The View from the Quai Voltaire FAQ

Where is the Quai Voltaire and what is it about? It's in Paris, France. Nowadays it's a good place to find a 4-star hotel. It is still a good place to go for a stroll--or, if you like, expatiate--but of course anywhere in Paris is good for that. Of particular symbolic and sentimental interest to us is that the quai Voltaire is where François Thibault (known as 'France' to his friends), in the 1850's, had a bookshop and intellectual clearing-house called the 'Librairie de France' (pun intended). Coffee was served, and there were chairs to sit in; some of the regulars (among them the brightest, best-informed men of the age) even having their 'own' chairs that nobody else was allowed to sit in. Talk was mostly political, though it ranged far afield; and, whatever it was, France Thibault kept abreast of it and added his share. Amazingly, the Librairie de France was also a fair commercial success, and enabled Thibault to retire in modest comfort when he sold it late in life--but that's nothing to us. The perspective I'm trying to frame here is the by-his-bootstraps, self-taught but world-worthy, intellectual integrity represented by France Thibault and his Librairie.