Concorde, metro station
curved walls/ceiling covered in lettered tiles by Francoise Schein > tiles spell out Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen of 1789 [Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen], a “fundamental document of the French Revolution” // they look a bit like crossword squares
Ezra Pound's ‘In a Station of the Metro’ was inspired by this station
A Moveable Feast
Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring and heard the pipes of the man with his herd of goats and gone out and bought the racing paper. But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, not sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight. (49)
[Stein] was angry at Ezra Pound because he sat down too quickly on a small, fragile and, doubtless, uncomfortable chair, that it is quite possible he had been given on purpose, and had either cracked or broken it. That finished Ezra at 27 rue de Fleurus. That he was a great poet and a gentle and generous man and could have accommodated himself in a normal-size chair was not considered. The reasons for her dislike of Ezra, skillfully and maliciously put, were invented years later [i.e. "A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not."]. (60)
Ezra was kinder and more Christian about people than I was. His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and he was so sincere in his mistakes and so enamoured of his errors, and so kind to people that I always thought of him as a sort of saint. He was also irascible but so, I believe, have been many saints. (88)
She quarrelled with nearly all of us that were fond of her except Juan Gris and she couldn't quarrel with him because he was dead. (93)
I was wondering if he [Ernest Walsh] ate the flat oysters in the same way the whores in Kansas City, who were marked for death and practically everything else, always wished to swallow semen as a sovereign remedy against the con; but I did not ask him. (98)