Robert Doisneau - Vue de Nuit des Halles

It ended at last, at daybreak in a bistro near Les Halles, where they had often gone at dawn for rolls or chocolate or coffee. Outside they could hear the nightly roar and rumble of the market, the cries of the venders, and smell all sweet smells of earth and morning, of first light, health, and joy, and day beginning.
(Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth)

Thomas Wolfe died at thirty-eight. William Faulkner was saying that Wolfe was the best writer of his generation. Some consider that Jack Kerouac, the leading chronicler of the Beat generation, was influenced by Thomas Wolfe.

When I left Paris I was only three years old – soon I forgot all that small amount of French that I was able to speak at three. I remember precisely the day when I started to use Romanian words. It was after six months – one morning when I discovered suddenly that I knew the French word and that I knew also its Romanian equivalent, and that I could use the Romanian one. I took quickly a decision, to use only Romanian words – and to keep in my speech only one French word, that I loved – bateau. And soon after that the only French word that remained in my memory was exactly this one, bateau. There were several marines in our house – one of them was showing several boats leading toward the harbor – I don’t know why I remained with the impression that those were Turkish boats, kind of caïc-s, and that the harbor was Constantinople. The painting is still hanging on a wall in my apartment in Bucharest, I still believe firmly that it shows caïc-s leading toward Constantinople, and I still don’t know why I believe that.

From Paris I kept two memories – firstly the escalators in the subway stations – as I had seen a gentleman getting on the escalators, taken up by them – and when he was on the middle of his way, the gentleman was always starting to go up by himself. I remember how I had seen this scene in Paris several times – amazing scene for a kid under three years old. This was my first chunk of memory that I remained with from my early childhood in Paris, and it was so strong that always when I am on an escalator, in a subway station, in a department store, wherever, I start to go up by myself when I am on the middle – aiding the escalator, so to speak.

The second chunk of memory that I kept was from my first birthday. It seems incredible, but the impression was too strong for the kid of one year old. My mother took me to a terrace of a café, to treat me with a glass of lemonade – and I was trying to put the glass to my mouth, and the sparkles were pinching my nostrils – so I tried several times to drink the lemonade without success.

Some places in Bucharest were impressing me in a particular way – one of them was Halele in Piata Mare (named today Piata Unirii). As I can see in the photo above, Halele in Piata Mare in Bucharest had as a model Les Halles of Paris – and like them they were demolished sometime in the seventies or so – their location was near the famous Hanul lui Manuc.

Well, after about fifty years I was again in Paris, this time for a week only, and as we were on our way from the Charles de Gaulle airport, some other memories, that I was unaware of, were emerging from me. But this is already another story, to be told some other time…