Travelers' Tales Paris by James O'Reilly Read Free Book Online Page B

wish. Of course he likes to play his games. Of course the art students and Rive Gauche locals—including an African prince in his robes, Swedish explorers, tousled philosophers, and me—were sadistically entertained by this unwinnable battle.
    S hakespeare and Company is an irreplaceable institution: it is an English-language outpost if you need that, but more fundamentally it is a place to renew yourself, a place that embodies a belief in books and in people, a place with a liberal, literate heart and soul — and in that sense a place that symbolizes part of the special spirit of the city. That spirit extends to the chalkboard notices scrawled outside the door, too, source of some of Paris’ prime wisdom and deals, where I found the following: “Paris bookseller looking for outdoor girl to build cabin in north woods. If she will cook him trout for breakfast every morning, he will tell her dog stories every night. “
    â€”Donald W. George,
“The Liberation of Paris,”
San Francisco Examiner
    One of the special pleasures of the Left Bank is browsing the different bookstores specializing in English and American books. First among equals is the famous Shakespeare and Company of George Whitman, who used to hint that he was descended from Walt Whitman. His shop on the rue de la Bûcherie, a few steps from the Seine, has been a hangout for poets and college kids since it was called Le Mistral many years ago, before George adopted the name of Sylvia Beach’s bookstore-publishing company, which first printed James Joyce. He keeps open late at night and has frequent mass Sunday teas for visiting geniuses. He is, as e. e. cummings once said aboutsomeone else, a delectable mountain, albeit a skinny and irascible one.
    The Rive Gauche is a swamp filled with birds and giants, a continent of fantasy, a very lazy but agitated ancient kingdom in the midst of the 20th century, a flâneur among the world’s earnest, a place to miss nothing but also to do nothing, a silence surrounded by noise, a sausage, a beer, a giggle, a dream of the past for those who have a shrug for the future, a baguette, a bottle of red, a bevy of students, a guitar jangle, a festive street orchestra that—I actually saw this—could not pass the hat because they had left it at home. In other words, the Left Bank is a delirious confusion and fantasy.
    Like the rest of Paris, the Left Bank really used to be what we still think it is. It is heading toward being a Rive Gauche Museum. That’s the truth and should be accepted. But the flower and bird markets still exist; so do the café sitters and their crises of exhilaration (call it inspiration, call it joie de vivre), and , in that magic light of the Ile de France, so does their gracious melancholy (call it pensive, call it acceptance of the mysteries of being).
    One night on the rue de la Huchette, I came upon a group of buskers singing a stirring version of “Let It Be,” that anthem of the late Sixties. They sounded exactly like the Beatles, except that they were singing in Korean. My French friends, a novelist and a psychiatrist who live upstairs from this year-round music festival, said they sometimes couldn’t decide whether to drop coins or bags of water on the entertainers. A few years ago this pedestrian quarter, surfeited with Danish Joan Baezes and Israeli Bob Dylans, was blanketed with revolutionary posters proclaiming a bas les gratteurs de guitares ! (Down With the Guitar-Scrapers!)
    My personal law for survival and thriving on the Rive Gauche is to enjoy the monuments, parks, museums, churches and great public buildings, but pay attention first of all to the people. They are the distilled essence of France, essence of Paris—beautiful, ugly, surly, funny, greedy, generous, friendly, rude, seething with energetic complication. The best, useless and most fruitful occupation is to find a café terrace, buy a newspaper or a guidebook