Paris Wall Newspaper
January 1st 2004
Some people call me
the Don Quixote
of the Latin Quarter
because my head
is so far up in the
clouds that I can
imagine all of us are
angels in paradise,
and instead of
being a bonafide
bookseller I am more
like a frustrated
novelist store has
rooms like chapters
in a novel and the
fact is Tolstoi and
Doestoyevski are
more real to me than
my next door neighb-
ors and even stranger
is the fact that even
before I was born
Dostoyevski wrote
the story of my life in
a book called ‘The
Idiot’ and ever since
reading it I have been
search for the
heroine, a girl
called Nastasia
Filipovna. One
hundred years
ago my bookstore
was a wine shop
hidden from the
Seine by an annex
of the Hotel Dieu
hospital which has
since been demolis-
-hed & replaced by
a garden. And
further back in
the year 1600
our whole building
was a monastery
called La Maison
du Mustier. In
medieval times
each monastery
had a frere lampier
whose duty was to
light the lamps at
night. I have been
doing this for fifty
years now it is
my daughter’s
turn.
GW
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