My parents were both great readers. In the family room, my father had built wall-to-ceiling shelves that my parents then filled with books. These were mostly adult books, poetry for my mother, fiction for my father. As I grew up, I came to enjoy his favorite authors: Mark Twain, with “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn,” of course, but also the less well known “Life on the Mississippi,” “Innocents Abroad,” and “Puddn’head Wilson,” a detective story.

They passed their love of reading on to me. I had my own large Philippine mahogany bookcase in my bedroom. It held, among others, the Oz stories, but I was a purist. I had only the original ones, those written by L. Frank Baum himself. The Oz books written by a successor after he died were just not the same. I also had a large collection of fairy tale books, notably the “color” series by Andrew Lang.

My father, an engineer working for a large oil company, was often gone on business, especially during World War II, which America joined after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when I was six years old. My father did not fight in the war as a soldier. He was an engineer, and the military draft authorities considered him more important in that role. Still, Papa would be away for weeks at a time, in the Pacific Northwest and Canada where there were oil deposits. He would send me postcards, including a humorous one showing a giant mosquito carrying off a deer. They were fun, but it wasn’t the same as having him there, reading me grownup stories like “The Count of Monte Cristo” instead of just the Mother Westwind stories Mama read to me about animals named Jimmy Skunk, Jerry Muskrat and Joe Otter.

I was bored staying home with Mama alone while my father was away. Luckily, I was saved by the neighbors. My father was often transferred because of his work, so we rented a lot of the time rather than buy a home. In 1942, we moved to Hillsborough, California. The Hammonds, our landlords, lived next door. They were not demanding or oppressive, the way landlords are often portrayed. They were open and friendly. Mrs. Hammond was particularly kind to me. One day she gave me a great gift in the form of an invitation. “I know how much you love our old house,” she said to me. “Our doors are never locked, you can come in whenever you want.” This was an unusual invitation, but for me, Mrs. Hammond was an unusual person because so unlike Mama. Her dress style was a great contrast to Mama’s. Instead of straight skirts and crisply ironed white blouses topped by cardigan sweaters, Mrs. Hammond’s home attire was faded blue jeans. They were perfect for the gardening she loved. During the war the Hammonds had a vegetable garden, a “Victory Garden” as they were called, the idea being that by growing a part of our own food, we were helping the war effort. I followed their example, and was proud of the carrots, beets, peas and string beans that I eventually provided for our dinner table.

I took advantage of Mrs. Hammond’s offer to visit next door whenever I wanted and I’d wander around the house, a big Victorian that had been in the family for generations. I mostly stayed in the downstairs rooms, which had the most character, where I would soak up the atmosphere of warmth and kindness I felt there. Especially, I’d visit her daughters Kate and Jane. Kate was six months older than I, and Jane, six months younger. They were my best friends. We played together almost every day, always at their house. Sometimes we went up to the attic, which had a trunk full of old clothes we could dress up in.

The Hammonds had only one bookcase, kept in what they called “the music room” because there was an upright piano against one wall. There, I often joined Kate and Jane to practice our scales. Music lessons were a must for nice upper middle-class girls like the three of us, the piano being the most popular instrument.

One day, when it was not my turn on the piano, I drifted over to the bookshelf across the room and explored its small collection. There were mostly medical textbooks left over from Mrs. Hammond’s time as a nurse before her marriage. But I also discovered a slim volume called “The Snow Goose” by the American writer Paul Gallico. It is a tale deriving from a real event of the Second World War, prior to the entry of the United States. It recounts the desperate sea evacuation of mostly British along with French soldiers trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk in northern France in 1940, using many small non-military ships and craft along with British destroyers and other military vessels. In the story, a large Canada goose plays a role in the rescue. “If you saw the goose,” one of the story’s fictional survivors says, “you were eventually saved.”

I read “The Snow Goose” for the first time right there on the floor in the Hammonds’ music room. It is a beautiful story, about a hunchbacked painter, an orphan girl, and a Canada goose, but because the painter dies during the evacuation it is very sad. It made me weep. Kate and Jane, busy working on a duet at the piano, did not notice my tears.

I continued to find “The Snow Goose” compelling. Seated on the floor in the Hammonds’ music room, I read it over and over. I kept rereading it until my father was transferred to Texas in 1948 and we moved away, when I was 13. Before we moved, I thought, briefly, of stealing “The Snow Goose”, carrying it off with me, but I could not do such a thing to the Hammonds, who had been such good friends to me. I left it where it was.

Years passed before I saw another copy of “The Snow Goose.” I came across it in a used bookstore in Montreal, when my late husband Earl and I were on vacation in Canada. This lovely book would be all mine, forever. It is a nicer copy than the one the Hammonds had, a special edition with four full-page color illustrations: one of the orphan girl with the goose in her arms, two of geese flying over the old lighthouse where the painter lived, and one of the Snow Goose alone in flight.

In my home in Paris where I now live, I have a bookshelf holding books that have special meaning for me. Occasionally, I’ll pick one up just to hold it in my hands or to flip through its pages or to reread it. Recently, for no conscious reason, I found myself drawn to my old and beautiful copy of the “The Snow Goose.” I reread it that afternoon and I loved it just as much as ever. I felt a connection with my six-year-old self sitting on the floor in the Hammonds’ music room. Though I hadn’t picked it up in many years, I realized that the book had been a part of my life for more than 80 years. Yet in the decades that I’ve lived in Paris, I had never been to Dunkirk, even though it’s only about 180 miles northwest of the city. I felt a sudden desire—no, a need—to go there.

