I Prefer Paris

David Burke's Writers in Paris: The Marquis de Sade in Paris

Besides my Writers in Paris Walking Tours, another offspring of my book Writers in Paris has been a series of talks I do called “Bad Boys and Bad Girls in Literature in Paris,” usually presented with plenty of illustrations.  Scandalous in their lifetime: that’s my criterion.  Colette, Oscar Wilde, Verlaine and Rimbaud, George Sand, and François Villon are some of my bad boys and girls. The talks have gone over big wherever I’ve done them, in several in Paris and in a number of places in the States.  But here’s the story of a writer who goes beyond the mere “bad boy” category … one whose best-known activities I’d be queasy about illustrating.
                                                          …..

On the gently curving street of the rue de Condé, originally cut through the abbey of Saint Germain-des-Prés’s medieval vineyards, the princely Condé family ‘s vast property of stood in the 17th and 18th centuries, fronting on what is today’s Numbers 9–15, just up from the Carrefour de l’Odéon.  On June 2, 1750, a cousin was born here.  He was Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, later the Marquis de Sade -- “the Divine Marquis” for those in the know.  He was baptized at the Church of Saint-Sulpice the following day.                                                                                                      

As a youngster he grew up at the Sades’ château in La Coste in the Lubéron and went to military school in Provence.  He served as a boy officer in the Seven Years War and was promoted to captain at eighteen.

Five years later, back in Paris, young Sade was pressured by his financially strapped father into marrying the daughter of a rich family of recent nobility. His father also hoped that marriage would temper his son’s evident libertine tastes. Five months after his high society wedding at the church of Saint Roch on the rue Saint-Honoré he was arrested in Paris for subjecting a prostitute to the sort of treatment that would make his name an “ism.” (Krafft-Ebing, who invented the term sadism, defined it as the inflicting of pain on others for one’s sexual pleasure). In this case, the instrument of Sade’s pleasure was a whip. He spent two weeks in prison at the Château de Vincennes.

In 1778, at his château in La Coste, Sade staged the marathon orgy of buggery, flagellation, and revoltingly unhygienic sexual practices upon which he would enlarge in massive tome The 120 Days of Sodom. At the instigation of his mother-in-law, he was imprisoned the same year. All but ten of his remaining thirty-six years were spent in prison cells, either at Vincennes, the Bastille, or the insane asylum at Charenton outside Paris.

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.

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: Jim Morrison in Père Lachaise Cemetery … and how he got there

This magnificent cemetery, the moodiest of all, is chock full of illustrious permanent Parisians, from the tragic Medieval lovers Abélard and Héloïse to Molière, Balzac, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Edith Piaf – you name ‘em!   These towering figures all have their share of visitors, but the most flocked-to of all is Jim.   That’s all you need to say: “Jim” (or “Jeem” if addressing French people), when asking where Jim Morrison is buried.  When I first came here twenty-five years ago, me and two kids, wondering how I will find his grave, I glanced at the big map on the wall of the Père-Lachaise Métro station as we were heading out, and there it was: a bold felt-tip arrow on the map and the name “Jim.”  And once we were in the cemetery, graffiti arrows on tombs led us right to Jim’s grave.  As you’ll see in the 1986 snapshots, there was a much-graffiti’d bust of Jim at that time (long gone), and every tomb surrounding Jim’s grave was  covered with graffiti messages – “the Lizard King lives!” We’re waiting for you, Jim!”  Quel bordel! 

Today there’s a metal barrier and a guard to try to stop the graffiti, but I’ve been noticing lately on my Writers in Paris Walking Tours (very popular, by the way) that graffiti Jim messages are sneaking back onto the edges of the other people’s tombs.  

A question that always comes up from my walkers is this: how did Jim Morrison end up here? 

So here’s the story, lifted from my book Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light.

James Morrison, Poet

On July 3, 1971, at five in the morning, Jim Morrison died in the bathtub of a borrowed fourth-floor apartment at No. 17 rue Beautrellis in the Marais. He was twenty-seven. The cause of death was undoubtedly the huge quantities of opium he was snorting, but his girlfriend Pamela Courson(or Mrs. Morrison, as she sometimes called herself) convinced the police that he was not a drug user and had a serious heart condition. The medical examiner listed cause of death as heart attack and identified him as “James Morrison, Poet,” as Pamela told him.                        

Rumors began flying in the American community the very morning of Morrison’s death: that he had OD’d in the toilet of a rock club and his body had been carried to the apartment; that he was offed by J. Edgar Hoover; that he was not dead, but faking it. Amazingly, none of the army of police officials and emergency rescue-squad members who saw the corpse recognized the world famous rock icon, nor did the man who came every day to keep the body packed in dry ice because of the city’s brutal heat wave.

