Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [1]
Solar-Powered Timekeeping in Paris by Susan Allport
Station to Station by Barbara Dinerman
Streets of Desire by Vivian Thomas
Paint the Town by Paris Muse
Passages by Catharine Reynolds
The Secret Shops of the Palais Royal by Barbara Wilde
Recommended Reading
THE SEINE
Bridging the Seine by Vivian Thomas
Recommended Reading
PERSONALITIES
The Master of the Machine by John Russell
The Message by Jeannette Ferrary
We’ll Always Have Paris by Stacy Schiff
Le Père Tanguy by Henri Perruchot
Recommended Reading
THE ÎLE-DE-FRANCE AND BEYOND: EXCURSIONS FROM PARIS
Interview: David Downie and Alison Harris
A Paris Miscellany
Acknowledgments
Permissions Acknowledgments
About the Editor
Other Books Edited by Barrie Kerper
Paris is a city that might well be spoken of in the plural, as the Greeks used to speak of Athens, for there are many Parises, and the tourists’ Paris is only superficially related to the Paris of the Parisians. The foreigner driving through Paris from one museum to another is quite oblivious to the presence of a world he brushes past without seeing. Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well. The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of Paris there is another city as difficult of access as Timbuktu once was.
—JULIAN GREEN, Paris
INTRODUCTION
A breath of Paris preserves the soul.
—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Those who have experienced Paris have the advantage over those who haven’t. We are the ones who have glimpsed a little bit of heaven, down here on earth.
—Deirdre Kelly, Paris Times Eight
Paris is truly an ocean. Plumb its depths, knowing you will never touch bottom. Run its length, describe it. Whatever care you take in exploring or detailing, however many and determined the navigators of this sea, there always will be virgin territory, unknown grottoes, flowers, pearls, monsters, something amazing, overlooked by literary divers.
—Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot
PARIS HAS LONG been a beacon—of light, beauty, culture, and civilization—to people and nations around the world. The city has been called the undisputed capital of the nineteenth century, though Gertrude Stein, writing in the early half of the 1900s, could also make the claim that “Paris was where the twentieth century was.” Though the city unquestionably lost some of its luster in the mid to late twentieth century, there is also no doubt that Paris is reemerging as a city of grace, significance, and prominence in the twenty-first. As anywhere, it is currently faced with some formidable urban challenges, yet as it works toward solutions to its ills, Paris retains its allure, and its image as a beacon will survive. Paris is still remarkably beautiful; it still has cachet and prestige, grandeur and distinction. “Oh, Paris!” writes Joyce Slayton Mitchell. “Even with modern and economic changes, the value of the beautiful is conserved.” The city still brings a sparkle to many an eye, and makes grown adults sigh at the mention of its name.
One of those adults is me. Though I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Spain—that’s where I took my very first overseas trip, with my tenth-grade Spanish class in 1975—it was Paris that changed my life, made me realize who I wanted to be, made me who I am today. It was in Paris that I lived as a student and learned to think in another language and grasped what was really important in life. Though I have only recently become familiar with the late historian Richard Cobb, a passage from his book Paris and Elsewhere perfectly sums up how I felt then: “To live in France is to live double, every moment counts, the light of the sky of the Île-de-France is unique and a source of joy, there is joy too in a small rectangle of sunshine at the top of a tall, greying, leprous building,