MARCEL PROUST SEEMS to be more celebrated now than he ever was, and the publication of recent books such as Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time by Patrick Alexander (Vintage, 2009), The Year of Reading Proust by Phyllis Rose (Scribner, 1997), and How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton (Pantheon, 1997) attests to the popularity of Proustomania. Many Proust fans who visit Paris also make a pilgrimage to Illiers-Combray, just south of Chartres, where Proust’s celebrated tome, In Search of Lost Time is set. Readers of my first Paris edition may recall a New Yorker piece I included in that book called “In Search of Proust” by André Aciman. In it, Aciman refers to the “Prousto-tourists” who come to the former town of Illiers, which added Combray to its name officially in 1971, on the centennial of Proust’s birth. Aciman also notes that the town of Illiers-Combray sells about two thousand madeleines, the famed cake at the heart of Proust’s story, every month. The village also has a very lovely Marcel Proust museum, which was originally the home of Proust’s paternal uncle and aunt and in fact is also known as Aunt Léonie’s House. In her excellent account of the museum’s restoration and history, “Marcel Proust at Illiers-Combray” (Architectural Digest, October 2000), Judith Thurman accurately notes that “all great writers have an exceptionally fine-tuned sense of place, but none, surely, has ever been finer than Marcel Proust’s. The architect of that sublime memory palace, In Search of Lost Time, is inseparable from his own décors, real and imagined.”
But, as anyone who’s read Proust’s literary masterpiece knows, Belle Époque Paris is at the center of the story. Here is a unique piece, originally appearing in Horizon, that is both a brilliant encapsulation of the novel and an annotated geographical legend to the city of Paris just before and after the turn of the twentieth century. The original article was accompanied by a map, because as the Horizon editors noted, the sense of reality in Proust’s novel is so compelling that “its characters seem as authentic as the Paris streets in which they come and go.” I encourage readers to look at a detailed map of Paris and locate the sites that Sanche de Gramont has pinpointed below. Again to quote the Horizon editors, “Such a mixture of the imagined and the actual would surely have pleased Proust. His own central character, in love with Gilberte Swann, once his childhood playmate, ‘had always, within reach, a plan of Paris, which … seemed to [him] to contain a secret treasure’—for in it he can find the street where his beloved lives.” Readers can imagine that they have “been allowed to glance at Proust’s carnet, or address book, where the novelist has jotted down some of the prominent landmarks of his vast work.”
SANCHE DE GRAMONT, introduced previously, is also the author of many books under the name Ted Morgan. Morgan is the author of, among others, Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War (Random House, 2010), FDR: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1985), My Battle of Algiers: A Memoir (Smithsonian, 2006), A Shovel of Stars: The Making of the American West, 1800 to the Present (Simon & Schuster, 1995), and Maugham: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1980).
WITH THE EXCEPTION of summer vacations in Combray, when the narrator was a child, and in the Channel resort of Balbec, where as a young man he meets Albertine, later his fiancée, and of a short trip to Venice with his mother, all of Remembrance of Things Past takes place in Paris. The presence of the city saturates the novel the way moisture saturates the air and determines its atmospheric pressure.
I can think of one other city so present in a great modern novel, and that is Joyce’s Dublin. But unlike Joyce, who delivers Dublin in a single day, Proust makes Paris unfold over a period of roughly forty-five years, from 1875 to 1920. To read Proust is to observe the flowering and decline of a period in the capital’s history, for the debacle of 1870 and the horrors of the Commune were followed by years of determined amusement known as la belle époque. Those who had expected a wake found, instead, a celebration that was interrupted only by another war.
Proust was born in 1871 in a Paris already physically transformed by the Baron Haussmann, who destroyed entire neighborhoods to build long, straight thoroughfares like the rue de Rivoli, who crossed the Seine with five new bridges, and who built the Halles central market. The transformation continued during Proust’s life. The avenue of the Opéra linked the rue de Rivoli with Garnier’s opera house, inaugurated in 1874. The young Proust saw the Eiffel Tower go up, its four perforated iron legs rising from the green meadow of the Champ de Mars. In 1900 the Petit and Grand Palais were opened to the public. In the same year the first line of the Métro was inaugurated, and the fanciful wrought-iron entrances, with their orange lights and insectlike appearance, contributed to what became known as the “firefly” style of decoration.