A friend who had been walking with Jim in Père-Lachaise Cemetery a few weeks earlier told Pamela that the singer had expressed the hope of being buried there someday. She agreed with the suggestion. When Pamela and the friend went to an undertaker, he informed them that it would be almost impossible to find a plot in that very crowded burial ground. But when the friend mentioned that James Morrison was a famous young writer, the undertaker found a plot right away.

The hush-hush burial took place on July 7. The cemetery has not been the same since.

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.

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: The Original Bad Boy of French Literature

The Original Bad Boy of French Literature
One of my favorite characters on my literary walks is the medieval poet, thief, priest-killer, and M.A. in theology François Villon. We find this sensitive hell-raiser at the Place de la Contrescarpe, on the outer fringe of the Latin Quarter, where he used to carouse in the mid-1400s. The wine was cheap there, not being taxed outside the walls of the city. 
 

Here’s what I say about him in my book Writers in Paris:  
François Villon

The original bad boy of French poetry was born François de Montcorbier (or François des
Losges) in Paris in 1431, the year Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.  His father died when
he was a little boy, and Guillaume de Villon, the chaplain of the church of Saint Benoît-le-
Bétourné on Rue Saint-Jacques, adopted him, gave him his name, and eventually sent him
to study for the priesthood at the Collège de Navarre. Villon earned his Master of Arts in Theology degree in 1452. But carousing in taverns was more to his liking.

Three years later, for reasons unknown, a fight broke out between Villon and a priest named Philippe Chermoye by the tower of Saint-Benoît, which stood at the corner of Rue Saint-Jacques and today’s Rue des Écoles. The priest pulled a knife and slashed Villon’s face. Villon responded with a knife to the groin. Chermoye died in the Hôtel Dieu hospital a few days later. Villon got his first taste of prison—six months in the Grand-Châtelet. But after a long inquest he was pardoned by Charles VII.

In 1456 he published his first book of poetry, Lais, also known as Le Petit Testament. On Christmas night of the same year, he took part in a robbery at his old college for which he was banished from Paris. While living among brigands in the Touraine, he was arrested for theft and imprisoned in the castle of Meung-sur-Loire, where he wrote Le Grand Testament, a long poem in the form of a will with humorous bequests to family,friends, and enemies, interspersed with ballads. Thanks to a general amnesty declared for the coronation of Louis XI, he returned to Paris in 1461.

The following year, Villon was arrested for robbery but quickly cleared.  Soon after, he was arrested again, this time for his involvement in a brawl in which a pontifical notary was stabbed to death. He was subjected to la question de l’eau (water torture), convicted of murder, and condemned to be hanged.  While awaiting execution, he wrote perhaps his most famous poem, “La Ballade des pendus” (“The Ballad of the Hanged Men”).  It starts:

« Frères humains, qui après nous vivez, N’ayez les cueurs contre nous endurcis … »
(Brothers among us who live on after us, Harden not your hearts against us … )

On appeal, his sentence was reduced to ten years of exile. He left Paris in January 1463 and was never heard from again. ” 

David Burke is launching his spring and summer program of Writers in Paris Walking Tours in April. Take a look at his web site for them:

www.writersinpariswalking tours.blogspot.com

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: When Fitzgerald Met Hemingway

“We were going to the Old World to find a new rhythm for our lives with a true conviction that we had left our old selves behind forever.” 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saturday Evening Post, 1924

The “old selves” Scott and his wife Zelda were leaving behind were as stars of “the Jazz Age,” a phrase coined by Fitzgerald himself.  He was the most famous young writer in America, catapulted to celebrity by his best-selling first novel This Side of Paradise in 1920, at age twenty-four.  This handsome young man from Minnesota and his enchanting Alabama belle Zelda plunged into the wild, boozing, lavishly spending party-going circles of New York and Long Island, the world he was to immortalize in The Great Gatsby. But after four years of this dissipated life, Fitzgerald woke up to the reality that he was destroying his chance to do what he truly wanted to do, write a serious novel instead of the short stories in popular magazines that were supporting them. So he and Zelda abruptly pulled up stakes and sailed with their little daughter Scottie to France, settling in the quiet Mediterranean town of Saint Raphaël.  There Scott went on the wagon, focused full-time on his novel, letting nothing at all stop him, even the terrible pain he felt because of Zelda’s affair with a French pilot, and finished The Great Gatsby in the fall of 1924.  After wintering in Italy, the Fitzgeralds moved to Paris at the end of April 1925. The Great Gatsby had come out at the beginning of that month, but the book was not selling well.  Praise from Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and T.S. Eliot helped lift his spirits (he was in awe of important writers), but beside having to support his and Zelda’s costly lifestyle, what he desperately needed was financial success from The Great Gatsby if he was to keep writing serious novels. He began drinking again and acting badly in public.           
 

