Ebook: The Gypsies

Since their unexplained appearance in Europe in the fifteenth century, the Gypsies have doggedly refused to conform to the settled life. As wandering blacksmiths, tinkers, pedlars, and horse-copers, as musicians, dancers, fortune-tellers, and bearleaders, as thieves and poachers, they have covered the continent and spread to America. This is the story of their origin and dispersion, their occupations and traditions, their customs in love and death, and their language, signs, and magic.

Jean-Paul Clébert was born in Paris in 1926. He was educated in a religious boarding-school until, in 1943, he abandoned his studies and joined the Resistance. When the war was over he took on various jobs in order to be free to continue his writing. At this period he knew Blaise Cendrars and Henry Miller and wrote under their influence. Clébert’s books always reflect the bonds between man and society; solitude and communication. His first book, Paris insolite, was a documentary about the tramps of Paris; his second, La Vie sauvage, about vagrants; his third, Le Blockhaus, portrayed imprisoned men. At the moment he is working on a new novel dealing with the psychology of a spy.