place
Paris
The capital of French art and fashion; in Rezek's polemic the source of the borrowed decadence---'the clothes and the convictions'---that has hollowed out Czech art.
Reading notes
- New Poems: The Other Part §39 PARIS
Rilke's Paris of the dispossessed—the city of the Malte years—whose old women lure the passer-by 'with the riddle of their mange'; the setting too of the next poem, the blind man.
- Duino Elegies §5 square in Paris
The 'endless show-place' where Madame Lamort plies her millinery of fate.
- The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge §121 Paris
The modern metropolis where Malte lives alone and poor; its streets, crowds, and above all its hospitals open the notebooks with the famous reversal — that people seem to come here not to live but to die.
- New Poems §58 PARIS
Paris; the marble-cart hauled by seven horses through the city's traffic, slow as a triumphant general.
- Two Stories of Prague §37 imports everything from Paris
The charge against the Czech 'Decadents' and Symbolists of the 1890s: that they took their orgies, their mysticism and their world-weariness ready-made from French models instead of from the life of their own people.