I Prefer Paris

Viva la France! France Wins 2018 World Cup

With bated breath and suspense, France waited for the outcome of the World Cup Final, which started at 5 PM yesterday. Cafes, pubs, and restaurants all around Paris were filled to the rafters with tense fans hoping, praying, and cheering. At about 7:30 PM, it was over- France beat Croatia with a score of 4-2.

I live on the rue de Rivoli, the busiest and most traveled street on the right bank. People took to the streets right after the match, happily and deliriously cheering and shouting slogans of victory. I also took to the streets, documenting their infectious joy with my camera.

Fans were decked out in patriotic garb, wrapping themselves in French flags, wearing red, white and blue Afro style wigs and funny hats, along with faces tattooed in French national colors. Children were also part of the celebration, dressed like miniature versions of their parents.

I walked up to Place de la Bastille, which was in total but friendly chaos, with people climbing up the July column to cheer. Motorcycles whizzed by supping up their engines and cars feverishly honked their horns, with passengers hanging out the windows waving flags.

And the celebration is just beginning. Today the winning team arrives back in Paris and at 5 PM there will be a parade on the Champs Elysees to honor them. Can we stand that much more joy? I say YES!

I was interviewed by Katrine Knudsen on World Radio Paris about my move to Paris. Click here to listen.

 

Do you love cheese? I go for a cheese tasting at Beau et Fort, a restaurant and cheese shop in the 9th arr. on A Bite of Paris

Click here to watch or link below.

https://youtu.be/4SAKUoiuBoM

Come experience Eye Prefer Paris live with Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I personally lead. Eye Prefer Paris Tours include many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes, food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks and gardens and much more.  In addition to my specialty Marais Tour, I also lead tours of Montmartre, St. Germain, Latin Quarter, in addition to Shopping Tours, Gay Tours, Girlfriend Tours, Food Tours, Flea Market Tours, Paris Highlights Tours, and Chocolate & Pastry tours.

Tours start at 225 euros for up to 3 people, and 75 euros for each additional person. I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you, my insiders, Paris.

 Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com 

David Burke's Writers in Paris: The Real George Orwell

One of my favorite literary walks is A Band of Outsiders in the Place de la Contrescarpe/Rue Mouffetard area on the fringe of the Latin Quarter. Here were James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and other great writers, our man George Orwell included. He lived in the Rue du Pot-de-Fer, off Mouffetard, where he began writing his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London. He calls the street “the Rue du Coq d’Or”:

“It was a very ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching toward one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday about a third of the male population of the quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and occasionally revolvers.”

George Orwell was just short of twenty-six when he arrived in the spring of 1928 in the Rue du Pot-de-Fer. To the distress of his father, a retired colonial administrator of the Indian Britain Empire, his son had resigned a fine position at the Imperial Police in Burma to become a writer. He lived in a squalid hotel at No. 6 in the bug-infested Hôtel des Trois Moineaux, as he calls it, and describes it with such loving disgust in Down and Out. The spur for this book came from a sudden plunge into poverty after most of his money was stolen. In the novel “a young Italian who called himself a compositor” takes the money from his hotel room; in real life, it was a prostitute named Suzanne. Over the following three months, he went for as long as three days without eating, pawned all his clothes except what he was wearing, and scrounged for menial jobs, most unforgettably as a dishwasher in the none-too-sanitary bowels of a luxury hotel.

The poverty was largely voluntary. His Aunt Nellie lived in Paris and would gladly have come to his aid if he had asked. But he wanted to know what living in these depths was like. And though he was only a visitor, he gave a voice to those who had no escape.

When Down and Out in Paris and London was accepted for publication in 1933, he avoided embarrassing his proper father by using a pseudonym, choosing the name of a little river called the Orwell near his parents’ home in East Anglia. He intended to use the word “Orwell” only for this first book, but the reviews were so good and the sales so unexpectedly healthy that the pseudonym of George Orwell became too valuable to abandon. So then Animal Farm, 1984, and so many others went by the Orwell name.

So what was real name?

In his churchyard in Oxfordshire reads his plaque …

HERE LIES

ERIC ARTHUR BLAIR

BORN JUNE 25TH 1903

DIED JANUARY 21ST 1950

http://writersinpariswalkingtours.blogspot.fr/

Eye Prefer Paris Postcards

I am thrilled to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Postcards, a 3, 6 or 12-month subscription service where the subscriber receives three physical postcards of my iconic Paris photos every month. Each month will have a specific theme, from architectural street scenes to romantic outdoor cafes to beautiful gardens to unique shots of iconic monuments. Each mailing will include two postcards in color and one in black & white or sepia, beautifully packaged in a special French Blue postcard holder with a custom designed seal.

Each 6” X 4.25” traditional size postcard is printed on thick matte coated card stock, similar to traditional vintage postcard stock that enhances the vibrancy of every image.

Only $30 for a 3-month subscription plus shipping or

Only $60 for a 6 month subscription (plus shipping)or

$110 for a 12-month subscription (plus shipping)

Click here to order a 12-month subscription from my Etsy store

Click here to order a 6-month subscription from my Etsy store

Click here to order a 3-month subscription from my Etsy store

Come experience Eye Prefer Paris live with Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I personally lead. Eye Prefer Paris Tours include many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes, food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks and gardens and much more.  In addition to my specialty Marais Tour, I also lead tours of Montmartre, St. Germain, Latin Quarter, in addition to Shopping Tours, Gay Tours, Girlfriend Tours, Food Tours, Flea Market Tours, Paris Highlights Tours, and Chocolate & Pastry tours.

Tours start at 225 euros for up to 3 people, and 75 euros for each additional person. I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.

 Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com 

  Click here to watch a video of our famous Marais tour

 

 

 

David Burke's Writers in Paris:Baudelaire on the Ile Saint-Louis

I am happy to welcome back David Burke and his Writers in Paris column. Today's story is a juicy one.

In the summer of 1841 the young Charles Baudelaire’s mother and his hated stepfather, General Aupick, sent him on a voyage to India. They hoped that a long absence from France would make the young man forget about becoming a poet. But after three months, he jumped ship in Mauritius and made his way back to France. With his twenty-first birthday approaching, he was eager to get his hands on his inheritance from his late father’s estate.

In March 1842, a month before reaching his majority, he moved to the Île Saint-Louis, to the house at No. 22 quai de Béthune, where a plaque marks his stay. He received his legacy the following month and immediately plunged into a dandified Bohemian style of life, spending freely at the finest tailor shops, and buying paintings and objets d’art. And as befit a young man of means, he also took a mistress.  She was Jeanne Duval, “La Venus Noire,” the illegitimate daughter of a mulatto prostitute from the West Indies, and a bit-part player in a vaudeville house when he met her. He installed her in a nearby flat at No. 6 rue le Regrattier. She was a drinker, a drug user, and an unfaithful woman, without heart or mind by most accounts, who held him in the trap of his sexual attraction to her during their tempestuous twenty-year-long affair. “The strange thing about Woman, her preordained fate,” as Baudelaire would later write, “is that she is simultaneously the sin and the Hell that punishes it.” But Jeanne Duval also inspired some of his finest poems, such as “Parfum exotique”:

“Warm autumn nights when, eyes closed, I breath
The scent of your welcoming breast
I see spreading out before me happy shores
Drunk on the fire of a monotonous sun”

In June 1843 he moved to the magnificent seventeenth-century Hôtel Lauzun at No. 17 quai d’Anjou. Impeccably restored, this gem of a grand siécle mansion is one of the most beautiful in Paris.  But in Baudelaire’s day, writers and artists lived in it. His three-room flat was on the top floor, rear. He continued to play the dandy, supporting his mistress and ripping through his inheritance at a breath-taking pace. Yet, as Théophile Gautier, another writer in residence, observed, “An English coldness seemed to him the height of good taste.” Both were members of the Hashish Eaters Club, which met in the grand salon. Some dipped heavily into the jar of jellied green substance passed around during the meal, but Baudelaire was not one of them, despite his well-merited reputation as an opium user years later.

Young women came to the soirées, most notably the bright, gorgeous artists’ model Apollonie Sabatier. Then in her early twenties, she was at the peak of her physical beauty. Baudelaire’s  poem “L’Invitation au voyage” (‘Luxe, calme, et volupté’) was inspired by her.

But by the summer of 1844 Baudelaire had run through half of his inheritance. To prevent him from squandering the rest, his mother and stepfather obtained a court order placing his legacy under the control of an administrator. A frugal person could have lived comfortably on his monthly allowance, but not Baudelaire. For the rest of his life he would systematically blow his stipend, borrow money, and beg his mother to cover his debts.

In June 1845 he wrote a suicide note and tried, not very convincingly, to kill himself with a knife. His mother responded by moving him into her and General Aupick’s residence on the Place Vendôme.

Baudelaire’s three glorious years on the Île Saint-Louis were at an end.

My Paris Apartment for Rent June 21 to June 27

I am renting my fabulous Paris apartment in the heart of the Marais near St. Paul metro, from  June 21 to June 27, a total of  7 nights. It's a spacious one-bedroom 750 sq. ft. loft style apartment with 12 ft. ceilings, decorated in chic Mid-Century Modern furniture and sleeps one or two people in a Queen size bed. Amenities include A/C,  washer/dryer, 16" flat screen TV, dishwasher, internet connection/Wifi and free long distance calls to the U.S.  The apartment is located on the second floor with an elevator.

The price is $225 a night.Photos upon request. Please email me at [email protected] if you are interested.

Come experience Eye Prefer Paris live with Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I personally lead. Eye Prefer Paris Tours include many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes, food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks and gardens and much more.  In addition to my specialty Marais Tour, I also lead tours of Montmartre, St. Germain, Latin Quarter, in addition to Shopping Tours, Gay Tours, Girlfriend Tours, Food Tours, Flea Market Tours, Paris Highlights Tours, and Chocolate & Pastry tours.

Tours start at 225 euros for up to 3 people, and 75 euros for each additional person. I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.

 Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com 

  Click here to watch a video of our famous Marais tour

Checkout my new photo site www.richardnahemphotography.com if you would like to order prints of my photos.

David Burke's Writers in Paris: New Film PARIS NOIR

Thanks to my friend Richard Nahem, I David Burke have been writing pieces for Eye Prefer Paris for some time.  All the stories that I’ve done are about writers in Paris, one way or another, from my book Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light, and the literary walks in Paris evolving from it.  

But there’s another David Burke writer in me:  the one who writes for films.  

In New York, decades ago, I was a writer and producer for PBS, NBC, and mainly CBS, for 60 Minutes and other TV programs, while at the same time my wife Joanne Burke was a top film editor in New York. But when we moved to Paris we began producing films on our own.  Joanne and I are the producers, Joanne’s the director and editor, and I’m the writer and cameraman. We’ve made a more than dozen films here. This year it’s PARIS NOIR, African Americans in the City of Light, a one-hour length documentary. It’s about the experiences of African Americans in France from World War I through the 1920s and 30s to the start of World War II.  There are Harlem Hellfighters soldiers in  the “Great War,” 369th Infantry Regiment marching band’s jazz-tinged numbers, Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet and other jazzmen galore, poets and novelists, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and others, and talented African American painters and sculptors in Montparnasse, the art capital of the world, and all this woven around the racial and social politics of the time both in America and France.  

