![]() “Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the street. I find it hard to convey the astonishment with which I greeted the opening pages of this book, which features the following description of the low-rent Paris district where Orwell lived while he researched and wrote about the lives of the poor and exploited classes in the city: I plucked Orwell’s 1933 nonfiction novel from the shelf, like Charlie Brown purchasing his scraggly little Christmas tree from the lot of shiny silver monstrosities, and began reading it that afternoon, sitting in the lobby of my hotel room and drinking hot chocolate while my family rested in our rooms upstairs. I knelt down to scan the bottom shelf and spied there a copy of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, looking forlorn and unadorned among the glitzy rash of travel books celebrating the glories of Paris. I thought I would purchase a book that would enrich my experience in the five days I had ahead of me in Europe’s cultural capital, but nothing was catching my fancy. ![]() ![]() In July of 2013, I was standing in the front room of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop, on the left bank of the Seine, looking through a shelf of books about Paris. ![]()
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