The recent events around a “City of Literature” application for Dumaguete had the effect on me of re-awakening long ago memories of my extraordinary good luck to be turning 20 in “my city of literature”, Paris, and of embarking on a year of glorious discoveries and learning in that most beautiful of cities.
It had all started with Mlle Brosolette’s class in UP, followed by the Manila Alliance Francaise, and then a small scholarship to France.
Fortunately, the language had come easily to me, perhaps helped by our household habit of shifting among the four languages we spoke at home.
As literature had won out over medicine when I was deciding on a university course, I was already poring over English and Asian literature, and now came the chance to immerse myself in French literature.
Thinking back to the authors and works I still remember, it seems incredible to have packed that much reading in something over a year. When the scholarship ran out, and I wanted to stay on, I found a morning job typing up the memoirs of an elderly American woman who was a Titanic survivor!
The rest of the time it was classes, discovery walks in the different city districts, where one could come upon the residences of celebrated writers like Victor Hugo (some French would say “Alas, our famous poet”), or of Mme de Sevigne, a highly-esteemed woman writer (that I can re-read as I have her famous letters.)
Many evenings were for the theater where, armed with a student card, entry to all theaters was almost free.
It made for a particularly rich experience to have discussed say, a Racine play, and then to watch the theater performance of the intense personal and public passions that characterized most of his work.
In the Comedie Francaise, the oldest continuously active theater company in Paris, Moliere plays, delightful with their satiric and comedic elements were a particular treat even as they made profound commentary on the issues of the time.
A student card also gave access to some of the famous libraries in the city. And a fun feature of Paris were the bouquinistes or the sellers of used and antiquarian books on stalls along the banks of the river Seine. When a friend from Manila was on a Paris visit, and we looked through the bouquiniste stalls, he found to his delight, a copy of what appeared to be a two century-old map of the Philippines, exciting for someone who was a scholar and historian.
Shakespeare and Company was a bookstore carrying English-language books opened and run by American Sylvia Beach who published Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, and sold Hemingway’s first book.
I enjoyed browsing there, too, knowing that it had been the gathering place for later famous writers who had converged in Paris to make it for a time, their city of literature.
It was also interesting that philosopher writers like Malraux, Sartre, and feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir continued to be active in that time, and that I could follow them in the press. Albert Camus had died just a few years earlier, but his work had been particularly meaningful to me, even before my Paris sojourn.
This exercise of remembering has made me want to reread, and relive the pleasure that those works gave me long ago.
A friend recently said that today is the golden age of online technology to access any and all written material. I want to learn to do that, and have started a list from my time in my city of literature: poetry of Ronsard, Moliere plays, Racine’s Phedre, the Lettres persanes, the last volumes of Proust…. Not a bad way, I think, of shutting out the ugly world of today.
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Author’s email: h.cecilia7@gmail.com
