I Prefer Paris

David Burke's Writers in Paris: Camus Goes to Thailand

The other day I did a walk in Paris with an unusual literary bunch -- a jolly TV crew from Bangkok shooting a film about Albert Camus.  Renowned author of L’Etranger (The Stranger), La Peste (The Plague), other novels, plays, and major essays, L’Homme révolté (The Rebel) and others, and Nobel Prize for Literature, Camus remains one of the most beloved of writers -- not only in France and the West -- but also in Thailand.  They love him too.  To wit: a 50-minute television documentary is in the works.    
Here are the places where I took my new Thai friends, in order of our walk. 

1946 to 1950:  No. 18 rue Séguier

When the Nazis were chased out of Paris in 1944, Albert Camus, then 30, suddenly became famous all across France, revealed as the editor-in-chief of Combat, the most important clandestine newspaper during the Occupation.  And when the paper went above ground, he continued as chief.  In 1946 he rented an apartment for his wife Francine and their year-old twins here in Saint Germain-des-Près.  Besides editing the paper, he completed his novel The Plague in 1947, a huge best seller, with 52,000 sold in the first two months, and considered by many his finest work of fiction.  But Combat could not compete with the big Paris, and he had to close it down at the end of the year.  

Camus had become friends with Jean-Paul Sartre 1943 and remained close at the start of this period, with Camus  commissioning Sartre in 1946 to go to America to report for Combat.  But politically, they were moving apart.  Sartre, never a member of the Communist Party, nevertheless hued to the Stalinist line, whereas Camus, once a Party member in Algeria, began speaking openly about the Soviet gulags and other forms of political repression.  “It is better to be wrong by killing no one rather than be right with mass graves,” he wrote. 

1943:  La Louisiane, No. 60 rue de Seine
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir lived in the Hotel La Louisiane during the last couple of years of the Occupation and after the Liberation.  Camus first met them at a rehearsal of Sartre’s play Les Mouches (The Flies) in 1943, Camus being a playwright too.  He was eight years younger than Sartre, and a sort of older brother/younger brother relationship began. Beauvoir would invite Camus for dinner at La Louisiane, even during the severe food shortage in the Occupation. In her memoir La Force de l’age (The Prime of Life), she calls Camus “a simple, cheerful soul,” ignoring Camus’ status on Combat, and certainly frowning at the fun he and Sartre were having.  

Jean Paul Sartre

Jean Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir

The Café de Flore and the Brasserie Lipp
Surprisingly, despite the restrictions of the Occupation, literature thrived in France during these years.  Camus published his first books The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942, and Sartre his philosophical tome Being and Nothingness and his play The Flies the following year, and No Exit in 1944.  Place Saint Germain-des-Prés was literary ground zero.  Sartre and Beauvoir and their “family” took over the upstairs room at Café de Flore as their work and socializing place, away from the German officers below.  Camus was not one to hobnob with groups of intellectuals. So he and Sartre would lunch or dine, just the two, across the boulevard at Brasserie Lipp.  Sartre did not consider Camus a philosopher, but he admitted that he was the better writer.

The Café de la Mairie du 6ème Arrondissement
After moving to the Saint Suplice area in 1950, the Café de la Mairie became Camus’s local.  He’d stop in for his petit déjeuner and paper on his way to his office at Gallimard, the company that published all his books and put him their elite readers’ committee in 1942,  and became practically a family member of the large Gallimard clan.  Their solid welcome helped make up for Camus troubled upbringing in Algeria, his father dead in World War I when Albert was just a baby, and his mother poor, Spanish-born, and illiterate.  

The last house: No. 29 rue Madame
In 1950 Camus, Francine and the twins moved to this attractive building right near the Luxembourg Garden, convenient for him to take the kids there.  Things went smoothly at the beginning, but the most painful period of his professional life came the following year, when The Rebel, Camus’s “intellectual genealogy of totalitarianisms,” came out in October, 1951.  The far-Left-leaning Saint German-des-Prés literati turned viciously against him.  Sartre roasted him in 19 vitriolic pages in Les Temps Moderne, attacking him for his “somber self-importance” and “mournful moderation” in his politics.  The press played it up as a personal feud, but it was essentially a dispute about the nature of the Soviet Communism.
In 1956 Camus wrote La Chute (The Fall), his last finished book, and the following year came the Nobel Prize.  At age of 43, he was the second youngest Nobel laureate, after Rudyard Kipling 50 years earlier, at 42. 

