Tight-Lipped

An offshoot of a reputable Italian publishing empire, the del Duca bookshop had sat on the boulevard des Italians since the fifties. As Parisian bookshops went, it had an extensive range of titles and was a rare standard bearer for literacy in its immediate neighbourhood. This was the Rive Droite, after all – less well-furnished in bookshops than the Rive Gauche, a geographical illustration of the struggle between art and commerce with which Marsay had just regaled an admiring crowd. How much longer it would be able to hold out was anyone’s guess. Its immediate neighbour was a flourishing Monoprix, the city’s dominant supermarket chain, which would no doubt be all too happy to snap up the two hundred or so square metres of retail space del Duca currently occupied.