“Nichevo” was Bertie Smyllie, the then editor. It’s just that when I looked up “Deux Magots” in this newspaper’s archive afterwards, I found it mentioned in An Irishman’s Diary from 1946, by “Nichevo”, who in the same piece also recalled that his previous visit to Paris, seven years earlier, had coincided with France’s last public guillotining. Speaking of the French Revolution (and of Irish diarists, as I’ll explain), a shock revelation of my brief visit to Les Deux Magots was that public executions by guillotine were still happening in France as recently as 1939. As Bartlett noted, Tone’s ambition was not to be the first president of an Irish Republic, but its first ambassador in Paris, with the ready supply of good “Burgundy” that would bring.īartlett’s talk was at the opening of a conference on “Irish Writers and French Connections”, hosted by the University of Chicago’s Paris campus. In a more peaceful era, he might have been a travel writer, such was his fascination with faraway shores in general. In fact, according to Tom Bartlett of the University of Aberdeen, he may have been the greatest of all Irish diarists (an opinion the rest of us will try not to take personally).ĭuring efforts to persuade revolutionary France to help free Ireland, Tone doubled as a tourist there, recording his impressions of the local food, wine, and women with colourful detail. But as I was reminded in Paris on Friday, he was also a noted diarist. Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–1798) is now mainly known as a republican martyr, of course. But even there, perhaps because of proximity to greatness, a double espresso was €6.80. In the event, we ended up at a less celebrated place down the road. Thanks to such associations, Les Deux Magots now bills itself as a “café littéraire” and has tourists queueing up to pay its inflated prices. It even has a picture of her writing it, live. The café website claims she composed the novel Les Mandarins (1954) here. This is partly the effect of 20th-century influencers, including Simone de Beauvoir, who used the place as her office. At one point, before posing for yet another shot, he hid his face behind a menu and yawned.Īround them, the terrace tables of Les Deux Magots were full and there was a queue to join them. The boy was seated in the background, with a croissant on the table in front of him that he must have been forbidden to eat. The little girl was foregrounded in shots. An all-female team including two photographers and a wardrobe department (or at least a woman supervising a suitcase full of clothes) were taking pictures of a pair of small schoolchildren in next season’s fashions.
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