Meet Messier

He was somewhere near fifty-five years old. Over drinks at La Joconde, Axel had gathered patches of his life. He had no formal education and grew up somewhere west of Sacre Coeur. He had no father, and his mother died of a drug overdose when he was a young boy. An alcoholic grandfather raised him. His first real job as a young teen was cleaning a bar. Then he was serving as a bouncer by the time he was nineteen. He filled in when the usual bartender didn’t show up for work. That became his vocation. Eventually, he found a job at La Joconde. His dream was to own it one day. That became a possibility when he met his future wife. While there was no dowry, his in-laws agreed to invest in the café when La Joconde’s owner died on his feet of a heart attack. It was just as the Nazis were heading toward Paris.