The Reading Warehouse

Paris at the turn of the century: odd jobs, odd times, odd women.

"You get all kinds coming to Paris: the rich, the poor, the curious, the exiled, the hopeless, those who don't really feel at home anywhere else, be it from failure, disappointment, crime or culture, and those who come, stay awhile, reap the city's most obvious benefits, and leave. These last are the unfortunate ones. Those who stay longer, for whatever reason, heartbreak, poverty, love, indolence or apathy, would eventually, I hope, live to see the beauty of the city as it is, and not as it is preconceived. You can buy a good French meal in any major metropolis nowadays, and, from what I've seen, one luxury hotel is much like the next. What makes Paris Paris is the canal, the Seine, its parks (like individually cut diamonds), the late-night brasseries, the all-night bars, the early-morning Arab caf s where men gather for a smoke and a drink, then another smoke and maybe another drink before heading off to work; the churches that seem to bloom everywhere, in back alleys, over railways, behind apartment complexes, like something ineluctable and irrepressible in the soil itself and that once helped form and flavor a particularly French feeling towards the world. It's found as much there as in a Poussin, David or Manet, or a piece by Saint-Sa ns, Debussy, or Messiaen, or a song by Piaf, Gainsbourg or Brel. It's the soul of Paris and no guidebook I know of has ever brought me anywhere closer to understanding it."

"William Prendiville's Paris will have readers who don't know the city wanting to live there, and will have those who know it longing to return. These are memoirs which catch the rhythm of people who live hand-to-mouth, day-to-day, until they come to think of Paris as the place they can never leave." Allan Massie