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—JOHN BERGER,

“Imagine Paris,”

Keeping a Rendezvous

Photo Credit p2.1

Foreword to John Russell’s Paris

ROSAMOND BERNIER

YEARS AGO, DURING the summer between my junior and senior years of college, a classmate and I were in the employ of an elderly couple who owned a large, rambling country house in Connecticut and a stunning apartment in one of New York City’s premier apartment buildings. Our job was to cook, clean, and otherwise help maintain the country house, at which there were dinners, parties, and house guests all summer long. As a result, we had the opportunity to meet a number of notable people, including some neighbors, two of whom were John Russell, former art critic of the New York Times, and his wife, Rosamond Bernier, cofounder of the prestigious French art magazine L’Oeil, author, and lecturer.

Exactly thirty years later, when I was working on this manuscript, I contacted Rosamond. I was thrilled to be corresponding with her—I’d attended a few of her wonderful lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art over the years (though I was too shy to introduce myself, certaine that she would not remember me)—and I still marvel at the joys of six degrees of separation; you just never know who you will meet again in your life. I asked Rosamond if I might include an article she wrote about Braque in my book, but she said she was saving that one for inclusion in her own memoir. While I was considering what else I had in my files by her, I began paging through John Russell’s Paris (Harry N. Abrams, 1983, 1994), and I read for the five hundredth time Rosamond’s foreword. I said to myself, Ça y est!—that’s it!—why not feature this in full in the book? Rosamond granted me permission, and it is with great pleasure that I include her foreword to my favorite book on Paris ever written.

ROSAMOND BERNIER was a contributing editor for Vogue for many years and is the author of Matisse, Picasso, Miró: As I Knew Them (Knopf, 1991). She was decorated by the French government in 1980 and 1999 when she received the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in recognition of her contribution to French culture. Bernier was honored (along with her husband, John) as a National Treasure by the Municipal Art Society of New York in 2004, and she has given more than two hundred lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Town & Country has referred to Bernier as “the Met’s living treasure,” and Leonard Bernstein wrote of her that “Madame Bernier has the gift of instant communication to a degree which I have rarely encountered.” Videos of her Met lectures are available exclusively through Kultur (kultur.com) and of these a great number feature French art topics, such as “French Impressionism: An Accessible Paradise” and “French Impressionism: Paris by Day and by Night.” Bernier is currently working on a memoir.

When I first read John Russell’s Paris, I remembered particularly a very small room halfway to the sky in what was then my favorite Left Bank hotel. The rooms on the top floor of the Pont Royal are not as large as the ones lower down, but after trying some of the others I decided to perch above, where each room had a small balcony and you could step out through the French windows, and there in front of you was a clear view across Paris.

You could look down to the right and follow the rue du Bac on its straight reach for the Seine. Eighteenth-century town houses with flat stone façades—not yet sluiced clean on André Malraux’s orders—and elegant doorways lined one side of the street, rising to steep, humped roofs (gray tile, usually) bitten into by mansard windows with projecting triangular hoods. Across the river was the cluttered mount of Montmartre topped by the ridiculous but endearing white fantasy of the Sacré-Coeur. To the left was the Eiffel Tower and, still further, the gold-ribbed dome of the Invalides. Paris in my pocket.

This is where I came to live in the late 1940s when an American magazine sent me to Paris to report on the arts. The Pont Royal was