Despite his anxiety over The Great Gatsby’s fate Fitzgerald remained an openhearted fellow who liked to help promising writers get a start.  So one day shortly after his arrival he went up to Montparnasse to seek out a young man whose stories he’d read and enormously admired -- so much so that he had already alerted his editor, the great Max Perkins at Scribner’s, about the young man, who had been published in Paris, but not yet in America.  Fitzgerald made his way to the right place, a popular expatriate hangout called the Dingo at No. 10 Rue Delambre.  And there he was:  Ernest Hemingway standing at the bar. That old mahogany bar is still there, in the Auberge de Venise, now a fine Italian restaurant.  People who come on my tours let out gasps when they lay eyes on this venerable literary relic where the difficult relationship of these two great writers began.  Unfortunately, there is only one account of this historic get-together: Hemingway’s A Movable Feast.  This memoir of his “very poor and very happy” life in Paris in the 1920s was written three decades after the fact, in the late 1950s, when he was suffering from the severe depression which led to his suicide in 1961.  Fitzgerald had died two decades earlier, in 1940, his books (even The Great Gatsby) out of print, and considered by everyone, even himself, to have been a failure.

My question is this: why did Hemingway feel it necessary to write so maliciously about him?    A large part of A Moveable Feast – some twenty percent -- is devoted to tearing Fitzgerald down in one way or another. Not that he was the only writer to be trashed by Hemingway.  Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Harold Loeb, Ford Madox Ford, and John Dos Passos also suffered the treatment. Hemingway was an extraordinarily competitive man, unwilling to admit that anyone had helped him.  And I think that since Fitzgerald was the writer who had done the most to advance Hemingway’s career, he got the worst of it.  In A Moveable Feast, the mean-spirited writing starts with their first meeting at the Dingo, where Hemingway portrays Fitzgerald as a less-than-manly man (“the mouth worried you until you knew him and then in worried you more”), objects to his overly enthusiastic public praise about Hemingway’s writing, a no-no in Hem’s manly code, and elaborates on his drunkenness at the bar (probably true; he was an alcoholic, after all).  Hemingway’s narrative stance is a patronizing one, coming across as a savvy older brother (though he was three years Scott’s junior) trying to help his wayward sibling get out of various messes, but also with an overt disdain for him because of his squandering of his literary talent.  The final scene about Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast takes place long after World War II, when the bar chief at the Ritz, who had worked at the hotel all through the 1920s, asks, “Papa, who was this Monsieur Fitzgerald that everyone is asking about?” People say he was a regular at the hotel back then, but the barman can’t recall the first thing about him. So he asks Hemingway to write about him, “and then if he came here I will remember him.”  “We will see,” says Papa. 

The one moment of outright respect he gives to Fitzgerald has to do with The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald has given him a copy at the Closerie des Lilas, asking Hemingway to read it and see if he can figure out why the book is not selling.  Hemingway writes, “When I finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, or how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. … If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.”

David and his tour guests at Auberge de Venise

David Burke is launching his spring and summer program of Writers in Paris Walking Tours in April. Take a look at his web site for them:

www.writersinpariswalking tours.blogspot.com

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

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: Colette and Willy on the Rue Jacob

This past Sunday I did the walk I call “Literary Ground Zero: Saint Germain-des-Prés.”  This part of Bank  is absolutely bursting with literary history and places associated with writers.  We think right away of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and their cohorts at the Café de Flore, Lipp, and Deux Magots in the years during and after World War II. In the 1920s it was the turn of Hemingway, James Joyce, and many others, French and foreign, while at the turn of the century Joyce’s compatriot Oscar Wilde drank absinthe at the Deux Magots and died nearby in a hotel which we visit.  Every writer we encounter has a fascinating story.  One that my walkers love to hear about is Colette’s -- a country girl when she came to Paris from her village in Burgundy, in 1893.  She would become one of France’s most famous writers of the 20th century, thanks to such novels as Chéri and stories as Gigi.  She came as the twenty year old bride of Henry Gauthier-Villars, thirteen years her elder, a jack of all literary trades who wrote under the nom de plume of Willy.  “It was marry Willy or become an old maid or a teacher,” she said.  They lived in the apartment house at No. 28 Rue Jacob.                                                                                                              

As the plaque on the wall says, Colette began her Parisian literary career here. This is true.  She wrote her first novel, Claudine à l’école (Claudine at School), in this house. According to her, Willy locked her in a room with pencils and notebooks and told her to write a novelized version of her school days in Saint-Sauveur.  But when Willy read it he found it lacking and stuck in drawer. A few years later he read it again.  This time  he liked it.  So he took it to a publisher and it was accepted.  Otherwise, said Colette, “it is probable that I should never have produced another line.”  That’s her story.

