Tight-Lipped

The book had pride of place in Robert Laval’s office on the third floor of Grasset’s headquarters on rue des Saints-Pères. The address – just round the corner from Saint Germain des Prés, a neighbourhood whose intellectual prestige the publishing house had helped to cement – was more impressive than the building. Aside from a bookshop at street level, whose cluttered interior supported its claim to stock every title Grasset had ever published, number 61 seemed little different from its residential neighbours. Behind the façade, however, lay four stories of oddly-shaped offices crammed around a steep staircase. Grasset had occupied the site since 1910. What had once been a well-appointed apartment building had become an industrious hive of literary worker bees.