A Moveable Feast (4 page)

I was very shy when I first went into the bookshop and I did not have enough money on me to join the rental library. She told me I could pay the deposit any time I had the money and made me out a card and said I could take as many books as I wished.

There was no reason for her to trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her, 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, could not have been a poorer one. But she was delightful and charming and welcoming and behind her, as high as the wall and stretching out into the back room which gave onto the inner court of the building, were shelves and shelves of the wealth of the library.

I started with Turgenev and took the two volumes of
A Sportsman's Sketches
and an early book of D. H. Lawrence, I think it was
Sons and Lovers,
and Sylvia told me to take more books if I wanted. I chose the Constance Garnett edition of
War and Peace,
and
The Gambler and Other Stories
by Dostoevsky.

'You won't be back very soon if you read all that,' Sylvia said.

'I'll be back to pay,' I said. 'I have some money in the flat.'

'I didn't mean that,' she said. 'You pay whenever it's convenient.'

'When does Joyce come in?' I asked.

'If he comes in, it's usually very late in the afternoon,' she said. 'Haven't you ever seen him?'

'We've seen him at Michaud's eating with his family,' I said. 'But it's not polite to look at people when they are eating, and Michaud's is expensive.'

'Do you eat at home?'

'Mostly now,' I said. 'We have a good cook.'

'There aren't any restaurants in your immediate quarter, are there?'

'No. How did you know?'

'Larbaud lived there,' she said. 'He liked it very much except for that.'

'The nearest good cheap place to eat is over by the Pantheon.'

'I don't know that quarter. We eat at home. You and your wife must come sometime.'

'Wait until you see if I pay you,' I said. 'But thank you very much.'

'Don't read too fast,' she said.

Home in the rue Cardinal Lemoine was a two-room flat that had no hot water and no inside toilet facilities except an antiseptic container, not uncomfortable to anyone who was used to a Michigan outhouse. With a fine view and a good mattress and springs for a comfortable bed on the floor, and pictures we liked on the walls, it was a cheerful, gay flat. When I got there with the books I told my wife about the wonderful place I had found.

'But Tatie, you must go by this afternoon and pay,' she said.

'Sure I will,' I said. 'We'll both go. And then we'll walk down by the river and along the quais.'

'Let's walk down the rue de Seine and look in all the galleries and in the windows of the shops.'

'Sure. We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new cafe where we don't know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink.'

'We can have two drinks.' 'Then we can eat somewhere.' 'No. Don't forget we have to pay the library.' 'We'll come home and eat here and we'll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we'll read and then go to bed and make love.'

'And we'll never love anyone else but each other.' 'No. Never.'

'What a lovely afternoon and evening. Now we'd better have lunch.'

'I'm very hungry,' I said. 'I worked at the cafe on a
cafe creme.'

'How did it go, Tatie?'

'I think all right. I hope so. What do we have for lunch?' 'Little radishes, and
good
foie de veau
with mashed potatoes and an endive salad. Apple tart.'

'And we're going to have all the books in the world to read and when we go on trips we can take them.' 'Would that be honest?' 'Sure.'

'Does she have Henry James too?' 'Sure.'

'My,' she said. 'We're lucky that you found the place.' 'We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.

5 People of the Seine

There were many ways of walking down to the river from the top of the rue Cardinal Lemoine. The shortest one was straight down the street but it was steep and it brought you out, after you hit the flat part and crossed the busy traffic of the beginning of the Boulevard St-Germain, onto a dull part where there was a bleak, windy stretch of river bank with the Halle aux Vins on your right. This was not like any other Paris market but was a sort of bonded warehouse where wine was stored against the payment of taxes and was as cheerless from the outside as a military depot or a prison camp.

Across the branch of the Seine was the Ile St-Louis with the narrow streets and the old, tall, beautiful houses, and you could go over there or you could turn left and walk along the quais with the length of the Ile St-Louis and then Notre-Dame and Ile de la Cite opposite as you walked.

In the bookstalls along the quais you could sometimes find American books that had just been published for sale very cheap. The Tour d'Argent restaurant had a few rooms above the restaurant that they rented in those days, giving the people who lived there a discount in the restaurant, and if the people who lived there left any books behind there was a bookstall not far along the quai where the
valet de chambre
sold them and you could buy them from the proprietress for a very few francs. She had no confidence in books written in English, paid almost nothing for them, and sold them for a small and quick profit.

'Are they any good?' she asked me after we had become friends.

'Sometimes one is.'

'How can anyone tell?'

'I can tell when I read them.'

'But still it is a form of gambling. And how many people can read English?'

'Save them for me and let me look them over.'

'No. I can't save them. You don't pass regularly. You stay away too long at a time. I have to sell them as soon as I can. No one can tell if they are worthless. If they turn out to be worthless, I would never sell them.'

'How do you tell a valuable French book?' 'First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.'

After that bookstall near the Tour d'Argent there were no others that sold American and English books until the quai des Grands Augustins. There were several from there on to beyond the quai Voltaire that sold books they bought from employees of the left-bank hotels and especially the Hotel Voltaire, which had a wealthier clientele than most. One day I asked another woman stall-keeper who was a friend of mine if the owners ever sold the books.