So please take a look at the short presentation below of PARIS NOIR. 

Eye Prefer Paris Postcards

I am thrilled to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Postcards, a 3, 6 or 12-month subscription service where the subscriber receives three physical postcards of my iconic Paris photos every month. Each month will have a specific theme, from architectural street scenes to romantic outdoor cafes to beautiful gardens to unique shots of iconic monuments. Each mailing will include two postcards in color and one in black & white or sepia, beautifully packaged in a special French Blue postcard holder with a custom designed seal.

Each 6” X 4.25” traditional size postcard is printed on thick matte coated card stock, similar to traditional vintage postcard stock that enhances the vibrancy of every image.

Only $30 for a 3-month subscription plus shipping or

Only $60 for a 6 month subscription (plus shipping)or

$110 for a 12-month subscription (plus shipping)

Click here to order a 12-month subscription from my Etsy store

Click here to order a 6-month subscription from my Etsy store

Click here to order a 3-month subscription from my Etsy store

Come experience Eye Prefer Paris live with Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I personally lead. Eye Prefer Paris Tours include many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes, food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks and gardens and much more.  In addition to my specialty Marais Tour, I also lead tours of Montmartre, St. Germain, Latin Quarter, in addition to Shopping Tours, Gay Tours, Girlfriend Tours, Food Tours, Flea Market Tours, Paris Highlights Tours, and Chocolate & Pastry tours.

Tours start at 225 euros for up to 3 people, and 75 euros for each additional person. I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.

 Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com 

  Click here to watch a video of our famous Marais tour

New! Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes
I am happy to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes. Come take an ethnic culinary journey with me and chef and caterer Charlotte Puckette, co-author of the bestseller The Ethnic Paris Cookbook (with Olivia Kiang-Snaije). First we will shop at a Paris green-market for the freshest ingredients and then return to Charlotte's professional kitchen near the Eiffel Tower to cook a three-course lunch. After, we will indulge in the delicious feast we prepared along with hand-selected wines.

Cost: 195 euros per person (about $210)
Time: 9:30AM- 2PM (approximately 4 1/2 hours)
Location: We will meet by a metro station close to the market
Class days: Tuesday,Wednesday, Thursday,Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
Minimum of 2 students, maximum 6 students.

Click here to sign up for the next class or for more info.

 

David Burke's Writers in Paris: A Tale of Two Books: Mary's and David's

One day last fall, in 2015, I received a message from Shakespeare and Company saying that they wanted to get more copies of my book Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light, but they were unable to come up with any.   So I emailed the head of my publisher in Berkeley to find out what’s what.  Bad news. They love the book, but sales have slipped, and the company has decided not print any more.   But they offered to release the book freely to me as the copyright owner if I found a solid publisher with a contract.   

By a remarkable bit of luck, only two days earlier, on October 18th, I’d been the guest speaker at the monthly meeting of the Paris Writers Group.  Its chief is the delightful and knowledgeable Mary Duncan, a writer and the publisher of the Paris Writers Press.  She likes my Writers in Paris.  So I called her and she said come on over.  Mary led me to her computer and showed all the steps of her favorite publishing app works. I’ve written books, but have no experience in publishing.  Both could see that I was not up to it.  So Mary said that, if I like, she could be my new publisher.  Whew!  

A few days later we met at the new Shakespeare and Company Café and discussed our contract. It was fine for me and for her too. But at this time of the year, it being December, both Mary and I were leaving Paris for three-month jaunts. She was off to California to be with her family and to work on her project of translating to English by Lynn Jeffress the autobiography of the fearless publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who savaged censor laws in the France of the 1950s and ‘60s, and is best known for the Marquis de Sade. Meanwhile my wife Joanne and I went off to China. But before leaving Paris I let my Berkeley publisher know that Mary and I had an agreement for Writers in Paris, but would not be taking it over until we were back to Paris in spring.  They were perfectly at ease with that.

Mary got back to Paris in late March, wrapping up her Jean-Jacques Pauvert book, which now had a title, Sade’s Publisher, A Memoir,  and in early April the transferring of Writers in Paris from Berkeley to Paris began. Mary did it all by herself. There were a few glitches along the way, but it was remarkably smooth overall.   

On April 22, 2016, Mary and I signed our contract in the Shakespeare and Company Café, with owner Sylvia Whitman our witness.  
While Mary was on business in New York in early May, UPS dropped a box from her printing press.  It was early proofs for both books, Sade’s Publisher and Writers in Paris, Second Edition in it. They were almost spotless, Mary told me on email.  Just a few little things to be altered.  And when she handed it to me in Paris, I found it at least as attractive as was the original version– which is saying plenty, because Counterpoint in Berkeley had done a beautiful job.  Mary was very pleased too with her brand new Sade’s Publisher.  And seeing the two books together was a treat.    

My first batch of Writers in Paris arrived in Paris on May 25th.Ten copies went to the shelves of Shakespeare and Company.  And from the photos sent to me from the D. G. Wills bookshop in La Jolla, California, the two books have stayed together come the long way from la Belle France.  

I thank for Mary for everything.

Click here to order Writers in Paris

http://pariswriterspress.com

Mary Duncan, David, & Sylvia Whitman (left to right)

Eye Prefer Paris Postcards

I am thrilled to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Postcards, a 3, 6 or 12-month subscription service where the subscriber receives three physical postcards of my iconic Paris photos every month. Each month will have a specific theme, from architectural street scenes to romantic outdoor cafes to beautiful gardens to unique shots of iconic monuments. Each mailing will include two postcards in color and one in black & white or sepia, beautifully packaged in a special French Blue postcard holder with a custom designed seal.

