Excerpt from The Pathos of Distance: A Book of a Thousand and One Moments
More than a quarter of a century has passed since I first entered the Cafe Guerbois, on the Batignolles, where begins the avenue de Clichy. A student of music, sans le sou, I lived in a little street that ran off the boulevard des Batignolles, No. 5 rue Puteaux, in a sunless room, at the top of a dark, damp building. I studied finger-problems on a tuneless upright pianoforte. Like the instrument, I was out of tune myself, for I was hungry at least eighteen hours of the twenty-four. Dining, as I grandly called it, was an important event in my day; a bowl of chocolate and a dry roll had to suffice me until the evening. Then what joy! soup, succeeded by the meat of the same, followed by a salad and cheese. The wine cost eight sous a litre; it was sharp, thin, and blue: yet it warmed, and when one is not twenty, and possesses a ferocious appetite, coupled with a yearning for the ideal, the human machine needs much stoking to keep up steam and soul.
It was not every day I could afford to sit upon the terrace of the Cafe Guerbois; there I proudly took my coffee and smoked in flush times, after my humble dinner lower down the Batignolles.
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