4

HE MAY BE USEFUL

PARIS BEGINS with the curious onlooker and ends with the gamin, two beings of which no other city is capable; passive acceptance satisfied with merely looking on, and exhaustless enterprise; Prudhomme and Fouillou. Paris alone comprises this in its natural history. All monarchy is comprised in the onlooker; all anarchy in the gamin.

This pale child of the Paris suburbs lives, develops, and gets into and out of “scrapes,” amid suffering, a thoughtful witness of our social realities.