But little over two years later, on January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car crash.

Francois Mauriac called him “the conscience of his generation.”  

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

 

 

 

David Burke's Writers in Paris:Rabelais in the Marais

The other day I was walking in the Marais, in the part down by the Seine, and as I cut up the rue des Jardins Saint-Paul, heading toward the big church of Saint Paul, I couldn’t help thinking about one of my favourite French literary heroes, François Rabelais, who lived on this street in the mid-1550s.  Today we freely banter the adjective of his name, Rabelaisian – “marked by gross robust humour,” as the dictionary says – but let’s not forget that François Rabelais was the first French novelist, famed for The Most Fearsome Life of the Great Gargantua and Pantaguel, rollicking tomes about two brilliant prank-loving giants, father and son, let loose on Renaissance Paris, both books published in the 1530s.  Much of the writing consists of wildly comical satire by this off-beat Benedictine lay priest of the strict Catholic-run University of Paris’s theological dogma – this in the early days of the Protestant Reformation.  Dissenters were being burned at the stake for far less, Rabelais’s own publisher Etienne Dolet being one of them.   But luckily for him, Rabelais had a stalwart protector: the Bishop of Paris.  

But the books deal with many other things as well: the Medieval wall of Paris, for instance.

Built by King Philippe Auguste at the turn of the 13th century, a 100-yard stretch of it still stands, the largest vestige extant, nine meters high with two round towers standing. It boards on a large sports field just down from the Lycée Charlemagne.  In Rabelais’s time it stood directly across from his house on the rue des Jardins Saint-Paul.  In Pantagruel, published in 1532, Rabelais makes fun of the ancient ramparts, which were still the first line of defence on the Left Bank of Paris.  In it, Pantagruel’s sidekick Panurge (“a mischievous rogue, a cheat, a boozer, a roisterer”) says:

“Oh, how strong they are!  They’re just the thing for keeping goslings in a coop.  By my beard, they are pretty poor defences for a city like this.  Why, a cow could knock down more than twelve foot of them with a single fart.”

In his final years, Rabelais lived on a sinecure, the salaries of two curacies at churches outside of Paris in which he seems never to have set foot.  He died in 1553 at age fifty-nine and was buried in a little local cemetery called Saint-Eloï.  It no longer exists.  In 1791, during the Revolution, it was cleared for real estate development. But unlike the ancient Cemetery of the Innocents in Les Halles, whose skulls and bones were sent to the Catacombs before construction began, houses were built on the land of the former Saint-Eloï cemetery with without the remains having been removed.  

So the unquiet ghost of François Rabelais roams the Marais.

NOTICE TO LOVERS OF LITERATURE:                                     

The walking season for David Burke’s Writers in Paris Walking Tours finishes at the end of November 2014.  It will resume in April 2015.  But don’t worry, you can continue to contact him and make reservations at www.writersinpariswalkingtours.blogspot.fr

LAST MINUTE PARIS RENTAL APARTMENT- HALF-PRICE! NOV. 30-DEC. 17
My renter did not come through at the last minute for my Paris apartment, so I am now offering it at HALF-PRICE.
My fabulous Paris apartment in the heart of the Marais near St. Paul metro is available from November 30 to December 16, a total of 17 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 two people in a Queen size bed. Amenities include 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 a large elevator.

The price is now 1400 euros instead of 2800 euros. Photos upon request.Shorter stays are avaiable. Email me at [email protected] if you are interested.

Christmas/Holiday Tour of Paris for 2014

Paris is magical during the holidays and I am happy to announce a special Christmas/Holiday Tour of Paris for 2014. Clients will experience the marvelous shop windows, gleaming outdoor lights, beautifully decorated trees, and festive Christmas markets. The tour includes a visit to Galeries Lafayette and Printemps department stores, the Champs Elysees Holiday market, the yummy gourmet shops Fauchon and Hediard on Place Madeleine overflowing with delicious holiday goodies, and the rue St. Honoré, with designer shops Hermes and Lanvin. To warm up, we stop for an authentic hot chocolate at one of the top Paris chocolate shops.

Tour times 10AM-1PM or 2PM-5PM
Cost: 225 euros for 1-3 people, 75 euros each additional person. Hot chocolate is not included in price. Click here to book the tour or for more information.