Each 6” X 4.25” traditional size postcard is printed on thick matte coated card stock, similar to traditional vintage postcard stock that enhances the vibrancy of every image.

Only $30 for a 3-month subscription plus shipping or

Only $60 for a 6 month subscription (plus shipping)or

$110 for a 12-month subscription (plus shipping)

Click here to order a 12-month subscription from my Etsy store

Click here to order a 6-month subscription from my Etsy store

Click here to order a 3-month subscription from my Etsy store

Come experience Eye Prefer Paris live with Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I personally lead. Eye Prefer Paris Tours include many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes, food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks and gardens and much more.  In addition to my specialty Marais Tour, I also lead tours of Montmartre, St. Germain, Latin Quarter, in addition to Shopping Tours, Gay Tours, Girlfriend Tours, Food Tours, Flea Market Tours, Paris Highlights Tours, and Chocolate & Pastry tours.

Tours start at 225 euros for up to 3 people, and 75 euros for each additional person. I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.

 Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com 

  Click here to watch a video of our famous Marais tour

New! Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes
I am happy to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes. Come take an ethnic culinary journey with me and chef and caterer Charlotte Puckette, co-author of the bestseller The Ethnic Paris Cookbook (with Olivia Kiang-Snaije). First we will shop at a Paris green-market for the freshest ingredients and then return to Charlotte's professional kitchen near the Eiffel Tower to cook a three-course lunch. After, we will indulge in the delicious feast we prepared along with hand-selected wines.

Cost: 195 euros per person (about $210)
Time: 9:30AM- 2PM (approximately 4 1/2 hours)
Location: We will meet by a metro station close to the market
Class days: Tuesday,Wednesday, Thursday,Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
Minimum of 2 students, maximum 6 students.

Click here to sign up for the next class or for more info.

David Burke's Writers in Paris: Alexandre Dumas and his Château de Monte-Cristo: A Short Hop from Paris

Please welcome back David Burke and his column David Burke's Writers in Paris.

After writing The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Queen Margot, and The Three Musketeers’s sequel Twenty Years After -- all in two years, 1844 and 1845 –  Alexandre Dumas was so wildly successful that he was able to buy five acres on a hillside overlooking the Seine in Port-Marly and realize his dream of building himself a château, one on his own scale— larger-than-life.  

“J’aime qui m’aime” was his motto, “I love whoever loves me.”  And he meant it.

He inaugurated his earthly paradise on July 27, 1847, with a party for six hundred guests.“Friends” kept flocking, but he turned no one away.  The thought of this genial giant pouring out pages to feed a mob of hangers-on appalled Balzac, himself a prodigal spendthrift. But Dumas thought he could write himself out of any hole.

Six months later, he was broke. His creditors forced him to sell the property the following year. But the Château de Monte-Cristo remains.  It is Renaissance in style with portraits of writers he admired on its elaborately sculpted façade.  His own portrait resides above the front door, along with his family’s coat of arms and the “J’aime qui m’aime” motto.

On the grounds, amid springs and false grottoes, he also built a little Gothico-Savoyard pavilion called the Château d’If where he could isolate himself to write.

Hilly footpaths thread the wooded park overlooking the Seine, where there is a labyrinth and a pond. Passionate about cooking and eating, Dumas, stocked the pond with 2,500 fish and 1,200 fresh water shrimp.

Dumas’s son, Alexandre Dumas fils, called his father “a big child I had when I was very little.”  The Château de Monte-Cristo is solid evidence of that.

HOW TO GET THERE FROM PARIS:  

By train, take the RER express suburban line A1 to the town Saint Germain-en-Laye.  It can be boarded at several stops in Paris, including such central ones on the A1 line as Châtelet Les Halles, Saint Lazare/Auber, Charles de Gaulle/Etoile.  From the Charles de Gaulle station it makes nine stops to Saint Germain-en-Laye.  

From there you can walk 1.5 miles to the Château.  Directions for the walk are found at the Saint Germain-en-Laye station.  I walked there in about 10 minutes.  But you may take a cab.  

The chateau is open every day except Monday from April 1st to the 1st of November.  For the hours, check on the excellent website of the Château de Monte-Cristo, in English and French, www.chateau-monte-cristo.com

Eye Prefer Paris Postcards

I am thrilled to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Postcards, a 3, 6 or 12-month subscription service where the subscriber receives three physical postcards of my iconic Paris photos every month. Each month will have a specific theme, from architectural street scenes to romantic outdoor cafes to beautiful gardens to unique shots of iconic monuments. Each mailing will include two postcards in color and one in black & white or sepia, beautifully packaged in a special French Blue postcard holder with a custom designed seal.

Each 6” X 4.25” traditional size postcard is printed on thick matte coated card stock, similar to traditional vintage postcard stock that enhances the vibrancy of every image.

Only $30 for a 3-month subscription plus shipping or

Only $60 for a 6 month subscription (plus shipping)or

$110 for a 12-month subscription (plus shipping)

Click here to order a 12-month subscription from my Etsy store

Click here to order a 6-month subscription from my Etsy store

Click here to order a 3-month subscription from my Etsy store

Come experience Eye Prefer Paris live with Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I personally lead. Eye Prefer Paris Tours include many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes, food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks and gardens and much more.  In addition to my specialty Marais Tour, I also lead tours of Montmartre, St. Germain, Latin Quarter, in addition to Shopping Tours, Gay Tours, Girlfriend Tours, Food Tours, Flea Market Tours, Paris Highlights Tours, and Chocolate & Pastry tours.