I made plans to go on my own for one week this past September. I took the train to Dunkirk, a 2½-hour ride from Paris’s Gare du Nord. My daughter had reserved for me a nice hotel near the beach in Malo-les-Bains, once a distinct seaside resort, now fully a part of Dunkirk. It was from Malo that much of the beach evacuation took place in 1940.

My first day there produced typical Northern France weather, a sky like homogenous gray soup threatening rain, and a brisk wind. Reluctantly, I postponed my plan to stroll by the beach. I settled for visiting the nearby Dunkirk War Museum, Musée Dunkerque 1940 – Opération Dynamo. Operation Dynamo was the codename for the wartime evacuation. Visiting the informative museum was well worth my time. While many of the displays and photos naturally tell about the war, the evacuation and its aftermath, I was intrigued by two photos of Dunkirk and Malo before the war, before they were pounded into rubble by German bombings. In the few hours I’d been in Dunkirk, I could already see that most of what now stands has been built since the war. Always a book lover, I bought two books, one in French, one in English, both titled “Operation Dynamo.”

The following day the weather began to clear. I went for a walk on the paved promenade, what the locals call la digue (the dike), that runs the full length of the beach. I could see far out across the water, beyond the low dunes with gray-green marsh grass growing in the sand. This was one of the sites of the evacuation. There was still wind, but not so strong, and it didn’t buffet the numerous small white sailboats I saw. In a trick of the mind, I imagined that they were part of the flotilla of small craft arriving to carry the stranded soldiers away to safety to the larger ships waiting farther out, to take them on to safety in England.

The next day, I returned to the path along the beach, now with “The Snow Goose” in my purse. It wasn’t the beautiful copy I had at home, but a pocket-size edition that a friend whom I had told about this touching story and about my plan to visit Dunkirk had kindly sent me from England. I found a wooden bench where, under blue skies with powder puff white clouds, I sat and began to read. From time to time, I looked along the beaches around me where the men had awaited rescue and out to the sea before me. I noticed how shallow the water was for a good distance out. For the first time, I truly understood the need for small boats to evacuate the soldiers. The larger boats that had tried to come in to pick up the stranded soldiers could not, because there was not enough depth. Thus hindered, they made easy targets for the German planes overhead, diving and strafing. Still, the little boats were not spared.

I reread the “The Snow Goose” entirely that afternoon, occasionally pausing to contemplate my surroundings. In my mind’s eye I could see those little boats trying to dart away from the diving planes. Some got through. Others did not. The little boat in “The Snow Goose” was one of the latter. For the lonely painter and the orphan girl who had come to love him, there was only loss. Although I usually prefer happy endings, such an ending would never have touched me the way this sad one has. I was moved in an unusual way, not to tears for a beautiful tale, but by the realization of how very close this evacuation, a “non-victory” as Churchill put it, came to becoming a resounding defeat. Yet in the final accounting, 340,000 British and French troops were successfully evacuated. They formed the nucleus of an army which would fight again, and, four years later, with Americans now on their side, return to the shores of France to eventually defeat Germany.

Though this was my first time in Dunkirk, being there was like visiting my own past. I thought of the kindness of the Hammonds and our peaceable lives in California. I thought about the effects of World War II on the American home front, with our sense of a just and necessary war, and the effort to engage ordinary civilians, women and even children like me, through Victory Gardens and War Bond drives, events that marked my childhood and have stayed with me as “The Snow Goose” has for over 80 years. As I sat there, watching families now walking peacefully in the sunshine along the beach and looking out to the calm waters and little sailboats sliding on the sea, I realized that I am now old enough to remember a time that fewer and fewer do. I realized this not with sadness or even nostalgia, but with a sense of privilege at having been a part of those heroic times.

© 2024, Alice Evleth

Read the accompanying article Dunkirk 1940, Dunkirk Today: Advice for a Day Trip or an Overnight by Gary Lee Kraut.

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* * *

We are often at a loss for words when we travel in continental Europe. It isn’t only the words for natural conversation that are lacking but also the vocabulary of the things we see.

We admire the architectural and ornamental details of cathedrals, castles, mansions, ornate buildings and interior design without being able to name them: the archivolt, tympanum and gable at the entrance to the cathedral, the rib vaulting and lancet and rose windows inside, or the madillions, scrolled pediments, atlantes and caryatids that draw our attention as we wander through town. Perhaps that’s why we take so many pictures, because we don’t have the vocabulary, even in English, to describe or remember the details.

That isn’t a failing on our part. After all, we have little to no contact with such elements back home. Still, if you find yourself curious for the name of such things, the handsome coffeetable book Vocabulaire Illustré de l’Ornament by Evelyne Thomas can go a long way in satisfying your curiosity in the vocabulary of ornamentation from Antiquity through the 19th century.

The 320-page book has hundreds of entries alphabetically organized and precisely illustrated with 800 photographs, nearly all of which were taken by the author Though the descriptions are in French, a 12-page lexicon of terms English-to-French and French-to-English adds a touch of accessibility to those unable to read in French.

Evelyne Thomas is a journalist originally from Tours who holds a doctorate in the History of Art. (Disclaimer: She is also member of the board of the Association des Journalistes du Patrimoine as is this writer.)

