ABSTRACT
Enthusiasm for the writings of Leon-Paul Fargue is reviving. Known mainly for Le Pieton de Paris, a collection of lively, first-hand accounts of the street- and night-life of the Paris of the 1920s, the prolific Fargue also wrote some twenty other volumes of prose and poetry about a city whose every quarter he explored intimately. Indeed, no substantial differences in subject matter, genre, or quality separate his little-known volumes from Le Pieton de Paris, although a few repetitions occur. As an ever-curious, extremely knowledgeable chronicler of the capital, Fargue has few rivals, not least of all because he was long "an honorable fork among the leading group of Parisians who dine out nearly every evening". Fortunately, in best passages, the ex-stroller continues to let his mind roam, a digressive habit often practiced with stunning, sometimes rather eccentric, effects in his earlier work. Now an invalid, he lets images "ricochet", as he puts it, "across the dark, rich waters of past".
