Saint-Germain-des-Prés is a Paris setting where Eduard Limonov’s rise brings him into contact with the elite world he still claims to despise. It also becomes part of his daily routine: after hours of writing, he walks its streets, treating proximity to fashionable society as compatible with keeping his hostility toward it intact.

A Scene of Social Access

After a society dinner, Limonov left with a famous Parisian beauty, and they went on to several bars. At dawn, she took him to her elegant apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. She was a countess who knew everyone in Paris, and their liaison lasted several months. The address marks a new degree of access for a man who had complained about his earlier romantic prospects: he was now welcomed at society dinners and celebrated, within his small circle of gay friends, as a fashionable lover.

A Daily Route Through the Chic District

The neighborhood also figures in Limonov’s working routine. He rose at dawn, exercised, and wrote at his typewriter for five hours; afterward, he gave himself time to wander, preferably through chic areas such as Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Faubourg Saint-Honoré. His choice of streets held a contradiction in place. He sought out fashionable neighborhoods, yet took pride in having preserved his hatred of them, as if disdain were proof that social success had not turned him into someone’s dependent or favorite. Saint-Germain-des-Prés thus links his material and social ascent to a self-image built on resisting the very world he had entered.