The Paris Bookseller

by Kerri Maher

Gertrude nodded. “I toyed with the idea once myself, I admit. But I prefer writing sentences to selling them.” “Owning a bookstore is much more than selling sentences. It’s putting the right sentences into the right hands.” Like Michel, who’d loved the Whitman and come back for more. Sylvia was inching him ever closer to Joyce, Eliot, Williams, and other important new writers.

“Well, in my family, Cyprian was always the one looking for attention. And she got it. I was jealous sometimes, but had nothing to offer the world like she did. I would occasionally bask in her reflected glory, but I’m really more comfortable in the background. But in the shop, I feel I can have both—to be in the background, but also have one of my accomplishments noticed.”

compliments were enough, but they weren’t. She wanted to do something, wanted Shakespeare and Company to be more than a diversion. Wanted Margaret and Jane to be seen as more than filthy Washington Squarites. Wanted Ulysses to have as broad an audience as possible. So many things to want. Just two years ago, she’d wanted a bookstore. Now she had it and she wanted more? Was that greed or ambition? Was there a difference?

“Of course not,” Larbaud replied, unruffled. “It took your American Revolution to stir ours, after all, and ours was much longer in coming. I only mean that there is an ebb and flow to these things. Rebellions cannot be controlled and cannot be forced. They take hold in their own time.”

Anyone who read that much had to be given to empathy.

Adrienne shrugged. “You plan for more exciting moments.” “But the best ones are unplanned.” “It might seem that way, but it’s not true. Ernest didn’t come to Shakespeare by chance. He came because of the experience you provide American writers in Paris. He’d heard of you. The more experiences you provide, the more interesting people you’ll attract.”

“Don’t be. You put your whole heart into this, as did Monsieur Joyce. We do not always have control over our hearts.”

“It is my absolute honor and pleasure,” she said, meaning every word. She’d taken a gamble, and it had been the right one. It had all been worth it. This moment, this book, this writer, this city. Stratford-on-Odéon. Odeonia. Her very own mythical Ithaca.

Shrugging, she said, “It was never for me.” “If you could let it go so easily, I guess that was true.” “You’ll never let it go.” “Never. It’s the only thing.” “Shakespeare and Company is my thing.” Saying it out loud, it felt right and true. It was her thing. And it was her thing. “Thankfully for the rest of us.”

“Peut-être,” Adrienne responded noncommittally, and Sylvia was amazed—as she often was—at Adrienne’s je ne sais quoi, her ability to command attention and then wave it off, as if she didn’t need to keep it, for there was plenty more where it came from.

“All tragedies contain a gift.”

“We’ve all been in quite a state,” Sylvia observed to Adrienne after one especially maudlin dinner, where everyone drank too much to medicate one ill or another. “Do you think we’re getting old?”