THE AMIABLE FLEAS

IN May 1954, more than fifteen years after writing Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck rented a house for himself and his family a stones-throw from the Champs-Elysées in Paris.

- John Steinbeck

The day after moving in, he heard that his friend Robert Capa had been killed by a landmine while photographing the advance of a French regiment in Vietnam. Sweet Thursday—the sequel to Steinbeck’s 1945 instant classic Cannery Row—would publish the following month. And Warner Bros. had just wrapped up production of the screen adaptation of East of Eden, the novel Steinbeck considered to be his greatest work . It was around this time that Steinbeck began to seriously consider writing for a French newspaper. He sketched out the idea that May in his letter to friend and agent Elizabeth Otis:

You know I have had an idea in the back of my mind for a long time. Here in France I get interviewed all the time. I spend hours with journalists helping them to make some kind of a story and then when it comes out it is garbled and slanted and lousy. I wondered why I did not write my own interviews and charge for those hours of time and have it come out my way. In other words, why should I not write 800 words a week for one French paper, simply called something like an American in Paris — observations, essay, questions, but unmistakably American. . . . [1]

A weekly column for the French daily Le Figaro might seem like an odd choice for a world-renowned American novelist who claimed to be “helpless in French.” Yet so it went. The tenth installment of “One American in Paris” was a short story published on July 31, 1954, as “Les Puces sympathiques.” To our knowledge, it has never before received mass distribution in English. We are humbled and honoured to share it here.