Vocabulaire illustré de l’ornament par le décor de l’architecture et des autres arts by Evelyne Thomas. Published by Eyrolles. 39.50€. First published in 2012, and recipient of the 2013 Demeure Historique book prize, the book’s second edition was published in this year.

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By James and Luanne Napoli

Bernard Daudibon is stacking books for display in a tent stand on Place des Anciennes Halles as he does on the first Sunday of every month. That’s when Bécherel, Brittany’s premier book town, holds its outdoor book market. It’s a cold March morning and only a dozen or so bibliophiles are picking through the hardbacks and softbacks, flipping through pages but not doing much buying.

Business is not so good, Daudibon admits, but it will get better. In Bécherel, blossoming trees don’t signal the start of spring so much as does the annual Fête du Livre over Easter weekend. Daudibon, bookseller at the Librairie du Donjon, and the other 13 booksellers in this commune of about 750 inhabitants can then turn the page on winter. And business will most assuredly pick up in the summer tourist season, when more book-addled Belgians, Italians and Brits ascend to the hilltop cité on their holiday treks through Brittany.

We are Americans who compulsively feed our libraries at home in Portland, Maine, and in our rural Breton cottage in Saint Aubin du Cormier, some 20 miles east of Bécherel. Literary Bécherel offers us the comfort of myriad dusty volumes in the intimacy of bookshops with welcoming owners who know their Flaubert from their Faulkner, an experience now rare back home.

Today we are looking for books by the French romantic writer François-René de Chateaubriand. We have a special affection for Chateaubriand because, like us, he loved the forests and rocky coasts of Brittany and he loved literature. He also knew Bécherel. In his memoirs, he notes that from his chateau in Combourg, 12 miles away, he could see the heights of Bécherel silhouetted against the sky.

We aren’t the only ones to feel a kinship with Chateaubriand in Bécherel. He is something of a favorite son. We find a coffee table book on Chateaubriand and Combourg at Librairie Abraxas, which has one of the most inclusive collections of French literature in town. At the Librairie Boulavogue on the square, we hit upon a cache of about 10 volumes by the author, and pick up a used paperback of his memoirs in French. At the same time, we couldn’t resist buying three or four classic detective novels in English that turned up in the shop’s extensive Policiers section.

We make our way across the square to the Café/Librairie Gwrizienn, which even the French can’t pronounce. The sun emerges only briefly between showers, making a retreat into the ochre-dark, cozy café and corner bar at the rear of the Gwrizienn irresistible. We’re sipping coffee and eavesdropping on a klatch of about 10 mostly gray men and women talking literature quietly and intently.

“They meet once a month, every month to discuss a book,” says the proprietress just as quietly and intently as her book-loving patrons. “A different book every month.”

In all, tiny Bécherel has at least 14 permanent used and antiquarian book stores and a range of galleries and shops specializing in the art of making books. The drive to promote books and literature, as well as other cultural enterprises in a rural environment, got traction in Bécherel in 1989 when a local cultural association, the Association Savenn Douar, organized the commune’s first book festival, the Fête du Livre, and designated Bécherel as a Cité du Livre or book town, the first in all of France and the third in Europe. Bécherel is now one of eight members of the Féderation des Villes, Cités et Villages du Livre en France.

Even before becoming known for books, Bécherel, formerly a textile town, was known for character. In 1978 it was a “Petite Cité de Caractère” by the national Association des Petites Cités de Caractère that supports small rural communities with historical significance, an architectural heritage and a commitment to promote cultural events and tourism.

It isn’t only books and the bookish that make a book town but also places to discuss books, to contemplate newly purchased books and to reflect on the bookish life, as well as a place to purchase a bottle of wine to accompany it at home. For the latter we stop into Yannick Bygot’s La Cave D’Elodie, specializing in “natural” wines. When hungry for more than literature we visit France and Olivier Chiffoleau’s Creole bistro La Part des Anges.

Bécherel straddles a steep hilltop with vestiges of ramparts and the dungeon of a centuries-old chateau, which now accommodates the granite-faced Donjon book shop. The intimate rampart walk leads to the spectacular view toward Combourg. But the walk also offers benches in a small walled park, perfect for perusing a newly purchased book and glimpsing the back yards of residents. From the square, the Rue Saint Michel drops past the church and cemetery, offering pastoral views of the adjoining valley. The ponds and fields at the base of the hill extend to a 19th-century covered wash basin (lavoir), where women laundered and exchanged the day’s news. A plaque at the site describes it as “radio lavoir.”

Bécherel is the perfect place for settling down on a bench with a good book. But you’ll need to buy one first.

James and Luanne Napoli are writers living in Portland, Maine. They have a cottage in Brittany and have been visiting France regularly for over 20 years.

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The book presents two novellas concerned with the lives of individuals during the German advance into France in the spring of 1940 and in an occupied village in the months that followed. Suite Française, a work of fiction, was drawn from draft manuscripts written by Irene Némirovsky between 1940 and 1942 as she lived through those wartime events. As such, it is an extraordinary example of documentary fiction from that period, even though first published over 60 years later.

The movie, based primarily on the second novella, Dolce, is a Hollywood-style adaptation that is refreshingly old-fashion in its telling of a tension-filled story of love, sex, resistance, collaboration, survival and redemption in an occupied village near Paris. Neither the treatment nor the characters are new to those with any familiarity with WWII war movies, but even in its broad strokes and polished romanticism, the intimacy of the film, the quality of the acting, the seductive sentimentality of the music, and the concise (if sometimes slow) nature of the scenes draws us into its depiction of the social and economic structure an occupied village, where individual choices have lasting consequences.

