Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time or all of the time they could afford it; mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named apéritifs were advertised, but few people could afford them except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.
The Café des Amateurs was the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard, that wonderful narrow crowded market street which led into the Place Contrescarpe. The squat toilets of the old apartment houses, one by the side of the stairs on each floor with two cleated cement shoe-shaped elevations on each side of the aperture so a locataire would not slip, emptied into cesspools which were emptied by pumping into horse-drawn tank wagons at night. In the summer time, with all windows open, you would hear the pumping and the odor was very strong. The tank wagons were painted brown and saffron color and in the moonlight when they worked the rue Cardinal Lemoine their wheeled, horse-drawn cylinders looked like Braque paintings. No one emptied the Café des Amateurs though, and its yellowed poster stating the terms and penalties of the law against public drunkenness was as flyblown and disregarded as its clients were constant and ill-smelling.
All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked.
—Ernest Hemingway (A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel)
Oh man. That photo gave me a really bad flashback! Ha ha... actually, I'll be working on mine tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteAren't we blessed with a word processor today? Way back when that was what you saw when you just finished your first draft: a pile of paper sheets typed or handwritten!
ReplyDeleteFrom now on when I go to literary festivals I'll ask that question of all the novelists I meet.
ReplyDeleteI did once read an interesting thing from a novelist whose name I forget: he said his first novel was play but his second felt like work, the third was a bit of a mixture but from his fourth onwards that sense of play hasn't left him.
Can we say the same thing about falling in love? I don't know. And I don't want to.
ReplyDeleteThe motivation for writing and completing a book changes with each one you write, consequently what constitutes a sense of reward is going to change too :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking the time to visit and comment on my blog by the way :)