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, witless grasses working for low-grade cops, middle- class types a bit too willing to conform (leaving aside the pound of black-market meat and the camembert without ration tickets) - all feel too ill at ease here. They’ve only got to stay away. Along with anyone else who doesn’t meet the requirements of this establishment: first and foremost, to keep your trap shut. The war? Past history. The Krauts? Don’t know any. Russia? Change at Reaumur. The police? There was a time when they were needed for directing the traffic. At Pignol’s, silence constitutes the most important, most difficult and lengthiest induction ordeal. After that, it’s a matter of imponderables. It works according to the rule of three: the people who don’t get along with the people that I get along with are people I can’t get along with. Syllogisms, of course. Now clear out! . Jacques Yonnet
Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.
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Roman Payne
For in Paris, whenever God puts a pretty woman there (the streets), the Devil, in reply, immediately puts a fool to keep her.
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Jules Barbey DAurevilly
... you’ll have to fall in love at least once in your life, or Paris has failed to rub off on you.
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E.a. Bucchianeri
The great correspondent of the seventeenth century Madame de Sevigne counseled, "Take chocolate in order that even the most tireome company seem acceptable to you, " which is also sound advice today!
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Barrie Kerper
When Hitler marched across the RhineTo take the land of France, La dame de fer decided, ‘ Let’s make the tyrant dance.’ Let him take the land and city, The hills and every flower, One thing he will never have, The elegant Eiffel Tower.The French...
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E.a. Bucchianeri
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...
