The Collected Traveler

Thinking about travel in the time of Covid-19 has made me remember a personage I read about in Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel (Pantheon, 2002): Xavier de Maistre was 27 in 1790 and a soldier in the army of the Sardinian Kingdom (which occupied present-day northern Italy and southern France).  He fought an illegal duel and was placed under house arrest in Torino, and during his 42 days of confinement, he wrote Autour de ma chambre (A Journey Around my Room).  The book parodies travel journals of the time, such as A Voyage Around the World by Louis de Bougainville (1771), and de Maistre proclaimed that this was a new form of travel with absolutely zero risk or expenses.  One could be a "housebound flâneur," an idea which inspired Joris-Karl Huysmans to write a novel entitled À Rebours (Against Nature), about a character named the Duc des Esseintes, a domesticated flâneur living in Paris.  In one scene, Des Esseintes had set out to go to London, got in a taxi, stopped in at an English tavern before his train departure, but then decides he can't complete the journey and goes home.  The imaginary journey is, for him, far preferable, "after all, what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair?"  

This "stationary travel" has been referred to as psychogeography by Merlin Coverley, author of a book by the same name as well as The Art of Wandering (Oldcastle Books, 2012).  Coverley defines psychogeography as "the point where psychology and geography meet in assessing the emotional and behavioral impact of urban space."  I was thinking of all this a few weeks ago, at the time of my last post, and while there is something ridiculous about the idea of journeying around a room, there is nothing ridiculous about armchair travel, at any time but especially now.  (By the way, if you want to read de Maistre's book, Hesperus Classics issued an edition in 2004, with a Foreword by Alain de Botton, fittingly.)  

Back in November, I went to a book signing at Albertine Books, in the beautiful Payne Whitney Mansion.  If you live in the New York metropolitan area and haven't been yet, add a visit to your To Do list at whatever point in the future that may be.  The Mansion (at 972 5th Avenue, 78th/79th) has been owned by France since 1952, and is home to the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Albertine, today the only French bookshop in New York City (there are some English titles available in the store as well).  The Mansion is also one of the few remaining buildings of New York's Gilded Age, and at least before Covid-19, was open to the public daily, welcoming around 30,000 visitors per year.  The Mansion was designed by Stanford White, of the prestigious McKim, Mead & White architectural firm, and in 1970 it was designated an official landmark of the City of New York.  

It's also a perfect venue for a book signing, and I was there for one by Elaine Sciolino, whose book The Seine: The River That Made Paris had just been published.  If you loved her previous The Only Street in Paris as much as I did, you will love this one even more, and if you ever have the opportunity to meet her in person you won't be disappointed: she is vivacious, interesting, funny, smart, and warm.  She engaged the audience throughout, and hands down, it was the best book signing I've ever attended.  I probably monopolized too much of her time afterwards, when she was signing books, but she was gracious about it.  Too many other projects prevented me from writing about this previously, but Elaine's book deserves continued notice, and perhaps now is an even more opportune time to read it.  

When I was a student in Paris, living with a family in the 7th arrondissement, the Seine was not a far walk from the rue de Grenelle and I walked to the river often.  In 1979 we hadn't yet heard of global warming, so then, even in April, it was not warm enough for long strolls (I was glad I left Paris for three weeks of spring break in Nice; it was rainy and cold when I left and the same when I returned, and on May 2nd, the day my  parents arrived for a visit, it snowed).  But later in May, I saw this painted on a wall along a pedestrian walkway next to the Seine:
  

(Long live the sun; always smiling -- this is actually on page 558 in my Paris book but it's not as easy to read because it's in black-and-white)  In her book, Elaine presents the Seine in all seasons, and she traveled the length of the river from its source in deep Burgundy "to the estuary where its waters meet the sea, and to cities, towns, tributaries, islands, ports, and bridges in between."  The idea for the book came about during a conversation with a friend, who asked her what had given her joy and comfort when she first moved to Paris as a young journalist many years ago (Elaine is a contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times). The answer to the question was the Seine, and among the many interesting details she reveals are these:

*There is evidence that Giovanni da Verrazzano, the Italian explorer who discovered New York, may have departed from Rouen, where the Seine spans three and a half miles, on his legendary journey to the New World. Verrazzano was part of the team assembled by King Francois I to search for new trade routes and sources of wealth, and he Frenchified his name to Jean de Verrazane when he landed in Rouen.  Volunteer carpenters have been at work creating a full-sized replica of La Dauphine, the ship Verrazzano sailed to the New World, and they are aiming to finish in 2024, five hundred years after Verrazzano's exploration.  Whether or not Verrazzano really did set sail from Rouen is a subject of debate; but Sciolino writes, "As an American whose four grandparents emigrated from Sicily to the United States, I'm on the side of Rouen's believers in Verrazzano."  (New Yorkers may recall that in 2018, the bridge's name that had (inexplicably to me) been misspelled for decades (as Verrazano) was finally corrected, with the missing 'z' added (to Verrazzano).    

*Sequana was the original name for the Seine, and Elaine is a member of the Sequana Association, whose mission is "preserving the patrimoine -- or heritage -- of historic boats and honoring the memory of Alphonse Fournaise, a master boat maker who founded La Maison Fournaise."  Renoir's masterpiece, 'Luncheon of the Boating Party,' depicts a group of friends on the balcony of La Maison Fournaise, which is still thriving today on the Île des Impressionistes, formerly known as the island of Chatou.  Elaine writes that "If you sit on the balcony and ignore the modern buildings on the other side of the river, you can imagine that you are near the spot where Renoir and his friends lunched, talked and laughed together on those distant Sunday afternoons that never seemed to end."  Members of the Sequana Association are also rowing fanatics.  "For three decades, its members have bought, restored, rebuilt, exhibited, and rowed some of the most important boats to have plied the waters of the Seine between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."  (Elaine also shares a tip that the Musée Archéologique de Dijon is "a hidden jewel, housed in a former Benedictine abbey with high stone ceilings and grand halls," and its prized treasure is a bronze statue of the healing goddess Sequana.  "I find her superb," the museum's curator told Elaine, "She is our Mona Lisa.")
  
  *One chapter is devoted to the bouquinistes along the Seine in Paris, and in particular one bouquiniste who is now her friend, Jacky.  But it was another bouquiniste who gave her the name of a book dealer who sold her an original first edition of Tableau de Paris by Louis-Sebastien Mercier, the subject of Elaine's doctoral dissertation.  A little investigating has turned up that this 12-volume work (sometimes referred to as Panorama of Paris) was published between 1781 and 1788, and is a complete picture of everyday life in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution.  I love it when one book leads a reader to another, and I can't wait to find out more about this one.  

*The famous ice cream purveyor Berthillon, on the Île-Saint-Louis, apparently also makes a superb tarte tatin.  Somehow, I did not know this, and as tarte tatin is probably my most favorite dessert on earth, I will not miss it on my next visit.  
 
"A book full of reasons to love Paris" is how author Edmund White described The Seine for The New York Times Book Review.  It's also full of wonderful facts that make for a compelling read -- every single chapter is jam-packed with interesting people and stories -- and is far more rewarding I think than a journey around a room in an apartment or a house.  

The promised Palermo post really will be next.