Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [284]
The Crimean War of 1854–55 confirmed the reputation of the Zouaves, and after the battle of Alma, Marshal de Saint-Arnaud noted, “Les Zouaves sont les premiers soldats du monde”—The Zouaves are the best soldiers in the world. It was at the battle of Sebastopol, however, that the Zouaves won immortal renown. They went on to play major parts in the battles of Magenta, Solferino, and Mexico, and in the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. But the Great War saw some Zouave battalions lose as many as eight hundred men in a single charge, and as camouflage, not color, became standard dress, their uniform passed into the pages of history by 1915.
Vincent van Gogh painted five works of Zouaves; with the exception of one in a private collection, all are on view in public museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim in New York and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The Pont de l’Alma originally had four statues of Zouaves built into its span, but now this one soldier stands alone, and he is Paris’s official flood gauge. During the worst overflowing of the Seine, in 1910, the river waters reached his beard.
Paris, to be Paris, must be the place where the great moral dilemmas of mankind are identified and where the experiments in the life of thought—if not of action—take place at the highest register. Paris should be infuriating, as it must have been to millions when, for example, Édouard Manet painted a naked woman lunching on the grass.… Above all, for Paris to be Paris, it has to be free. The question thus is not: Are there too many Arabs in Belleville, too many Chinese in the thirteenth arrondissement, too many neighborhoods that have lost their character? The question is: Will the fear that there are no longer any Parisians lead the inhabitants of the great village on the Seine no longer to fashion a place that matters to all humanity?
—Richard Bernstein, Fragile Glory
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A book of any type requires the efforts of a staggering number of people, but an anthology requires the involvement of even more people as well as a staggering number of details. The likelihood is great, therefore, that I have neglected to name some people who helped create this finished book or who kindly inquired about it, and I can only hope that they will understand and forgive me. Once again, I extend an enormous merci to Vintage publisher Anne Messitte, Vintage Editor-in-Chief LuAnn Walther, and my editor Diana Secker Tesdell, who likely never anticipated that an anthology series could prove to be so compliqué. Other patient and talented colleagues in the extended Vintage family who diligently helped this book along include Cathryn Aison, David Archer, Bette Graber, Kathy Hourigan, Jo Anne Metsch, Roz Parr, Nicole Pedersen, Russell Perreault, Anke Steinecke, and Allison Zimmer. Merci bien also to Steven Barclay, Sebastian Beckwith, Carol Bonow, Ceil Bouchet, Joan DeMayo, Lindsey Elias, Barbara Fairchild, Ina Garten, Suzy Gershman, Mark Greenside, Mireille Guiliano, Linda Hollick, Ruth Homberg, Judith Jones, Sylvie de Lattre, Kim Levesque, Alec Lobrano, Kermit Lynch, Emily Marshall, Caroline Mennetrier, Jennifer Paull, Emanuelle Sasso, Clark Terry, Patricia Wells, and Molly Wizenberg. Sincere thanks to each of the individual writers, agents, and permissions representatives for various publishers and periodicals without whose cooperation and generosity there would be nothing to publish, and I would not have the opportunity to share the work of many good writers with my readers. Extra special thanks to traveling companions and friends Amy Myer and Lorraine Paillard, and to Arlene Lasagna, who bravely stepped in as amateur camerawoman in the absence of my official photographer, Peggy Harrison (www.peggyharrison.com).