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 he’d stuffed into the pocket of his raincoat, folded up any old how. I helped him. Then he asked me, straight out, ‘What would you say was the true centre of Paris?’I was taken aback, wrong-footed. I thought this knowledge was part of a whole body of very rarefied and secret lore. Playing for time, I said, ‘The starting point of France’s roads . the brass plate on the parvis of Notre-Dame.’He gave me a withering look.‘ Do you take for me a sap?’ The centre of Paris, a spiral with four centres, each completely self-contained, independent of the other three. But you don’t reveal this to just anybody. I suppose - I hope - it was in complete good faith that Alexandre Arnoux mentioned the lamp behind the apse of St-Germain-l’Auxerrois. I wouldn’t have created that precedent. My turn now to let the children play with the lock.‘ The centre, as you must be thinking of it, is the well of St-Julien-le-Pauvre. The “Well of Truth” as it’s been known since the eleventh century.’ He was delighted. I’d delivered. He said, ‘You know, you and I could do great things together. It’s a pity I’m already “beyond redemption”, even at this very moment.’ His unhibited display of brotherly affection was of childlike spontaneity. But he was still pursuing his line of thought: he dashed out to the nearby stationery shop and came back with a little basic pair of compasses made of tin.‘ Look. The Vieux-Chene, the Well. The Well, the Arbre-a-Liege On either side of the Seine, adhering closely to the line he’d drawn, the age-old tavern signs were at pretty much the same distance from the magic well.‘ Well, now, you see, it’s always been the case that whenever something bad happens at the Vieux-Chene, a month later – a lunar month, that is, just twenty-eight days – the same thing happens at old La Frite’s place, but less serious. A kind of repeat performance. An echo Then he listed, and pointed out on the map, the most notable of those key sites whose power he or his friends had experienced. In conclusion he said, ‘I’m the biggest swindler there is, I’m prepared to be swindled myself, that’s fair enough. But not just anywhere. There are places where, if you lie, or think ill, it’s Paris you disrespect. And that upsets me. That’s when I lose my cool: I hit back. It’s as if that’s what I was there for. Jacques Yonnet
Sometimes I feel like we're a knot, too tangled to be taken apart.
-
Kiera Cass
Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.
-
Willa Cather
Learning the truth has become my life's love.
-
Dan Brown
I am not a victim. No matter what I have been through, I'm still here. I have a history of victory.
-
Steve Maraboli
It is better to fill your head with useless knowledge than no knowledge at all.
-
Jim Hinckley
More Quotes By Jacques Yonnet
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 he’d stuffed into the pocket of his raincoat, folded up any old how. I helped him. Then he asked me,...
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 from the Tax Register of the period....
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, their logic. You cannot imagine what great delights this profession...
Men are so isolated, prisoners of their own wretched selves, that they can be unbelievably sociable.
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 knowledge of arrested time. They play with those vacant moments as though...