Tours start at 225 euros for up to 3 people, and 75 euros for each additional person. I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.

 Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com 

  Click here to watch a video of our famous Marais tour

New! Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes
I am happy to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes. Come take an ethnic culinary journey with me and chef and caterer Charlotte Puckette, co-author of the bestseller The Ethnic Paris Cookbook (with Olivia Kiang-Snaije). First we will shop at a Paris green-market for the freshest ingredients and then return to Charlotte's professional kitchen near the Eiffel Tower to cook a three-course lunch. After, we will indulge in the delicious feast we prepared along with hand-selected wines.

Cost: 195 euros per person (about $210)
Time: 9:30AM- 2PM (approximately 4 1/2 hours)
Location: We will meet by a metro station close to the market
Class days: Tuesday,Wednesday, Thursday,Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
Minimum of 2 students, maximum 6 students.

Click here to sign up for the next class or for more info.

 

David Burke's Writers in Paris: A Literary Pilgrim Goes to Paris

Four years ago, my first full year of literary walks, Bill Collis and fellow Australians took the walk I call “A Band of Outsiders".  This stroll takes place in the colorful Place de la Contrescarpe-rue Mouffetard neighborhood of the Latin Quarter, home no less to the likes of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell in the 1920s and other very great writers earlier. Bill liked it so much that he wrote about it when he returned home.  His article ran in the Sunday Australian newspaper and subsequently Bonjour Paris.  He called it “A Literary Pilgrim Goes to Paris.”

What follows are Bill’s article, pictures of him and others on the walk, and Patti Miller, the literary mentor of my Australian walkers and outstanding writer whose latest book is the memoir Ransacking Paris.    

A Literary Pilgrim Goes to Paris
Walking along the boulevards of Paris, becoming a flaneur, is an essential Parisian experience – more so if you have a passion for the literary history of the city. For the ‘The Band of Outsiders’ Literary Walking tour in Paris, I met the expatriate American writer, David Burke, with my fellow walkers at Place de la Contrescarpe. He began by explaining that just as writers were enriched by living in Paris, our appreciation of their lives and work is heightened by following them from place to place in our imaginations or, even better, in our walking shoes.

In spite of the snobbish idea that tourism is not really travel I was hoping, as I arrived in Paris, that it was still possible to have a life-enhancing, even life-changing, experience in a short time away from the humdrum world of daily life. Like everyone else interested in literature I had read that Paris in the first half of the twentieth century was a haven foreign writers and artists, attracted by its great artistic and social freedom. I read Being Geniuses Together 1920-1930, by  Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle, about expatriate American writers and artists living in Paris, which had inspired me to read Hemingway, Fitzgerald and many others. Gertrude Stein wrote: “Paris was where the twentieth century was.”

I also had a fascination with the vast series of novels, La Comédie Humaine, by Honoré de Balzac. When I started reading them in my twenties I found it all so different and foreign from anything else I had read. My acquaintance with this city seems to have spanned my whole adult life; in my dreams and in my reading.

So, now I stood with David and our group at the centre of the ancient Fauberg Saint Medard, an area which in the Middle Ages lay outside the city walls. He described how wine was cheap and untaxed then and this area teemed with traders and travelers. Francois Villon and later, Rabelais were known to have caroused at the taverns there.

In 1922 the young Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Hadley, moved into an apartment around the corner in rue du Cardinal Lemoine. The old building is still there with a plaque indicating their stay there. David reminds us of Hemingway’s character, Harry, in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, thinking about this area: “And in that poverty, and in that quarter…he had written the start of all he was to do. There was never another part of Paris that he loved like that.”

And it is a rich quartier. Down the hill a block from Hemingway’s we stopped at Valery Larbaud’s apartment where James Joyce finished writing Ulysses.  Then we strolled on through the colorful market street Rue Mouffetard to Rue du Pot-de-Fer where George Orwell once was living a life of poverty that he described in such detail in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London.

It was beginning to rain as we stopped outside the house Balzac used as a model for Mme Vauquer’s pension bourgeoise in Le Père Goriot. For shelter we ducked into a nearby art gallery, and David took the opportunity to entertain us with the stories about characters Balzac used in his novels, like the young law student Rastignac and the evil Vautrin. Paris is a tangible mix of the past and present, and the longer we stay in Paris we will come to agree with Balzac when he claimed: “while searching the dead I only see the living.”

Our walk concluded at the 15th century church of Saint Medard, where Jean Valjean is pursued by the evil Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. We then adjourned to a nearby café where we relaxed over a glass of wine, un vin rouge, trying to absorb what our afternoon had given us.

That is where their true legacy lies.

Patti Miller

Eye Prefer Paris Postcards

I am thrilled to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Postcards, a 6 or 12-month subscription service where the subscriber receives three physical postcards of my iconic Paris photos every month. Each month will have a specific theme, from architectural street scenes to romantic outdoor cafes to beautiful gardens to unique shots of iconic monuments. Each mailing will include two postcards in color and one in black & white or sepia, beautifully packaged in a special French Blue postcard holder with a custom designed seal.

Each 6” X 4.25” traditional size postcard is printed on thick matte coated card stock, similar to traditional vintage postcard stock that enhances the vibrancy of every image.

I am running a sale this month for the the postcards.

A three-month subscription is now $25 instead of $30 plus shipping.
Click here to order.

A six-month subscription is now $50 instead of $60 plus shipping.

Click here to order.

A twelve-month subscription is now $95 instead of $110 plus shipping.
Click here to order.

This offer is good until February 29, 2016.

