Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [55]
The rue Saint-Augustin is a reminder of the Baron de Charlus’s complaint that Jews live in streets bearing saints’ names, which he considers a sacrilege. He suggests they ought to live in a street “which is entirely conceded to the Jews, there are Hebrew characters over the shops, bakeries for unleavened bread, kosher butcheries, it is positively the Judengasse of Paris.”
The rue de Rivoli is the street of the Louvre. The Duchesse de Guermantes visits the museum to see Manet’s Olympia, and comments: “Nowadays nobody is in the least surprised by it. It looks just like an Ingres! And yet, heaven only knows how many spears I’ve had to break for that picture, which I don’t altogether like but which is unquestionably the work of somebody.”
The narrator sees the Eiffel Tower covered with searchlights, lit over wartime Paris in 1914 to detect German planes.
The rue de Varenne is where the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes live, until they move to a new mansion on the avenue du Bois, today’s avenue Foch.
To the Orangerie, in the Tuileries gardens, the writer Bergotte, suffering from an attack of uremia, goes to see Vermeer’s Street in Delft, on loan from The Hague Museum. A critic has written that a fragment of yellow wall in the painting could be considered a thing of perfect beauty, and against the advice of doctors, Bergotte goes out to see this fragment. “His giddiness increased; he fixed his eyes, like a child upon a yellow butterfly … upon the precious little patch of wall. ‘That is how I ought to have written.… My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint, made my language exquisite in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.’ … he sank down upon a circular divan … he rolled from the divan to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead.”
This scene parallels one in Proust’s life. Although mortally ill, Proust left his apartment for the last time, on the arm of his friend Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, to see this very Vermeer painting, which he considered “the most beautiful in the world.” The exhibit opened in May 1921. Proust died in November of the following year after finishing Remembrance of Things Past.
G. Y. Dryansky
Gerald Dryansky may not be a writer whose name is known in every household, but for readers of Condé Nast Traveler his name is very well known indeed. Dryansky has been writing for Traveler since, I think, its inception in 1987, and I have long admired his well-written and thought-provoking pieces. I regret I was unable to include one of the very best articles ever written about Paris here, but I urge readers to go online to search for the article, which appeared in February 2003: “The Secret Life of Paris,” by Gerald Dryansky and with photos by William Abranowicz (one of my favorite photographers). Among a number of perceptive passages in his piece is this one: “There is something special in the material beauty of a city whose contribution to civilization is not so much vistas and monuments as it is the local approach to a civilized life. To understand Paris, you have to start with Parisians.” Dryansky’s daughter Larisa has also written for Condé Nast Traveler, and one of her articles, “The Villages of Paris” (February 1995), is also one of my favorites. It focuses particularly on the neighborhoods