They made their way to the flea market near Boulevard de Strasbourg. One particular booth stood out. Its attendant was an older man with a full gray beard reaching half way to his waist. He was wearing a hat and a long worn topcoat with a handkerchief in the breast pocket. The coat was heavy but not that out of place considering the unpredictable weather of that May. On his display table was an incredible array of fishing lures and a few well worn paperbacks. Glancing, I noticed the title of one was "L' Affaire Charles Dexter Ward" and another was "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman. "Which is your favorite lure?" I asked. He bent over his display for a moment and then reached into his pocket, and pulled out an inexpensive cigarette holder.

How oddly this light suffuses the covered arcades which abound in Paris in the vicinity of the main boulevard and which are rather disturbingly named passages... as though no one had the right to linger for more than an instant in those sunless corridors. A glaucous, gleam seemingly filtered through deep water, with a special quality of the pale brilliance of a leg revealed under a lifted skirt.

— Louis Aragon