Tours will be conducted everyday from December 20, 2014 to January 5, 2015 except on Christmas and New Years Day.

   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: 185 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.
 

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

Tours cost 210 euros for up to 3 people, and 70 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: Victor Hugo: The "Stovepipe" and the Elephant

Place de la Bastille
Although the mother of all revolutions has no monument to commemorate it at the spot where it started, there is one for a far lesser upheaval four decades later. La Colonne de Juillet, the July Column, poking up in the cobblestone vastness of Place de la Bastille, honors Parisians who lost their lives in the Revolution of July 1830, which toppled Charles X, the last Bourbon king, and brought his cousin Louis-Philippe to power.

Hugo
Victor Hugo watched the July Column going up in the early 1830s when he was a neighbor at the Place des Vosges. A “gigantic stove adorned with a stovepipe,” he called it.  But the elephant was another story.  This was a giant plaster and wood mock-up of an elephant that was supposed to be the centerpiece of a magnificent fountain dreamed up by Napoléon. The mock-up was built in 1812, but the empire collapsed before it could be bronzed. The poor pachyderm was removed from its base to make way for the “stovepipe” and shunted to the edge of the Place de la Bastille, near where the Opéra is now. Punished for decades by wind, sun, and rain, the aged eyesore moved Hugo deeply. In Les Misérables he wrote:
In that open and deserted corner of the Square, the broad front of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his size, his enormous rump, his four feet like columns, produced at night, under a starry sky, a startling and terrible outline.  One couldn’t tell what it meant.  It was a sort of symbol of the force of the people. It was gloomy, enigmatic, and immense. It was a mysterious and mighty phantom, visible standing by the side of the invisible specter of the Bastille.

In one of the most touching scenes in the novel, the resourceful street urchin Gavroche takes two little lost boys he finds wandering on Rue Saint-Antoine into the comfy nest he has built for himself in the belly of the beast, protected from the rats infesting the structure by a cage made of copper mesh appropriated from the Jardin des Plantes. The little boys are the brothers Gavroche did not know he had.

The story about the “Stovepipe” and the Elephant comes straight from the pages of David Burke’s excellent book Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light.  His principal work now is his series of literary walking tours. David Burke’s Writers in Paris Walking Tours:  www.writersinpariswalkingtours.blogspot.fr

We missed seeing many of you at the opening, so please come by another time this week. The gallery is open today and Wednesday, 12PM to 7PM, Tuesday 2:30PM-7PM, and Thursday 12PM-8PM, as we will have a closing party from 6PM-8PM.

102 rue Cherche-Midi, 75006
Metro: Vaneau, Sevres-Babyone, Saint Placide

My Paris Apartment for Rent
I am renting my fabulous Paris apartment in the heart of the Marais near St. Paul metro, from November 30 to December 16, a total of 17 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 two people in a Queen size bed. Amenities include 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 a large elevator.

The price is 2800 euros/165 per night for 17 nights, 1500 euros for 7 nights, and anything in between 7 & 15 nights, 175 euros per night. Minimum rental 7 nights or 1500 euros. Photos upon request.

Please email me at [email protected] if you are interested.

   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: 185 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.
 

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

Tours cost 210 euros for up to 3 people, and 70 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: Walking the "Lost Genration" Art Deco

There's more than just writers on my "Lost Generation" Montparnasse literary walking tour, and one of my recent walkers shows us why.  She is Martha Bardach, a retired photo editor, whose eye for the significant architectural detail is as sharp as ever.  This we shall see in Le Select, La Coupole, the former Dingo, and the Closerie des Lilas, haunts of Hemingway, and many other writers in the Art Deco days of the 1920s. And, oh yes, there's a glimpse of me in action!

David Burke is the author of Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light, and the personal tour guide of David Burke’s Writers in Paris Walks /http://www.writersinpariswalkingtours.blogspot.fr To learn about the book and the walks and the writer go to www.writersinparis.com. David is also a documentary filmmaker and former 60 MINUTES writer/producer who came to Paris for what he thought would be a year, but turned into more twenty. He now divides his time between Paris and New York. Checkout the Time Out rave review of David's walking tours. http://www.timeout.com/paris/en/walks-tours/writers-in-paris-walking-tours

 

No less than four scenes are set in the cafe Le Select in Ernest Hemingway's first novel The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, just a year after the cafe opened.