And yet the capital of two and a half million people still resembled a collection of villages. The Champs-Élysées remained unpaved until the twentieth century. The houses on the avenue du Bois (today’s avenue Foch) still had private stables. Passy was a rustic suburb. Public transportation consisted mainly of horse-drawn omnibuses, despite the Métro, which Proust mentions only once.
Electric street lighting was still a novelty, so that the narrator, going to visit Mme Swann, the mother of Gilberte, was guided by the light in her living room, which shone like a beacon in the dark. Houses, even the houses of the rich, were badly heated. In the early spring Mme Swann received visitors with an ermine wrap over her shoulders and her hands in an ermine muff, like “the last patches of the snows of winter, more persistent than the rest, which neither the heat of the fire nor the advancing season had succeeded in melting.”
The traditional coexistence of luxury and discomfort was tempered by new inventions. Thus, the narrator acquires a telephone. As he waits for a call from Albertine, he remarks: “The advance of civilisation enables each of us to display unsuspected merits or fresh defects which make him dearer or more insupportable to his friends. Thus Dr. Bell’s invention had enabled Françoise [his maid] to acquire an additional defect, which was that of refusing, however important, however urgent the occasion might be, to make use of the telephone. She would manage to disappear whenever anybody was going to teach her how to use it, as people disappear when it is time for them to be vaccinated.”
This, then, was the city the narrator inhabited, not a mere setting, or a series of useful addresses, but a source of daily nourishment for his senses. Its sounds reached him as he lay ill in his room: “On certain fine days, the weather was so cold, one was in such full communication with the street, that it seemed as though a breach had been made in the outer walls of the house, and, whenever a tramcar passed, the sound of its bell throbbed like that of a silver knife striking a wall of glass.”
The street hawkers outside his window were “an orchestra that returned every morning to charm me.” Their cries seemed like a recitative in an opera, “where an initial intonation is barely altered by the inflexion of one note which rests upon another …” When he heard the cry “Les escargots, ils sont frais, ils sont beaux … On les vend six sous la douzaine,” it reminded him of parts of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. The practical Albertine interrupted his reverie to say: “Do make Françoise go out and buy some.… It will be all the sounds that we hear, transformed into a good dinner.”
In counterpoint to the aristocracy with which Remembrance is mainly concerned, Proust shows us the little people of Paris, like the street vendors and the rouged lady called the “Marquise,” who operates the public toilet on the Champs-Élysées. Someone asks the Marquise why she does not retire, and she replies: “Will you kindly tell me where I shall be better off than here … my little Paris, I call it; my customers keep me in touch with everything that’s going on. Just to give you an example, there’s one of them who went out not more than five minutes ago; he’s a magistrate, in the very highest position there is … for the last eight years … regularly on the stroke of three he’s been here, always polite … never making any mess; and he stays half an hour and more to read his papers and do his little jobs.… And besides … I choose my customers, I don’t let everyone into my little parlours …” The instinct for social stratification, Proust shows us, exists at every level.
Another of Paris’s multiple functions is to evoke distant places where the narrator has never been, canceling the need to travel. He imagines “that the Seine, flowing between the twin semicircles of the span and the reflection of its bridges, must look like the Bosporus.” There was a room from which he saw “across a first, a second, and even a third layer of jumbled roofs … a violet bell, sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in the finest ‘prints’ which the atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solution of black; which is, in fact, nothing else than the dome of Saint-Augustin, and which imparts to this view of Paris the character of some of the Piranesi views of Rome.”
This room was Proust’s own bedroom on the boulevard Haussmann, but the narrator, more elegant, and for the requirements of the plot, lives in a wing of the Duc de Guermantes’s town house, the address of which is never specified. “It was one of those old town houses, a few of which are perhaps still to be found, in which the court of honour—whether they were alluvial deposits washed there by the rising tide of democracy, or a legacy from a more primitive time when the different trades were clustered round the overlord—is flanked by little shops and workrooms, a shoemaker’s for instance, or a tailor’s …”
Just as Proust’s Paris is more than a city, the Duc de Guermantes’s town house is more than an address—it is the symbolic fortress of an inaccessible caste, for the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes are the social leaders of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, which is less a location than a state of mind. It is not limited to the fine old houses clustered around the boulevard Saint-Germain. The Guermantes town house, for instance, is on the other side of the river, on the right bank. It has everything to do with belonging to the ancien régime aristocracy, still conscious of its privileges, still royalist, certain of its superiority and contemptuous of outsiders, surviving thanks to an exclusiveness that makes it seem the custodian of a rare and desirable way of life, and to the rigid enforcement of a complicated social code.
The Baron de Charlus, the Duc de Guermantes’s younger brother (that brothers should have different family names is one of the arcana of the Faubourg), says: “I know nothing outside the Faubourg Saint-Germain.” Like the forbidden city of Peking, it is a closed, self-contained, self-sufficient society. Albertine, jealous of her fiancé’s Faubourg friends (whom she will never meet), says: “Of course, whoever comes from the Faubourg Saint-Germain possesses all the virtues.”
To the narrator, viewing it at first from afar, the Faubourg is a sublime enigma. He is incapable of imagining what it can be like, what these remote minor deities say to one another, what language they use. The guests arriving at the Duc de Guermantes’s house “might have been made of some precious matter; they are the columns that hold up the temple.” “Alas,” he says, “those picturesque sites … I must content myself with a shiver of excitement as I sighted, from the deep sea (and without the least hope of ever landing there) like an outstanding minaret, like the first palm, like the first signs of some exotic industry or vegetation, the well-trodden doormat of its shore.”
The narrator discovers, however, that the boundaries of the Faubourg are more flexible than he thought. A few outsiders are given “naturalization papers,” little ways in which they know they have become accepted. Proust, like his narrator, gained access to the reputedly unapproachable world of the Faubourg because he was witty, kind, and solicitous, and above all, because he passionately wanted to. It is hard to resist true passion. After having been its distant admirer, the narrator becomes the chronicler of the Faubourg. The focus of Proust’s Paris shifts, and centers on this tiny minority with an inflated sense of its own importance, absorbed in matters of rank and social exclusion, indifferent to the world outside its gates.
Familiarity makes the narrator lose the sense of ecstasy he felt when the Faubourg was out of reach. He becomes aware of the malice and foolishness that exclusiveness conceals. He tests the walls of the temple, and they give a hollow sound. The exquisite politeness is calculated: “The ladies of the Faubourg build up a credit of amiability in anticipation of the dinner and garden party where they will not invite you, and are particularly nice in prevision of the day when they will overlook you.” The men are convinced that no greater honor exists than that of being accepted by them. Charles Swann, an outsider who has been thus honored, is by birth neither an aristocrat nor a Gentile. When the fate of Captain Dreyfus intrudes on the smugness of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the Duc de Guermantes cannot understand how Swann, after having received a friendly reception from the Faubourg, can be sympathetic to the Jewish officer convicted of treason.
The elegance, the refinement, the courtliness are screens that mask unfeeling hearts. The narrator, although still awed by the Faubourg’s splendor, exposes its callousness, as in the famous scene where Swann arrives at the Guermantes town house and announces that he is dying to the Duchesse, who is late for dinner. “ ‘What’s that you say?’ cried the Duchess, stopping for a moment on her way to the carriage, and raising her fine eyes, their melancholy blue clouded by uncertainty. Placed for the first time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and shewing pity for a man who was about to die, she could find nothing in the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow, and, not knowing which to choose, felt it better to make a show of not believing that the latter alternative need be seriously considered, so as to follow the first, which demanded of her at the moment less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that any existed. ‘You’re joking,’ she said to Swann.”
The Faubourg carries within it the seeds of its decline. The narrator watches it founder, the victim of external circumstances such as the war, as well as of its inability to defend itself against the principal cause of infiltration—misalliances. When Robert de Saint-Loup, the Duc de Guermantes’s nephew, marries Gilberte, the daughter of Odette and Swann, the Princesse de Silistrie complains that “there is no more Faubourg, Saint-Loup is marrying a Jew’s daughter.” The narrator, returning to Paris after a long absence, finds the Faubourg no longer exclusive: “… a thousand alien elements made their way in and all homogeneity, all consistency of form and color was lost. The Faubourg Saint-Germain was like some senile dowager now, who replies only with timid smiles to the insolent servants who invade her drawing rooms, drink her orangeade, present their mistresses to her.”
Stunning reversals have hastened the Faubourg’s decline. The Prince de Guermantes (cousin of the Duc), ruined by the war, his wife dead, has married the rich Mme Verdurin, the incarnation of bourgeois pretentiousness, whom no lady of the Faubourg, a few years earlier, would have received. The Faubourg’s standard-bearers, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, have more or less abandoned it. The Duchesse now frequents social groups much further down the social scale, and has become particularly fond of the company of actresses. The Duc has become hopelessly infatuated with Swann’s widow, Odette, who has in the meantime been married to the Baron de Forcheville.
Thus Odette, who starts out a common courtesan, becomes in the end the wife of one member of the Faubourg and the mistress of another. The doddering Duc de Guermantes is so taken with Odette that he accepts in her home the presence of people he would in the past have disdained. Social boundaries have crumbled, and Odette shows off her relic of the Faubourg like a collector showing an antique. “All that seemed to be forever fixed is constantly being refashioned …” the narrator remarks.
Running parallel to the decline of the Faubourg as a social bastion is the decline of the narrator’s friends caused by advancing years, and the transformation of the city owing to the war. On his way to a musical matinee at the Prince de Guermantes’s, the narrator sees Charlus in the street, recovering from an attack of apoplexy, bent, his hair and beard gone completely white, his eyes glazed, hardly able to walk. At the matinee, he sees the men and women he had known young arriving like phantoms, imprisoned in the thousand bonds of the past, age having marked their faces the way geologic change marks the surface of the earth.
The men were now elderly white-haired hermits. Women’s faces were crumbling like those of statues. Women who still seemed young from afar grew older as they were approached and one saw the wrinkles and the greasy spots on their skins, the deep erosion along their noses, the alluvial deposits on the edge of cheeks that filled the face with their opaque mass. Some faces seem covered by a plaster mask, others by a gauze veil. Gilberte, the narrator’s first love, has become a fat lady whom he fails to recognize, and then mistakes for her mother, Odette.
Wartime Paris causes the same sense of dislocation. Planes circle the city, little brown specks against the sky. The museums are closed, and from the doors of shops hang handwritten signs saying they will be open at some remote time in the future. The blackout begins at nine-thirty. Soldiers on leave fill the streets, looking into the windows of crowded restaurants and saying: “You’d never know there was a war on here.” Sirens announcing a Zeppelin raid seem to the narrator “Wagnerian, so natural to announce the arrival of the Germans.”
Although the Germans are an hour’s drive from Paris, receptions and dinners continue to be given, and fashionable women attend them wearing bracelets made from shell fragments, while the men carry cigarette cases made from English coins. The narrator feels “the surprise of a foreigner who knows Paris well but does not live there, and who, upon returning to the city for a few weeks, sees in the place of a little theatre where he has spent pleasant evenings, that a bank has been built in its place.”
The city’s permanence is merely another illusion, for nothing lasts, in cities as well as in hearts, and the very streets can alter as quickly as a face ages. Paris’s final function is to serve as the setting for Proust’s inquiry upon the passage of time. As the narrator enters the Guermantes courtyard on his way to the matinee and trips on uneven paving stones, he experiences the happy rush of involuntary memory. Just as, earlier, the shell-shaped pastry called a madeleine brought back his childhood, the paving stones bring back his trip to Venice, for he had walked over uneven paving stones in the St. Mark’s baptistery. Instead of joining the other guests, he retires to a library to savor this “veritable moment of the past.”
He has stepped outside the flow of time and experienced a sensation that is not disappointing, for it is given to him whole, recaptured. Reality was disappointing because at the moment he perceived it he could not imagine it, “by virtue of the inevitable law that we can only imagine what is absent,” and it was only through his imagination that he was capable of grasping beauty.
But now, thanks to the physical sensation in the present that has restored the past, reality and imagination are fused and allow the narrator to apprehend “a fragment of time in the pure state … A minute freed from the order of time has re-created in us, to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And one can understand that this man should have confidence in his joy, even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contain within it the reasons for this joy, one can understand that the word ‘death’ should have no meaning for him; situated outside time, why should he fear the future?”
The privileged moment is brief, and once over, the narrator must return to the aging faces and the eroding landscape. And this is the final, melancholy lesson taught not only by Proust’s characters but by the city streets they walk on and the buildings they live in, by the restless spirit of the great city: “The places that we have known belong now not only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”
The Champs-Élysées is where the narrator as a child becomes the playmate of Gilberte, daughter of Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy—themselves major characters in the novel. The children play on the lawns near the Alcazar d’Été. Under century-old cedars, candy and soft drinks are sold from wooden booths. A little farther down stands the cast-iron public lavatory where the narrator’s grandmother suffers the stroke that leads to her death. On the corner of the Champs-Élysées, above the rue de Berri, the narrator, now grown up, sells a family vase to a Chinese curio shop for ten thousand francs, in order to buy flowers for Gilberte. On his way back from the shop, he sees Gilberte with a young man he cannot identify, and suffers pangs of jealous uncertainty. On the corner of the rue Royale stands a photographer’s stall, where the narrator’s servant, Françoise, buys a snapshot of Pope Pius IX, while the narrator chooses one of the actress La Berma.
