A Brief Account of Recent Travels

 The library, Trinity College, Cambridge

            Just before we left Paris there appeared in one of the national daily papers a lengthy article concerning the state of the tourist industry in France.  The tourist industry in France is, in a word, robust.  Not merely is France the number one tourist destination in the world, this year’s cohort of visitors is likely to prove the largest in recorded history.  No one staying in an apartment near the Eiffel Tower, as we were, would be tempted to suspect this was Fake News; but we didn’t grasp the full implications of it until we got to Charles de Gaulle airport about noon on Monday.  Even though the authorities had accelerated the perfunctory process of “passport control” to the speed of the production line in the factory in Modern Times, it took the better part of an hour and a half to run us through the mill.  And the torture of the egress from Paris was actually less wearing than that of the ingress to Newark.  But to dwell on the only unfortunate twelve hours of an otherwise blissful three-week-long trip would be all wrong.

            Our trip devolved in the three stages I outlined in an earlier post: an intensive educational tour in southern and eastern England, a short week of lotus-eating in the Var in the south of France, and a variegated week of cultural, social, and gastronomic immersion in the City of Light.

            A professional medievalist can perhaps be assumed to indulge somewhat rarified tastes, but I can now confess that even I was a little dubious about the sustaining power of our proposed tour of great libraries, even one sponsored by so cerebral an outfit as Princeton Journeys.  To be sure I myself find few things more engaging than old folios stoutly bound in calf.  But how about the famous species homme moyen sensuel, of which there must be one or two representatives among the body of Princeton alumni?  Well, I should have worried rather about whether I could match the erudition and the mental energy of my so-called “students”.   What wonderful places we went, what wonderful things we saw!  Between the expert and imaginative preparations of the travel professionals, and the cohesive bonhomie of our traveling bibliophiles, it turned out to be, as the saying goes, the trip of a lifetime.        

            I am an Oxford man, and over the years I have willingly if mindlessly participated in the kind of boring banter which the alumni of the two ancient universities sling back and forth.  But I have to say that the collegiate libraries of Cambridge seem to me to surpass those of Oxford both in beauty and variety.  Such comparisons are of course finally otiose.  Better to be simply thankful for the nearly miraculous preservation of Duke Humphrey in the top of the old Bodleian in Oxford or the Wrenn masterpiece at Trinity College Cambridge.

 The sitting room at Knebworth House, Herts.

            The tour included visits to various ancillary literary shrines: the archives of Canterbury Cathedral, the Dickens Museum in London, and the extraordinary stately home once the possession of Bulwer-Lytton, author of twenty-nine novels, twelve illegitimate children, and the immortal opening line “It was a dark and stormy night…”  We also took in a number of antiquarian book dealers in London, including Jarndyce (just across the street from the British Museum), whose extraordinary range of Dickens items was of particular interest to the several Dickens enthusiasts on the tour.  Though an English professor and a great admirer of the nineteenth-century novelists, I must confess that my own favorite unaffordable book was of a political genre, and related to my work on anti-Communist literature.  There was on offer at Peter Harrington’s on the Fulham Road in Chelsea a signed and inscribed first edition of Karl Marx’s Kapital, vol. the first, 1867.  The asking price for this rare item: £1,325,000.  One may view this bibliographical phenomenon either as a refutation of Marx’s labor theory of value or as a stunning confirmation of his analysis of the audacity of capitalist commodification. 

            This library trip did keep us on the run a bit—I gave a few lectures and tried to respond intelligently to the numerous questions that came up—and though I was sorry to see it end, I was more than ready for the down time that followed.  We had a wonderful week with our very old and very dear friend Andrew Seth at his paradisal establishment in the south of France: soft, lazy days, lots of reading, lots of challenging conversation, and probably too much good eating.  The final week was in Paris, where another very old friend was being fêted by her extensive family for her eightieth birthday.  I am not moving all that fast these days, and we limited our activities to a single event or museum per day.  There was a big Mary Cassatt show at the Jacquemart-André Museum.  At the Petit Palais there was a fascinating exhibition concerning French impressionists who had for longer or shorter periods been exiled in England, mainly as a result of the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of the Paris Commune.  Who knew?  Not me.  So that’s the brief report.  I am back now to sweltering Jersey heat and humidity, and the blog has come back with me.