The massive cafe and restaurant La Coupole opened on December 27th, 1927, and has been popular with writers and everyone else ever since. Josephine Baker used to parade among the tables with her pet cheetah Chiquita in a diamond leash and collar. 

Local Montparnasse artists volunteered to paint frescos on the pillars in exchange for meals.

In May 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald first met Ernest Hemingway at this literary relic, the old wooden bar at the then-Dingo American Bar, now the Auberge de Venise.  Hem writes about their encounter (not very kindly) in A Moveable Feast.

Me talking about Scott Fitzgerald.

The Closerie des Lilas, Hemingway's writing headquarters when he lived down the street from 1924 to 1926.

Crystal screens in the Closerie des Lilas

Facsimile place mats with old doodles by writers in the Closerie barroom. 

My Paris Apartment for Rent
I am renting my fabulous Paris apartment in the heart of the Marais near St. Paul metro, from November 30 to December 16, a total of 17 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 two people in a Queen size bed. Amenities include 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 a large elevator.

The price is 2800 euros/165 per night for 17 nights, 1500 euros for 7 nights, and anything in between 7 & 15 nights, 175 euros per night. Minimum rental 7 nights or 1500 euros. Photos upon request.

 

Please email me at [email protected] if you are interested.

   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: 185 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.
 

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

Tours cost 210 euros for up to 3 people, and 70 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: Monsieur Nicolas On The Ile Saint-Louis

One of my favourite characters on my “Notre Dame and the Ile Saint-Louis” walking tour is the self-described “perverted peasant” Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne, the most prolific writer of the 18th century.  The secluded quays of the Ile Saint-Louis in those years were popular places for lovers’ trysts.  But they were not as alone they thought, thanks to Monsieur Nicolas.  Every night this obsessive nightwalker (an owl was his emblem) would cross from his lodgings in the Latin Quarter, spy on the doings of couples, scratch coded notes on the walls, and continue his rounds.  The next day he would come back and copy his notes for use in his chronicles Le Paysan perverti and Les Nuits de Paris. But the scratches are gone, erased over the centuries by prudes and the elements.

Monsieur Nicolas was the first writer to see ordinary Parisians as worthy subjects for literature, launching a genre.  Les Nuits de Paris, his vibrant, accurately observed multi-volume chronicle of his prowls in pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary Paris, was wildly successful. But forced into retirement by ill health, he ended in poverty. All the same, two thousand admirers, from streetwalkers to duchesses, followed the “perverted peasant” to the cemetery after his death on February 3, 1806.

David Burke is the author of Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light, and the personal tour guide of David Burke’s Writers in Paris Walks /http://www.writersinpariswalkingtours.blogspot.fr To learn about the book and the walks and the writer go to www.writersinparis.com. David is also a documentary filmmaker and former 60 MINUTES writer/producer who came to Paris for what he thought would be a year, but turned into more twenty. He now divides his time between Paris and New York. Checkout the Time Out rave review of David's walking tours. http://www.timeout.com/paris/en/walks-tours/writers-in-paris-walking-tours

   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: 185 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.
 

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

Tours cost 210 euros for up to 3 people, and 70 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: Writers in the Luxembourg Gardens-The French

More than at any other time in French literary history, the 19th century saw the high point of popular adoration of writers.  As evidence of that, all we need do is stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens and see all the statues and busts of poets and novelists from that era.  

My personal favorite is the 1883 sculpture called Le Marchand de Masques – The Mask Merchant – by Zacharie Astruc. It shows a boy hawking masks of famous writers, artists, and composers.  He is waving one of the masks on high; others are seen at his feet.  One of these of is Honoré de Balzac, who lived near the park in the 1830s, during the period of Le Père Goriot and other great novels.  At night he would circle the garden in his monk’s cowl, candelabra in his hand.  The mask in the young merchant’s hand is that of the most idolized writer of the century, Victor Hugo.  He lived nearby as a boy, loved roaming the park, and later, in Les Misérables, he had Marius catching his first glimpse of Cosette on a pathway by the tree nursery. Soon they would be exchanging amorous sighs.

Balzac

Only steps from the Boulevard Saint-Michel gate of the Luxembourg Gardens, on the same woodsy plateau as The Mask Merchant, we find a marble statue of George Sand. She and her lover Alfred de Musset, the boy wonder of Romantic poetry, strolled the secluded pathways together.  He later wrote about their storm-tossed affair in his bitter novel Confessions of a Child of the Century.  She wrote about it more calmly in her autobiography.  

