Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)

    French poet. Married Mathilde Mauté in1870 and, by 1872, lost interest in her and abandoned her and their son, preferring the company of his new lover.

    There followed a stormy affair with Arthur Rimbaud, which lasted nearly two years. Later, while teaching English at a school in Rethel, Verlaine fell in love with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois,who died of typhus in 1883.

   Verlaine's last years saw his descent into drug addiction, alcoholism, and poverty. He lived in slums and public hospitals, and spent his days drinking absinthe in Paris cafés.
                   

       In 1894 he was elected France's "Prince of Poets" by his peers.

               

[extracted from Wikipedia]

Seeking Order from Chaos

When the last man person standing was made out of plaster.

Office of the Director

Galleria Degli Uffizi

Despite a paid, timed entry to the Forentine Uffizi, and weaving around tour groups of Asians, photographs were still not permitted…leaving me this one entry picture.

The Parishioner

Exit Only

Same Day

Two_Dogs, Two Coffee Cups, No Silverware

nepojmenovaná

Today—No Picture

Given the damned depressing hole we have dug for ourselves, I offer this quotation from Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth, 1944:

“For the people is just as big a danger as the government. I mean, if you let it get on your mind. Because there’s more of it. More and worse and bigger and emptier and stupider. One man is a living soul, but two men are an indiarubber milking machine for a beer engine, and three men are noises off and four men are an asylum for cretins and five men are a committee and twenty-five are a meeting, and after that you get to the mummy-house at the British Museum, and the Sovereign People and Common Humanity and the Average and the Public and the Majority and the Life Force and Statistics and the Economic Man, brainless, eyeless, wicked spawn of the universal toad sitting in the black bloody ditch of eternal night and croaking for its mate which is the spectre of Hell.”

L'Ecole des Filles, Paris

This is a school for girls in the 9th arrondissement. The fading stencil on the bricks says "Don't be a sheep".

In the news now, French writer and pedophile Gabriel Matzneff is being brought to trial for stalking teenage girls outside schools in Paris.

Prague, Czech Republic, 13 October 2011

Always something worthy to look at in bookshops, even if you don't understand the language.

Jugendstil_Owls