Monday Morning with Janet

Over many months, between books, semesters, sloughs of sloth, waking and sleeping, I've been dipping into Paris Was Yesterday. Janet Flanner needs more love. A few choice snippets from my bus ride:

"French literature is peculiarly devoid of nature - indeed, there is hardly a tree in the whole lot of it; and to the French, despite their instinct to appreciate him, Hardy reads rather like pages from a seed catalogue."

"So far as the French are concerned, Egypt was discovered by Napoleon: as a result of his campaign, sarcophagi first settled in the Louvre, and the Sphinx entered the Empire drawing room as a mantlepiece decoration."