George Sand

On the same path as George Sand’s statue is a stele honoring Stendhal, the author of two of the century’s greatest novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Just steps beyond him is a bust of Sand’s dear friend Gustave Flaubert, whose scandalous masterpiece  Madame Bovary got him tried for obscenity in 1857. The same year, same charge, and in the same Paris courtroom, Charles Baudelaire was put on trial for his shocking poems in Les Fleurs du Mal. Flaubert and Baudelaire wrote back and forth condemning the Second Empire for the hypocritical and ultimately damaging ordeal it had put them through.  A bust of Baudelaire is to be found – if you look carefully -- over by the orchard. 

Stendahl

Flaubert

Baudelaire

On a path to the east of the Palais de Luxembourg, the seat of the French Senate, we find novelist Henri Mürger, the author of Scènes de la vie de bohème, looking no way bohemian at all. Up the hill on the same path is the bust of “art for art sake” poet Théodore de Banville. He is bare-chested. Verlaine called him “the one with the tits.”

Henry Murger

Banville

Verlaine

As for Paul Verlaine, his elaborate bust is all the way to the west of the garden. As famed in his time for his debauchery as for his exquisite poetry, Verlaine was elected as Prince of Poets in 1894 by the leading poets of France. Verlaine was deeply moved by the honor. From the window of his shabby hotel the newly crowned prince gestured toward the Luxembourg Gardens and said, “I have no palace, but this is my royal park.” 

 David Burke is the author of Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light, and the personal tour guide of David Burke’s Writers in Paris Walks /http://www.writersinpariswalkingtours.blogspot.fr To learn about the book and the walks and the writer go to www.writersinparis.com. David is also a documentary filmmaker and former 60 MINUTES writer/producer who came to Paris for what he thought would be a year, but turned into more twenty. He now divides his time between Paris and New York.

 

   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: 185 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.
 

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

Tours cost 210 euros for up to 3 people, and 70 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: Writers in the Luxembourg Gardens-The Americans

A special treat this month, David Burke has written a two part series about Writers in the Luxembourg Gardens, Part one- The Americans, today, and tomorrow, Part two- The French.

Surrounded as it is by such intensely literary areas as the Latin Quarter, Saint Germain-des-Prés and Montparnasse, it’s no surprise that “the Luco” has long been a magnet to writers, foreign as well as French. But as we are English-speakers, most of us, anyway, we start with a batch of American writers who succumbed to its charm and wrote about it -- Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner – and will look at the French writers the next time.

In James’s 1903 novel The Ambassadors the trusty Lambert Strether has been sent from his home town of Wollett, Massachusetts, by the formidable Mrs. Newsome, his fiancé and boss, to find out what’s going on with her son Chad. The young man has spent five years in Paris and shows no sign of coming home. With Chad out of town when Strether arrives, he takes a few days to put himself “in relation” to the city,revisiting scenes from his own stay when he was a young man:

“In the Luxembourg Gardens he pulled up; here at last he found his nook, and here, on a penny chair from which terraces, alleys, vistas,fountains, little trees in garden tubs, little women in white caps and shrill little girls at play all sunnily ‘composed’ together, he passed an hour in which the cup of his emotions seemed truly to overflow.”

Two decades after The Ambassadors came out another American coming here was the “very poor and very happy” young Hemingway in the years he would write about in A Moveable Feast.  As he says in the memoir, he would walk in the park when he was “belly-empty, hollow hungry” to escape the tantalizing odours of food on the streets. “You saw and smelled nothingto eat all the way from the Place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard.” Besides protecting himself from smells, he would go in the Luxembourg Museum, where Cézanne’s paintings were on display. Being hungry made him understood Cézanne’s work more truly,
he believed.

Young Hem would also cut through the park to visit Gertrude Stein at her atelier on the rue de Fleurus, just down the street from the western gate.  Stein loved the Luxembourg Gardens. She and Alice took their daily walks in the tree-lined alleyways. Coincidentally, Stein landed in Paris the same year The Ambassadors came out.  She was deeply influenced by James’s writing.  In the 1920s she would tick off for her visitors the four greats of American literature:  “Poe, Whitman, James, and myself.”  And since James had passed away a few years earlier, she was the only one left standing.

