The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru Quotes

“Looking at his paintings is a bit like the Mediterranean in September. A beautiful, fleeting dream you can dive into, swim around in, lose yourself in for a moment.” His voice was distant, as though he were home in his native south, submerging into the sea. I glanced at the painting. Chagall had stopped by a few months ago for a coffee reading about whether he should travel to Normandy and Brittany. His aura was as colorful as his art, and I told him that he should go, regardless of what Baba Valya said. He gifted us this painting in thanks, of two fortune tellers sitting at an azure-blue table, painted in his usual mystical, dreamlike style. “He is my favorite, too,” I muttered.”
― Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru

“How did we start to tell fortunes? I asked her at some point. Eh, probably with some blind old woman somewhere in ancient Rus’, Baba Valya replied, referencing that long-dead predecessor of today’s Soviet Russia. Her eyes sparked. Or with Marie Anne Lenormand. The woman who had predicted the futures of Alexander I and Emperor Napoleon? I thought all we shared with the famous French fortune teller was her name, a name Baba Valya had adopted here in France to forget her real name. Not even I knew it.”
― Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru

“Baba Valya’s sitters were the quaint yet frightfully old and out-of-touch Russian ladies of the rue Daru community—the tangle of streets by the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral called Little Russia by most everybody in Paris, comprising Russian émigrés and exiles of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and subsequent civil war.”
― Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru

“Paris is full of Russians…. They are drifting along in Paris in a childish sort of hopefulness that things will somehow be all right. —Ernest Hemingway, Toronto Daily Star”
― Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru