YEARS AGO, DURING the summer between my junior and senior years of college, a classmate and I were in the employ of an elderly couple who owned a large, rambling country house in Connecticut and a stunning apartment in one of New York City’s premier apartment buildings. Our job was to cook, clean, and otherwise help maintain the country house, at which there were dinners, parties, and house guests all summer long. As a result, we had the opportunity to meet a number of notable people, including some neighbors, two of whom were John Russell, former art critic of the New York Times, and his wife, Rosamond Bernier, cofounder of the prestigious French art magazine L’Oeil, author, and lecturer.
Exactly thirty years later, when I was working on this manuscript, I contacted Rosamond. I was thrilled to be corresponding with her—I’d attended a few of her wonderful lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art over the years (though I was too shy to introduce myself, certaine that she would not remember me)—and I still marvel at the joys of six degrees of separation; you just never know who you will meet again in your life. I asked Rosamond if I might include an article she wrote about Braque in my book, but she said she was saving that one for inclusion in her own memoir. While I was considering what else I had in my files by her, I began paging through John Russell’s Paris (Harry N. Abrams, 1983, 1994), and I read for the five hundredth time Rosamond’s foreword. I said to myself, Ça y est!—that’s it!—why not feature this in full in the book? Rosamond granted me permission, and it is with great pleasure that I include her foreword to my favorite book on Paris ever written.
ROSAMOND BERNIER was a contributing editor for Vogue for many years and is the author of Matisse, Picasso, Miró: As I Knew Them (Knopf, 1991). She was decorated by the French government in 1980 and 1999 when she received the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in recognition of her contribution to French culture. Bernier was honored (along with her husband, John) as a National Treasure by the Municipal Art Society of New York in 2004, and she has given more than two hundred lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Town & Country has referred to Bernier as “the Met’s living treasure,” and Leonard Bernstein wrote of her that “Madame Bernier has the gift of instant communication to a degree which I have rarely encountered.” Videos of her Met lectures are available exclusively through Kultur (kultur.com) and of these a great number feature French art topics, such as “French Impressionism: An Accessible Paradise” and “French Impressionism: Paris by Day and by Night.” Bernier is currently working on a memoir.
When I first read John Russell’s Paris, I remembered particularly a very small room halfway to the sky in what was then my favorite Left Bank hotel. The rooms on the top floor of the Pont Royal are not as large as the ones lower down, but after trying some of the others I decided to perch above, where each room had a small balcony and you could step out through the French windows, and there in front of you was a clear view across Paris.
You could look down to the right and follow the rue du Bac on its straight reach for the Seine. Eighteenth-century town houses with flat stone façades—not yet sluiced clean on André Malraux’s orders—and elegant doorways lined one side of the street, rising to steep, humped roofs (gray tile, usually) bitten into by mansard windows with projecting triangular hoods. Across the river was the cluttered mount of Montmartre topped by the ridiculous but endearing white fantasy of the Sacré-Coeur. To the left was the Eiffel Tower and, still further, the gold-ribbed dome of the Invalides. Paris in my pocket.
This is where I came to live in the late 1940s when an American magazine sent me to Paris to report on the arts. The Pont Royal was cheap in those days, and it was near to everything that I wanted.
I was extraordinarily lucky to be starting a career at that time, when Paris was still a great center of intellectual and artistic energy. Art and life were beginning again after the long dark night of the German occupation. As Cyril Connolly once wrote about French writers, “Intelligence flows through them like a fast river.” The river was indeed flowing fast. The great figures of twentieth-century art were still in full activity. There were new magazines, new books, new art galleries, new plays, new hopes. Even new music was beginning to make its way.
Writers, publishers, art dealers from all over stayed at the Pont Royal or met there. Fred, the Swiss concierge, knew them all and kept a fatherly eye out for me. When I came home from work he might tell me, “Monsieur Skira left this morning to visit Monsieur Matisse in Vence. Monsieur Matisse didn’t sound a bit pleased when he telephoned.” (The Swiss publisher Albert Skira was chronically late and never answered letters, which infuriated the supermethodical Matisse.) Or he might say, “Monsieur and Madame Miró are arriving tomorrow from Barcelona for a week. Monsieur Curt Valentin is expected from New York Tuesday.” (Curt Valentin was the most imaginative New York art dealer of the day.) “Monsieur Stephen Spender came in from London and was looking for you.”
My room with its turkey-red carpet, brass bed, and nubbly white coverlet offered few amenities: one chair; an old-fashioned stand-up wardrobe; watery lights. The telephone was cradled uneasily on two metal prongs. Its function was mainly symbolic. Even the most exasperated jiggling rarely caught the attention of the standardiste. Often it was quicker to go out, buy jetons, and call from a café. Once, in a rage of frustration, I stormed down to confront the telephone operator face to face, only to find her standing in her cubicle, tape measure in hand, intently fitting a friend for a dress while her switchboard flashed futile appeals.
The bar, downstairs from the lobby, was conspiratorially dark, and filled with deep and overstuffed brown leather armchairs and sofas. This was my club, a quintessentially Parisian listening post where you went to find out who’s in, who’s out, and who’s gone away and will never come back. Publishers and authors negotiated over the new fashionable drink in France: “le Scotch.” The painter Balthus, more Byronic than Byron himself, would drop by and give me news of Picasso. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were regulars. At that time their fame and the provocative aura that surrounded the word “Existentialist” (practically nobody knew what it meant) had made them objects of universal curiosity, and they had abandoned their previous headquarters at the Café de Flore for the less exposed Pont Royal.
Later, when I had an apartment, I continued to see Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, though neither of them cared much for Americans in general. Once when Sartre came to lunch he gave an offhand demonstration of mental agility: without stopping the general conversation he deciphered, one after another, the formidably difficult word-and-picture puzzles on my dessert plates.
Although I moved from the Pont Royal I never left the quarter. It was, and is, a neighborhood of bookstores and publishing houses. The grandest, Gallimard, is a few steps from the Pont Royal. I used to go to its Thursday afternoon garden parties every June; they were long on petits fours and short on liquor. Alice B. Toklas lived around the corner from my office and was always ready to receive the favored visitor with enormous teas. She was exquisitely polite, and even when very old she would insist on serving the guest herself. When I did her some small favor, she sent a charming note of thanks in such minute handwriting that I had to take out a magnifying glass to read it. Although her dress was monastic, she loved elaborately flowered hats, and would appear at my apartment, a diminutive figure under a herbaceous border that not even Russell Page himself would have imagined. She bought one such hat every year, she told me.
In Paris, you are on easy terms with the past. I would nod to Apollinaire, a favorite poet, as I went by 202 boulevard Saint-Germain, where he lived after coming back wounded from the front in World War I. I liked going by the Jesuit-style Église de Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, set back from the boulevard, where Apollinaire was married, with Picasso as witness. On my way to Nancy Mitford’s I would go by 120 rue du Bac, a handsome house from which Chateaubriand set off every afternoon to visit Madame Récamier. Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, George Sand, Madame de Staël, Voltaire, Wagner (he finished Die Meistersinger in Paris) were among the friendly neighborhood ghosts.
It is often said, and with some reason, that Parisians are not hospitable to the foreigner. But what an abundance of generosity and hospitality came my way! I remember Picasso rummaging through the indescribable chaos of his vast studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins to try and dig up some drawings I wanted to publish. (He found them, I gave them back, and he never could find them again.) Fernand Léger lined up his recent work for me and asked which canvases I liked best. Pleased with my choice he whacked me jovially across the back: “You’re a good girl, you have a good strong stomach.” Matisse received me with all the books he had illustrated meticulously opened out so that he could explain in each case what problems he had solved, and how. The admirable, austere Nadia Boulanger (who taught so many American composers, beginning with Aaron Copland) invited me to her icy apartment on the rue Ballu to hear her latest protégé. The composer, Francis Poulenc, a bulky pear-shaped figure, was droll beyond words and yet indescribably poignant as he accompanied himself on a small upright piano and sang the soprano solo—that of a woman desperately trying to hold on to her lover—from his La Voix humaine. President Vincent Auriol took me on a tour of the Palais de l’Élysée after a press conference to point out the famous Gobelin tapestry. And I remember the ultimate Parisian accolade: a great French chef, the late René Viaux of the restaurant in the Gare de l’Est, named a dish after me.
