Read Online B004MMEIOG EBOK by John Baxter - Free Book Online

walk.
    For the walk that talks, however, none equals one that once saved Mitterrand’s career. During his presidency, a scandal loomed when an opponent threatened to leak to Paris Match the details of his illegitimate daughter, who’d been brought up in the Elysée at government expense. Mitterrand got wind of this and consulted Roland Dumas, his foreign minister and a famous schemer. At a gala that night, Dumas strolled up the steps of the presidential palace with an unprepossessing woman on his arm. Mitterrand’s enemy paled. She was the madame of a brothel in the eighth arrondissement where he was a frequent client. The article never appeared.

Chapter 14
A Proposition at Les Editeurs
    What walker shall his mean ambition fix
    On the false lustre of a coach and six?
    O rather give me sweet content on foot,
    Wrapped in virtue, and a good surtout.
    JOHN GAY, “Trivia; or, Walking the Streets of London”
    I ’d known Dorothy since I first came to France. She was one of the longtime American residents who, from behind the scenes, and largely out of love, manage its society of expatriates. Former booksellers, restaurateurs, diplomats, or civil servants on a pension, they’re usually, like her, married to someone French, and have created over decades what the French call a réseau— a network of old school friends, ex-lovers, distant relatives, and neighbors that keeps the nation functioning. No book in France receives less use than the telephone directory. To fix a leak, issue a writ, buy a car, or find a lover, your first stop is your agenda —a gold mine of relatives, friends, and remote acquaintances, among whom you are sure to find the expertise you need.
    Through a good part of its twenty-year history, the Paris Literary Seminar, France’s longest-running English-language event for writers, had occupied Dorothy’s time. For one week every summer, fifty people from around the world converged on Paris to take classes with authors and poets and absorb the ambiance that inspired Stein, Baldwin, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Joyce.
    The latest seminar had just begun, but Dorothy insisted on seeing me immediately at our preferred local hangout, Les Editeurs. A large, bright, and open café at the foot of my street, it has conferred on our intersection a little of the glamour once monopolized by the Deux Magots, Flore, and Brasserie Lipp, that clustered around the intersection of boulevard Saint-Germain and rue de Rennes, five blocks farther west. One U.S. journalist, seduced by its book-lined walls, red leather armchairs, and the atmosphere of a London gentlemen’s club—or rather how the French imagine a London gentlemen’s club might look—called Les Editeurs “a real Parisian café.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was only three years old. Before that, it had been Le Chope d’Alsace , a real Parisian café, at least of a certain sort: dark as a cave, even at midday, smelling of cheap wine and Gauloise cigarettes, with a carpet that clung stickily to the soles of your shoes.
    Dorothy bustled in, administered the obligatory air kisses, one on each cheek, sat down, and, beginning with a bulging Filofax, proceeded to colonize the table with folders, brochures, and schedules.
    “How’s it going?” I asked.
    “Fine, fine,” she said absently.
    It was a meaningless question. The seminar always went well. The concept was as adaptable as the hamburger, functional as Kleenex, simple as a shovel.
    The real question was: Why did it work so well?
    “It makes no sense,” I protested when she first explained it to me. “Fifty people, mostly from the United States, pay thousands of dollars to spend a week in France, taking courses in writing?”
    “Yes.”
    “And teachers—many of them from the United States as well—are paid to come here and teach them?”
    “Correct.”
    “Then why don’t these people save their money and get together in, I don’t know, Atlantic City?”
    My naiveté made her