Copyright 2010 Kenneth J. Ross All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

. Photographers: Bertrand Celce and Kenneth J. Ross Editor: Lynda Rivington Translator: Michle Lejars Translation: Adam Ross/Shauna Peck Designer: L-Phan Publisher: Clover Leaf Publishing Company Photo credits: Bertrand Celce: pages VI, VIII, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 20, 24, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 40, 47, 48, 49, 51, back cover. Ken Ross: front cover, pages I, X, 2, 5, 7, 21, 27, 43, 44, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60 Special thanks to Frank Tierney for his advice in the publication of this book Grateful acknowledgement is extended to all the artists who agreed to be part of this book. Should further information be required the author can be contacted at kennethross@rogers.com ISBN 978-0-9685898-1-6 First printing October 2010 Printed in Canada PARIS INTO DREAMS by Kenneth J. Ross Distributed to the book trade as a limited edition by the Clover Leaf Publishing Company.

First Edition

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ............................................................ IX Part One The Introduction ............................................. 1 1. Paris With Good Intentions ...................................... 3 2. The Inspiration To Write ........................................... 5 Part Two The Stories ...................................................... 11 1. A Chance Encounter With Ernest Hemingway ..... 13 2. The First Time I Saw Paris ....................................... 21 3. Looking Out At La Coupole From A Window Seat In Montparnasse ....................................................... 29 4. The Metro Violinist .................................................. 41 5. Marie-Antoinette And The Uninvited Guest ........ 49

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A Chance Encounter With Ernest Hemingway

getting away from it all. I was an aspiring writer with an uneven track record and needed the cover of darkness to search out creative ideas that would inspire me to continue with my work. Paris was the perfect place for this endeavor. There was no other city quite like it. It immersed you at every turn into its history, into its munificence, into the golden years of its yesterday. If you were alive to the artistic landscape that identified its culture and its place, you understood its aesthetics, its well-being and its raison dtre. It was a city of light, a city of dreams, a city above the clouds, a haven for artistic expression, for creativity and the written word. It was the perfect place for a would-be writer, for someone with work-in-progress; someone living on the blind side hoping for the best. I had come to Paris to write the great novel. I had left behind the remnants of a failed marriage, loads of unpublished material and several shoeboxes of unpaid bills. Paris was the beginning and the end. If one was going to be a writer, it would happen here, in the heart of the city. Paris would be the litmus test. If you couldnt write in Paris, you couldnt write at all. After a few days of wandering around the city, I found an affordable, four-story walk-up apartment near the Sorbonne. It was not far from the Latin Quarter and the Jardin du Luxembourg. It was a stones throw from the rue Cardinale Lemoine and particularly No. 74 where, on the third floor, a very young Ernest Hemingway and his wife lived for a short time as he explored his writing talents and his love for adventure.

I had walked the streets of Paris for months in the quiet of the late nights. It was my way of

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Madame Limonier, my agente immobilire, assured me that my apartment was much nicer than the old Hemingway apartment. This was comforting to me, even though I did not quite believe her. It was not what you would call the Palais de Versailles. It had its shortcomings. It was cold and small and the plumbing was faulty. Hemingway, I am told, had the benefit of a toilet on the landing that worked all the time. It was pumped out every night into horse-drawn tank wagons. While Im sure this was not the most elegant of situations, it was better than walking down four flights of stairs to look for the janitor to attend to these matters. But that was the apartment and this was Paris. It was not New York or Toronto or Chicago or Los Angeles. It was Paris, home to the rich and famous, to the living dead immortalized in Montparnasse, and Montmartre, and le Cimetire du Pre Lachaise. It was home to the politicians who kept office hours in the wine bistros thinking and talking about lingerie and the future of France. It was home to the fashion designers who produced clothing that nobody wore. It was home to the government workers, les fonctionnaires, who never reached their full potential because they spent so much time walking the streets in protest for not having to walk the streets in protest because wages were too high and the benefits too good. And it was also home to the boulevardiers and the kept ladies with their fancy hats who sat in the outdoor cafs in the long afternoons waiting for recognition and a waiter to bring them the bill. Yes, it was true, the Parisians were different. They kept to themselves. And yes, they could be exasperating and yes, they could be rude, but only fashionably so. If they were unkind it was not by design. It was a part of their Gaullist heritage. They had genuine beliefs in politics as well as religion. They could talk law and order but were happy to overlook both so long as it did not affect the status quo. They were socialists at heart. It was their meal ticket into old age. They were also Roman Catholic. They believed in the Holy Ghost and the sanctity of the Virgin Mary, both of which they honored every Sunday. It was a day reserved for piety and obligation. For the rest of the week, well, there were so many other matters to contend with.

