the power of this city's stories

The bells of Notre Dame.

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river once again to ramble on the right bank, through the bare wintry Tuileries Garden, where I am even more surprised to meet one of my own fictional creations.

I suppose I should have expected to bump into Willem Prins, a disillusioned South African author who spends four days obsessively wandering through Paris in the novel You Lost Me (Misverstand in Afrikaans), which my partner and I recently finished translating into French. And since the French version was published on Amazon shortly before this trip to Paris, Prins's Parisian odyssey is still fresh in my mind - especially his lonely walk on the Sunday morning after the terror attacks of 13 November 2015.

Prins accompanies me for a while, a sad and silent companion, until I remember that Hemingway's The Moveable Feast became an unexpected bestseller in France in the aftermath of those attacks. The French title, Paris est une fête, was regarded as a symbol of defiance and of Parisians' determination to celebrate life. I wish Prins could have known that when he walked through the city on that sad Sunday morning.

At the Egyptian obelisk on Place de la Concorde, I lose sight of Prins as my attention drifts to yet another book. Somewhere around here was the infamous Hotel X where George Orwell worked as a dishwasher, an experience he described so impressively in his 1933 memoir, Down and Out in Paris and London.