 

Paris

             I want to write about Paris because I must, but in order to keep things real and to avoid some of the sentimental excesses I am finding in the press, I begin with an anecdote.  In 1962, newly married, Joan and I set out from Paris into the provinces of France in search of certain medieval manuscripts in local municipal libraries. We had purchased an old Citroën Deux-Chevaux.  Its license plate, beginning with 75, identified it as Parisian.  Somewhere far from the city we stopped to buy something at the edge of the road.  Joan’s French is excellent, and it is Parisian French.  A local woman rudely cut in front of her at the stall where she had begun to shop, saying to the stall-keeper, “She can wait—they’re Parisians!”  When Joan told her she was in fact an Englishwoman and I an American with a second-hand car, both of them apologized profusely.  Obnoxious, pushy, selfish—such were the characteristics they were eager to attribute to Parisians en masse, and to counter with an uncharacteristic rudeness of their own.

A Deux-Chevaux of the belle epoque 

            I have lived and worked in Paris long enough to understand that woman’s point of view which, while not the truth, was not without some truth.  Paris can be pretty cold as well as pretty cool, and it is nothing like the little towns of my youth where strangers on the street smiled and said “Hi,” as others in passing pickups half raised a laconic hand in friendly greeting.  Still I struggle in vain to imagine a level of anomie or alienation or ghettoization or cultural indignation or in fact anything else that might be assuaged by spraying a sidewalk café with Kalashnikov fire or blowing oneself up at the gates of a football stadium.  I think attempted explanations, in fact, defy the powers of human imagination, despite the best efforts of the Op-Ed pages of the Times.

            In those pages this morning I find a letter from some woman berating me for lavishing upon the Paris slaughter an outpouring of concern not previously expressed over similar terrorist atrocities in Nigeria, Lebanon, and Yemen.  The truth is that there is such a thing as shock fatigue.  God’s heart is infinite.  He knows of every sparrow that falls.  My own experience is constrained by a demeaning but inescapable finitude.  I know some things, a paltry few.  Paris I do know, at least as a man with a pail full of sea-water knows the ocean, and that is enough to know the horror of this moment.  Every American, indeed every Westerner of however modest cultural attainment, knows Paris well enough to know the horror.

            It’s the place young Americans fought and died to protect in one war, then fought and died to liberate in a second war.  Long before that it was the place that sent us, in the eighteenth century, military aid without which there well might never have been a United States of America.  Above all it’s the place that approximately from the twelfth century has been sending to the whole world, at least to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, great books, great art, great ideas.  Oh--and great wine.  That one requires palates to taste.  So there is something peculiarly atrocious about the Paris slaughter, as the Allahuakbarists surely perceived.  Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo.  Je ne suis pas parisien.  Je suis américain, moi.  Nonetheless I am a brother in pain, and I do express my outrage and my condolences with the rest of the sentient world.

            I learned of the slaughter while I was in Philadelphia at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 “for the promotion of useful knowledge.” In fact I was being formally inducted into that august society.  They obviously made either an exception or a typographic error in my case.  Not too many life experiences can accurately be described as “awesome”, but writing my signature in a book containing the earlier autographs of Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson has to be for me one of the few. The obvious models for the APS were the royal societies of the great European powers.  Franklin and Jefferson in particular had close life-long ties to French intellectual life.

 The American Cathedral in Paris in the good old days

            From our Paris apartment at the very edge of the Fifteenth Arrondissement on the Avenue Suffren we used of a Sunday morning to walk to church at the American Cathedral.  As we would cross the Champ de Mars near the Eiffel Tower, the gypsy con-artists would already be trying their tiresome “lost ring” ploy on a few early birds among the Chinese tourist.  We walked down the little Rue du Général Camou past the American Library until the street ends in the Avenue Rapp.  Then we would turn left, walk along Rapp and cross the river by the Pont d’Alma.  Just on the right bank at the Place d’Alma is the striking monument, with an eternal flame, marking the place where Princess Diana died.  We then continued up the de luxe Avenue Georges V past the vast Chinese embassy to our church.

            That’s quite a lot of international complication in one short Paris walk, but for me the quirky highpoint was something uniquely, inescapably, and perhaps insanely French.  It is the art nouveau decorative portal of an apartment house at 29, Avenue Rapp.  We passed it going and coming, and I hope to once again, despite all the powers of darkness.

