THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS-Elliot Paul-Random House ($2.75).
Global, bearded Elliot Paul is one of the rare writers who has been able to turn an amiable yen for the gutter into pay dirt. If publishers' advance sales figures mean anything, some 25,000 readers were waiting avidly last week for this naughtily natural history of a Paris side street.
Paul is the author of the best-selling The Life and Death of a Spanish Town, of two best-selling murder mysteries, and of three worst-selling novels (Indelible, Impromptu, Imperturbe). He is the ex-coeditor of the esoteric expatriate magazine, transition, and an expert on boogie-woogie and the accordion. He is the man who introduced into the Massachusetts Legislature a bill (defeated) forcing book & play censors to pass an intelligence test and to prove that their sex lives were normal.
The Last Time I Saw Paris is a loving, microscopic peep at the infusorial life of the block-long rue de la Huchette (just off the boul' Mich'), Author Paul's lost hedonistic heaven. Its hotels, bars, bordello and habitues exhale for him the garlicky breath of the real France−"the France one prefers to remember." Mostly they stagger between the tough tenderness of a Daumier cartoon and William Locke's The Beloved Vagabond. They also suggest a reason for France's fall.
Author Paul discovered his beloved street one soft summer night in 1923, when it was still possible "to do things without premeditation." After dropping into "the most perfect small Gothic church in France, St. Severin," he picked up a trollop named Suzanne. She steered him into the rue de la Huchette.
France Found. The rue de la Huchette runs parallel to the left bank of the Seine for some 300 yards. On one corner stood a tiny police station. Usually the cops tried to chase the drunks, their commonest clientele, into another precinct. The Paris police, says Author Paul, were "almost saintly ... in their gentleness and understanding." But one night a smalltime thief tried to break into a store. "When surprised by the even more astonished agents," the marauder wounded one of them. "He was kicked to death that night, on the cold stone floor of our little .local station, and, with intestines steam-ingly exposed, was lugged under a cheap stiff blanket to the morgue. . . . That ended the unfortunate affair."
Across from the police station was Le Panier Fleuri (The Flower Basket), "the neighborhood bordel run by Madame Mariette." The other corner was occupied by a laundry "which employed three hardworking girls and also served as a clandestin. That is to say, men who found it banal to patronize the orthodox establishment could, if they were known to Mme.
Lanier, go upstairs with the laundress of their choice."
At the other end of the rue de la Huchette stood the Hotel du Caveau. Thither Suzanne steered Author Paul. After losing Suzanne, Author Paul sat down at a table awash with Dubonnet. "There," he says, "I found Paris-and France-."