Come experience Eye Prefer Paris live with Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I personally lead. Eye Prefer Paris Tours include many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes, food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks and gardens and much more.  In addition to my specialty Marais Tour, I also lead tours of Montmartre, St. Germain, Latin Quarter, in addition to Shopping Tours, Gay Tours, Girlfriend Tours, Food Tours, Flea Market Tours, Paris Highlights Tours, and Chocolate & Pastry tours.

Tours start at 225 euros for up to 3 people, and 75 euros for each additional person. I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.

 Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com 

  Click here to watch a video of our famous Marais tour

New! Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes
I am happy to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes. Come take an ethnic culinary journey with me and chef and caterer Charlotte Puckette, co-author of the bestseller The Ethnic Paris Cookbook (with Olivia Kiang-Snaije). First we will shop at a Paris green-market for the freshest ingredients and then return to Charlotte's professional kitchen near the Eiffel Tower to cook a three-course lunch. After, we will indulge in the delicious feast we prepared along with hand-selected wines.

Cost: 195 euros per person (about $210)
Time: 9:30AM- 2PM (approximately 4 1/2 hours)
Location: We will meet by a metro station close to the market
Class days: Tuesday,Wednesday, Thursday,Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
Minimum of 2 students, maximum 6 students.

Click here to sign up for the next class or for more info.

 

David Burke's Writers in Paris: Victor Hugo in the Marais and Elsewhere

In October 1832, thirty years old and already the titan of French letters,Victor Hugo moved with his wife Adèle and their two sons and two daughters into the spacious second-floor apartment in the Hôtel Rohan-Guéménée at No. 6 Place des Vosges, looking over the park.  Now the Musée Victor Hugo, it is a rich part of my “Great Days of the Marais” walking tour.

Riding high on the success of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, several lavishly praised books of lyrical poetry, and his riot-igniting play Hernani already behind him, Hugo was the Romantic Movement’s acknowledged leader. Here he wrote his most successful play Ruy Blas, three other dramas, poetry, and drafts of sections of Les Misérables. In 1841 he was elected to the Académie française and four years later elevated to peer of France as viscount by King Louis-Philippe. But during the Revolution of 1848, Hugo switched to the democratic side and was elected deputy to the Second Republic ‘s National Constituent Assembly.

Casting a pall over Hugo’s triumphs, however, was the calamitous state of his marriage. Adèle, his childhood sweetheart, came to see him as an egotist and a tyrant, and she entered upon an affair with Hugo’s close friend Sainte-Beuve. The double betrayal crushed him. But in January 1833 he met a lovely young actress engaged for a bit part in his play Lucrèce Borgia. From his first night with Juliette Drouet to her death half a century later, they spent hardly a day apart. “Jugu,” as he called her, unleashed in her “Toto” a passion for the erotic, and she thrilled to his poetry, as Adèle never had. Juliette became his copyist, putting his unruly scrawl into legible form until her eyes gave out in old age. Although they saw each other almost daily, they managed to exchange seventeen thousand notes and letters.

Toto set Jugu up in a modest apartment nearby on Rue Sainte-Anastasie. The back door of his house opened onto the Impasse Guéménée, providing convenient cover for his visits to her, and eventually, to many others. Juliette managed to live with his dalliances, but his serious affairs hurt.

Hugo loved being on the Place des Vosges, but on June 24, 1848, after street fighting broke out during a workers’ uprising, he wrote in his journal:

“Fourteen bullets hit my coach house door, eleven outside, three inside. A soldier of the line was mortally wounded in my courtyard. We still see the streak of blood on the paving stones.”

Hugo quickly moved his family to the then-countrified neighborhood of Saint-Georges, in today’s Ninth Arrondissement. Three years later, in 1851, his fiery denunciation of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état forced him to flee from France, and he, his family, and Juliette went into exile, first in Brussels, then in the Channel Islands, remaining there until the fall of “Napoléon le Petit,” as Hugo dubbed him, in 1870.

The rooms in the Musée Victor Hugo are devoted to three periods of Hugo’s life:
ν    his dwelling place on the Place des Vosges …

ν    his exile in the island of Guernsey (we see a Medieval-themed room from his Hautville House and a Japanese-style room from Juliette Drouet’s house Hautville Fairy)…

ν    and his last fifteen years in Paris.

The reconstituted bedroom from his final home on Avenue Victor-Hugo (named for him during his lifetime, a very rare honor) is dominated by the Louis XIII bed in which he died on May 22, 1885, at eighty-three. His last words were “Je vois la lumière noire”—“I see the black light.”

Bust of Victor Hugo

Portrait of Adèle Hugo

Portrait of Juliette Drouet

Medieval themed room from Victor Hugo's Hautville House in Guernsey

Japanese-style room from Juliette Drouet's house Hautville Fairy

The bed in which Victor Hugo died

Portrait of elderly Victor Hugo

David Burke’s Writers in Paris Walking Tours 2015 series continues through November 29. 2015.  Check it out on www.writersinpariswalkingtours.blogspot.fr

 Eye Prefer Paris Postcards

I am thrilled to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Postcards, a 6 or 12-month subscription service where the subscriber receives three physical postcards of my iconic Paris photos every month. Each month will have a specific theme, from architectural street scenes to romantic outdoor cafes to beautiful gardens to unique shots of iconic monuments. Each mailing will include two postcards in color and one in black & white or sepia, beautifully packaged in a special French Blue postcard holder with a custom designed seal.

Each 6” X 4.25” traditional size postcard is printed on thick matte coated card stock, similar to traditional vintage postcard stock that enhances the vibrancy of every image.

Only $60 for a 6 month subscription (plus shipping)or

$110 for a 12-month subscription (plus shipping)

My offer of a 12-month subscription with an extra month free is good until October 31, so remember to order now before the offer ends.