In fact, Willy did put her in the room with the pencils and notebooks. He also encouraged her to spice the story up with a bit of schoolgirl lesbian flirtation.  But far from finding it without merit, he took the manuscript to a number of publishers, none of whom wanted it   That was in 1896.  A few years later,  when another schoolgirl novel became a success, Willy showed Colette’s work around again.  This time a publisher took it. Claudine à l’école came out in 1900 and was a smash hit – with Willy taking the sole credit as author.  Over the next three years, Colette wrote three more Claudine novels.  All were best sellers.  Only on the last one of the series did Colette get a credit – “par Colette et Willy.”

David Burke is launching his spring and summer program of Writers in Paris Walking Tours in April. Take a look at his web site for them:

www.writersinpariswalking tours.blogspot.com

 

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

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: Happy Birthday, Denis Diderot, A Bit in Advance

Denis Diderot’s 300th birthday is coming up in October. There will be plenty of celebrating of this multi-tasking genius, including a plan to install his ashes in the crypt of the Pantheon. There he will join the two other greatest figures of the Enlightenment, his collaborators Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Diderot is known chiefly for his vast and profoundly influential Encyclopédie, but he was also a very exciting novelist whose works are as fresh now as they were when they flowed from his quill in the 18th century. To wit, the other day a big movie based on his novel La Religieuse opened in twenty-two cinemas in Paris and its suburbs -- to excellent reviews.  

Here’s my take on this extraordinary resident Saint Germain-des-Prés from my book Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light:  

Jean Gautherin’s vigorous bronze of Denis Diderot is one of the finest statues of a writer in Paris. It stands at No. 245 boulevard Saint-Germain, a few steps from the house where Diderot lived from 1754 to 1784, later replaced by the s building. One of the big three of the Enlightenment, Diderot shared with Voltaire and Rousseau a passion for philosophy, literature, morality, and the betterment of the human race, but only he delved deeply into science and technology, making him the consummate “universal man.”

Diderot is chiefly remembered for L’Encyclopédie.This project began as a job translating Ephraim Chambers’s pioneering English Cyclopaedia,but instead, Diderot and mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert developed a plan for a vast new work. With seventeen volumes of text, eleven volumes of plates, and sixty thousand articles, it would become the very embodiment of the Age of Reason.

The first volume came out in 1751, and nine more followed until 1759, when the Conseil du Roi abruptly halted the project on the grounds that Diderot and his contributors (Voltaire and Rousseau among them) were lacing the books with challenges to church and state with ideas such as this:

“The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and reason, the governors are entrusted with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state whathealth is to the individual.”

After Diderot threatened to publish the Encyclopédie in Holland—no idle threat, because the project was one of Paris’s leading employers—the government allowed publication to resume.He agreed to let the censors review everything,but invented all sorts of cunning ruses to get around them.
 

Diderot’s works of fiction, brilliant,often droll, and remarkably modern in tone, were written for his own enjoyment and that of select friends. Almost all were too scandalous to be published at the time he wrote them. They include La Religieuse (The Nun), Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master),and  Le Neveu de Rameau(Rameau’s Nephew). Only one novel, Les Bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels), published in Holland, came out during his lifetime. In it, women talk “from the most sincere part of them and the best instructed in the things you desire to know . . . from their jewels.” It was a version of The Vagina Monologues two and a half centuries before its time.
_____________________________________________________________________________
David Burke is launching his spring and summer program of Writers in Paris Walking Tours in April. Take a look at his web site for them:

www.writersinpariswalking tours.blogspot.com

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 195 euros for up to 3 people, and 65 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

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: Bad Boys and Bad Girls of Literature in Paris

Dear Subscribers,
There's been a glitch with Feedburner, the company that delivers my subscriptions, so my apologies for receiving this post again which was delivered on Saturday and also for the reposting of the my Valentines Day story. Maybe it's because Mercury is in retrograde.