In 1925 William Faulkner lived in a garret room overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens on the rue de Vaugirard. It was the only place he liked in Paris.  He planned to stay for two years, but left after only five months and went back to his true creative milieu in Mississippi
and future home to his mythical Yoknapatawpha County. The only literary use of Faulkner’s stay in Paris is set in the final pages of his 1931 novel Sanctuary, where we find the young heroine Temple Drake, unhinged by her kidnapping at the hands of the pervert Popeye, having been brought to Europe by her father to help her forget. The scene takes place at a concert in the Luxembourg Gardens:

“Rich and resonant the brasses crashed and died in the thick green twilight, rolling over them in rich sad waves. Temple yawned behind her hand, then she took out a compact and opened it on a face in miniature sullen and discontented and sad. Beside her her father sat, his hands crossed on the head of his stick, the rigid bar of his moustache beaded with moisture like frosted silver.  She closed the compact and from beneath her smart new hat she seemed to follow with her eyes the waves of music, to dissolve into the dying brasses, across the pool and the opposite semicircle of trees where at somber intervals the dead tranquil queens in stained marble mused, and on into the sky lying prone and vanquished in the season of rain and
death.”

David Burke is the author of Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light, and the personal tour guide of David Burke’s Writers in Paris Walks /http://www.writersinpariswalkingtours.blogspot.fr To learn about the book and the walks and the writer go to www.writersinparis.com. David is also a documentary filmmaker and former 60 MINUTES writer/producer who came to Paris for what he thought would be a year, but turned into more twenty. He now divides his time between Paris and New York.

 

 

   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: 185 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.
 

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

Tours cost 210 euros for up to 3 people, and 70 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: Edith Wharton on the Rue de Varenne

I am happy to have David Burke writing again for EPP after a few months absence.

In 1906 Edith Wharton and her husband Teddy sublet George Vanderbilt’s spacious apartment at No. 58 Rue de Varenne, now an annex of the Prime Minister’s office. She was forty-four years old, a famous novelist thanks to her second novel The House of Mirth, a critical and financial success the previous year, but she was suffocating intellectually in the high society circles of New York and Newport. Wharton was fluent in French thanks to a childhood spent in Europe, and she wanted to challenge her mind in the vibrant cultural climate of Paris, which she adored.  “Je l’ai dans mon sang,” she wrote in her diary. Henry James called her the “pendulum woman” because of her clockwork-like annual visits. Between 1885 and 1914, she made sixty to seventy Atlantic crossings. This time she meant to stay through the winter. The Whartons arrived with six servants, a cook, their automobile and chauffeur, and two dogs.

She was a close friend of other Americans with equally strong ties to Europe, including Henry Adams, Walter Van Rensselaer Berry, Bernard Berenson, and her literary idol James.  And in  the spring of 1907 she met a dark, handsome, mustachioed American in Paris named Morton Fullerton, a Harvard graduate, correspondent for the Times of London, and friend of Henry James since 1890. Three years her junior at thirty-nine, he was cultivated, seductive, and “very intelligent, but slightly mysterious, I think,” she told a friend.  She saw in him the possibility of something she dreamed of, but had never experienced: a complete relationship with a man. They became regular theater and travel companions and, early in 1908, lovers. As her letters and poems to him make clear, she took enormous joy in their lovemaking and experienced at long last her erotic awakening. In the second year of the affair, however, Fullerton alternated between brief periods of passion and long unexplained silences, very painful to her. Though she never learned his full range of his erotic involvements, they included numerous lovers of both sexes, a short-lived marriage to a French opera singer, and a current affair with his young cousin Katherine. He was also being blackmailed by a woman who had proof of his homosexual past. The affair ended in 1910, but Wharton continued to see him as a friend and advised him about his writing. Most importantly for her readers, her fiction took on a new emotional depth thanks her ability to describe love in the full range of emotions it arouses -- jealousy, sadness, guilt, rejection, possessiveness, bliss -- in such novels as Ethan Frome, The Reef (with Fullerton the model for George Darrow), and her masterpiece The Age of Innocence.

In 1910, having decided to live in Paris, she moved with her husband Teddy to a larger apartment in the house across the street at No. 53, where a plaque quotes her saying:
“My years of Paris life were spent entirely in Rue de Varenne – rich years, crowded and happy years.” 

