2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland.
When I moved to Paris, in 1955, my reactions were the exact opposite of those to London. I was surrounded by references, to the point that they almost seemed too obvious. The steps of Montmartre, the kids brandishing their baguettes, the pre-war funfairs and the streetlamps in the mist could hardly fail to remind me of the French films of the 30’s and of the so-called humanist photographers that were inspired by them, though their romanticism wasn’t quite my cup of tea. Other associations, however, were irresistible. A glance from a woman walking past, as in Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal: ‘Oh toi que j'eusse aimée, oh toi qui le savait!’ (‘Oh you whom I might have loved, oh you who knew it.’) Or the ghosts of demolished houses, as in Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge: ‘… it wasn’t, so to speak, the first wall of the surviving houses, but the last of the ones that had been there before. You could see the inside. At the level of some of the stories, you could see where the wall-hangings were still attached, and here and there some floor-boards, or parts of a ceiling…’ And, of course, Apollinaire’s Pont Mirabeau, Balzac’s Grands Boulevards, Edgar Allan Poe’s Quai des Orfèvres, Sartre’s Café de Flore… And added to these literary recollections, there were the appeals from the shop windows, the restaurant menus, the playbills and of course and above all the women, glimpsed as they sat inapproachably in a passing car, or eyed as they paraded all too approachably on the pavements of rue Saint-Denis.