I’ve done quite a few sorts of presentations based on my book Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light, but the most fun I’ve had – the audiences too – is with the series I developed called “Bad Boys and Bad Girls of Literature in Paris.” It’s about extraordinary writers who also happened to lead scandalous lives. Colette, George Sand, Oscar Wilde, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, Jean Genet, François Villon, and the Marquis de Sade are among them. Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud are great favorites of mine, both for their magnificent poetry and their sensationally wild lives.  I will be talking about Verlaine and Rimbaud, along with a couple of others (Colette and George Sand, most likely), at Adrian Leeds’s monthly Parler Paris Après-Midi get-together in the Marais on Tuesday afternoon March 12 (see details of the time and place below).
 

To give you a brief taste, here’s how Verlaine and Rimbaud came to meet and an overview of how their relationship evolved. 

Verlaine and Rimbaud in Montmartre

In the summer of 1871, after the fall of the Commune, Paul Verlaine, then twenty-seven, was fired from his job as a civil servant at the Hôtel de Ville.  So he and his pregnant young wife Mathilde had to move into the home of her parents, the Mauté de Fleurvilles, in Montmartre. The house is still there, at No. 14 Rue Nicolet, where a Ville de Paris plaque tells what happened -- but without giving us the dark side of the story!

Ironically, it was Mme Mauté, Verlaine’s mother-in-law, who urged him to invite Rimbaud to come stay with the family.  This cultivated lady, a former piano student of Chopin and Debussy’s teacher at the time, was thrilled by the verses mailed to Verlaine by the unknown poet. “Come, dear great soul,” Verlaine wrote, believing he was addressing a mature man.  But Arthur Rimbaud was less than seventeen when he knocked on their door on September 10, 1871, and a rude, coarse, unkempt boy at that.

Rimbaud, who despised all bourgeois attitudes, responded to Mme Mauté’s and Mathilde’s well-meaning but patronizing reception with grunts. But as for Verlaine, after reading Le Bateau Ivre and hearing the “devilishly seductive” boy expand on his vision of the poet as a seer, he was ready to follow him anywhere.  So “Rimbe” and “Verlomphe” embarked on what Rimbaud called “a long, immense, and reasoned disordering of all the senses” in quest of a new, visionary poetic language, with absinthe as their holy sacrament. Their outrageous behavior alienated them not only from the family, but from Verlaine’s circle of poet friends, the “Vilains Bonshommes,” considered the most avant-garde poets of their time. But Rimbaud found them hopelessly conventional and made no secret about that.  They were irked by his insolence and shocked by the unabashed sexual rapport between the two.

 

A month after Rimbaud moved in with the family, M Mauté returned from a long hunting trip and ordered the disruptive boy out of the house. But the family’s season in hell was just beginning. One night Verlaine returned home drunk, beat the pregnant Mathilde, and tried to set her hair on fire. Later he flung his three-month-old son Georges against the bedroom wall. Miraculously, the baby was unhurt.  Outraged, M. Mauté threw his son-in-law out of the house. Verlaine moved into the room he had rented for Rimbaud in Montparnasse, but when Mathilde threatened divorce returned to her at Rue Nicolet. Rimbaud went home to his mother in Charleville, near the Belgian frontier.

After a few months of impeccable behavior, Verlaine came home one night with stab wounds in his thighs. The boy was back. In July 1872 the two poets left Paris, first travelling to Belgium, then England, then back to Brussels where, on July 19, 1873, Verlaine shot Rimbaud with a revolver, luckily only grazing his wrist. The court sentenced Verlaine to two years in prison. Rimbaud took off for the Middle East and North Africa, never to write poetry again.

His work, barely known to begin with, was forgotten. But in 1884, after Verlaine published some of Rimbaud’s poems, which he knew by heart, in his book Les Poètes Maudits, France began awakening to the genius of the wild boy from Charleville.

For the time and place of Adrian Leeds’s Parler Paris Après-Midi get-together on Tuesday, March 12, click on www.adrianleeds.com/apresmidi.

For information about David Burke and Writers in Paris and his literary walks click on www.writersinparis.com.

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 195 euros for up to 3 people, and 65 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

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: Beaumarchais: Rebel Extraordinaire

In an 18th century Paris absolutely bursting with amazing characters, few if any could match Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. His life reads like a picaresque novel. Born in 1732, the son of a clockmaker in Paris, he was clockmaker to the court of Versailles at twenty-two, thanks to an ingenious invention that made watches run on time.  Two years later he married a wealthy aristocratic widow and added “de Beaumarchais” to his name.  In rapid succession he became harp teacher to the Louis XV’s daughters, a royal financier, secret agent, arms dealer, inveterate pamphleteer, publisher of the complete works of Voltaire when they were officially banned, founder of the Société des Auteurs Dramatiques to protect the rights of playwrights, and most famously a playwright himself, writing two of the finest and most important plays of the 18th century, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro.