Having already been released in the UK, Suite Française, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Michelle Williams and Matthias Schoenaerts, will be released in France on April 1.

I would like to think that those who have not read the book and are unlikely to do so would find the above sufficient information to decide whether or not to see Suite Française, and if yes then whether to see it on the big screen, on the medium-size screen at home, or perhaps on the small screen of your next overseas flight. (For those in France, there is also the choice of seeing it in the original English version or dubbed in French, which is how I saw it.)

But even before finding this text one is likely to have already encountered far more information about the book. This is true whether or not one has read it. And that’s where the potential trouble with this film begins.

I’m a fan of ignorance in this case—I believe that the film is more effective, enjoyable, even moving without the added baggage—since those elements of non-fiction force the fiction of the film (and of the book) into a stance that it doesn’t have without meta-analysis. But those elements are too tied up in Suite Française to ignore. Even before comparing book and film, one is preoccupied by the backstory, the sidestory and the epilogue.

Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 to a Jewish family that fled the Russian Empire when she was a teen. She became a writer in Paris, publishing in French, married Michel Epstein (a Jewish French banker), converted to Catholicism in 1939, fled Paris in 1940 for a village in Burgundy when life in the capital become untenable, and was eventually arrested for being a foreign Jew and deported to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus. Némirovsky’s arrest for deportation in July 1942 was followed several months later by her husband’s (he went second because he was French). When Denise, their elder daughter, then 13, and their younger daughter Elisabeth, then 5, were taken into hiding, Denise took with her a suitcase containing her mother’s manuscripts. She claimed she didn’t read the manuscripts for the next 50 years because she thought them to be her mother’s wartime diaries that would be too painful to read.

In 2004, Suite Française was finally published including those biographical details and many more, and it takes a special kind of reader to avoid having them color their reading of the book.

Those who have read the book and are now considering seeing the movie might read reviewer Deborah Ross’s take on book vs. film question in an article published in The Spectator.

But those considering seeing the movie without having already read the book should stop reading the meta-analysis (fascinating and thought-provoking as it may be) and go enjoy Suite Française on the screen. Because enjoyable it is. The heavy hand of Hollywood awaits the characters in their film fate here, but even so the story on the screen is as tense as it is revealing of village life in occupied France.

Those who know the book may shirk at some of the broad strokes and character transformations and particularly the stock ending, but I shirk more at the thought of the movie that might also have been made with this material: a movie about a Jewish-cum-Catholic writer named Irene Némirovsky, forbidden from publishing due to France’s wartime anti-Jewish laws, writing a fiction about the mostly Catholic inhabitants of an occupied village as she is about to be arrested for being Jewish… and then there’s a knock at the door. Thankfully, the filmmakers resisted the temptation to make such a movie, though they couldn’t resist the infidelity of adding a character whose identity card is stamped Jewish and her daughter into the movie along with an unambiguous ending.

It’s best then not to read too much about the book or about the author if you want to enjoy the film for what it is: a memorable wartime drama situated in France (though filmed in Belgium), earnestly played by a few familiar faces, accompanied by sentimental music, about characters living in tough circumstances who make tough choices with heavy consequences, some of whom exude sex appeal (if not necessarily together).

I am reminded very much of Casablanca, a film released in Nov. 1942. That’s about the time Némirovsky’s first two novellas might have been published had Rick managed to get the manuscripts onto that plane with Ilsa and Victor.

© 2015, Gary Lee Kraut

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There it is. I have seen pictures of it on websites and in guidebooks. The familiar yellow sign with green lettering.

SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY.

I enter the bookstore and I’m greeted by “The Lost Generation.”

Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce. They are all there. Immortalized.

I bypass them, tilt my head and read the category subtitles: fiction a-z, history, geography. I wander with my head at an angle. Dozens and dozens of titles blur together. I pause when I see the drama section. I scan the shelves looking for Scottish writers but I can’t find any. I skim past Beckett and Ibsen and Miller.

I’m looking for something. I’m looking for something but I don’t know what it is.

I leave drama and enter poetry. A pink collection of love poems sits on a stand. I see blue books and green books, white, black, red, orange.

I reach a staircase and climb it. I click my fingers repeatedly, a sign that I am both tired and irritated.

Harry Potter greets me. I feel my love of children’s literature creep upon me. I stop to look at a beautiful edition of “Alice in Wonderland”; white with raspberry coloured flamingoes adorning it.

I follow the sound of music and find two teenage boys playing piano together in a room full of thick, dark hardbacks. They do not see me. I back away to avoid breaking their musical moment.

Another room with comfy seats. Readers sit quietly. I stand in the doorway and watch. It is a public room and, yet, I feel like I have entered a private space. I do not want to go in any further.

I see a wooden cubicle and approach it slowly. I duck my head and find myself inside a small booth with a broken typewriter. I press a few keys to hear the metallic noise. A childhood memory flickers.

Post it notes and little scraps of paper litter the inside of the booth. They are piled on top of each other, stuck overlapping on the wall; different handwriting scrawled in colored inks.

I read a torn note and a curious sensation hits me. I am surrounded by thoughts, memos and moments. The personal declarations of strangers.

I read another and another. Some are simple, often thanking Shakespeare and Company for their existence. Some are funny, commenting on the broken typewriter. Others share scattered sentiments: one thanks God for their purpose in life.

