Around that Place there were two kinds; the drunkards and the sportifs. The
drunkards killed their poverty that way; the sportifs took it out in exercise. They were the
descendants of the Communards and it was no struggle for them to know their politics.
They knew who had shot their fathers, their relatives, their brothers, and their friends
when the Versailles troops came in and took the town after the Commune and executed
any one they could catch with calloused hands, or who wore a cap, or carried any other
sign he was a working man. And in that poverty, and in that quarter across the street from
a Boucherie Chevaline and a wine cooperative he had written the start of all he was to do.
There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old
white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in that round
square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue
Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue
Mouffetard. The street that ran up toward the Pantheon and the other that he always took
with the bicycle, the only asphalted street in all that quarter, smooth under the tires, with
the high narrow houses and the cheap tall hotel where Paul Verlaine had died. There were
only two rooms in the apartments where they lived and he had a room on the top floor of
that hotel that cost him sixty francs a month where he did his writing, and from it he could
see the roofs and chimney pots and all the hills of Paris.