In the spring of 1775, two months after his first big hit with The Barber of Seville, Beaumarchis was sent to London as a secret agent by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Throughout the year he developed close relations with Americans and anti-George III English supporters of American independence in London.  He came to genuinely believe in the cause, but also saw the rebellion as a great chance to capitalize on England’s distress.  In reports passed on to Louis XVI, he argued for French military support for the Americans. But Louis was afraid it would lead to war with England.  To get around that, the king’s advisors convinced him to allow it by clandestine means. Beaumarchais was chosen to set up and run the operation.

On October 6, 1776, he moved to the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande, a splendid 1660 mansion at No. 47 Rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais, home to his undercover business, and began buying canons, rifles, and all sorts of other military supplies and leasing ships to transport them.  In the spring of 1777 he shipped enough weapons, gunpowder, and other supplies to equip 25,000 men. They would prove crucial to the defeat of the British and surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga in October -- the first victory for the Americans and the turning point of the war.  Convinced now that the rebels could win, France began openly began shipping a massive flow of arms and materiel and committed the all-import involvement of the French navy, leading eventually to the victory at Yorktown. 

In 1778, while the arms business was still going on, Beaumarchais wrote the most important French play of the 18th century, The Marriage of Figaro, but the government censors saw its mockery of the exorbitant privileges of the aristocracy as dangerous and refused to let it be performed.  But after six years of royal foot-dragging, Louis XVI, who had once declared “This play will never go on,” finally caved in to pressure from Marie-Antoinette and others who had read it.  On April 27, 1784, at the Comédie-Française’s big new 1,900-seat Théâtre de l’Odéon, The Marriage of Figaro finally had its premiere. 

In it, the valet Figaro outsmarts his master Count Almaviva and holds him, and by inference, his whole class in contempt: 

Because you are a great nobleman you think you are a great genius … Nobility, fortune, rank, position!  How proud they make a man feel!  What have you done to deserve such advantages?  Put yourself to the trouble of being born -- nothing more!

The play was a smash hit.  Even the aristocrats had to laugh at the mirror Beaumarchais held to their faces -- only five years before the Revolution.








Vestiges of Beaumarchais in Paris:

In 1787 (a year after Mozart’s version of Figaro opened in Vienna) Beaumarchais bought a large piece of land fronting on what is now Nos. 2 through 20 Boulevard Beaumarchais and built an Italianate villa and magnificent gardens.  He died in 1799 (the plaque in his honor at No. 2 has him dying nine years too early) and was buried in a simple, non-religious tomb in his garden.  But in 1825 the government appropriated Beaumarchais’s property to run the Canal Saint-Martin through it (the canal runs under the esplanade of the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, where the open market is held on Sundays).  

Beaumarchais’s remains were transferred to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery.  Sadly, the soft stone of his tomb has deteriorated badly and is hard to locate.  Half of the Beaumarchais name has chipped away.  Fortunately his birth name of Caron is clear to read.

In the Marais, a vigorous bronze statue of Beaumarchais stands on Rue Saint-Antoine at the foot of Rue des Tournelles, near the Place de la Bastille.

The charming Hôtel Caron de Beaumarchais at No. 12 Rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais, down the street from the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande where he ran his gun-running operation, is a mini-museum of the time of our hero.

Vestiges of Beaumarchais on line: 
For a fascinating historical account entitled “Beaumarchais and the American Revolution” researched by by the CIA go to:  https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent csi/vol14no1/html/v14i1a01p_0001.htm

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.

 

In addition to my Eye Prefer Paris Tours, we now offer Eye Prefer New York Tours, 3-hour walking tours of New Yorkís best neighborhoods including Soho, Meatpacking/West Village & Tribeca. Tours cost $195 for up to 3 people and $65 for each additional person.Come take a bit of the Big Apple on an Eye Prefer New York Tour!

