Things I've looked up for The Paris Wife

First, I love the language and I'm really savoring reading this book but I need to pick up the pace. I have stacks of reading waiting, not to mention Madame Bovary for book club. I have lots of chanson and bal musette music set aside to put me in the mood though, no worries.

I didn't know a lot about Hadley Hemingway, other than she was quite an influence on Ernest. I didn't realize she was 8 years older than him and they married when he was only 21. Despite her fame (even before I started on this book, she was the only spouse of his I could name, although that's probably because of A Moveable Feast), they were only married from 1921-1926. Here is a picture of the both of them with their son John in 1926:

He looked old even when he was young.

According to Wikipedia, she remarried Paul Mowrer, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, in 1934. Hemingway gave her all of the proceeds from The Sun Also Rises in the divorce (she also was paid for the movie rights.) She only saw Hemingway once more, on vacation in Wyoming. She outlived Hemingway by nearly 18 years, dying in January of 1979. It's all very sad considering how in love they once were and the circumstances of Hem's death. By many accounts, he regretted dumping Hadley for women who were more trendy.

Hadley mentions shopping at Les Halles marketplace (not sparing any details about the rats in the alleyways and the stench of rotting food-also, when you bought a chicken there, it was a whole feathered dead chicken.)  Les Halles was torn down in 1971 and relocated to the suburbs. There is now a huge underground mall on the site. There weren't many pictures I could find, but here's one of the market from 1954: