Hemingway in Love by A. E. Hotchner

Author:A. E. Hotchner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466889484
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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LA LIBERTÉ ÉCLAIRANT LE MONDE

Auguste BARTHOLDI (1834–1904)

A l’occasion de l’exposition universelle de 1900, le sculpteur Auguste Bartholdi a offert au musée du Luxembourg le modèle en bronze qui lui servit à réaliser la statue de la Liberté de New-York. Cette statue a été placée en 1906 dans le jardin du Luxembourg.

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“This particular night, I was feeling a kind of resentment for my predicament, a sort of panic, placing the blame on Paris intrigue, not my own doing.

“I sat there on a bench facing Lady Liberty and took myself back to Oak Park and the day I left our house and the smothering nagging of my mother and lit out on my own with nothing but my own determination to keep me going. I was nineteen, half adventurous, half scared. Getting to Italy and the glory of being an officer in the middle of combat [World War I], but then right off the bat blown up in a trench eating a cheese sandwich, the hospital and rehabilitation in Milan and beyond, limping back to Oak Park, rejected by the nurse I thought I was going to marry, stuck in that house with that righteous Bible-quoting mother of mine.

“So now, I thought, maybe I should once again limp back to the States and come down off my literary high horse and give up this conceit that I belong here, where I have made such a goulash of my life and the lives of those I really care about. How pathetic that I’ve been seriously thinking about suicide as the only way out. I said all that to Lady Liberty, and in the saying I realized what a coward I had become.

“The Luxembourg helped me through several nights like that, and the new day would come along and reset my clock.

“One night, after a string of bad nights, I decided to visit my original neighborhood where we lived at 74 Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine in a small two-room flat, a steep four-flight walk-up. I stood across from our scabrous building, which had a water faucet and a pissoir on every landing but not in our flat. Our bathroom was a closet that had only a pitcher, a bowl, and a slop jar that had to be emptied into a big slop jar on the landing below. Garbage was four flights down into a big garbage bin in the courtyard.

“Thinking about that drab place, I was reminded of my constant hunger. We’d been living on less than less—one egg each or a boiled potato for lunch. Sometimes I’d grab a pigeon in the Luxembourg for dinner.

“No nostalgia for that time of my life, I can tell you. On the street level next door was a bal musette, which was just as lively as it had been when I lived there, the same sign above its entrance: CAROINEL CLUB DANSE. I crossed the street and went in and ordered a whiskey at the bar. It was the same dim, smoky, crowded place, with couples closely dancing on the narrow floor.

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