A Life in Paris – January 12, 1934

I hope you had a happy Christmas and New Year. Everyone here is in a great state of excitement over the Stavisky scandal…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

I hope you had a happy Christmas and New Year. Everyone here is in a great state of excitement over the Stavisky scandal. Yesterday they had out all the police of Paris, besides troops, and there was quite a row in the neighborhood of the Chamber of Deputies. All the “grilles” where the trees are planted were torn up and several trees uprooted, as we noticed last evening in going up the Boulevard Saint Germain. I don’t know why they took it out on the poor trees.

Also, people are spending all their spare cash on newspapers now, that recount all these exciting events and ‘hot news’ so there is nothing left to buy books. And there are no Englishmen nor Americans in Paris any more. They have all gone home on account of the exchange and the depression.

Sylvia Beach, to James Joyce

Notes:
• From The Letters of Sylvia Beach
• Sylvia Beach was an American who founded the original Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. She also published Ulysses by James Joyce.

A Life in Paris – January 12, 1860

We are in our dining room, that pretty box lined, enclosed and canopied in tapestry…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

We are in our dining room, that pretty box lined, enclosed and canopied in tapestry, against which have hung Moreau the elder’s triumphant “Revue du Roi,” lighted up and enlivened by the soft glow of a bohemian glass sconce.

At our table sit Flaubert, Saint-Victor, Aurélien Scholl, Charles Edmond, Julie, and Mme Doche, whose slightly powdered hair is gathered attractively into a red net. […] At dessert Mme Doche went off to a dress rehearsal […], and Saint-Victor […] went along with her and Scholl.

The rest stayed and talked about the theatre, Flaubert making fun of it rather rudely, as is his wont. “The theatre is not an art,” he said, “it is a secret [….] This is the secret. First, you have a few glasses of absinthe at the Café du Cirque. Then you say of whatever play is being discussed: ‘It’s not bad, but it wants cutting.’ Or you say: ‘Not bad, but there’s no play there.’ […]

The conversation passed on to this person and that among those in our circle, with a great deal about how hard it is to find people one can get along with, people who are not vicious, nor unbearable, nor middle class, nor ill bred. […]

We were left alone with Flaubert in the sitting room all foggy with cigar smoke, he striding back and forth across the carpet, knocking his bald head against the pendant of the chandelier, pouring out words, overflowing, delivering himself up to us as to his brothers in the spirit. He talked to us once again of his retired existence, solitary even in Paris, shut in and barred against the world. His only recreation is this Sunday dinner at Mme Sabatier’s, La Présidente, as Théophile Gautier and his friends call her.

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

Notes:
• From The Goncourt Journals 1851-1870
• Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, brothers, were French writers.