Questions and Answers

Today, one hundred years ago, the moving van arrived at 27, rue de Fleurus and Alice B. Toklas’s belongings were unloaded and she moved in with Gertrude Stein!  They had first met almost three years before to the day.  Since that meeting, coming to ’27’ on a daily basis became a part of Alice’s routine and though she had undoubtedly begun to assume some household responsibilities during that period, she had most notably become the primary typist of Gertrude’s manuscripts.

A picture postcard of Paris, 1910.

Alice had been living in an apartment on rue Notre Dames des Champs within walking distance of rue de Fleurus with her San Francisco neighbor Harriet Levy.  When Harriet decided to return to San Francisco, she asked Alice to handle shipping her furniture and paintings including a Matisse.

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Last summer when I told one of my friends, who is also a big GertrudeandAlice fan, that I was going to write a blog devoted to them, his first response was that he hoped I’d be writing about things that hadn’t been written about and that I wouldn’t write silly things making fun of them.

I did mention the chickens in England  named Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in an earlier post about items I’d received through my GoogleAlert.  I guess that was silly. Sorry.

But now to some  items about GertrudeandAlice that, though factual, could fall into the “Believe It or Not!” category.  Some are the kind of tidbits that scholars love to unearth or reference to indicate that they are really in the know and that they’ve scoured those boxes in the lower basements of research libraries.  For fans like me, they are like the shiny nuggets among the pebbles in a gold miner’s pan and almost as exciting as finding a previously unseen photograph of GertrudeandAlice tucked away in the pages of a rare book.

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