“Then came the period of long walks around Paris. He let himself wander, going wherever the whim took him, plunging into the five-o’clock bustle of office workers. He trailed along shopfronts, went into all the art galleries, walked slowly through the arcades of the IXth arrondissement, stopping at every store. He stared with equal attention at rustic washstands in furniture stores, bedheads and springs in mattress-makers’ windows, artificial wreaths in in undertakers’ shopfronts, curtain rails in haberdasheries, “erotic” playing cards with macromammaried pin-ups in novelty stores (Mann sprich deutsch, English speaken), the yellowing photographs advertising Arts Studios: a moon faced urchin in a vulgarly-cut sailor suit, an ugly boy in a cricket cap, a pug-nosed youth, a rather repellent bulldog type of man by a brand-new car; in a pork-butcher’s Chartres cathedral in lard…”

Gerges Perec, Life A User’s Manual , Collins Harvill, London, 1988, p. 237.

(original title and pub. date: La Vie mode d’emploi, 1970)