Читать книгу Satori in Paris and Pic - Jack Kerouac - Страница 12

SO I GO TO THE LIBRARY, LA BIBLIOTHÈQUE NA-tionale, to check up on the list of the officers in Montcalm’s Army 1756 Quebec, and also Louis Moréri’s dictionary, and Pêre Anselme etc., all the information about the royal house of Brittany, and it aint even there and finally in the Mazarine Library old sweet Madame Oury the head librarian patiently explains to me that the Nazis done bombed and burned all their French papers in 1944, something which I’d forgotten in my zeal. Still I smell that there’s something fishy in Brittany—Surely de Kérouack should be recorded in France if it’s already recorded in the British Museum in London?—I tell her that—

You cant smoke even in the toilet in the Bibliothèque Nationale and you cant get a word in edgewise with the secretaries and there’s a national pride about “scholars” all sitting there copying outa books and they wouldnt even let John Montgomery in (John Montgomery who forgot his sleeping bag on the climb to Matterhorn and is America’s best librarian and scholar and is English)—

Meanwhile I have to go back and see how the gentle ladies are doing. My cabdriver is Roland Ste. Jeanne d’Arc de la Pucelle who tells me that all Bretons are “corpulent” like me. The ladies are kissing me on both cheeks French style. A Breton called Goulet is getting drunk with me, young, 21, blue eyes, black hair, and suddenly grabs Blondie and scares her (with the other fellows joining in), almost a rape, which me and the other Jean, Tassart, put a stop to: “Awright!” “Arrète!”—

“Cool it,” I add.

She is just too beautiful for words. I said to her “Tu passe toutes la journée dans maudite beauty parlor?” (You spend all day in the damn beauty parlor?)

“Oui.”

Meanwhile I go down to the famous cafes on the boulevard and sit there watching Paris go by, such hepcats the young men, motorcycles, visiting firemen from Iowa.