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> Hyacinthe Goujon, age six, who had ambitions to be a movie star, carried a tiny powder box, a small stick of rouge and chose her own perfume, "had quite astonishing ideas about her clothes and those of other 'women.' " She told Author Paul "without a flicker of her violet-blue eyes or a vulgar inflection of her well-trained voice, that she remained with Madame Absalom on Tuesday and Friday afternoons because her mother entertained her 'lover' on those days." ^ M. Corre, the conservative who ran the Epicerie Danton, scrimped so that his son could learn German and become a big salesman some day. Result: because he knew German, young Corre was sent to the Maginot Line, killed. ^ Odette kept the butter & eggs store and wore green-black clothes and looked pious and demure. "Actually she was an infidel and a Socialist." The milk she sold was bluish and watery; her eggs "bore unmistakable evidence of having been near hens."
>M. Panache was a floor walker. Like his crony, The Navet, he was generally detested (all the conservatives in The Last Time I Saw Paris are detestable). "To keep M. Panache in a perpetual hell of suspicion and rage," the chestnut vendor kept whispering to him that the proprietor of the Hotel du Caveau "rented Panache's room now and then for twenty-minute periods to streetwalkers who did not draw the color line." The street was delighted when he contracted the barber's itch. >M. de Malancourt, a wealthy gentleman, had an "astonished camera artist take an art photo of his plump and symmetrical backsides, without drapery." Then he sent a handsomely mounted and autographed print to an art expert whom he suspected of selling him a fake Watteau. Sued for libel by the expert, M. de Malancourt conducted his own defense in the great French tradition. "A picture of one's backsides, he argued, was more intimate and personal than a photograph of one's face. To send it to a friend or acquaintance, therefore, was not an insult, but a mark of affection and esteem. Furthermore, it was a token more permanent and honest than the conventional photograph, since one's bottom changes less rapidly and radically than one's face, the latter being exposed to wind and weather as well as the ravages of time." The human face, Monsieur de Malancourt remarked, is like that of a fish and has been immemoriably, much over-rated as an art-object.
Author Paul also has lively and knowing accounts of the local Reds (Pierre Vautier became a devout Communist), and of Le Panier Fleuri, its personnel and practices. Interspersed are bright observations on French art, cooking, music, writers, women and politics.