A Moveable Feast: Sketches of Paris in The Twenties

"You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people sat outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard.

"There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when he was hungry.

"I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry.

"Later I thought Cezanne was probably hungry in a different way."

A Moveable Feast:Sketches of the Author's Life in Paris in The Twenties (Ernest Hemingway), First Edition, BMC (1964). Offered for sale by Chewybooks, as of June 14, 2010.