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Eugene Atget: Rue des Ursins, 1923.

Source:
Fine Art Photography Gallery & Forum: Eugene Atget:
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Gaito Gazdanov's Paris / 23

A turn of the wheel

Paris is made up of isolated zones. I heard an old labourer – I met him at the paper factory near the boulevard de la Gare – say that in forty years of living in Paris he had never gone to the Champs Elysées because, as he explained, he never worked there.

In this city – in the poorer districts – in the midst of a modern world, without blending into it, without even colliding with it, subsisted a very ancient mentality, a fourteenth-century mentality.

And sometimes, obliged to venture into streets whose existence I had not even suspected, I said to myself that the Middle Ages were still in their death throes.

But it was only rarely that I could concentrate on a single idea: a turn of the wheel and the narrow street disappeared, giving way to a broad avenue full of buildings with glass doors and elevators. [24]