Hard-Hearted

Those who could not face a day without a book could always try Le Divan on rue de la Convention. The address was still hard to digest for those who had known the bookshop in its glory days. A fixture of Saint-Germain-des-Près from the 1920s onwards, it had once stood round the corner from Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore. A much-loved place, it had struggled to stay afloat in the rising tide of commercial rents in the late nineties and had finally been forced into exile in the lower half of the fifteenth arrondissement. A Dior boutique had stepped in and taken its place.