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hey also considered themselves on the cutting edge, in the avant-garde of fashion and design. But yet they were mired in traditions that went back to the Napoleonic age and in many ways were old-fashioned and behind the times. They believed in a short work week and a good pension. It was paramount to their engaging lifestyle. The family came first, food and wine came second, and free time to enjoy the benefits of both came in third. After that, nothing else mattered. What was left over was the responsibility of government. That was why they were elected. It was an idealized lifestyle that exhibited itself in the bistros and cafs all over the city; an espresso, a glass of red wine, a Gitane cigarette. I was taken in. I was caught in the culture. I was the poor man in Paris looking for his place in the sun, looking for immortality in the company of Flaubert and Camus and Proust and Malraux and who else did I leave out? There had to be more. And there was. But before I could sit at the table with these literary giants and bask in the sunlight of my imagination, I had to produce the words, the phrases, the sentences that would keep the readers on the page. It was a difficult task given that I had marginal talent. But I persisted and I was enthusiastic. I wrote every day, producing a reasonable amount of material that I thought both good and original. And while I wrote, I thought of the great English writer and lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, who was asked to comment on a manuscript sent to him for review. Your manuscript, he said in reply, is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good. I was concerned with the thought but I was not threatened by it. I was on higher ground. Getting the material out was what counted. I was happy with my day. However, as time went by, my luck changed and I began producing less and less. Soon, I was looking at nothing but blank pages. This was not in my best interest. Blank pages did not sell well. It was a writers worst nightmare. I had hit the wall. Those fresh, clean pages that were stacked up in the tray in the morning were still stacked up in the tray at the end of the day. It was disconcerting. But the writing business was like that.

tried to be productive, no matter how hard you tried to knit the words together with the adjectives and the verbs and the nouns that were piling up in front of you like so many logs jammed up in a river, there was very little you could do about it. You had to stop writing and give it a rest; you had to wait for the weather to change, for the tides to come in and for the logs to give way. And while I waited, I walked the streets of Paris in the late hours of the night. And in the glimmering shadows that fell away from the iron lamps lined up along the boulevards and the cobblestone streets, I looked for the answers to my literary dreams. During these walks, I often dropped in to a small zinc bar not far from the apartment in the Latin Quarter on the Rue de Seine in the sixime arrondissement. It was an escape from the writing and an opportunity to unwind in one of Pariss oldest bistros, La Palette.

There were days when you had to live with the empty page. And no matter how hard you

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who were regulars. They were often seen sitting quietly on a corner banquette away from the bar, drink in hand, with a sketch pad or a notebook nearby lying on one of the wooden tables highly honed with the patina of age and the care of a polished rag. It was a popular bistro, not only because it was across the street from the cole des beaux-arts and attracted the art students from the school, but because it was part of a Bohemian lifestyle. It attracted everyone. Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni were regular patrons. They liked the atmosphere and the lack of attention they received from the amiable, crotchety waiters who, it seemed, bent over backwards most of the time to avoid the clientele. But this was not unusual. Waiters were a special breed in Paris. They were in a world of their own. They were created with an attitude by the Almighty Himself who made them invincible, legendary and insufferable from birth.

It had been around a long time, going back to the days of Picasso and Braque and Hemingway

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oday, not much had changed. The large canvases by les petits matres were still hanging above the bar and around the room. They had been placed up near the ceiling and angled to better display their prominence to the art world even though they were minor works. In the back room, on the walls, were the tiled murals from the thirties that advertised the virtues of liquors no longer available to the discerning man about town. They looked up-to-date like they had been put there yesterday, even though they were seventy years old. They added atmosphere. They complemented the art work. It was part of the decor. I liked the place. I liked its history. I liked its ambiance. It was true to character and to form. And while it was quieter these days than it had been years ago, it still maintained an active trade, not so much with the art students who had moved on to other bistros in the area, but with the tourists and the out-of-towners who had stepped into their shoes. They were now the guardians of this Bohemian tradition, loyal to the times remembered and the idealizations of the past. Un whiskey, Charlie, I called out as I settled into the banquette by the door and lit up a Gitane. I was in for the long haul. If I could not string words together on a page, I could string them into a glass. In the morning, I would start again. I had not taken more than a swallow of the whiskey when a burly, bearded character sat down at the table next to me. I was startled by his appearance and his familiarity. He was odd in an odd sort of way, masculine and heavy set, with whiskers, white on white, trimmed all the way down to his neck. He had a pugnacious nose that extended out from his face which highlighted the shadows under his eyes. His hair was rumpled and tossed over to one side and his hands, muscular and tight, spoke of self-assurance and know-how. He looked so damn familiar and yet...I knew the face well enough or, at least, I thought I did. It was just the name. While I continued to ponder the matter, he ordered a drink and took out a notebook from the inside pocket of his wool jacket. He carefully placed it on the table in front of him. And, as he started to write hunched up over the table, with his pen in his hand and his beard flowing over the page, it came to me suddenly.

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