“He insisted on clearing the table, and again devoted himself to his game of patience: piecing together the map of Paris, the bits of which hed stuffed into the pocket of his raincoat, folded up any...”

“The Oberge des Mailletz is by far the oldest tavern of which any record can found in the City archives. In 1292, Adam des Mailletz, inn-keeper, paid a tithe of 18 sous and 6 deniers.This we learn f...”

“An historian is a kind detective in search of the fact remote or otherwise - that brings to a set of events apparently unconnected with each other, the link that unites them, their justification, ...”

“No one will shake my conviction that those leaders of men, who are in the nature of carbuncles, of semi-conscious abscesses, who draw feverish crowds to them like noxious humours, have an innate kn...”

“Men are so isolated, prisoners of their own wretched selves, that they can be unbelievably sociable.”

“Silence, like madness, is only comparative.”

“It’s splendid how much at home we feel at Pignol’s. A tacit complicity at every moment prevails among the regulars here. A process of self-selection operates: starving crooks, thirsty whores, witle...”

“Paris was all so... Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all - the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Child...”

“Oh, well, it might look like a patterned world, laid out in prim design, but to those living there it could never be so simple. They were as alive as she: that old peasant contriving to outwit the ...”

“I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.”