Auguste Renoir

AUGUSTE RENOIR

This one came from a villa just off one of District 1’s old tree-lined streets, the kind of house that would have belonged, before 1975, to a family with connections to the former colonial administration. By the time I found it, the house had been subdivided into three or four households, and the book had been quietly kept by whichever family had ended up with the back room. Nobody was entirely sure any more whose it had originally been, only that it had always been there, and that it seemed wrong to throw it out.