 

Come experience my blog ìliveî with my Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I lead. 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 195 euros for up to 3 people, and 65 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. www.eyepreferparistours.com
 

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 Charlotteís 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, and Friday
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: Balzac's Hideaway

After seven bombs published under fanciful pseudonyms, Honoré de Balzac finally hit it big with his novel Les Chouans in 1829. He was thirty years old.  It was first time he signed his name to one of his works.  But by this time he was already deeply in debt, due to the collapse of his printing company a year earlier.  A race between two  driven Balzacs was on.  One was the brilliant, dynamic, prolific, phenomenally imaginative best-selling author, the other the quixotic business man. He plunged into such off-the-wall schemes as a pineapple plantation in the Paris suburb of Sèvres and an abandoned Roman Empire silver mine in Sardinia and poured his royalties into two newspapers he created, all total flops. Ironically, of all the novelists of his day Balzac was the one who wrote the most perceptively about the role of money in the lives of his characters, while his own finances were an unending disaster. By the end of the 1830s the demands of his creditors were insufferable. So he went into hiding.

In November 1840 Balzac rented what he called a “provisional shelter,” a discreet little house with a garden he enjoyed in the then-rural village of Passy outside Paris.  He ended up staying for more than six years.  He rented it under name of his housekeeper Mme Brugiol, deliberately misspelled as “M de Breugnol.”  To get in, a caller had to provide two passwords: “I am bringing lace from Bruges” and “the plum season has arrived.” One feature of the house Balzac especially appreciated was that it opened onto on two different streets.  It fronts on the Rue Raynouard and backs onto an alleyway, two levels down.  He had an escape hatch cut into the floor of the parlor (unfortunately now covered over) so he could quickly escape creditors who came to the front door. He’d then be able to slip down to the basement, out the back door to the Rue Berton alley, and make his getaway.

Now a museum, the Maison de Balzac, is rich in evidence of his life and his work, most importantly his meticulously restored study, where he spent the better part of his nights and days.  From his remarkably tiny writing table came staggering amounts of manuscript.  Writing for a minimum of twelve hours a day, as was his habit, he corrected the whole of the Comédie Humaine for its collected edition and wrote more than twenty other books. The pace turned all the more feverish in 1842 when he opened a letter from his mistress the Countess Eveline Hanska in Russia and learned that her husband had died.  Hoping all the more to pay down his debts to have a reasonably clean slate should they be able to marry, he went into overdrive, working up to sixteen hours a day. “My arm has almost worn itself out from moving it around as I write,” he wrote to her.  Among Balzac’s most popular novels written here were the last volume of Lost Illusions, Cousin Bette, and the last one he would write, Cousin Pons.

On display is Balzac’s famous coffee pot, the source of the twenty or so cups he drank every day to keep up his furious pace of work -- undoubtedly a factor for his early death, at fifty-one, three years after leaving this house.  

In the parlor we see oil portraits of Balzac’s father and mother and other key people in his life, most notably the Countess Hanska, his lover and eventual wife.  And there are images galore of Balzac himself, from satiric cartoons of the day to all sorts of respectful sculptures, from David d’Angers’s marble bust, done from life in 1844, and Allesandro Puttini’s 1837 marble portrait  of him in the famous monk’s cowl he wore when he wrote, to a number of later clay sculptures by such artists as Auguste Rodin, a huge fan of Balzac’s work. 

To me, the most original display is of the marvelous woodblock printing plates illustrating  characters and scenes from the Comédie Humaine, etched during Balzac’s lifetime and shortly after his death. They offer vivid portraits of a few hundred or so of the more than six thousand characters the dynamo of French fiction brought to life. 

As Baudelaire put it:
“From the summit of the aristocracy to the lower depths of the plebian, all the actors of his Comédie are more greedy for life, more active and cunning in the struggle, more patient in misfortune, more gluttonous in pleasure, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real word shows them. In short, in Balzac, even the door-keepers have genius. All his souls are loaded to the muzzle with will. Just like Balzac himself. "

Maison de Balzac
47 Rue Raynouard, 75016 Paris. 
Metro: Passy or La Muette. 
Open every day except Monday from 10am to 6pm.
www.balzac.paris.fr

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.

 

In addition to my Eye Prefer Paris Tours, we now offer Eye Prefer New York Tours, 3-hour walking tours of New Yorkís best neighborhoods including Soho, Meatpacking/West Village & Tribeca. Tours cost $195 for up to 3 people and $65 for each additional person.Come take a bit of the Big Apple on an Eye Prefer New York Tour!

 

Come experience my blog ìliveî with my Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I lead. 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 195 euros for up to 3 people, and 65 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. www.eyepreferparistours.com
 

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 Charlotteís 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, and Friday
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

I am delighted to announce a new monthly series titled David Burke's Writers in Paris. Every month David Burke, author of Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in Paris, will pen a revealing and interesting article about writers in Paris. Please welcome David and let us know how you like the new series. David has also taken the photos.
 