A few years after my Pont Royal days I was starting my own art magazine, L’Oeil, in a minute office at the back of a cobbled courtyard on the rue des Saints-Pères. It was sparsely furnished—no pictures yet. The wall behind me was painted a shade of blue I like particularly, the color of a package of Gauloise cigarettes. When Alberto Giacometti came by for a chat, I said a bit apologetically that it must seem odd—an art magazine office with no art around. “Not at all,” he answered, looking at me across my desk. “You are a personnage sur fond bleu, that’s all you need.” (Giacometti characteristically tried to discourage us from running an article on him in the first issue. “It will ruin the chances of your magazine. No one will buy it if it shows my work.” Naturally, we paid no attention.)
For the magazine, we needed good writers and got in touch with a young English art critic whose weekly column in the London Sunday Times was indispensable reading if you wanted to know not only what was going on in England but on the Continent as well. It was clear that, unlike many critics, he loved art; he wrote about it with informed enthusiasm, and he wrote in crystalline prose. There was not a dull phrase to be weeded out in translation (French translation did wonders for some of our German, Dutch, Italian, and English-language contributors) and, what is more, he knew France and the French language very well.
We corresponded. He sent in his articles—on time. We met. Our conversations centered on ideas for features and deadlines. I had the intense seriousness of the young and the harassed, and I was producing a monthly publication on a shoestring as thin as the one Man Ray wore in lieu of a tie. In private life both of us were programmed, to use computer language, in other directions. Unlikely as it seems, I had no idea that while I was discovering Paris and the Parisians he was working on a book about Paris.
Some twenty years later, Reader, I married him. Only then did I discover John Russell’s book Paris (originally published in 1960). Here was sustained delight. No one else could combine the feel and the look, the heart and the mind, the stones and the trees, the past and the present, the wits, the eccentrics, and the geniuses of my favorite city with such easy grace.
Reading this book, for me, was like sauntering through the city where I had lived so long. By my side was a most civilized companion who casually brought all the strands together and made them gleam—not forgetting to stop for an apéritif and a delicious meal en route. The book was long out of print, and I felt it unfair to keep this to myself. I showed it to a publisher friend. He immediately agreed that others would enjoy John Russell’s Paris as much as we did. He suggested it be brought up to date, in an illustrated edition.
The author and I went to Paris to gather the illustrations. There was some confusion about our hotel reservation, and the receptionist at the Pont Royal apologized for giving us a small room on the top floor. Here the circle closes in the most satisfactory of ways: it was the identical room, no. 125, in which I had lived when I first came to Paris. The turkey-red carpet was now royal blue, the furniture was spruced-up modern, there was—is this possible?—a minibar. And there was a pushbutton telephone that clicked all of Europe and America into the streamlined receiver.
We stepped out onto the little balcony. Deyrolle the naturalist’s, where I used to buy crystals and butterflies, was still across the street. There were some new chic boutiques, but the noble eighteenth-century façades still stood guard over the past. We looked around happily: there they were, our cherished landmarks—the Invalides, the Église de Sainte-Clotilde, and the Eiffel Tower on the left, and on the right the former Gare d’Orsay, soon to be a museum of late nineteenth-century art, the Sacré-Coeur, and the Grand Palais.
The huge open sky overhead had drifted in from the Île-de-France. The bottle-green bus bumbled down the rue du Bac. The tricolor flew the way it flies in Delacroix’s Liberty Guiding the People. I was back again, this time in John Russell’s Paris.
“One of my favorite things to do in Paris is to go to the movies. Now, some may blame this on my Southern California upbringing, but to me it’s a true cultural immersion. Seeing a film there feels like a capital-E Event. Parisians relish films as they would a meal, paying close attention and settling in for their little rituals (which used to include uniformed ushers escorting everyone to their seats). Parisian film buffs continue to cherish the old while chasing the new: you might find a classic Hollywood screwball comedy, the latest blockbuster, a brooding new Euro-indie flick, and Les Enfants du paradis playing in a ten-block radius.
“Most of all, I love seeing a film at La Pagode in the seventh arrondissement. A grassroots effort saved this Belle Époque cinema from demolition, and the last time I went there it still had an atmospheric whisper of decay. It’s a delirious Far East fantasy of a building, with a curving roof and a shaggy, mysterious garden. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre has nothing on this!”
—Jennifer Paull, freelance writer and former Fodor’s editor
