Parisians Quotes

“In those days, long before, a view over the rooftops of Paris was an unaffordable luxury. The apartment he had shared with a mousy young writer from Laon had a view of the Jardin de Luxembourg – if he stuck his head out of the window as far as it would go and twisted it to the left, a smudge of green foliage appeared in the corner of one eye. That had been his best apartment to date. They had decorated it in the ‘Bohemian’ style of the 1830s : a few volumes of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, a Phrygian cap, an Algerian hookah, a skull on a broomstick handle (from the brother of a friend, Charles Toubin, who was an intern at one of the big hospitals) and, of course, a window box of geraniums, which was not only pretty but also illegal. (Death by falling window box was always high up the official list of fatalities.) For a proper view of Paris, they visited Henry’s painter friends who lived in a warren of attic rooms near the Barriere d’Enfer and called themselves the Water-Drinkers. When the weather was fine and the smell of their own squalor became unbearable, they clambered onto the roof and sat on the gutters and ridges, sketching chimneyscapes, and sending up more smoke from their pipes than the fireplaces below.
Three of the Water-Drinkers had since died of various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money’. When the last of the three was buried, in the spring of 1844, Henry and the others had found themselves at the graveside without a sou to give a gravedigger. ‘Never mind’, said he, “you can pay me the next time, ‘ and then, to his collegue : ‘It’s all right – these gentlemen are a regular customers.”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“As the shabby section of the audience rose to its feet, waving its hats and food-wrappers, a rich, stale smell wafted through the auditorium. It had something of the fog on the boulevard outside, where the pavements were sticky with rain, but also something more intimate : it suggested old stew and course tobacco, the coat racks and bookshelves of a pawnshop, and damp straw mattresses impregnated with urine and patchouli. It was - as though the set designer had intended some ironical epilogue - the smell of the real Latin Quarter.”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“Roused from the sleep of countless centuries by alcoholism and political hysteria, primitive traits had reasserted themselves in the modern world. (pg. 165)”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“Within minutes of Vidocq’s death in 1857, a squad of policemen rushed to his house in the Marais and removed his files, leaving not a single clue by which to solve the penultimate mystery: when news of his death reached the newspapers, eleven women turned up at his home, each carrying a signed will that made her the sole heir to his fortune.
The old convict had remained slippery to the end. Some of the people who attended his quiet funeral at Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement in the Marais might have been forgiven for wondering whose body was in the coffin. The gave in Saint-Mandé cemetery, marked with the half-erased inscription, ‘Vidocq, 18–‘, is now known to contain the body of a woman. (pg. 110-111)”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“…and elegant women who filled the air with perfume and colour like the flowers in front of the Tuileries Palace” (pg. 85)”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“Two years after the young lieutenant’s visit, when the Palais-Royal became a centre of revolutionary activity, she might have joined her sisters-in-arms in the historic meeting around the fountain, when ‘the demoiselles of the Palais-Royal’ vowed to publish their grievances and to demand fair remuneration for their patriotic labours:
The confederates of all parts of France who are joined together in Paris, far from having reason to complain of us, will retain a pleasant memory of the lengths to which we went to welcome them. (pg. 22)”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

“He had turned the loss of his virginity into a campaign, when all it took was a few sous and five minutes of his time. (pg 21)”
― Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris