Two Bedrooms in Paris: Two Beds I Had No Business Sleeping In
Two Bedrooms in Paris: Two Beds I Had No Business Sleeping In
The narrator of these stories is a young man from nowhere in particular — well-read, poorly funded, and convinced, in the way of the very young, that proximity to interesting people constitutes an education.
In The Silence, he cuts foam mattresses at a flea market and is invited into a rue Monge apartment full of jazz, hashish, and people who have read all the right books and done all the right things with them except make sense with their lives.
In Madame, a few years later, he lives rent-free in a borrowed Montparnasse flat, attending operas on someone else's subscription, reading Kant at someone else's desk, and doing his best to ignore someone else's mother.
He is not always successful.
Whether any of this happened is beside the point. What matters is that it has the texture of something remembered — which is to say, selected, arranged, and slightly improved in the telling. The important moments, as he eventually discovers, are not what he did. They are what he almost did, and didn't. To desist can be the ultimate resistance.