Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [259]
You don’t have to walk far in Paris to experience a bit of the baron, and Transforming Paris (Free Press, 1995) is a wonderful companion. It’s really a book about Paris that features Haussmann more than a biography of Haussmann. Included are many maps and photographs that excellently convey the changes Haussmann made, plus a moving epilogue about Jordan’s visit to his grave in Père-Lachaise. Haussmann’s grave is not featured on the Père-Lachaise map you can buy for a few euros at the entrance, but it’s in the avenue Principale in the fourth section. “He is prominently placed for eternity,” Jordan notes, “amid the graves of distinguished contemporaries, many now as forgotten as he. Visited, without deep emotion, by very few, he is best remembered by what he did. Take a moment to look down on Paris from the cemetery. It is the best memorial.”
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Launched in 2000, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline (metmuseum.org/toah) is “a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection.” It is nothing less than an extraordinary achievement: “an invaluable reference and research tool for students, educators, scholars, and anyone interested in the study of art history and related subjects.” A vast number of French works appear in the timeline, from the year 500 to the present (the timeline goes much further back), and I encourage readers to dip into it and get lost in it. The timeline—which is researched and written by the Met’s curators, conservators, and educators—allows visitors to compare and contrast six thousand works of art from around the globe at any time in human history.
Hollins Abroad Paris
I’m very fortunate to be a graduate of Hollins University (formerly Hollins College), a private women’s college in Virginia founded in 1842. Hollins has a fine liberal arts curriculum (Forbes recently included Hollins in the top one hundred of its America’s Best Colleges list) and renowned undergrad and graduate English and creative writing programs. Graduates of other alma maters may feel equally fortunate, but Hollins has one other attribute that most colleges and universities don’t: its study abroad program in Paris. Hollins Abroad Paris, founded in 1955, is one of the longest-established American programs in Paris. Its distinctive program was for many years located in the sixteenth arrondissement (rue Lauriston), then in the seventh (rue de l’Odéon), and is now a member of the Reid Hall campus, which it shares with nine other American schools, including Columbia University, Smith College, and Dartmouth College. I attended in 1979, and lived on the rue de Grenelle in the seventh arrondissement with a family of five that didn’t speak a word of English. Absolument, HAP is greatly responsible for who I am today as well as for the creation of The Collected Traveler.
“Letter from Paris,” a booklet written by the Hollins Abroad pioneers of 1955, perfectly conveys, in words I wish I’d written myself, the experience:
If you are a girl with a call for adventure, with curiosity, a widening scale of values, and a bit of courage, then you are the one who should go abroad. You may cry when you leave, count the days till you come home, and be a homesick pup, but you’ll never—we promise you, never—regret it or forget it. When you’re a sophomore in college and having the time of your life, we know it’s no easy thing to consider throwing it all aside for a year of who knows what; but we, the ones who went in ’55, are asking you to follow. Our year’s adventure has been invaluable; we have seen and lived an