![and then there was light book french blind and then there was light book french blind](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ePf8rU8BlJA/Vc5O4XAkFBI/AAAAAAAACTU/wY4rpm5jZEo/s1600/doerr.jpg)
We lived in small apartments but they always seemed to me large. My family belonged to the petite bourgeoisie in France in those days. That was the joy of my childhood, the magic armor which, once put on, protects for a lifetime. I passed between dangers and fears as light passes through a mirror. Objects had no weight and I never became entangled in the web of things. My parents carried me along and that, I am sure, is the reason why through all my childhood I never touched ground. When I think of my childhood I still feel the sense of warmth above me, behind and around me, that marvelous sense of living not yet on one’s own, but leaning body and soul on others who accept the charge. My parents were protection, confidence, warmth. There was no need, for his parents loved him and he loved them. The small boy attributed no special qualities to his parents. But why say these things? As a small boy I was not aware of them. Both of them were generous and attentive. My mother, who had studied physics and biology herself, was completely devoted and understanding. My father, a graduate of a school for advanced physics and chemistry and a chemical engineer by profession, was both intelligent and kind. I was born in a modest nineteenth-century house, in a room looking out over a courtyard.
![and then there was light book french blind and then there was light book french blind](https://www.beauxbooks.com/user/products/large/1995.jpg)
I was born in 1924, on September 19 at noon, in the heart of Paris in Montmartre, between the Place Blanche and the Moulin Rouge. That would be the worst kind of foolishness. All the same, if the water of my childhood runs clear, I am not about to muddy it up. Besides, it is so little the fashion these days that one can hardly believe in it. I was that little boy, and today when I look back at him from the midpoint of life which I have reached, I marvel, a happy childhood is so rare. Once upon a time in Paris, between two world wars, there lived a happy little boy. AS I REMEMBER IT, my story always starts out like a fairy tale, not an unusual one, but still a fairy tale.