Mid-July 1955, 889 years after the Battle of Hastings, the townspeople of Auvers, a one-steepled, overgrown tarry town near Paris, woke up to a spanking, hand lettered, red-white-and-blue poster festooned across the front of the café A Van Gogh.

Janet Flanner, under the pen name of Genêt, began writing her fortnightly "Letter” for The New Yorker in October, 1925, a few months after the magazine was founded.

When my son Henry was a year old I took him to Boston to meet my mother. She didn’t show up. It turned out that she had gone to Foxwoods Casino instead, which sounds bad and maybe was, but it had been three years since I’d seen her or even spoken to her; we wouldn’t see each other for seven more. I couldn’t blame her for trying her luck elsewhere.

Once you fight your way to the glass door, you find that it’s locked—and beyond it, on the street, there’s another crowd. But this one is more diverse, made up of both men and women. A policeman is stationed by the door. He’s holding a vessel of some kind. Of course: an oil lamp. Well, it took you a while. It’s Holy Saturday. The crowds are waiting for the Holy Fire to land.

Sixteen years after the publication of this interview, what I remember of it—before rereading—is a veil of resentment that, perhaps unfairly, has lingered all this time. I was, it goes without saying, hugely pleased to have been invited to be the subject of a Paris Review interview; it was a distinction I valued. Yet what got stuck in my head afterward was the interviewer’s having hammered away at money.