{"id":91988,"date":"2015-11-16T17:19:09","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T22:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=91988"},"modified":"2015-11-16T17:37:04","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T22:37:04","slug":"a-narrow-street-at-dawn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/11\/16\/a-narrow-street-at-dawn\/","title":{"rendered":"A Narrow Street at Dawn"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From a Bantam paperback edition of The Last Time I Saw Paris<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Over the weekend, I found myself picking up Elliot Paul\u2019s 1942 memoir of prewar Montmartre,\u00a0The Last Time I Saw Paris<\/em>. (It must have been a gift from my grandfather; at any rate, it\u2019s a discard from the Salinas Public Library.) A novelist, journalist, and, later, screenwriter, Paul was in the thick of Lost Generation artistic circles. He was friends with Gertrude Stein, a coeditor of\u00a0Transition<\/em>, an intimate of James Joyce. The book\u00a0is unquestionably a \u201cportrait\u201d of that time, and an elegiac one: caf\u00e9s, cheap rents, local characters, and literary cameos all abound. And yet it\u2019s\u00a0not wholly steeped in nostalgia; by its end, the series of vignettes has begun to illuminate the more sinister tendencies of some of his neighbors, and forecast an end to an era that was already rosy with setting-sun glory. Which makes it so strange that the cover\u2014striped in the bleu<\/em>, blanc<\/em>, rouge<\/em>, bearing a Montmartre street sketch\u2014should be emblazoned with the following words: \u201cA book about the France the whole world prefers to remember.\u201d<\/p>\n

This passage is from the chapter \u201cA Narrow Street at Dawn\u201d:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

In the place St. Andr\u00e9 des Arts I found myself staring with awe into a taxidermist\u2019s window. Like all the other citizens of France, the taxidermists of France were individualists. Even French mothballs seemed to have slight differences, one from the other. The taxidermist in the\u00a0place St. Andr\u00e9 des Arts made a specialty of stuffing pet dogs and cats with which their owners could not bear to part. Monsieur No\u00ebl, the tall stuffer of birds and animals, whom I learned to know very well in later days, made them look, if not lifelike, decidedly unique \u2026 No\u00ebl pointed out to me that men and women, like gods, choose pets in their own image. My friend took sly delight in accentuating these resemblances.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the weekend, I found myself picking up Elliot Paul\u2019s 1942 memoir of prewar Montmartre,\u00a0The Last Time I Saw Paris. (It must have been a gift from my grandfather; at any rate, it\u2019s a discard from the Salinas Public Library.) A novelist, journalist, and, later, screenwriter, Paul was in the thick of Lost Generation artistic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[20224,3292,3294,270,20226,3266,20225],"class_list":["post-91988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-elliot-paul","tag-gertrude-stein","tag-montmartre","tag-paris","tag-taxidermists","tag-taxidermy","tag-the-last-time-i-saw-paris"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nElliot Paul\u2019s \u201cThe Last Time I Saw Paris\u201d (1942)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 16, 2015 \u2013 Over the weekend, I found myself picking up Elliot Paul\u2019s 1942 memoir of prewar Montmartre,\u00a0The Last Time I Saw Paris. 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