Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [48]
I am currently preparing an electronic version of Around and About Paris and rewalking Paris for that purpose. It’s a mixed experience of joy and sadness: the joy of seeing an old courtyard, bistro, or artisan’s shop still standing unchanged; the sadness over those that have disappeared. Such is life. Besides, this was also the case in the 1980s when I began to write my books. Like all organic life, Paris is a city in the making and in constant mutation, and some of it is good. Renewal also brings hope and freshness. Some places look better than they used to, some new gardens are exquisite, here and there a shabby wall has been embellished by an artist unknown to me. And despite the reign of commerce and electronics, there are still so many bookshops in Paris! It is heartwarming to see that it remains a place of intellectual pursuit and debate, inhabited by a population that actively cares about politics and societal issues. Have no fear—the constant aggravation caused by strikes and protest demonstrations is proof enough that the passionate Gallic spirit is still very much alive in its capital city as well as in the rest of the national territory.
Proust’s Paris
SANCHE DE GRAMONT
MARCEL PROUST SEEMS to be more celebrated now than he ever was, and the publication of recent books such as Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time by Patrick Alexander (Vintage, 2009), The Year of Reading Proust by Phyllis Rose (Scribner, 1997), and How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton (Pantheon, 1997) attests to the popularity of Proustomania. Many Proust fans who visit Paris also make a pilgrimage to Illiers-Combray, just south of Chartres, where Proust’s celebrated tome, In Search of Lost Time is set. Readers of my first Paris edition may recall a New Yorker piece I included in that book called “In Search of Proust” by André Aciman. In it, Aciman refers to the “Prousto-tourists” who come to the former town of Illiers, which added Combray to its name officially in 1971, on the centennial of Proust’s birth. Aciman also notes that the town of Illiers-Combray sells about two thousand madeleines, the famed cake at the heart of Proust’s story, every month. The village also has a very lovely Marcel Proust museum, which was originally the home of Proust’s paternal uncle and aunt and in fact is also known as Aunt Léonie’s House. In her excellent account of the museum’s restoration and history, “Marcel Proust at Illiers-Combray” (Architectural Digest, October 2000), Judith Thurman accurately notes that “all great writers have an exceptionally fine-tuned sense of place, but none, surely, has ever been finer than Marcel Proust’s. The architect of that sublime memory palace, In Search of Lost Time, is inseparable from his own décors, real and imagined.”
But, as anyone who’s read Proust’s literary masterpiece knows, Belle Époque Paris is at the center of the story. Here is a unique piece, originally appearing in Horizon, that is both a brilliant encapsulation of the novel and an annotated geographical legend to the city of Paris just before and after the turn of the twentieth century. The original article was accompanied by a map, because as the Horizon editors noted, the sense of reality in Proust’s novel is so compelling that “its characters seem as authentic as the Paris streets in which they come and go.” I encourage readers to look at a detailed map of Paris and locate the sites that Sanche de Gramont has pinpointed below. Again to quote the Horizon editors, “Such a mixture of the imagined and the actual would surely have pleased Proust. His own central character, in love with Gilberte Swann, once his childhood playmate, ‘had always, within reach, a plan of Paris, which … seemed to [him] to contain a secret treasure’—for in it he can find the street where his beloved lives.” Readers can imagine that they have “been allowed to glance at Proust’s carnet, or address book, where the novelist has jotted down some of the prominent landmarks of his vast work.”
SANCHE DE GRAMONT, introduced previously, is also the author