It’s splendid how much at home we feel at Pignol’s. A tacit complicity at every moment prevails among the regulars here. A process of self-selection operates: starving crooks, thirsty whores, witless...
Sunset’s the best time to take a stroll down Mouffetard, the ancient Via Mons Cetardus. The buildings along it are only two or three stories high. Many are crowned with conical dovecotes. Nowhere in P...
In response to a tactless question he once said to me, ‘What do you expect? This lousy neighbourhood gave me the come-on. I couldn’t resist.
Here, in a few words, you’ve said all you need to say. People stand by each other, but they don’t talk. It’s remarkable. I’ve investigated the extraordinary history of these walls. I think I’m the onl...
Old Hubert must have had a premonition of his squalid demise. In October he said to me, ‘Forty-two years I’ve had this place. I’d really like to go back home, but I ain’t got the energy since my old g...
Fortunately the City is vigilant. It too has its secret weapons. Since the summer it has released safety valves that form part of a wonderful mechanism, known only to itself. For the past three months...
And there, until 1884, it was possible to gaze on the remains of a generally neglected monument, so-called Dagobert’s Tower, which included a ninth-century staircase set into the masonry, of which the...
An age-old city is like a pond. With its colours and reflections. Its chills and murk. Its ferment, its sorcery, its hidden life.A city is like a woman, with a woman’s desires and dislikes. Her abando...
Every day the words that Keep-on-Dancin’ and the Gypsy imparted to me - theories, observations, advice and warnings - are substantiated and acquire deeper meaning.‘It’s not for nothing there are so ma...
I should like one day, as some anonymous pedestrian revisiting the scenes of these memories, to follow on the heels of an attentive reader - here are some - and to relish his delight when, with this b...
Better beware of the newly deadOf the white-handed ghostAnd the brightness of these lamps . . .wrote Luc Berimont in 1940, in Reign of Darkness.I’ve always felt the greatest reluctance to go anywhere...
An event is never just what it is in itself and nothing more. It’s what goes on around it, at the same time, that makes it — potentially — a tragic situation.You have to have been exposed to this, at...
I’d very much like to ‘conclude' something from this experiment. Or that it should raise a question in my mind, and a commitment to get to the bottom of the matter, to investigate, to come up with an...
Silence, like madness, is only comparative.
No one will shake my conviction that those leaders of men, who are in the nature of carbuncles, of semi-conscious abscesses, who draw feverish crowds to them like noxious humours, have an innate knowl...
Men are so isolated, prisoners of their own wretched selves, that they can be unbelievably sociable.
An historian is a kind detective in search of the fact — remote or otherwise - that brings to a set of events apparently unconnected with each other, the link that unites them, their justification, th...
The ‘Oberge des Mailletz’ is by far the oldest tavern of which any record can found in the City archives. In 1292, Adam des Mailletz, inn-keeper, paid a tithe of 18 sous and 6 deniers.This we learn fr...
He insisted on clearing the table, and again devoted himself to his game of patience: piecing together the map of Paris, the bits of which he’d stuffed into the pocket of his raincoat, folded up any o...