I have no idea how long I sit in the booth for. I feel strangely comforted here. In amongst the pockets of people, I have found my own little space.

I am about to leave when one, final note catches my eye:

Not all those that wander are lost.

A half laugh catches in my throat. There it is. Thank you Tolkien. Thank you stranger for leaving this.

I open my handbag and retrieve my diary. I rip out a small piece of paper. I write: From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring;

I leave my note on the desktop for the next wanderer to find.

© 2014, Morna Young

Morna Young is a playwright, actress and musician from Scotland. Her plays include Lost at Sea, Netting and Never Land. She won the New Playwright’s Award 2014 (Playwrights’ Studio, Scotland). For more about Morna Young see www.mornayoung.com.

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The Ferrandi faculty and some of their illustrious alumni and friends have contributed their savoir-faire and 143 recipes for the mega-cookbook Le Grand Cours de Cuisine Ferrandi (The Great Ferrandi Cooking Class).

Named by Le Figaro as Best Cookbook of 2014, this book digs into the nitty-gritty: deboning a pigeon, un-shelling a crab, shucking an oyster, dressing a duck, filleting a sole, roasting a peach. There are even 18 large color pictures that give the step-by-step process of de-choking an artichoke.

However, there’s no pressure to start out with Yannick Alléno’s go-for-baroque Oyster/Chorizo medley or Olivier Roellinger’s mega-complex Chocolate/Sherry Lobster, a dish that—even with pictures—looks like it requires a sous-chef armed with a sonic screwdriver from Gallifrey. Less accomplished chefs can begin by learning how to pull off a perfect hard-boiled egg before professing at their own speed to an airy omelet.

Two “simple” versions of blanquette de veau (beginner, intermediate) are explained, while black-belt chefs may head straight for the Michelin-starred version by Alsace star Olivier Nasti.

A significant part of the book’s 695 pages are devoted to recipes from restaurant celebrities like William Ledeuil, Adeline Grattard (both Ferrandi grads) and Thierry Marx.

Le Grand Cours de Cuisine Ferrandi offers no helpful tips on catching your rabbit, but once you’ve bagged your bunny, it will show-and-tell you everything else you need to know about turning it into cuisses de levreau en civet à l’échalote grise with candied apples and chanterelle ravioli on the side… a recipe contributed by Eric Briffard at the Hôtel George V.

The Ferrandi cookbook is perfect for the aspiring or confirmed chef on your gift list, whether in bicep-building hardback (the book tips the scales at 4.1 kilos) or in its e-book version. Published by Hachette, 49.95 €.

© 2014, Corinne LaBalme

For more about The Ferrandi School on France Revisited read this.

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Beyond his responsibilities at Versailles, Baraton is at once a folk historian, a provocateur and an entertainer in writing about the dark side of Versailles in Vice et Versailles: Crimes, trahisons et autres Empoisonnements au palais du Roi-Soleil (Vice and Versailles: Crimes, Treacheries and other Poisonings at the Palace of the Sun King).

“Money is celebrated in every corner [of Versailles],” he writes (in French). “There isn’t a statue or restored vase that doesn’t have its plaque thanking a generous donor… My greatest wish would be that a plaque, however modest, serve as a reminder that this palace of fairy tales is also that of dramas and misfortunes, because I cannot and don’t want to forget those, numerous as they are, who suffered in their flesh and paid with their life to enable us today to contemplate and to appreciate the chateau of kings, Versailles.”

In the absence of such a plaque, Baraton pays homage to the victims of Versailles in this book, though “homage” may not the appropriate term for his account of much the suffering he describes seeing how much he seems to delight in telling it. He spares no gore in telling stories about Versailles that “Historians,” he writes, “scarcely evoke,” “truths that would tarnish the luster of Versailles.”

This zone on the way to Normandy from Paris was once the stomping ground of a less titled band of crooks and hoods before Louis XIII purchased land at the village of Versailles in 1632 and ordered the construction of a hunting lodge. His son Louis XIV, upon assuming the reigns of power, would then use that lodge as the inner shell around which his expansive palace would develop beginning in 1662, a project that he would pursue for the next 50 years. Versailles was built a tremendous theater where Louis XIV always stood center stage, whether in the palace or in the garden, asserting and ensuring his role as the Sun King, the power and the glory around which all rotated.

Always quick to point out the murky side of this story, Baraton writes: “It’s fear that brought Louis XIV to Versailles, frightened by the Fronde [a rebellion against the royal government during the king’s minority]. It’s blood that allowed him to remain there. The sweet paths that we visit and the fabulous luxury of a palace that we admire are built on an open grave that would make the worst tyrant nauseous.”

At the time of its construction, Versailles was the largest construction site in Europe: 36,000 men worked on the site and there were 22,000 soldiers in the area. Malnourished and poorly paid, they worked under horrible conditions, suffering from cold, fever and frequent accidents. Baraton writes: “While I don’t know how many men died—the number 8,000 that has been mentioned by some sounds optimistic to me—I know that three hospitals… were built to care for the victims of a project worthy of a pharaoh.”

Beyond the sufferance of those who created Versailles, he invites the reader to revel in shadowy corners of the history of Versailles over the past 400 years whether telling us that the Grand Trianon was built on the site of a cemetery, noting that the last court-ordered public execution in France took place in the town of Versailles in 1939, or speaking of a of tortures, crimes, acts of vengeance and the occasional bloodletting.

