The Steppes of Paris Read Online Free

“reasonably decent” hotel was in a narrow grey side street off the Boulevard Saint Germain and as he walked back towards it via a leisurely route, Edward was surprised to find himself registering a number of places where he thought it might actually be quite fun to live. He crossed the Pont des Arts and followed the quais as far as the Boulevard Saint Michel. He could live behindone of those stiff, po-faced façades looking out over the river. The caramelised yellow surface of the Seine would chug past on a summer’s evening, always consoling. Or he could live somewhere very high up, looking out over a roofscape: irregular grey slates and lurching television aerials and chimney pots. He caught himself; one day in Paris and he was succumbing to the chocolate box. Next, he would be reminiscing fondly about pitchers of vin rouge on café terraces like those old codgers in London. Determinedly sullen, he ploughed his way up the Boulevard Saint Michel. He overtook crowds of pedestrians of flamboyantly assorted nationalities, all strolling at a slow, self-conscious dawdle. Only a lot later that evening, eating, alone, a deliberately parsimonious pizza in a modest Italian restaurant, did he think that, now he was unavoidably here, surely the right thing to do was to enjoy it. If he acted intelligently, exploring the possibilities of Paris à la Henry Hirshfeld, then it wouldn’t be a selling-out. It would be a journey made against all odds.
    Around him in the dim bedroom, the furniture challenged this momentary optimism. His walk had ended in the Jardin du Luxembourg and there depression and disgust had threatened to win out. A chirruping crowd of Parisians, pigeons and little dogs filled the garden. The air was saturated with perfume and the sound of unsuitable footwear clipping over gravel. Edward had considered the jumble of green metal chairs, the statuary and the bulrushes and reflected that the park was, if possible, even more citified than the boulevard outside. A portrait gallery of Parisian intellectuals sat on the green metal chairs, reading – or perhaps only affecting to read – a selection of slim journals about philosophy, literature, music, art. He had been gripped by a ferocious physical and mental claustrophobia.
    It was the lace curtains, he decided drowsily, which he found most oppressive. The street light came through them where he had not completely closed the thicker brown ones, intensifying the pattern of curlicues and unimaginative flowers. They were redolent of primness, inhibitions, repression. Living behind that kind of curtains would belike trying to breathe with your head inside a polythene bag.
    Just as he was falling back to sleep, he became aware of the noise of two people starting to make love with considerable gusto in the room next door. It seemed to Edward they were laughing in Portuguese.

 
    In the morning, the hotel pipes blew like a hunting horn. Edward felt for his alarm clock, saw it was seven o’clock, and decided to make a good impression on Henry Hirshfeld by arriving at the office as soon as possible after eight.
    His shower put the first damper on his resolve; it petered, rather than anything else, out of the old shower rose so that, instead of beginning the day as he liked to with his normal all-over blasting of hot water, he was simply wettened. He dressed for the office, relieved that Hirshfeld, who had the day before been wearing corduroy trousers, a brown belt and brown shoes, was not a tie man. He kept an unbelievably battered old sports jacket on the back of his door and, at lunch time, he had simply shrugged it on, whereupon it fell into place about him like a baggy skin.
    There seemed something immature about having breakfast in the hotel, so Edward went out into the warm just faintly misty morning, intending to stop for a coffee and a croissant somewhere on his way. The pavements of the Boulevard Saint Germain were already quite busy, mainly with smart but grim-faced