with a tight-lipped lion-tamer who may once have been her mirror. Each dusk, a roulette of shadows spins: a burglary staged as ballet, a sermon delivered by a hyena, a love letter etched in chalk on the flank of a sleeping tiger. When the city’s gendarmes finally storm the gates—bayonets glinting like cheap film stars—the fauves do not flee; they levitate, ascending on ropes of celluloid smoke, carrying Marie astride a paper-mâché giraffe. The last shot freezes not on triumph or defeat but on a single, unanswered question glowing in her irises: who, precisely, has been caged, and who holds the key to the open sky?