Moore, George: Reminiscences of the Impressionist painters (Dublin: Maunsel, 1906)

this I felt—I must not be afraid to repeat
the verb, for at times I was guided more by
feeling than by reason—well, I felt that my
first business was the discovery of a cafe where
I could pass the evening—nothing seemed to
me more essential than that. In the mornings
I worked at the L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, but
one’s evenings are more important than one’s
mornings, the soul evolves in the gaslight; and
as soon as my valet left me I started on the
quest of the cafd of my instinctive predilec-
tion round the Odeon and the Luxembourg
Gardens. In the Middle Ages young men
went in search of the Grail, to-day the cafe
is the quest of a young man in search of
artistic education. But the cafds about the
Odeon and the Luxembourg Gardens did not
correspond to my need, I wearied of noisy
students, the Latin Quarter seemed to me a
little out of fashion ; eventually I immigrated
to Montmartre, and continued my search
along the Boulevard Extdrieur. One evening
I discovered the ideal cafd on the Place Pigale.
I cannot say now if it were instinct that
guided me there or if perchance I met some-
one who told me that Manet spent his evenings
in the cafd of the Nouvelle Athenes. The
name sounds as if it were invented on pur-
pose, “The New Athens.” You wouldn’t
have thought it was “a new Athens” if you
had seen it, but it was one for all that.
I can see it now, the white nose of a block of
buildings, stretching up the hillside into the
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