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Thirty Years in Paris; To Which Are Added La Fédor and Arlatan's Treasure
Thirty Years in Paris To Which Are Added La Fdor and Arlatan's Treasure Author:Alphonse Daudet General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1900 Original Publisher: Little, Brown, and Co. Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where ... more »you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: II. VILLEMESSANT.1 Sometimes -- when my personal necessities and the hazards of my wanderings coincide -- I go to be shaved or have my hair cut at Lespes's. A curious and distinctively Parisian spot is that great barber's shop, occupying the whole corner of the Frascati building, on Rue Vivienne and Boulevard Montmartre! Its clientage is All- Paris; that is to say, that infinitely small fragment of Paris which leads its life between the Gymnase and the Opera, Notre-Dame de-Lorette and the Bourse, and fancies that it alone exists; hangers-on of the greenroom, actors, journalists, to say nothing of the restless, busy legion of worthy botilevardiers, who do nothing at all. Twenty or thirty permanent attendants shave and curl them all. Superintending everything, with one eye on the razors and the other on the jars of pomade, the master, Lespes, prowls about here and there, an active little man whom the fortune he has made -- for he is very rich -- might have fattened, were it not that a certain disappointed ambition keeps him in a suitably feverish frame of mind. It was in that house, predestined in very sooth, that Le Figaro had its offices twenty years ago, on the same entresol where Lespes shaves his clients. There were the passage way, the subscription department, the counting-room, and, behind an iron-wire grating, the round eye and hooked nose of Pere Legendre, always vexed, rarely good-natured, like a parrot playing the role of cashier. There was the editorial office (The Public not admitted! on the soiled glass panes of the door), a few chairs and a lar...« less