Poisoning, Baraton explains, was all the rage during Louis XIV’s reign, “an arm for women that was very fashionable at the time.” As to elixirs of love, he has dug up the recipe of the love potion that Madame de Montespan supposedly managed to sneak into the king’s bloodstream: testicles of wild boar, artichoke, cat urine, fox excrement, toad powder, an eye of viper.

The author playfully lets us know that a bit of the macabre can await us, too, when we visit the great palace. In the name of history and beauty, mercury, despite its known toxicity, was recently used in the Hall of Mirrors to restore and replace those of the famed mirrors that had deteriorated over the centuries. “The level of toxicity is certainly beneath the safety level established by the WHO, but I recommend visitors who are particular about their appearance to not gaze upon themselves too long in the Hall.”

Though haphazard in its telling of the horror stories of Versailles, “Vice et Versailles” is a pleasant and easy trot of a read—in French only—full of anecdotes, ironic asides, juicy tidbits, black humor and broad historical strokes.

Published by Grasset in 2011, “Vice et Versailles” is one of a number of books that Baraton has written about the grounds where he has been employed since 1976 at the age of 19. He is also the author of more cheerful books including “Le Jardinier de Versailles” (Grasset, 2006), “Versailles vu par Alain Baraton” (Hugo et Cie, 2007) and “L’Amour à Versailles” (Grasset, 2009), along with other books on gardening, landscaping and trees. Baraton is especially known to a wide public in France through his weekly gardening show on the radio station France Inter. (Think a French version of “You Bet Your Garden” on NPR.)

During the height of Louis XIV’s reign at Versailles, 7000 people worked in the gardens of Versailles. Nowadays, with 800,000 flowers to plant each year along with general upkeep and various restorations, there are now 48 permanent gardeners for 2100 acres (850 hectares) along with surveillance agents and employees of ten private companies that periodically intervene “without,” Baraton said during a presentation of his book, “the same personal attachment [to Versailles] that the permanent gardeners have.”

In a conversation with the author-gardener it’s clear that he sees a certain amount of horror in the effects of contemporary tourism in Versailles, albeit far less bloody horror. He cites the eyesore of garbage cans now placed everywhere as a consequence of picnickers having so much waste. He also doesn’t like the idea of visitors listening to audio devices rather than to the natural environment. And he’s no fan of the golf carts that visitors can use to visit the garden but in which people don’t even look at what they’re passing but simply use to get from point A to point B. He would rather have us remember that beyond the palace the park of Versailles is a 17th-century creation that ought to be approached in the spirit of that era, meaning with lots of walking, perhaps in the wind or the cold, and with moments of silence so as to listen to the birds.

Though “Vice et Versailles” doesn’t present the technical aspects of his work overseeing the garden and park of Versailles, Baraton, as heir of sorts to André Le Nôtre, the landscape gardener who created Louis XIV’s backyard at Versailles, lets it be known that he has “an account to settle” with his forebear.

ALAIN BARATON, LE JARDINIER DE VERSAILLES… par AJPAT

In the interview video above conducted by Michel Shulman, president of the French Assocation of Heritage Journalists (Association des journalistes du patrimoine), Baraton explains (and I translate):

“Le Notre is a truly competent professional who left us with a unique and remarkable work, except that Le Notre didn’t invent anything—it’s worth bearing in mind—and Le Notre didn’t transmit anything either. When one has the opportunity, as Le Notre did, to be titled, to be near the king, to be wealthy—to keep everything for himself and take to the grave the secrets of his work, it’s not honorable. So I love Le Notre’s creation but I like the man himself a lot less… When one does work such as his it’s one’s duty to perpetuate it… I’m mad at Le Notre and that’s why from time to time I take a perverse pleasure in damaging a little his memory.”

Recognizing his role as a media personality, Baraton concludes that “My own obsession today is to transmit not only my own knowledge but that of my colleagues and to do exactly what he, Le Notre, didn’t have the courage to do.”

For those who read French, “Vice et Versailles” is a enjoyable and bloody introduction to some of that transmission.

Vice et Versailles: Crimes, trahaisons et autres empoisonnements au palais du Roi-Soleil by Alain Barton. 203 pages. Published by Grasset, 2011.

© 2013, Gary Lee Kraut

Other articles, photographs and videos about Versailles on France Revisited include:
Your, Mine and Le Nôtre’s: An American Photographer Examines the Garden of Versailles  (photography)
Jealousy and the Thrones at Versailles  (exhibtion)
The Gardens of Versailles in Winter (photograph/video)
Versailles, an Alternate Approach (advice)
Versailles, Versight, Versails, Versighs, Versize, Versache: How I learned to Forget the Crowds and Appreciate Versailles (3-part article)

The post Vice & Versailles: A Master Gardener Delves Into the Dark Shadows of the Louis XIV’s Palace appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Over the course of a single day, the novel follows the parallel stories of the three Americans and their respective tutors through separate walks on the streets of Paris: A woman who’s traveled to Paris alone after the death of her married lover; a women living in Paris and seeking freedom from family life; and the husband of a well-known actress who’s in the French capital to make a film.

Their parallel stories are explorations of love, loss, fidelity and loneliness—and of course of the beauty of Paris. In each case, the characters must decide what to do about their attraction to their opposite-sex French tutors.

