Three Days in Paris

“Three days in Paris” begins as a travel diary and develops into an exploration of cultural milieu, sexual identity and artistic passion. Constantine Cavafy was 34 years old when he visited Paris. Apart from a few years in Istanbul, when he and his family were fleeing the Anglo-Egyptian War, and several in London when he was still a young child, he had spent his entire life in the prosperous, insular Greek community of Alexandria in Egypt.

It was in May 1897 that Cavafy made the trip to Paris with his older brother John, just a few days after a terrible fire had broken out in the Paris bazaar, killing over 200 people. The city was still in shock.

But there were other kinds of shock-waves, too, reverberating through Paris just then. Already, in the last years of the nineteenth century, it was a mecca for the avant-garde, the place where Marcel Proust, Erik Satie and Edgar Degas were living and creating, where modernism was being born. Artists from all over the world were flocking to Montmartre. Alexandria, with its feluccas and water vendors and decaying aristocracy, was a backwater in comparison, a provincial town still mired in the past. 

In 1897 Cavafy had accepted his homosexuality, though socially he was a very formal and old-fashioned person. But however tormented and secretive he may have been about his desire for other men, Cavafy was coming to a point in his development as a poet where he would be able to write about that desire openly in an unapologetic, direct way, unifying his passion for the past, for the “Hellenic” civilization, and his passion for other men in poems that met his own rigorous standards for publication.

For rights enquiries: Fiammetta Biancatelli, Walkabout Literary Agency:

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