I was in Paris in mid-2019. As soon as I disembarked, I deliberated: I will use my stay to buy some works that I have difficulty finding in Brazil.
Well, It was my first time in Paris. They advised me to search for the books in small tallows on the edge of the River Seine, near the Louvre, to find the best prices. There I went and arriving, you see, I found not one, but twenty tents lined up, all of them full of books. “I am in the homeland of letters” — I thought.
So I started doing math: I did not have the space or the money to take everything I wanted to buy. I would have to choose, say, four or five authors and that’s it. I desired, anyway, a physical version of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal; Aveux et anathèmes, by Cioran, was another indispensable purchase. I therefore decided and asked the first seller, “Avez-vous quelque chose de Baudelaire, Cioran, Flaubert ou Maupassant?“. The quelque chose sounded to me like insolence. There would certainly be the complete works of all the authors…
The salesman searched, searched, searched and returned the answer: “Non“. I went to the next tent; again the answer: “Non“. So I passed in each of the stalls, always asking the same question, and always getting the same answer. When I received the last “non” and noticed that the tents had run out, I just did not believe it, I thought it was impossible the scene I had just experienced.
There were, as I said, about twenty tents, each with two, maybe three hundred books. How did none of them have a single work by Charles Baudelaire, the greatest poet of the 19th century? I understand the French do not read Cioran, but Baudelaire? Flaubert?
Then the obvious question popped into my head: “If there is no Cioran, Flaubert, Maupassant or Baudelaire, what are these tents full of?” And, believe it or not, sweeping the nearest shelf with my eyes, there I found, in a prominent position, L’alchimiste, by Paulo Coelho.
____________
Read more: