An Afternoon in Paris

Some years back a good friend who was suffering through a painful divorce went to Paris to nurse his broken heart. While he was there he sent me frequent emails talking about the city and what he was feeling. It was a good thing for him and he stayed for months and months.

One day while we were emailing back and forth I was telling him about a difficult thing I was going through and he asked if there was anything he could do. I said, Send me an afternoon in Paris. About a week later a small package arrived in the mail and in it was a beautiful black and gold tin of tea from a little shop in Montparnasse. The name of the tea was “Afternoon in Paris”. It was a heavenly concoction of black tea spiced with orange peel, figs, rose petals and spices. I savored every last bit of it.

I’ve been thinking about that because of a wonderful book that came my way recently. Of all the books I have ever read the one that I cherish the most is Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. It is a memoir of his life as a young man written when he was an old man about his life in Paris among fellow artists and writers. It is beautiful because it is about friends who love each other and fight and who cheat and who make mistakes but are still always there for one another. It is filled with exquisite details as only Hemingway can write then — the taste of oysters fresh from the sea, the color of the liqueurs that Alice B. Toklas served in tiny crystal glasses, the magnificence of the paintings that were an everyday part of his life.

The book contains the lines, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

The book that I just finished is Murder in Montparnasse: A Mystery of Literary Paris by Howard Engel and, if you are a fan of A Moveable Feast, it is a delightful little treat. In some ways, I suppose, it is a bit of a heresy because, though the writer is skillful and has much of Hemingway’s language down well, it is, after all, NOT Hemingway. But I still enjoyed it.

The basic story is that among the friends of the Paris café crowd there is a beautiful but scheming young woman who has an unpleasant habit of cozying up to artists and writers and then using their relationship to blackmail them. She ends up dead and, of course, the whole crowd is suspect. It is a fun read and makes use of the great blow Hemingway suffered when a suitcase filled with his manuscripts, including the originals, was stolen from a train. I have to say, I savored every page of the book.

One of the most wonderful things about a book you really love, as I do A Moveable Feast, is that you can never really get enough of it. And though the imitators are rarely as good as the original (a possible exception being Nicholas Meyer’s Sherlock Holmes books, it gives true fans the opportunity to spend time with beloved characters and see them in new ways. It’s fun.

It has been beautiful here the last few days and that makes me happy. I’ve been lucky to be busy lately with friends who are as tired of winter as I am. We go out to dinner and lunch and get together just to be outside and talk and talk and talk. My friends talk a lot about art and books. I am lucky. So this book was my afternoon in Paris for this year. If you could use one, and you appreciate Hemingway, you might give this book a try.

Thanks for reading.