Originally from Trenton, New Jersey, as is this interviewer, Ellen and her husband Neal now live in the San Francisco Bay area. She has two grown daughters.

Gary Lee Kraut: How did you learn French and was your teacher cute?

Ellen Sussman: When I moved to Paris I had a one-year-old and I was pregnant with my second child. So I never had time for real French lessons. For a short period of time I did set up for a French tutor to come to my apartment to give me lessons. We’d sit at the kitchen table and my daughters would be a constant distraction. No wonder my French is so bad! When I created the character of Riley in French Lessons I wanted to make two major differences between us so that I would feel freer to write fiction rather than memoir. Riley hates Paris – I loved Paris. And Riley got a hot French tutor. Mine was definitely not hot.

GLK: What is it about Paris that arouses fantasies about sex and romance?

ES: Come on – you guys are always making out on the street! Well, maybe not always. But there are more kisses and caresses on Parisian streets than we might find in the US. And I don’t blame the French. Paris is very romantic. It’s a gorgeous city – and there’s a long history of romance tied to the place. So when we visit Paris we think about love, we think about sex. We might also think about loneliness. A long walk along the Seine at night will make a person yearn for someone, maybe even someone they haven’t yet met.

GLK: Two of the American characters learning French in your novel are women, one is a man. In your opinion, do men and women have different perceptions of Paris?

ES: I used all three characters to explore different perceptions of Paris. I’m not sure the differences are gender-based. In fact, Jeremy might be my most romantic character, rather than either of the women. And the one who lives in Paris hates it – at least, in the beginning of her day. Maybe Paris is a reflection of our own need for love and romance in our lives.

GLK: Did you write any of French Lessons while in Paris?

ES: No, but I was taking notes! I think I spent every day of the five years I lived there taking mental notes, and sometimes filling notebooks with my observations. Every walk I took – with one baby in the stroller and one in the Snugli – every dinner conversation – every hour spent in the parks, became material for French Lessons. When I finally started writing the novel – years after I left Paris – it poured out of me. I was so ready to use my Paris.

GLK: How did you select the three specific walks that your characters take?

ES: That was a joy to create! I wanted my characters to hit some of my favorite spots in Paris. So I led them through the different arrondissements, stopping at small museums or parks along the way. My writing challenge was to make Paris matter. I didn’t want each location just to be a pretty background. I wanted each spot to make a difference to the characters – to change them in some way. So, for instance, when Josie and Nico reached the Eiffel Tower, they had to walk up the stairs; they had to gaze from the top – they had to be transformed by the Tower.

GLK: Paris is so associated with romance. Do you recommend it for single travelers?

ES: Yes! I think romance is good for the soul, even if it’s the romance of dreams. And Paris moves us to dream.

GLK: When did you first visit Paris? Do you remember how you felt that first time?

ES: I was 24 on my first visit to Paris. But it was too quick, too short. When I moved there I was 33 and I discovered the real Paris, not the tourist’s Paris. I think everyone who visits should stay awhile. Walk the streets of Paris and take it in. You can learn so much from the city. Explore the nooks and crannies – the secrets of Paris off-the-beaten-track.

GLK: Has your appreciation of Paris changed over the years?

ES: Yes. It helps that I finally speak French (sort of – well, at least on the level of a five-year-old.) And that I know the city and push myself to explore new areas every time I’m there. I’d like to live in Paris again for a long period of time. I think the city has changed a great deal and I’d like to get to know this new diverse city. It’s less formal, less traditional. It’s younger!

GLK: You lived in Paris from 1988 to 1993. How did your time in Paris influence you as a writer?

ES: I think all writers should live abroad for a period of time! It’s a remarkable experience – it opens your eyes and makes you see the world in a brand new way. I think it’s good for writers to be outside their comfort zone – and living abroad will do that. We also learn the world in a bigger way – so that the vision of the world we bring to the page can be a deeper, more expansive one.

GLK: What’s your process for writing a novel?

ES: I write a first draft fairly quickly. It might take 6 months to a year. Then I spend another six months or so revising that draft many many times. I don’t have a plan when I write the first draft – I discover the characters and the plot as I write. So there’s a lot of work to be done on that manuscript. I’m also a very disciplined writer – I write every morning, for three or four hours.

GLK: What’s your next writing project? Are you working on a new novel? Where does it take place?

ES: I’m almost done with my new novel. It’s called The Paradise Guest House and it takes place in Bali. (Yes, I like exotic locations!) The story: A young woman is caught in the terrorist attacks in Bali in 2002 and returns to the island five years later to find the man who saved her.

I’m already thinking about the next novel – and I know where it takes place: the south of France. Back to France!

“French Lessons” by Ellen Sussman. Published in paperback in July 2011 by Ballantine Books. 256 pages.
Ellen Sussman’s website.
A schedule of Ellen’s book readings can be found here.

Comments may be left at the bottom of this page.

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A flâneur is a man about town, often alone, out to experience the city not so much as a gathering place for a dense population but rather as an anonymous and varied space where he encounters buildings, streets, shop windows, parks, gardens and cafés. Every visitor who has spent more than a few days in Paris understands how well the French capital lends itself to “flanning.”

“Flanning” is a dreamy state, bemused though not ironic, perhaps melancholic though  never depressed, often witnessing but not reflecting too deeply or at great length—there is always another scene or another street to draw his attention away from a singular thought. On his slow, idling stroll through the city, the flâneur abandons himself to the sights and sounds and scenes and views and oddities of the moment.

