半條菸，in which novel, or short story, did Somerset Maugham mention that, a man in the streets, looking for a tobacco shop in vain, therefore he opened his own tobacco shop in that street?
(ChatGPT, 2026-1-18)
It’s from Maugham’s short story “The Verger.”
In the story, Albert Edward Foreman walks along a long street after losing his job, notices there isn’t a single shop where he can buy cigarettes, and thinks he can’t be the only person who wants tobacco there—so he rents a shop on that street and sets up as a tobacconist (and newsagent) the next day.
In which street in Barcelona did Maugham say that he wished it never ends? (ChatGPT, 2026-1-18)
Somerset Maugham was referring to La Rambla in Barcelona.
He writes—more than once, in slightly varying forms—that La Rambla is a street he wishes would never end, because of its inexhaustible flow of life: people strolling, talking, watching, lingering in cafés, the sense that the whole city passes by before your eyes. The remark appears in his travel writing and autobiographical reflections, most commonly traced to The Summing Up, where Barcelona (and La Rambla in particular) figures as an emblem of lived, worldly pleasure rather than monumentality.
For Maugham, La Rambla is not “beautiful” in the postcard sense; it is existentially generous—a street that keeps offering human variety, and therefore resists closure. That is precisely why he wished it would never end.
If you’d like, I can locate the exact English sentence and its surrounding paragraph, or compare Maugham’s La Rambla with Benjamin’s arcades or Bashō’s roads that never finish—they resonate in interesting ways.
