I sit on the same bench where I had sat with my sister in the spring of 1969. We were in our early twenties, when everything, including the sentimental head of the poet, was a revelation. Inquisitive sisters with a handful of precious addresses of cafés and hotels. The Deux Magots of the existentialists. The Hôtel des Etrangers, where Rimbaud and Verlaine presided over the Circle Zutique. The Hôtel de Lauzun with its chimeras and gilded halls where Baudelaire smoked hashish and penned the opening poems in Les fleurs du mal.
