Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [154]
Barclay holds dual French and American citizenship—he was born in Los Angeles, but when he was four, his father, who worked for Bank of America, was transferred to Europe and the family landed in Paris in 1965. His maternal grandmother was French, and his mother now lives in Paris year-round. (Barclay lives in San Francisco but owns a place in Paris that happens to have the address of the original Shakespeare and Company bookstore.) “France was always home,” he told me, “and today I go to Paris every two months and I stay for ten days or so, and then I go in the summer and stay a month.”
Working on his book enabled Barclay to reconstruct his Paris. When he reached adolescence, he read “anything and everything to do with Paris. I read authors who had travel essays about Paris, diaries and memoirs, everything. And I collected them all. I photocopied them and I would reread them and I put them all in a box. And so the contents of that box became a book. Just as I tend to avoid books on the bestseller lists, I tried to find writings that hadn’t become clichéd. The book was the purest form of Paris for me—it’s the Paris that exists in your head and you can have it at any moment when you turn the pages of my book.”
I asked Barclay to share some of his Paris favorites. He loves “the Deux Magots at seven a.m., when there are no Americans there. You can read the Trib or Le Monde and it’s wonderful. I love it. The same four people wait on you. Give me pavement and a café any day! I do not long for a park or a forest or a beach. The Place des Vosges at eight in the morning is also nice, because there’s no one there.”
But Barclay’s favorite Parisian spot is the Musée Albert-Kahn and its garden, in a suburb just west of the city (14 rue du Port, Boulogne-Billancourt / albert-kahn.fr). “I can’t remember how I first heard about it, but I’m always interested in anything new. I was stunned by its beauty, and I have an affinity for small museums that used to be private residences. Kahn was a wealthy banker who lost everything in 1929, but for ten to fifteen years preceding that, he had, with his money, enabled young people—not professional photographers—to use his state-of-the-art equipment to create a color photographic record of, and for, the people of the world. He wanted to show the French people that we were all the same. The photos are now considered to be the most important collection of early color photographs in the world, and the gardens are beautiful and well maintained. It’s a complete secret—no one really seems to know about it, even the French. People say things like, ‘My aunt took me there when I was ten—what’s it like now?’ ”
A Tale of Two Artists
CATHARINE REYNOLDS
HERE’S A GOOD piece on two artists, Eugène Delacroix and Aristide Maillol, and their eponymous museums in Paris. Neither museum is ever especially crowded, but each is rewarding. I am an especially big fan of Maillol’s 1905 La Méditerranée bronze in the Musée Maillol. Happily you can also see this sculpture in the Musée d’Orsay, which has both a marble version (a copy made during Maillol’s lifetime) and a bronze (a recent cast). The original limestone statue is in Switzerland.
CATHARINE REYNOLDS, introduced previously, was a contributing editor at Gourmet, where this piece originally appeared. Reynolds recently wrote to give me a great recommendation for a restaurant near both museums profiled here: Café Varenne (36 rue de Varenne, 7ème / +33 01 45 48 62 72). “Diane Johnson has been spotted there more than once, alongside all the pols from the Matignon. The food’s the best