“It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and natural distilled liquors made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries…. The paintings and the cakes and the eau-de-vie were truly wonderful.”

This is Earnest Hemingway on snacking and boozing with Gertrude Stein and her “friend” in A Moveable Feast. I’m enjoying the book quite a lot but I was wondering: when he’s hanging out with a soon-to-be-legendary writer and eating and drinking delectable things in Paris in the 1920s, must he add that it all was “truly wonderful”? Don’t rub it in, Tatie.