Paris Photos – Paris Walks, a handsome 176-page, hardback, black-and-white photographic essay, is the fruit of O’Toole’s “flanning” in Paris between 1996 and 2007. O’Toole lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The book was printed in Minneapolis.

As a flâneur, O’Toole rarely stops to talk with people (we encounter few in his photographs), though occasionally he observes them. Mostly he avoids crowds, except to occasionally view them from a distance.

Does he wish that he could enter into or be a part of a social scene? I don’t know. But in the absence of a willingness or ability to take part in the social life of the city, it appears from these photos that O’Toole would rather have the streets of Paris himself.

In O’Toole’s Paris it is mid-spring (tulips are coming up, and the linden leaves are budding the garden of Palais Royal) or summer (the roses are out in the Bagatelle Garden and the trees provide full shade in the Boulogne Woods) or September (the leaves of the horse chestnut trees have begun falling in Place Dauphine). In any case it is light jacket weather. There is often dampness in the air.

The long shadows in many images indicate that the photographer is especially fond of Paris within an hour or two or sunrise or sunset.

Tourists are avoids: the courtyard of the Louvre is empty, the top of Montmartre is quiet. Yet as a flâneur Peter O’Toole is clearly a visitor, so even if he doesn’t necessarily seek out the clichés of Paris, he does have a romanticized view of the city.

His gaze in the book’s 150 tri-tone black-and-white photographs, some grainy depending on the film speed, seems to seek out Paris of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. One could easily mistake these images as coming from earlier decades. Whether shot from the hip or with a tripod or with camera to the eye, his Leica is a tool for nostalgia.

Most of the photographs, O’Toole says, are presented full-frame and uncropped, but he has nevertheless shielded his lens from any indications of a contemporary evolving city. Woody Allen shares that view in presenting the city’s easy-going and “natural” beauty in his film “Paris at Midnight”; Allen’s streets and shops and cafés, like O’Toole’s, are always inviting, rarely crowded. The city employees, waiters and tradesmen work earnestly, unobtrusively, without complain.

There is tendency in such a collection of photographs or such a movie to gloss over the realities of city life, but whereas Allen’s characters are fatally stuck in their search to simultaneously express private wealth and personal fulfillment, O’Toole, to his credit, seems to enjoy the romanticized city without visible angst.

The 150 photographs of O’Toole’s book are ostensibly presented in the form of a series of promenades, with each of the 14 sections preceded by a map outlining the photographer’s route and a brief introductory text in both French and English. However, Paris Walks shouldn’t be seen as a call to take specific routes but rather as an invitation to flâner on your own.

Paris Photos ~ Paris Walks by Peter J. O’Toole is 176 pages hardbound, with 150 tri-tone black and white Paris photographs arranged in 14 chapters each representing a separate area of the city. Published in 2009, with a first printing of 1700 copies, it is available in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and on Amazon.com. Retail price: $44.95.

© 2011, Gary Lee Kraut

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That may have been intended as a sound bite since Monet did in fact work in a studio as well as outside. Two studio spaces that he used subsequent to that interview can still be seen at his home in Giverny. He also installed something of a studio on a boat while there. Nevertheless, the point was well taken: nature and the outdoors were where Monet lived as an artist.

And the Seine was not Monet’s studio alone. It also served at times as the studio for many of his fellow Impressionists—e.g. Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Caillebotte—as well as for those who preceded and came after the heydays of Impressionism of the 1870s and 1880s, such as Courbet, Corot, Turner, Jongkind, Saurat and Signac.

A new book, La Seine Impressionniste, at once guidebook and small encyclopedia, revisits those “studios” along the Seine and its surroundings. In it authors Monique and Georges Lucenet present a step-by-step view of the 471 miles (776 km) of the river and the sights along the way, from its source in Burgundy to its estuary in Normandy.

This handsomely illustrated 464-page paperback reveals the artistic and general history of the sights and space that inspired or attracted (or were merely easily accessible to) the Impressionists and others as they developed what I think of not so much as an art of nature but an art of place. The text, in French, is accompanied by 160 reproductions of works coming from more than 40 museums. The book also tells of the literary figures of the time who were also attracted to these riverbanks.

La Seine Impressionniste by Monique and Georges Lucenet, 24.90€.

* * *

But you don’t read French, you say? Or you’re tired of the Impressionists?

Here then is another way of regarding the banks of the Seine as it passes through Paris.

The video below, entitled Notre Train Quotidien (Our Daily Train), examines the contemporary relationship between the left and right banks of the Seine.

Our Daily Train was filmed between the metro stations Gare d’Austerlitz and Quai de la Rapée. That’s where metro line 5 crosses over the Seine, mid-way between the zone of the historical Left Bank/Right Bank at the center of the city (arrondissements 1 through 7) and the Left Bank/Right Bank developments of the past 25 years on the eastern edge of the city (arrondissements 12 and 13).

The video was filmed by Gonzague Petit Trabal, with music by Rémy Klis. It is posted on France Revisited with permission from the authors.

Grab a glass of wine or your relaxation drug of choice, place the video on full screen mode, and let yourself get transported back and forth between the left and right banks of the River Seine.

© 2011, Gary Lee Kraut

See also on France Revisited: “The Art of Punching, Kissing and Lunching: Monet, Renoir and the Impressionist Island at Chatou” and “Paris Rive Gauche: a 21st Century Left Bank.”

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