'No,' she said. 'They are all thrown away. That is why one knows they have no value.'

'Friends give them to them to read on the boats.' 'Doubtless,' she said. 'They must leave many on the boats.' 'They do,' I said. 'The line keeps them and binds them and they become the ships' libraries.'

'That's intelligent,' she said. 'At least they are properly bound then. Now a book like that would have value.'

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood. At the head of the Ile de la Cite below the Pont Neuf where there was the statue of Henri Quatre, the island ended in a point like the sharp bow of a ship and there was a small park at the water's edge with fine chestnut trees, huge and spreading, and in the currents and backwaters that the Seine made flowing past, there were excellent places to fish. You went down a stairway to the park and watched the fishermen there and under the great bridge. The good spots to fish changed with the height of the river and the fishermen used long, jointed, cane poles but fished with very fine leaders and light gear and quill floats and expertly baited the piece of water that they fished. They always caught some fish, and often they made excellent catches of the dace-like fish that were called
goujon.
They were delicious fried whole and I could eat a plateful. They were plump and sweet-fleshed with a finer flavour than fresh sardines even, and were not at all oily, and we ate them bones and all.

One of the best places to eat them was at an open-air restaurant built out over the river at Bas Meudon where we would go when we had money for a trip away from our quarter. It was called La Peche Miraculeuse and had a splendid white wine that was a sort of Muscadet. It was a place out of a Maupassant story with the view over the river as Sisley had painted it. You did not have to go that far to eat
goujon.
You could get a very good
friture
on the Ile St-Louis.

I knew several of the men who fished the fruitful parts of the Seine between the He St-Louis and the Place du Vert-Galant and sometimes, if the day was bright, I would buy a litre of wine and a piece of bread and some sausage and sit in the sun and read one of the books I had bought and watch the fishing.

Travel writers wrote about the men fishing in the Seine as though they were crazy and never caught anything; but it was serious and productive fishing. Most of the fishermen were men who had small pensions, which they did not know then would become worthless with inflation, or keen fishermen who fished on their days or half-days off from work. There was better fishing at Charenton, where the Marne came into the Seine, and on either side of Paris, but there was very good fishing in Paris itself. I did not fish because I did not have the tackle and I preferred to save my money to fish in Spain.

Then too I never knew when I would be through working, nor when I would have to be away, and I did not want to become involved in the fishing which had its good times and its slack times. But I followed it closely and it was interesting and good to know about, and it always made me happy that there were men fishing in the city itself, having sound, serious fishing and taking a few
fritures
home to their families.

With the fishermen and the life on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smoke-stacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great elms on the stone banks of the river, the plane trees and in some places the poplars, I could never be lonely along the river. With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was fro2en. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.

6 A False Spring

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain. The sun was drying the wet faces of the houses that faced the window. The shops were still shuttered.

The goatherd came up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the floor above us came out onto the sidewalk with a big pot. The goatherd chose one of the heavy-bagged, black milk-goats and milked her into the pot while his dog pushed the others onto the sidewalk. The goats looked around, turning their necks like sightseers.

The goatherd took the money from the woman and thanked her and went on up the street piping and the dog herded the goats on ahead, their horns bobbing. I went back to writing and the woman came up the stairs with the goat milk. She wore her felt-soled cleaning shoes and I only heard her breathing as she stopped on the stairs outside our door and then the shutting of her door. She was the only customer for goat milk in our building.

I decided to go down and buy a morning racing paper. There was no quarter too poor to have at least one copy of a racing paper but you had to buy it early on a day like this. I found one in the rue Descartes at the corner of the Place Contrescarpe. The goats were going down the rue Descartes and I breathed the air in and walked back fast to climb the stairs and get my work done. I had been tempted to stay out and follow the goats down the early-morning street. But before I started work again I looked at the paper. They were running at Enghien, the small, pretty and larcenous track that was the home of the outsider.

So that day after I had finished work we would go racing. Some money had come from the Toronto paper that I did newspaper work for and we wanted a long shot if we could find one. My wife had a horse one time at Auteuil named Chèvre d'Or that was a hundred and twenty to one and leading by twenty lengths when he fell at the last jump with enough savings on him to keep us six months. We tried never to think of that. We were ahead on that year until Chèvre d'Or.

'Do we have enough money to really bet, Tatie?' my wife asked.

'No. We'll just figure to spend what we take. Is there something else you'd rather spend it for?'

'Well,' she said.

'I know. It's been terribly hard and I've been tight and mean about money.'

'No,' she said. 'But—'

I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers. I thought of bathtubs and showers and toilets that flushed as things that inferior people to us had or that you enjoyed when you made trips, which we often made. There was always the public bath-house down at the foot of the street by the river. My wife had never complained once about these things any more than she cried about Chèvre d'Or when he fell. She had cried for the horse, I remembered, but not for the money. I had been stupid when she needed a grey lamb jacket and had loved it once she had bought it. I had been stupid about other things too. It was all part of the fight against poverty that you never win except by not spending. Especially if you buy pictures instead of clothes. But then we did not think ever of ourselves as poor. We did not accept it. We thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich. It had never seemed strange to me to wear sweatshirts for underwear to keep warm.