Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [171]
Station to Station
BARBARA DINERMAN
I PREFER TRAVELING by train above all other modes of transportation, and arriving in or departing from a grand train station is much more exciting to me than any airport. A tour of Paris’s train stations is also a tour of the city in the years around the turn of the twentieth century. If you have time to see only one, you won’t be disappointed in choosing the Gare de Lyon, home of the beautiful and evocative Le Train Bleu restaurant.
BARBARA DINERMAN is a former resident of Paris and returns frequently. She has written regularly on interior design, travel, and art for Veranda, Robb Report, and Art & Antiques. In 1997, she won an annual journalism award from the American Society of Interior Designers. Dinerman is also the author of award-winning short stories and a novel, H (iUniverse, 2007). The following piece was originally published in 1999.
WE DON’T USUALLY think of such utilitarian buildings as train stations when we plan our explorations of Paris. But the six great stations extant today are certainly worth our inspection. They’re as much a history lesson as the noted monuments, as rewarding an architectural study as Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s façades of the Grands Boulevards, and as much fun as a visit to any of the flower-laden parks.
With the exception of the Gare Montparnasse, which soars eighteen stories in its familiar late-twentieth-century structural form, Paris’s train stations reflect the exuberant faith in industrial progress that marked the end of the nineteenth century. The great architects of the day conceived these remarkable structures, and Impressionist artists such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Gustave Caillebotte, Jean Beraud, and Norbert Goeneutte competed to properly record the dramatic impact of the stations on the Parisian landscape and its citizenry.
Just three years after the Paris Salon of 1874 (where Manet’s The Railway, now known as The Gare Saint-Lazare, brought down a storm of ridicule), Émile Zola took up the cause. “That is where painting is today,” he wrote in defense of new paintings by Monet. “Our artists have to find the poetry in train stations, the way their fathers found the poetry in forests and rivers.”
In fact, Monet’s group of eleven works depicting the Gare Saint-Lazare became the basis for an art exhibition titled Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare at the Musée d’Orsay last spring. The successful exhibition then moved to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. For modern-day audiences, these artistic efforts are powerful reminders that the trains, along with the cuttings and tracks that transformed their neighborhoods, were nothing less than a wondrous symbol of change.
As the stations made grand architectural statements, we can admire them today as a glimpse back at the turn of that century, and for what they still are today. Enter any station, and the crowds—not to mention the restaurant facilities and even the poster art—will amaze you. This dazzling network of railways is alive and well, despite the preponderance of air travel. Compare the SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer) with Amtrak: not exactly a contest.
Of course, the sense of nostalgia is strong, and marketing efforts have been surprisingly aggressive. Having adopted the slogan À nous de vous faire préférer le train (We’ll make you want to take the train) on its brochures, schedules, and ubiquitous ads, the company’s officials are aware of the sentimental value of rail travel. Vintage posters show the legendary trains such as the 1925 Sud Express steaming out of the Gare de Lyon for the Riviera, and the Boîte à Sel delivering elegantly dressed and coiffed passengers to the Gare d’Austerlitz from Biarritz.
With the stations recently cleaned up and vigorously updating their amenities, it can be richly rewarding