58 rue de Varenne

53 rue de Varenne

But these years were also blighted by her relationship with Teddy, a mentally unstable man twelve years her elder with whom she had never had an emotionally, intellectually, or sexually fulfilling marriage, who secretly squandered her money, and was a philanderer to boot. His wayward manipulations eventually forced her to sell the splendid house she built in Lenox, Massachusetts, the Mount.  In 1913, after twenty-eight increasingly painful years of marriage, she finally divorced Teddy.

With the outbreak of World War I, she threw herself into war work, creating a network of orphanages, hostels, clinics, and crafts workshops to aid displaced people in Flanders and northeastern France. Her friends André Gide and Jean Cocteau worked for “Mrs. Wharton’s Charities,” as they were known. In 1916 she was made a chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur.

After the war Wharton moved to the Pavillon Colombe, an elegant 18th century house she bought in Saint Brice-sous-Fôret north of Paris, wintering at her Château Sainte-Claire overlooking the Mediterranean in Hyères. Her final years were rife with rewards, including the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence in 1921 and an honorary doctorate from Yale two years later, the first woman to be so honored by the university. As the grande dame of American letters, she received countless literary admirers, most embarrassingly, F. Scott Fitzgerald when he visited her in 1925. He was in such awe of her, both socially and artistically, that he kept fortifying himself with little nips on the drive to her house and ended up making a complete ass of himself. She, gracious lady, took it in stride.

Edith Wharton died in 1937 and is buried at the American Cemetery in Versailles.

Henry James portrait by Sargent

 

 Morton Fullerton

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: 185 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.
 

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

Tours cost 210 euros for up to 3 people, and 70 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:Samuel Beckett, Résistant

In a corner of Paris not known at all for its literary figures, a plaque here commemorates one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.  “Irish Writer, Nobel Laureate for Literature, Samuel Beckett,” it reads.  The plaque stands in the Allée Samuel Beckett, a block-long stretch of the leafy esplanade of the Avenue René Coty, in the 14th Arrondissement, just down from the Place Denfert-Rochereau.  Unimposing though this area may look, it was a key place for Beckett when he was part of the Gloria SMH Résistance network during the Nazi Occupation.  Gloria SMH conducted widespread espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance activities in Paris and Northern France for the British Special Operations Executive, the SOE, in London.  It was life-risking business.  More than 50 members of Gloria SMH would be captured by the Gestapo and sent to German concentrations camps.  Many died there, including Beckett’s closest French friend and literary associate Alfred Péron.  (Péron is seen in the snapshot in his French Army uniform, taken just before the German invasion in 1940, his wife Mania at his side). Beckett needed no coaxing when Péron recruited him for the network on September 1, 1941.  He despised Hitler, Nazism, and racial hatred and was incensed by the forced wearing of the yellow Star of David by Jews.  Thirty-five at the time, Beckett had been living full-time in Paris since 1937, and with Suzanne Deschevaux-Daumesnil, his future wife, since the following year.  She fully supported what he was doing, despite the risks. 
 

Beckett’s work involved translating French documents provided to him by Gloria SMH spies into English and delivering them to a photographer, code name “Jimmy the Greek” or “Tante Léo,” in the vicinity of today’s Allée Samuel Beckett.  The documents would be microfilmed, then smuggled by courier into Vichy France and on to the SOE headquarters in London. The risks for Beckett were many:   He could be arrested by Gestapo agents when documents were delivered to him, documents could be found in searches of his apartment, he could be stopped while crossing the city with the translations, caught as he delivered the documents to the photographer, or -- always a threat -- a member of the network could name names during torture by the Gestapo, or pro-Nazi spies could infiltrate the network.  In the end, a pro-Nazi Catholic priest was the one.  The network was broken.

On August 16, 1942, the Gestapo arrested Alfred Péron.  Fortunately, his wife Mania was able to telegram Beckett and Suzanne and warn them to leave their apartment immediately.  They did as she said, and just in time.  Gestapo agents came to their 15th Arrondissement apartment, ransacked the premises, and stationed guards to wait for them to return. They holed up for a few nights at their friend Mary Reynolds’s apartment at No. 24 rue Hallé, only steps from today’s Allée Samuel Beckett, then moved from hideaway to hideaway in Paris for a month before escaping to the South. They lived clandestinely in the Lubéron for the rest of the war.

