A Moveable Feast Read Online Free PDF

on the walls, it was a cheerful, gay flat. When I got there with the books I told my wife about the wonderful place I had found.
    'But Tatie, you must go by this afternoon and pay,' she said.
    'Sure I will,' I said. 'We'll both go. And then we'll walk down by the river and along the quais.'

    'Let's walk down the rue de Seine and look in all the galleries and in the windows of the shops.'
    'Sure. We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new cafe where we don't know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink.'
    'We can have two drinks.' 'Then we can eat somewhere.' 'No. Don't forget we have to pay the library.' 'We'll come home and eat here and we'll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we'll read and then go to bed and make love.'
    'And we'll never love anyone else but each other.' 'No. Never.'
    'What a lovely afternoon and evening. Now we'd better have lunch.'
    'I'm very hungry,' I said. 'I worked at the cafe on a cafe creme.'
    'How did it go, Tatie?'
    'I think all right. I hope so. What do we have for lunch?' 'Little radishes, and good foie de veau with mashed potatoes and an endive salad. Apple tart.'
    'And we're going to have all the books in the world to read and when we go on trips we can take them.' 'Would that be honest?' 'Sure.'
    'Does she have Henry James too?' 'Sure.'
    'My,' she said. 'We're lucky that you found the place.' 'We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.
    5 People of the Seine
    There were many ways of walking down to the river from the top of the rue Cardinal Lemoine. The shortest one was straight down the street but it was steep and it brought you out, after you hit the flat part and crossed the busy traffic of the beginning of the Boulevard St-Germain, onto a dull part where there was a bleak, windy stretch of river bank with the Halle aux Vins on your right. This was not like any other Paris market but was a sort of bonded warehouse where wine was stored against the payment of taxes and was as cheerless from the outside as a military depot or a prison camp.
    Across the branch of the Seine was the Ile St-Louis with the narrow streets and the old, tall, beautiful houses, and you could go over there or you could turn left and walk along the quais with the length of the Ile St-Louis and then Notre-Dame and Ile de la Cite opposite as you walked.
    In the bookstalls along the quais you could sometimes find American books that had just been published for sale very cheap. The Tour d'Argent restaurant had a few rooms above the restaurant that they rented in those days, giving the people who lived there a discount in the restaurant, and if the people who lived there left any books behind there was a bookstall not far along the quai where the valet de chambre sold them and you could buy them from the proprietress for a very few francs. She had no confidence in books written in English, paid almost nothing for them, and sold them for a small and quick profit.
    'Are they any good?' she asked me after we had become friends.
    'Sometimes one is.'
    'How can anyone tell?'
    'I can tell when I read them.'
    'But still it is a form of gambling. And how many people can read English?'
    'Save them for me and let me look them over.'
    'No. I can't save them. You don't pass regularly. You stay away too long at a time. I have to sell them as soon as I can. No one can tell if they are worthless. If they turn out to be worthless, I would never sell them.'
    'How do you tell a valuable French book?' 'First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.'
    After that bookstall near the Tour d'Argent there were no others that sold