Jean Rhys Goes for a Chinese in 1920s Paris

About a year ago I blogged about reading Jean Rhys’s earlier works and how she describes (fictionally – but all her fiction was drawn from her early, rather vagabond, life) going for a Chinese meal in Paris in the early 1930s. Just so happens I recently read her another of her earlier works, Quaret, a fictionalised account of her 1920s affair with Ford Madox Ford in Paris. So it seems she went for a Chinese earlier, in the 1920s…I’m not sure there’s a Chinese restaurant where she describes there now, or even was in the 1920s, but she tells of the Restaurant Chinois on Rue de L’ecole de Medicine. The street is in the Odeon quarter of the sixth arrondissement. It’s close to the Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter and so, not surprisingly, Rhys describes moving upstairs from the restaurant after dinner to,

“the red-lit bar where several Chinese students were dancing with very blonde women long past their first youth. The students strutted past in a stiffly correct way, melancholy for the sake of dignity, but obviously highly pleaseed with themselves. At intervals the lights were lowered and a good-looking young violinist played sentimental music on muted strings, and occasionally the something-or-other girls, four of them, pranced in and did a few acrobatics in strict time.’

A late nineteenth century view of the area around Rue de L’ecole de Medicine