Читать книгу The Invention of Paris - Eric Hazan - Страница 23

As for the Odéon quarter – an isosceles triangle with its apex at the Odéon intersection, its sides formed by Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and Rue de Condé – is it part of the Latin Quarter? Léautaud was categorical, and he knew what he was talking about, as he lived at various times on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Rue de l’Odéon and Rue de Condé, working at Le Mercure de France on the same street. In his Journal, on 6 October 1903, he wrote: ‘Move from Rue de Condé to Rue de l’Odéon, 6 October. Hatred of this whole Latin Quarter. When will I be able to live somewhere else?’ For him, it was crossing Rue Tournon that brought you into Saint-Germain-des-Près. In the early twentieth century, and in the years between the wars, this point of view was certainly justified. If the Odéon quarter was not really a student district, the booksellers under the theatre colonnade played a role in literary life. For the bachelier Vingtras-Vallès, ‘the Odéon is our club and our asylum. Rummaging on the bookstalls there gives you the air of a man of letters, and at the same time you’re sheltered from the rain. We come there when we get tired of the silence and smell of our hovels.’ Many years later, Léon Daudet – a student in medicine, which did not work out for him – was also attracted by ‘the famous galleries of the Flammarion bookshop around the Odéon, bristling with books. These are connected for me with meeting rather wild young people, and also with my first success, Les Morticoles. I did not dare inquire about it in the two weeks after the volume appeared. The booksellers, who knew me, signalled to me from a distance, and one of them cried out: “Great success!” ’¹⁵⁸

And around the same time, Léon-Paul Fargue: ‘We read under the galleries of the Odéon, standing up, our noses as far forward as possible in pages that were not cut, seeking our food.’¹⁵⁹ Behind the theatre, on the corner of Rue de Tournon and Rue de Vaugirard, Foyot’s restaurant was frequented by intellectuals – senators too – until an anarchist bomb blew them up.¹⁶⁰ The Mercure, and the bookshops of Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach on Rue de l’Odéon, gave the triangle a literary coloration that succeeded in attaching it to the Latin Quarter, but has since almost entirely disappeared.