Click here to order a 12-month subscription from my Etsy store

Click here to order a 6-month subscription from my Etsy store

 

Come experience Eye Prefer Paris live with Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I personally lead. Eye Prefer Paris Tours include many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes, food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks and gardens and much more.  In addition to my specialty Marais Tour, I also lead tours of Montmartre, St. Germain, Latin Quarter, in addition to Shopping Tours, Gay Tours, Girlfriend Tours, Food Tours, Flea Market Tours, Paris Highlights Tours, and Chocolate & Pastry tours.

Tours start at 225 euros for up to 3 people, and 75 euros for each additional person. I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.

 Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com 

  Click here to watch a video of our famous Marais tour

New! Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes
I am happy to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes. Come take an ethnic culinary journey with me and chef and caterer Charlotte Puckette, co-author of the bestseller The Ethnic Paris Cookbook (with Olivia Kiang-Snaije). First we will shop at a Paris green-market for the freshest ingredients and then return to Charlotte's professional kitchen near the Eiffel Tower to cook a three-course lunch. After, we will indulge in the delicious feast we prepared along with hand-selected wines.

Cost: 195 euros per person (about $210)
Time: 9:30AM- 2PM (approximately 4 1/2 hours)
Location: We will meet by a metro station close to the market
Class days: Tuesday,Wednesday, Thursday,Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
Minimum of 2 students, maximum 6 students.

Click here to sign up for the next class or for more info.

 

David Burke's Writers in Paris: Jean Rhys in Montparnasse

Jean Rhys in Montparnasse …
with Ford Madox Ford and Two Others

The classic 1920s Art Deco café Le Sélect is one of the key stops on my “Lost Generation” literary tours. Standing at the corner of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the rue Vavin, Le Sélect opened its doors at the height of the expatriate frenzy, in 1925, and remains the best preserved café of the era. This was a hotbed for writers. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway here set no less than four scenes in his first novel, published the year after the cafe’s opening. But other outstanding writers also made fine use of Le Sélect – Jean Rhys among them, in her first novel Quartet, published in 1928.

In a scene in the café, her fragile heroine Marya has to endure a nasty scene at with her lover Heidler and his testy wife Lois. Trying to lighten the tension, Heidler beckons Guy Lester to the table, but the utterly plastered Guy calls Marya a hussy.:

“Darling Marya,” said Lois, laughing on a high note. “You don’t know her,
you don’t. She’s as harmless at they’re made, Guy. A sweet young thing on the
sentimental side.”

The thinly disguised models for Heidler were Ford Madox Ford, Lois for his long time mistress the Australian artist Stella Bowen, and Marya for Rhys herself.

Ford Madox Ford was a British literary powerhouse, famed for his 1916 World War I novel The Good Soldier. He moved from London to Paris in 1922, in time to attend Proust’s funeral as the self-appointed representative of English letters. In Paris he joined Ezra Pound in promoting James Joyce’s work and in 1924 founded the Transatlantic Review. He and Stella Bowen moved to No. 84 Rue Notre Dame des Champs in 1925.

Ford was a wheezy middle-aged fat man with a walrus-like moustache, but had remarkable success with women. His friend Joyce wrote:
“O Father O’Ford you’ve a masterful way with you,
Maid, wife and widow are wild to make hay with you.”

Jean Rhys was one of those wives. She was officially Mme Jean Lenglet, married to a Dutch man of that name. Ford hired her in 1924 to work on the Transatlantic Review. He tutored her in the craft of writing, published her first story in the Review, and took her birth name of Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams to the pseudonym he created for her of Jean Rhys. She was thirty-four (hardly the young thing Marya seems to be in Quartet), a beautiful woman, but emotionally shaky and painfully shy.

Their affair began early in 1925, after her husband Lenglet went to prison for embezzlement.

At the time that Ford and Stella Bowen moved to Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Rhys was in Juan les-Pins, helping a rich American woman write a book (as does Rhys’s heroine Sasha Jansen in her later novel Good Morning, Midnight), but Ford managed to get her fired by the lady, forcing Rhys  to come back to Paris, where he installed her in a hotel by the Gare Montparnasse. It was just such a place as the one Heidler installs Marya in Quartet:

“It was impossible, when one looked at that bed, not to think of the succession
of petites femmes who had extended themselves upon it, clad in carefully
thought out pink or mauve chemises, full of tact and savoir faire and savoir
vivre and all the rest of it.”

Ford’s final break with Jean Rhys came in the fall of 1926, when, after much griping from Bowen, he left for an extended book tour in the United States. Rhys then returned to her husband in Holland, where she wrote Quartet. Its publication two years later was successful – and sparked alternate versions of it by the three other concerned parties: a novel apiece by Ford Madox Ford and Jean Lenglet and a frontal attack on Rhys by Stella Bowen in her autobiography, Drawn from Life. Ironically, Quartet turned a quartet.

David Burke’s Writers in Paris Walking Tours 2015 series continues through the spring, summer and fall.  Check it out on www.writersinpariswalkingtours.blogspot.fr.

 

Come experience Eye Prefer Paris live with Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I personally lead. Eye Prefer Paris Tours include many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes, food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks and gardens and much more.  In addition to my specialty Marais Tour, I also lead tours of Montmartre, St. Germain, Latin Quarter, in addition to Shopping Tours, Gay Tours, Girlfriend Tours, Food Tours, Flea Market Tours, Paris Highlights Tours, and Chocolate & Pastry tours.

Tours start at 225 euros for up to 3 people, and 75 euros for each additional person. I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.

 Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com 

  Click here to watch a video of our famous Marais tour

New! Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes
I am happy to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes. Come take an ethnic culinary journey with me and chef and caterer Charlotte Puckette, co-author of the bestseller The Ethnic Paris Cookbook (with Olivia Kiang-Snaije). First we will shop at a Paris green-market for the freshest ingredients and then return to Charlotte's professional kitchen near the Eiffel Tower to cook a three-course lunch. After, we will indulge in the delicious feast we prepared along with hand-selected wines.

Cost: 195 euros per person (about $210)
Time: 9:30AM- 2PM (approximately 4 1/2 hours)
Location: We will meet by a metro station close to the market
Class days: Tuesday,Wednesday, Thursday,Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
Minimum of 2 students, maximum 6 students.

Click here to sign up for the next class or for more info.

David Burke's Writers in Paris: Ezra Pound’s Atelier, at Last!

I’m fascinated by the relationship of people and their places, especially when it comes to writers in Paris -- where they were and what they did there. Take this photo from 1922.  \From left to right, they are Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Joyce’s lawyer John Quinn.  I knew that it was photographed in front of the big wooden door to Pound’s atelier at No. 70, bis, rue Notre Dame-des-Champs in Montparnasse.  I had stopped at the sturdy steel street gate there many times during my “Lost Generation” literary walking tours, but must to my frustration the sturdy steel gate was always closed, making it impossible to go in and see Ezra Pound’s place.  But then last November when I was doing a walk with four jolly Swedes, the steel gate was wide open.  Construction work was going on. I was through the gate with a flash, with my team of Scandinavians racing behind, down the long, narrow corridor to the little courtyard in front of Pound’s atelier, where modernization was going on.

At last I know where it was. Note the bulky wooden door in the 1922 photo with Ezra Pound and his visitors and look at the one of me standing before that same wooden door in November 2014.  

Here are the photos from last year:

Ezra Pound in Paris (excerpt from Writers in Paris)

Poet, editor, and all-round cultural gadfly, Ezra Pound lived with his artist wife, Dorothy
Shakespear, at No. 70, bis, rue Notre Dame des Champs from the summer of 1921 until the winter of 1924.

A brilliant and omnivorous student and translator of ancient poetry, including Chinese and Japanese verse, this Idaho-born American settled in London in 1908, where he wrote influential poetry (“In a Station of the Metro,” and the Hugh Selwyn Mauberly cycle), edited the little magazines Poetry, the Egoist, and Blast, and became a guru to younger poets, most notably H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and T. S. Eliot. But feeling that London had lost its literary edge (“an old bitch, gone in the teeth”) and having talked James Joyce into moving to Paris, Pound decided that he should be there too. He arrived in December of 1920. Sylvia Beach was in for a surprise when he first paid a visit to Shakespeare and Company:  

“His costume—the velvet jacket and open-road shirt—was that of the English aesthete of the period. There was a touch of Whistler about him; his language, on the other hand, was Huckleberry Finn’s.”

The tall, lanky, red-bearded Pound was one of the most influential figures on the expatriate scene as magazine editor, advisor to Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press, and champion of Joyce and Eliot. In Pound’s words, this was “a grrrreat litttttterary period.” He was also a mentor to Hemingway, giving him lectures on literary style in exchange for boxing lessons. Gertrude Stein was Pound’s only known enemy. She called him “the village explainer, excellent if you were in a village, but if you were not, not.”

He called her “that tub of guts.”

Besides his work for others, Pound started writing his Cantos, the vast cycle of poems that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

After four years, he felt that the city had become too crowded with Americans who were “anything but the Passionate Pilgrims of James’s day or the enquirers of my own.” At the end of 1924, Pound, his wife and his mistress, the concert violinist and musicologist
Olga Rudge, moved to Rapallo, where Rudge had a daughter by him the following year.Pound’s unbridled support of Mussolini, capped by pro-Fascist, anti-Semitic broadcasts during World War II, irremediably tarnished his reputation and led to his incarceration in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital in 1946 (though he could have faced the death penalty for treason). Twelve years later a group of literary supporters, including his old protégés Hemingway and Eliot, successfully petitioned for his release. He returned to Italy, where he died at eighty-seven in 1972.

David Burke’s Writers in Paris Walking Tours begins its 2015 series on Sunday, April 19th and continues through the spring, summer and fall.  Check it out on www.writersinpariswalkingtours.blogspot.fr.

 

New! Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes
I am happy to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Cooking Classes. Come take an ethnic culinary journey with me and chef and caterer Charlotte Puckette, co-author of the bestseller The Ethnic Paris Cookbook (with Olivia Kiang-Snaije). First we will shop at a Paris green-market for the freshest ingredients and then return to Charlotte's professional kitchen near the Eiffel Tower to cook a three-course lunch. After, we will indulge in the delicious feast we prepared along with hand-selected wines.

Cost: 195 euros per person (about $240)
Time: 9:30AM- 2PM (approximately 4 1/2 hours)
Location: We will meet by a metro station close to the market
Class days: Tuesday,Wednesday, Thursday,Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
Minimum of 2 students, maximum 6 students.

Click here to sign up for the next class or for more info.
 

Come experience Eye Prefer Paris live with Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I personally lead. Eye Prefer Paris Tours include many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes, food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks and gardens and much more.  In addition to my specialty Marais Tour, I also lead tours of Montmartre, St. Germain, Latin Quarter, in addition to Shopping Tours, Gay Tours, Girlfriend Tours, Food Tours, Flea Market Tours, Paris Highlights Tours, and Chocolate & Pastry tours.

Tours start at 225 euros for up to 3 people, and 75 euros for each additional person. I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.

 Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com 

Click here to watch a video of our famous Marais tour