29, Avenue Rapp

Bounded by History

I've always had a snobbish aversion to the word "historic" as used by American travel agents and local civic boosters. They present us with historic sites, historic areas, historic neighborhoods, and historic buildings galore. Usually this means that the thing referred to has been around forever, with a starting date for forever being somewhere around 1920. History, surely, is universal. It is the medium in which we live and move. I may fail to achieve fame or glory, but I can no more opt out of being "historic" than I can opt out of being mammalian or bipedal. To use the language so oddly used by our President of Afghanistan, history is a category of necessity and not of choice. Nonetheless, I find myself talking quite shamelessly about how "historic" our location in Paris is.
Here we are at the point of the little yellow slip, on the Avenue de Suffren as it separates us in the Fifteenth Arondissement from my daughter and her family in the Seventh across the street. As you can see, we are practically in the Champ de Mars park, which runs between the Eiffel Tower on the one end to the École Militaire at the other.

On a proportional basis, at least, there is probably more of revolutionary Philadelphia still intact than there is of revolutionary Paris. Practically all European capitals show the evidence of the drastic and unforgiving progress of the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. There is very little of Balzac's Paris left for the same reason there is so little of Dickens's London. Nobody in particular wanted to keep it, and there were piles of money to be made by changing it. But in Paris the remaking was particularly intentional and drastic. The great urban planner Baron Haussmann rebuilt Paris on lines not merely incompatible with the the old unplanned jumbled neighborhoods, but positively hostile to them. He wanted a city that was new, beautiful, and different, and he got all three. But certain things have a better chance of survival than others. Only Xerxes or the Army Corps of Engineers would have the gall to change the course of a river. Only a vandal would turn the Tuileries into office blocks. And the Champ de Mars--well, as its name implies it was a military parade ground of ancient lineage. You might as well try to turn Fort Dix into a theme park. Actually, when you come to think of it....but I digress. This means that right at the moment the Flemings are living directly across the road from, well, history!

At the Musée Carnavalet on the edge of the Marais--another happy escapee from Haussmann's radiating avenues--there is currently an exhibition concerning Paris in the Revolution. There was a kind of tributary mini-expo featuring English satirical prints dealing with the Revolution or Napoleon Buonaparte--to the extent that Gillray and his contemporaries made a distinction between the two. The Carnavalet's mission is Parisian history, and its collection of revolutionary prints, paintings, and knickknacks is unrivalled.

Among the most striking prints on display were several that depicted events on the Champ de Mars. On July 17, 1791 a large crowd gathered there in connection with a circulated petition demanding the abdication of the king. As is usual with "historic" events what actually happened next depends upon what "history" you read. But the upshot (so to speak) was that units of the National Guard, probably under the command of Lafayette, fired into the crowds, killing many people. What was called the "Massacre of the Champ du Mars" was one of a series of radicalizing events that would spell doom for the "liberal" revolution imagined by people like Lafayette. Indeed the damagogue Marat attacked Lafayette violently in the aftermath of the event.




Less violent, though disturbing enough to some in its own way, was the formal institution of a new civil religion, replacing traditional Christianity, but imitating some of its outward forms. The revolutionaries went so far as to install the goddess Reason (in the form of a super-model of the day) on the altar of Notre-Dame cathedral. Someday I intend to write a little essay about this, because I am convinced that the organizers of this quasi-liturgical event took as their iconographic guide in coming up with Reason's costume a medieval manuscript of the Roman de la Rose! The revolutionaries were for the most part a godless bunch. A few were actual atheists; many more were when pressed what I would call low-church Deists. Their "theology", if any, was of the "clock-maker" sort; and though they were democrats the last thing they wanted was to invited that particular artisan back into the Assemblée Nationale. But Robespierre and some of his friends found it convenient to take at least a step in that direction, perhaps rather as Stalin in the middle of the War found it convenient to reanimate, in a limited way,the Orthodox Church. They instituted something called the "Feast of the Supreme Being". Try to imagine a block party presided over by, say, Matthew Arnold, and you'll get the feel of the thing.

In the Carnavalet exhibition one of the more striking images was this one--the celebration of the Fête de 'Être Suprème on the Champ de Mars, 20 Prairial de l'an II (June 8, 1794). That would have been about three hundred yards from where I sit as I write this. Talk about historic!