A movable feast4/15/2023 ![]() This straight‐backed young woman, in whom every gesture displayed the old style of breeding, was endlessly tolerant of the most perverse human foibles. Sylvia, in a tailored suit, was bone‐dry of body and laconic wit, receiving with a smile that verged at times on a sardonic leer, offering no conversation unless it was wanted. Here, also, one found and talked to every British and American author who turned up in Paris.Īdrienne was plump, beaming and voluble in the full‐skirted Quaker‐grey dress she wore in her shop. Miss Beach was to publish “Ulysses” in February, 1922, and Joyce, not normally a man to circulate much, came in to pick up and return page‐proofs, later to read reviews and hear reports of sales. Monnier shared a flat in the same street-Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Co. Here Larbaud, one evening, read his famous lecture that was the first evaluation of “Ulysses.”Īcross the way was the lending library of the Princeton parson's daughter with whom Mile. One was Adrienne Monnier's lending library, the Malson des Amie des Livres, where certain leading writers of the Nouvelle Revue Française forgathered every afternoon and one was privileged to hear their conversation: Gide, Valéry, Larbaud (translator and shortstory writer), Léon‐Paul Fargue (poet and night‐wandering raconteur), Jules Romains-and, when he was not absent en poste, the poet‐ambassador Claudel. Artists and writers were a united family and nothing more than the conventional contempt for the bourgeoisie inherited from the romantics of 1830 divided them off from the rest of the world.ĪLONG the route between Montparnasse and the St.‐Germain quarter stood two rest camps in the Rue de l'Odéon. Acquaintance was easily made, talk was on matters of common interest for this generation, still in the temper of “art for art's sake,” ideological passions were as yet unknown. “Everybody” frequented the same half‐dozen cafés, ate in one or another of the same score of restaurants. Hemingway carried letters from Sherwood Anderson (doubtless from others, too), but in that small tranquil world there was no need of formal introduction. Lecomte cried in 1920 “I used to darn his socks for him.”) which 10 years later was taken over, like Sutton Place in New York, by-it must be agreed-a bearable species of “the rich and well‐born.” John Dos Passos and the playwright John Howard Lawson had come upon the Rendezvous des Mariniers on the Ile Saint‐Louis (“Monsieur Dos Passos!”' Mme. Those who could afford it lunched in view of the Luxembourg Gardens at the Café de Médicis, where they drank the 1915 vintages of the Hospice de Beaune topped off by the Marquis d'Audiffred's marc de Bourgogne. Students drank beer at Baizar's‐ in the Rue des Ecoles. Behind the boulevard, painters found studios and writers rooms in the direction of the Montparnasse Cemetery. It ran and still runs, as everybody knows, the length of the Boulevard Montparnasse from the Closerie des Lilas at the Observatoire to the Restaurant du Petit Trianon opposite the dingy railway station, and by one route or another down to St.‐Germaindes‐Prés and the Seine. Already, the beat had been marked out which young American aspirants in letters and the arts follow to this day. ![]() ![]() WHEN Ernest and Hadley Hemingway came to Paris in December, 1921, the dreary aftermath of World War I was receding and life on the Left Bank had begun to revive. ![]()
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