Swann, the rich aesthete, is invited to lunch at the Élysée Palace, on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, with the president of France, Jules Grévy. It is an invitation that astonishes Doctor Cottard, one of the members of the “little clan,” as Mme Verdurin’s tacky, bourgeois salon is known. “What’s that you say? M. Grévy? Do you know M. Grévy?” asks Cottard, finding it hard to believe that someone he was having dinner with, and who held no official post, could be on friendly enough terms with the head of state to be invited for lunch at the Élysée.
The old Trocadéro is described as a gingerbread castle “whose towers at twilight glowed so that they seemed covered with currant jelly like the towers pastrycooks make.” It was torn down in 1937 to make way for the present Palais de Chaillot.
The musician Morel, who becomes the lover of the Baron de Charlus (the Duc de Guermantes’s homosexual brother) and of Robert de Saint-Loup (Guermantes’s nephew), is a member of the Conservatory on the rue Bergère.
On the rue de Bourgogne, the narrator’s butler observes the Baron de Charlus spending an hour in a pissotière, recognizing him by his bright yellow trousers.
Mme Verdurin holds her salon on the Quai de Conti, in a building she claims is the former residence of the Venetian ambassadors.
The Quai d’Orléans is where Swann lives as a bachelor. Odette, the lovely courtesan who will become his wife, considers the apartment musty and old-fashioned and the neighborhood inelegant because it is close to the Halle aux Vins, the wine market.
On the avenue Gabriel a homosexual propositions the narrator’s friend Saint-Loup, who is dressed in his officer’s uniform. Saint-Loup, shocked at the audacity of the “clique,” pummels the accoster savagely, but is later found to be himself a member.
To the Halles, or central market, the narrator’s servant, Françoise, goes to choose the ingredients for her famous boeuf en gelée, “as Michelangelo passed eight months in the mountains of Carrara choosing the most perfect blocks of marble for the monument of Jules II.”
The rue Rabelais is where the Jockey Club still stands. Swann is a member, as is the Baron de Charlus, who goes there every evening at six. When the obscure Chaussepierre is elected president over the Duc de Guermantes, the Duc concludes that the reason is his friendship with Swann, a Jew, at a time when the Jewish Captain Dreyfus had been accused of treason and anti-Semitism was raging. Guermantes would refer to the Dreyfus case, “ ‘which has been responsible for so many disasters,’ albeit he was really conscious of one and one only; his own failure to become president of the Jockey [Club].”
The Invalides is the tomb of Napoléon I, to which the government invites the Princesse Mathilde, his niece, to welcome the visiting Czar Nicholas of Russia. She sends the card back, saying that she needs no invitation to go to the Invalides, since her place in the crypt, next to the emperor, is reserved.
The pious Françoise has never been to the cathedral of Notre-Dame. “In all the years she had been living in Paris, Françoise had never had the curiosity to visit Notre-Dame. That was because Notre-Dame was part of Paris, a city in which her daily life unfolded, and in which, consequently, it was difficult for our old servant to place the object of her dreams.”
From the Gare Saint-Lazare, the narrator takes the train for the resort of Balbec, where he spent the summers as a young man and where he meets Albertine, his next love after Gilberte. He enters “one of those vast, glass-roofed sheds … into which I must go to find the train for Balbec, and which extended over the rent bowels of the city one of those bleak and boundless skies, heavy with an accumulation of dramatic menaces, like certain skies painted with an almost Parisian modernity by Mantegna or Veronese, beneath which could be accomplished only some solemn and tremendous act, such as a departure by train or the Elevation of the Cross.”
Before her marriage, Odette has a small house on the rue La Pérouse. Swann is courting her, and the mere mention of the street is enough to start his heart fluttering. In a conversation with an army general Swann says: “ ‘Some fine lives have been lost … There was, you remember, that explorer whose remains Dumont d’Urville brought back, La Pérouse …’ (and he was at once happy again, as though he had named Odette)….