Rilke and Rodin … and How the Rodin Museum Came into Being
On August 31, 1908, the greatest German poet of his time, Rainer-Maria Rilke, moved into a studio in an 18th century mansion in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.  He was immediately inspired to write this note:

“Dear Great Friend,                                                                                                              You must see this beautiful building and the room I have been living in since this morning.  Three bay windows open prodigiously on an abandoned garden where from time to time we see naïve rabbits leap over the trellises as in an ancient tapestry.   If you are in town one of these days it would be my greatest joy if we might lunch together” …

The “dear great friend” was none other than Auguste Rodin. 

This was the first time Rilke had communicated with Rodin in two years, since the great sculptor had abruptly fired him from his job as his secretary.

This is the story of the on-again/off-again relationship of these two geniuses and how it ultimately led to the existence of the Musée Rodin. This magnificent property includes not only the handsome 1730 mansion the Hôtel Biron, but also the third-largest garden of any house in Paris (after the Elysées Palace and the Hôtel Matignon), dotted with one Rodin masterpiece after another –  “The Thinker,” “The Burghers of Calais, “The Gates of Hell,” and dozens of others.  But at the time Rilke wrote to Rodin it looked nothing like today.  It was an elegant dump, abandoned four years earlier when the convent school occupying it lost its government subsidy. Writers and artists began to move in. 

Auguste Rodin was Rilke’s artistic idol. The Prague-born poet first came to Paris in 1902 to write an essay about him. A generation older, Rodin took a liking to the gifted but emotionally and artistically immature poet, then twenty-six, and he loved what Rilke wrote about his work. So in 1905 he hired the young man as his secretary and brought him to live with his family at his home in Meudon, outside Paris, where his vast sculpture atelier was located. Rilke reveled in his chance to see Rodin at work every day, to feel the intensity of his work ethic, and observe his ability to make, as if by magic, solid material come to life.  At night Rilke would enter a room, lamp in hand, to look at the small sculptures: “As they wake up, one by one, like animals, life comes back into them, hesitantly, still heavy with dream…”  He was in heaven. But six months into the job, Rodin suddenly dismissed him without explanation. Devastating though the shock of being fired was, it set off a poetic explosion.  

In July 1907, Rilke wrote to his wife Clara that he had spent a whole morning watching three gazelles in the zoo of Paris’s Jardin des Plantes:  “As women gaze out at you from pictures, so they gaze out with something, with a soundless final turn.”  This became the inspiration for his poem “The Gazelle,” one of his so-called “thing poems,” heavily influenced by Rodin – but going the opposite way. Whereas Rodin made inanimate objects come to life, Rilke turned animate objects into things, sculpted by the words of his poems. Thanks to such poems as “The Gazelle” and “The Panther,” also based on his visits to the Jardin des Plantes, his two volumes of New Poems in 1907 in 1908 were tremendous hits. 

And they gave him the confidence to invite Rodin to lunch.  

Rodin accepted. He loved the place. He signed a lease for the ground floor right away and moved in a month later. Now on a relatively equal artistic basis, their previous woes forgotten, Rodin and Rilke were able converse freely.  Their only disagreement was about women.  Rodin could not separate them from their sexuality (his “French temperament, as Rilke saw it), whereas Rilke defended the model of Nordic women, whose purity did not make them obstacles to art. 

In 1912 the government decided to demolish the Hôtel Biron. To prevent that from happening, Rodin offered to will a large body of his works to the French government if it would preserve it as a museum after his death. Thanks to a massive outpouring of support, the government agreed. And when he died five years later the Hôtel Biron and its grounds became the Musée Rodin.

But what about Rilke?  Does he get any credit? Take a look at the wall to the left of the massive wooden carriage doors at the entrance to the compound, and you will see a little plaque. It says:
In this mansion, to which he introduced Auguste Rodin, Rainer-Maria Rilke lived from 1908 to 1911

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.

 

In addition to my Eye Prefer Paris Tours, we now offer Eye Prefer New York Tours, 3-hour walking tours of New Yorkís best neighborhoods including Soho, Meatpacking/West Village & Tribeca. Tours cost $195 for up to 3 people and $65 for each additional person.Come take a bit of the Big Apple on an Eye Prefer New York Tour!

 

Come experience my blog ìliveî with my Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I lead. 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 195 euros for up to 3 people, and 65 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. www.eyepreferparistours.com
 

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 Charlotteís 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, and Friday
Minimum of 2 students, maximum 6 students.

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