Owen Wilson in Woody Allen's
Midnight in Paris"Within my young friend's heart what mysteries keep
Aglow, soul from this sweet mask breathing a flower?"
from
La Dormeuse by Paul Valery
Published in Paris, a Literary Chronicle of Paris in the 1920's and 1930's, by Hugh Ford
"Well,
Ernest, here you are again talking to me at the Cafe de Flore in Paris. I haven't seen you for a while. I have several versions of that sonnet I wrote after your death but I never got it right. I love you,
Ernest, I still do. You were an interesting man, and the first friend I really quarrelled with..."
from "
Ernest Appears Again" by Leonard Cohen
"Colin Field behind the Bar Hemingway, Hotel Ritz, la Place Vendome," photo by Thomas Harris
"I had nothing more to give you of myself last night than any man,
Sated and avuncular and filled with his own good rhapsodies. But
One thing you can be certain of, nonetheless: the bird I saw there,
Up in a tree from the village yard, was a happy bird, and the pail
I kicked, later on in the dark, bounced all the way up to heaven
And back, and it gave itself to the night, and was full, and slept."
from
Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot
They are all there: Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, T.S. Eliot, Carla Bruni(!), Fitzgerald, Man Ray... And if determined, you can go back even further to La Belle Epoque, the court of Louis XIV...