As for Beckett’s friend Alfred Péron, he was incarcerated in three prisons in France before being deported to the huge Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where brutal treatment and malnourishment destroyed his health.  The Swiss Red Cross freed him when the camp was finally liberated, but too late.  He died on May 1, 1945. 

Reference:  Damned to Fame, The Life of Samuel Beckett, by James Knowlson, Bloomsbury, London, 1996
--------------------------

David Burke is the author of Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light, and the personal tour guide of David Burke’s Writers in Paris Walks. To learn about the book and the walks and the writer go to www.writersinparis.com. David is also a documentary filmmaker and former 60 MINUTES writer/producer who came to Paris for what he thought would be a year, but turned into more twenty. He now divides his time between Paris and New York.

Alfred Peron and wife Mania

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

Tours cost 210 euros for up to 3 people, and 70 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: 185 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.
 

New Eye Prefer Paris Photos for Sale

I am happy to announce the sale of a new set of prints of my Eye Prefer Paris Photos.  I am offering 20 of my most popular and iconic images for sale including my doors, architectural details, statues, and monuments. They will make great gifts for all your Francophile friends, relatives, and colleagues but don't forget to buy some for yourself.

Click here to see photos and for full details including sizes, prices, and shipping. Here is a sample of some of the photos.

 

David Burke's Writers in Paris: Balzac in a Bag

The spot where I meet my groups for the start of my “Lost Generation” Montparnasse walking tour is at the foot of Auguste Rodin’s mighty, larger-than-life bronze statue of Honoré de Balzac. This walk is about the expatriate writers in this part of Paris of the 1920s, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and others. That’s what my walkers are here for.  But before we move off on the walk itself, everyone wants to know about this statue -- and rightly so.  It is a very strange sculpture with a very strange history to match.                                 

In 1891, Emile Zola talked the Société des Gens de Lettres, of which he was the president, into commissioning a statue honoring the founder of their literary society, Balzac, who had died forty years earlier. Rodin, a great fan of Balzac’s writing, was awarded the commission.  He promised to deliver it in eighteen months. After missing several deadlines he finally came up with a model that pleased him: a squat barrel of a Balzac exploding with raw vigor and, other than a band of cloth covering the massive bulge in his crotch, utterly naked.  “Indécent et hideux” was the judgment of the literary society.   

So Rodin went back to his studio and eventually created the final version: the giant Balzac we see today with the  famous monk’s cowl he wore when he was writing cloaking his body from shoulder to foot, a blur of a face, and deep, dark pits for his visionary eyes.  Rodin exhibited the work in a full-sized plaster model at the Salon of 1898.  The critics threw up their hands. They called it “a colossal fetus,” “Balzac in a bag,” “an obese monstrosity,” “a snowman” … Zola liked it, but he was no longer president of the society, and his role in the Dreyfus case (1898 being the year of “J’accuse”) made him too controversial to be any help to Rodin. The Société des Gens de Lettres rejected the statue.

Four decades later, on July 2, 1939, the statue, now cast in bronze, was installed here on the leafy traffic island at the central crossroads of Montparnasse, the Carrefour Vavin, where the Boulevards du Montparnasse and Raspail intersect, facing the Café Rotonde and Le Dôme.  Another bronze casting of this Balzac statue stands in the garden of the Rodin Museum on the Rue de Varenne in Paris, and inside the museum is the “indécent et hideux” version which was so shocking to the literary society. 

David Burke is the author of Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light, and the personal tour guide of David Burke’s Writers in Paris Walks. To learn about the book and the walks and the writer go to www.writersinparis.com. David is also a documentary filmmaker and former 60 MINUTES writer/producer who came to Paris for what he thought would be a year, but turned into more twenty. He now divides his time between Paris and New York.

 My Apartment for Rent

I am renting my fabulous one -bedroom apartment from November 1- November 16 in the heart of the Marais near St. Paul. For more info email me at [email protected] 

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

Tours cost 210 euros for up to 3 people, and 70 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: 185 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.
 

New Eye Prefer Paris Photos for Sale

I am happy to announce the sale of a new set of prints of my Eye Prefer Paris Photos.  I am offering 20 of my most popular and iconic images for sale including my doors, architectural details, statues, and monuments. They will make great gifts for all your Francophile friends, relatives, and colleagues but don't forget to buy some for yourself.

Click here to see photos and for full details including sizes, prices, and shipping. Here is a sample of some of the photos.