"What struck me on this return -- I stayed on the Place de la Sorbonne -- was the intellectual vitality of Paris. There are bookstores everywhere, stores dedicated to every imaginable literary specialty, so many you wonder how any bookseller makes a living. The best ones are the rare books shops, where a bell tinkles and an old gent in a chair nods as you enter. In one old medical bookstore near the Faculté de Mèdecine I leafed through accounts of anesthesia through the ages, learning about the relative merits of chloroform v. ether. Before that, they just held you down and cut you open."

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