“ ‘Oh, yes, of course, La Pérouse,’ said the General.… ‘There’s a street called that.’
“ ‘Do you know anyone in the rue La Pérouse?’ asked Swann excitedly.
“ ‘Only Mme. de Chanlivault, the sister of that good fellow Chaussepierre.…’
“ ‘Oh, so she lives in the rue La Pérouse. It’s attractive; I like that street; it’s so sombre.’
“ ‘Indeed it isn’t. You can’t have been in it for a long time; it’s not at all sombre now; they’re beginning to build all round there.’ ”
The narrator remarks on people “who look like their neighborhood, who carried on their persons the reflections of the rue de l’Arcade, or the avenue du Bois, or the rue de l’Élysée.” The passing reference to the rue de l’Arcade is particularly interesting, for the male brothel that the Baron de Charlus frequents was based on Proust’s experience in a similar establishment at 11 rue de l’Arcade, run by a former footman, Albert le Cuziat. Proust here is indulging his habit of dropping veiled hints about his secret aberrations. It was in Le Cuziat’s brothel that young men posing as butchers’ apprentices were brought for Proust, and that he watched rats being tortured. These activities are implicit in the innocent-appearing reference to the rue de l’Arcade.
The rue Saint-Augustin is a reminder of the Baron de Charlus’s complaint that Jews live in streets bearing saints’ names, which he considers a sacrilege. He suggests they ought to live in a street “which is entirely conceded to the Jews, there are Hebrew characters over the shops, bakeries for unleavened bread, kosher butcheries, it is positively the Judengasse of Paris.”
The rue de Rivoli is the street of the Louvre. The Duchesse de Guermantes visits the museum to see Manet’s Olympia, and comments: “Nowadays nobody is in the least surprised by it. It looks just like an Ingres! And yet, heaven only knows how many spears I’ve had to break for that picture, which I don’t altogether like but which is unquestionably the work of somebody.”
The narrator sees the Eiffel Tower covered with searchlights, lit over wartime Paris in 1914 to detect German planes.
The rue de Varenne is where the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes live, until they move to a new mansion on the avenue du Bois, today’s avenue Foch.
To the Orangerie, in the Tuileries gardens, the writer Bergotte, suffering from an attack of uremia, goes to see Vermeer’s Street in Delft, on loan from The Hague Museum. A critic has written that a fragment of yellow wall in the painting could be considered a thing of perfect beauty, and against the advice of doctors, Bergotte goes out to see this fragment. “His giddiness increased; he fixed his eyes, like a child upon a yellow butterfly … upon the precious little patch of wall. ‘That is how I ought to have written.… My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint, made my language exquisite in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.’ … he sank down upon a circular divan … he rolled from the divan to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead.”
This scene parallels one in Proust’s life. Although mortally ill, Proust left his apartment for the last time, on the arm of his friend Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, to see this very Vermeer painting, which he considered “the most beautiful in the world.” The exhibit opened in May 1921. Proust died in November of the following year after finishing Remembrance of Things Past.
Gerald Dryansky may not be a writer whose name is known in every household, but for readers of Condé Nast Traveler his name is very well known indeed. Dryansky has been writing for Traveler since, I think, its inception in 1987, and I have long admired his well-written and thought-provoking pieces. I regret I was unable to include one of the very best articles ever written about Paris here, but I urge readers to go online to search for the article, which appeared in February 2003: “The Secret Life of Paris,” by Gerald Dryansky and with photos by William Abranowicz (one of my favorite photographers). Among a number of perceptive passages in his piece is this one: “There is something special in the material beauty of a city whose contribution to civilization is not so much vistas and monuments as it is the local approach to a civilized life. To understand Paris, you have to start with Parisians.” Dryansky’s daughter Larisa has also written for Condé Nast Traveler, and one of her articles, “The Villages of Paris” (February 1995), is also one of my favorites. It focuses particularly on the neighborhoods of Auteuil, Montsouris, Passy, Plaisance, Butte-aux-Cailles, Rhin-et-Danube, Batignolles, Charonne, Belleville, Ménilmontant, La Goutte-d’Or, and Montmartre.
In my correspondence with Gerald, he mentioned in passing that one of his Traveler pieces he likes best is “True Glitz,” about Monte Carlo (May 2007). In addition, he and his wife, Joanne, are the coauthors of Fatima’s Good Fortune (Hyperion, 2003), a novel set in Paris.