Strolling around the river gauche at Quai Voltaire I stopped over one of those bouquiniste stands by the Seine to take a quick glance into the bouquins. Anyway I was overdue for an interview job and was strapped for money but a thick volume in beautiful binding, rose vellum, gold embossed caught instantly my eyes:
James Joyce-Clarissa Holloway Letters (1928-1941)
Hogarth Press, 1953.
At first sight I believed it was a long-winded, pedantic essay about the metafictive connection between James Joyce and Virginia Woolf's styles. Or maybe someone lampooning both writers. However when I started to flick through those yellowish pages there was not doubt: I was reading the crossed letters between a real person and a fictional character from a very famous novel. I muttered something to myself smirking, pretty sure that was only a boutade contrived by some two-bit admirer of Georges Perec. But I noticed the book was prefaced by Leonard Woolf himself who spent several years to compile the letters. I read some of them with the growing curiosity of a scholar. This really oozed the aroma of something pukka, not a bogus.
Enthused with such a unique trove, I asked the bouquiniste(an old blue-eyed geezer with grey beret and Quebec's accent) about the book price. He dusted it off examined the first pages like an expert with a magnifying glass, tipping at the same time the beret over one ear, then over the other like a madman. "40 euros"-suddenly snapped without raising the eyes from the book.
I was surprised, rather expecting a hefty price well beyond my means. Even so I had just 20 euros on me so I nearly begged the bouquiniste not to sell the book to anyone, that I'd be back in a jiffy with the fric. I nipped to the next ATM and withdrew 40 euros.
When I hurried back to the stand, I came across the same books but not the same bouquiniste: this time I was in front of a young and strapping Senegalese with long and colourful dreadlocks. His dark shades mirrored back my po-faced look. A kind of piercing glinted on his lower lip. Sat down on a stool, slouchy, he seemed more interested in selling old postcards about Notre Dame de Paris. I asked him about the old man with grey beret and the book he had put me by. I flaunted my 40 euros. His dark shades reflecting now the sad and overcast sky of Paris. He only grinned and gave me the cold shoulder billowing out the smoke from an odorous spliff, then got up to attend a gaggle of Japanese tourists. Disappointed, I asked around all the stands, all the string of bouquinistes around Quai Voltaire but nobody knew anything about the book, never heard of the blue-eyed old geezer with Quebec's accent.
