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In a wistful, almost clumsy way, he tells how he was plagued by dark night thoughts. On the one occasion they treated themselves to a Michaud dinner after a pony came home for him, the meal did not sit well. When he remembers looking in at James Joyce dining en famille in Michaud's on the corner of the Rue Jacob, he remembers also that he envied neither Joyce's genius nor his fame, but the tournedos the "Celtic crew" could afford to eat and he and Binney usually could not. Paris may have been the capital of genius-in-exile, but Hemingway's feet were firmly planted on the pavé. Gertrude Stein had told him he was not yet good enough for the Saturday Evening Post, and he was trying to beat the horses at Auteuil and Enghien to stake a trip to Pamplona to see the bullfights. He had sold a few short stories for marks in Germany and peanuts in the little magazines like translatlantic review. They were "Tatie and Binney" to each other and nothing to anybody else except a handful of fellow writers who shared the 25-year-old Midwesterner's tough belief in his own talent. These 20 well-tooled tales are of "how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy," when "we" meant a part-time correspondent for a Canadian newspaper and his redheaded wife Hadley. Almost, it seems like a last-minute appeal from a man who suddenly felt himself trapped in his own latter-day legend as "Papa." Follow the glum testaments and boring memorabilia most men bequeath to the world, Ernest Hemingway left behind an invitation to laugh with him amid the scenes of his youth, where he was happier than he ever would be again.