In which the author recites a sonnet and discovers the true power of poetry as well as a French cop's passion for art

In England, cricket can be a religion, intolerant of casual fealty. I caught hell at my school for eating cherries out of a bag when our side was at bat, a sign of defective loyalty. Punishment was administered in the form of having to write out a line that began, "It ill behoves... " over and over till my fingers cramped. Not that cricket didn't please me; it did, but for all the wrong reasons—like the fragrance of new-mown grass or the satisfying plock of a well-hit ball. And for certain inquisitors this was like going to church for the stained glass. I didn't really mind my punishment: Spring was intoxicating. On free afternoons, I would take off my school jacket and set off haphazardly, following long, bending lanes flanked by box hedges taller than I was. Beyond the hedges rose full-crowned beeches and ornate gables, Victorian settings that my imagination peopled with bright-eyed consumptives and imperious maidens. When at year's end I got a prize, I sensed the bemused reluctance with which it was bestowed. Allowed to choose a book, I carefully pasted my bookplate inside an anthology of French poetry.

Several of the poems were so good that they stuck in my memory, though their deeper meaning eluded my 15-year-old self. There was a famous sonnet by Mallarmé that began, "Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui / Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'aile ivre." It meant that today was virgin, vivacious and beautiful, and might rend us with a stroke of its drunken wing... and then the syntax sort of squirmed away from me, though the verses went on flapping in my head.

Years later, I wound up in Paris on a French scholarship, and though I wasn't reading much poetry anymore, those poems stayed with me. Sometimes I would remember them as I sat down at some rainy sidewalk café, or admired the ­Parisiennes window-shopping along the boulevard St-Michel, or wondered whose parties these were that I was always crashing in the rue d'Alésia. Paris for the very young can be a place drained of accountability, and so it was for me, because none of it computed, none of it added up.

The French have an expression for living on no money—"to eat of the mad cow"—and my personal cow was getting madder. The scholarship was slender, and writing home for money had begun to embarrass me. Then one day the fatal choice lay between eggs for another potato omelet and lightbulbs for my reading lamp, and traipsing through the Bazaar de l'Hôtel de Ville, I swiped a package of two Mazda bulbs. It was a shocking reversion to adolescent shoplifting, and perhaps because the delinquent hadn't done it as a lark but because he actually needed the boodle, he was careless and was nabbed. "Monsieur, vos papiers," said a male voice in my ear the moment I stepped outside the store.

A plainclothes detective with a clipped mustache had slipped his hand under my elbow. Blankly his eyes engaged mine as he inspected my passport and demanded that I accompany him to the police commissariat. My life in Paris—sitting in cafés with my friends, sipping Calvados, overhearing people talk about other people's shoes and love affairs—was over. Miserably, I recalled the clause in my scholarship acceptance document that stipulated deportation should I be found guilty of a crime or misdemeanor. Then the detective asked me what I did.