La Bâtarde
Violette Leduc
Language: English
Pages: 427
ISBN: 1573226092
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In her second revealing memoir of literary Paris, Leduc shares her insights into a post-War Parisian scene dominated by the likes of Camus, Genet, Sartre, Cocteau, and Simone de Beauvoir, who became her mentor for a time. Original.
Les Miserables (Penguin Classics)
The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, Volume 3) (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Pleasures, and gives way to l1er every caprice. Hermine demands nothing--except, when night comes, to be allowed to sleep. An insomniac herself, Violette rebels against this desertion. Later, she forbids it to Gabriel as well. "I hate people wlw sleep." She shakes them, wakes them up, and forces them with tears or kisses to keep their eyes open. But Gabriel, less tractable than Hermine, claims tl1e right to follow his profession and dispose of his free time as he pleases; every morning, when he.
On very little money and a great deal of curiosity, courage, and enthusiasm for books, nature, a cigarette, a bodice she was cutting out, a concert, a lecture, a fingernail file. Her nostrils quivered, her eyes sparkled, her indulgence in the study hall was proverbial. She called out the names of the girls who were talking, she never lowered herself to exact penalties. I would stay up on the dais with her too long. Mlle. Fromont would come in to take Her mine's place at the desk and catch us.
World in which I was floundering with a wooden leg. Their vocabulary made me an outsider. But I could see how transparent they were to each other, standing elbow to elbow. Mid day. Gin and beer in the country bars where I came from. Midday in Paris. They were going to play at diabolo-menthe and melt-cass. They sounded like games. But they weren't playing : they were drinking and fraternizing with colors. I thought them frivolous and too full of themselves; their Parisian accents grated on me.
See. Not with this frosted glass . . ." "You see the others." "Yes, but this is Paul Bourget." "Well, he can come now if he wants to. I've got the file ready." The Disciple. I'm going to see The Disciple. Life after all . . You're polishing your shoes at school, sitting in the shoe shop, and then whoosh . . . . There you are, certain the author of The Disciple is coming. But it's not the man I'm waiting for, it's his fame. Life after all . . . There's nothing it can't do. Except it isn't life.
Come back, and I say : "You loved him. What a poor sort of man he was." You bristle. No, I don't want to demolish you by demolishing him. "A prince. A true prince." That's what you used to call him. I lis tened, I dribbled, I don't dribble anymore. The next day, in the grocer's, you say to the woman behind the counter : "Some nice fruit. It's for the goddess. I shall have complaints." You wound me. You wouldn't get complaints. What a gloomy young girl you had been. The bad soup in the orphanages.