Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [34]
DeJean relates a truly fascinating history of the first sofas, private bedrooms, bathrooms, and living rooms that could not have been accepted and embraced without visionary architects and interior designers, as well as the influence of two women, the Marquise de Maintenon (Louis XIV’s mistress) and the Marquise de Pompadour (Louis XV’s mistress). Interestingly, she relates that although the French have been recognized as style leaders for centuries, the phrase art de vivre “is no longer much in use.” DeJean is the author of nine other books on French literature, history, and culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all of which have somehow escaped my reading list. Among the titles is The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (Free Press, 2005), about which I will report on my blog.
This is the France the French know best and love best, their private France, the one they grow up with and have pictures of and instantly turn the clock to when no one’s looking, the France they’d like nothing better than to hand over to their children in the twenty-first century, the way it was just barely handed over to them after two world wars from those who inherited it from the nineteenth century—a France that, for all its turmoil at home and elsewhere, and for all the changes brought on by the Information Age and the Age of Anxiety, has managed to safeguard the daily rhythm and precious rituals of its day-to-day life, a France that always seems to trust it will be there tomorrow, a France that is always open for business and infallibly closes at very set hours. It is a France that, all told, is never bigger than a city block but that, within its narrow purview, easily explains why so many Parisians have never ventured beyond their own arrondissement or why so few have ever bothered to learn another language. They know every conceivable shade of the French subjunctive and know every meandering anonymous lane near home—and that’s good enough. Walk the block from the fromagerie to the boulangerie, to the boucherie, to the traiteur, to the marchand de tabacs, to the fruitier, crémerie, and charcuterie, and, come to think of it, you have walked the world.
—André Aciman, Entrez: Signs of France
PARIS
We think of Paris as la ville lumière, and it is unthinkable that the word could be attached to London, Rome or even Athens.
—ROBERT PAYNE,
The Splendor of France
I thought everyone should see Paris, if just once. Paris galvanizes you, makes you think of better things, be a better person.
—DEIRDRE KELLY,
Paris Times Eight
On a corner the smell of fresh croissants wafts from a patisserie. Time to get dressed. In a greengrocer’s shop two men are arranging fruit and vegetables as if they were millinery. An uncle in a café is looking through a magnifying glass at the stock prices in the morning paper. He doesn’t have to ask for the cup of coffee which is brought to him. The last street is being washed. Where’s the towel, Maman? This strange question floats into the mind because the heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house. Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished … Paris is a mansion. Its dreams