Staggering out of la gare, barely awake after five days in Florence and an all-night gabfest with a gay Nigerian, I spared a glance for Notre Dame on my way to “the poorer quarters where the ragged people go” and… nearly got killed by an octogenarian on a bicycle who was wielding a bag of tenpenny nails. He jumped off his bike, asked me to help him build some bookshelves (!) and welcomed me into his weird world. This was none other than George Whitman, owner of S&Co. Ensued total craziness ranging from bookshelf building to busking to midnight rides with weird cabbies to dancing in the Tuileries to the great climactic moment, a late-night wine-sodden cafe argument with a biographer, an actor, a backpacker, and anyone else who happened by as to whether one could translate “Jabberwocky.” Yeah, I know the usual topic in Paris is the Decline and Fall of Something, but that night we were like necromancers trying to raise the body of Latin and make it dance to Lewis Carroll’s poetry.

I never did go inside the Louvre. I spent a total of thirty minutes on the rive droite. So I need to go back, and preferably in late September or October again. But another weird thing happened to me there… George told me I had better go home and buy a bookshop of my own, and when I came back, one was for sale, just half an hour away from my then-apartment. So I bought it. George, my mythical Leopold Bloom, I owe you, man.