A traveler without knowledge is a bird without wings.
—Sa’adi, Persian poet, Gulistan
The Collected Traveler editions are meant to be companion volumes to guidebooks that go beyond the practical information that traditional guidebooks supply. Each individual volume is perfect to bring along, but each is also a sort of planning package—the books guide readers to many other sources, and they are sources of inspiration. James Pope-Hennessy, in his wonderful book Aspects of Provence, notes that “if one is to get best value out of places visited, some skeletal knowledge of their history is necessary.… Sight-seeing is by no means the only object of a journey, but it is as unintelligent as it is lazy not to equip ourselves to understand the sights we see.” Immerse yourself in a destination and you’ll acquire a deeper understanding and appreciation of the place and the people who live there, and, not surprisingly, you’ll have more fun.
This series promotes the strategy of staying longer within a smaller area so as to experience it more fully. Susan Allen Toth refers to this in one of her many wonderful books, England as You Like It, in which she subscribes to the “thumbprint theory of travel”: spending at least a week in one spot no larger than her thumbprint covers on a large-scale map of England. Excursions are encouraged, as long as they’re about an hour’s drive away.
I have discovered in my own travels that a week in one place, even a spot no bigger than my thumbprint, is rarely long enough to see and enjoy it all. For this reason, most of the books in The Collected Traveler series focus on either cities or regions, as opposed to entire countries. There will not be a book on all of France, for example. I am mindful that France is a member of two communities, European and Mediterranean, and that an understanding of both is essential to understanding Paris, and I have tried to reflect this wider-world sense of community throughout the book. But even though some visitors to Paris may travel on to points farther afield in France, each of its regions deserves to be covered in a separate book and is too far outside this particular thumbprint.
The major portion of this book features a selection of articles and essays from various periodicals and recommended reading relevant to the theme of each section. The articles and books were chosen from my own files and home library, which I’ve maintained for more than two decades. (I often feel I am the living embodiment of a comment that Samuel Johnson made in 1775, that “a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”) The selected writings reflect the culture, politics, history, current social issues, religion, cuisine, and arts of the people you’ll be visiting. They represent the observations and opinions of a wide variety of novelists, travel writers, journalists, and others whom I refer to as “observant enthusiasts.” These writers are typically authorities on Paris, or France, or both; they either live there (as permanent or part-time residents) or visit there often for business or pleasure. I’m very discriminating in seeking opinions and recommendations, and I am not interested in the remarks of unobservant wanderers. I am not implying that first-time visitors to France have nothing noteworthy or interesting to share—they very often do, and are often keen observers. Conversely, frequent travelers can be jaded and apt to miss the finer details that make Paris the exceptional place it is. Above all, I am interested in the opinions of people who want to know France, not just see it.
I’ve included numerous older articles because they were particularly well-written, thought-provoking, or unique in some way, and because the authors’ views stand as a valuable record of a certain time in history. Even after the passage of many years you may share the emotions and opinions of the writer, and you may find that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. I have many, many more articles in my files than I was able to reprint here, and I ask for your forgiveness if it seems a particular neighborhood or monument gets more attention than others, or if I have highlighted certain topics more than others. The truth is, I embrace it all, the complete picture, if you will. To borrow a lovely phrase from One Hundred & One Beautiful Small Towns in France, I claim, “as you will after your own visit, a surfeit of abundance, and a divine temptation to be reckless.” Though there are a few pieces whose absence I very much regret, I believe the anthology you’re holding is very comprehensive.
Some notes about the cuisine and restaurant sections, “La Cuisine Française” and “À Table!,” are in order. Food, and the enjoyment of it, still holds a place of honor in French life, prompting Elizabeth Bard, in Lunch in Paris, to write, “So much of what I’d learned about France I’d discovered autour de la table—around the table.” Likewise, Suzy Gershman, in her book C’est la Vie, relates a revealing tale about the first time she made the French dessert clafoutis. Even though she’d cooked it for the proper amount of time, it appeared completely liquified. Just then her doorbell rang. It was the telephone repairman, and though he was there to fix a damaged telephone line, she explained her predicament with the clafoutis. He complimented her on its appearance and said that she simply had to let it cool and it would congeal, or she could put it in the fridge and it would set more quickly. “Only in France would the telephone repairman know how to rescue a clafoutis.” And as Edward Behr notes in his excellent journal The Art of Eating, “The French still care enormously about food. In a luxury restaurant in Paris not long ago, I felt an extraordinary sense of comfort and of intimate contact with craftsmen working without inhibition to accomplish their best. Even the welcome was a lesson in the craft of the server—not friendliness (there’s no skill in that) but a concern for my happiness during my time in the restaurant. I was certain that the warmth reflected pride in the chef, all the cooks, the entire restaurant.”
For all of these reasons and more, I hope you will take my book as merely the first step in investigating this crucial area of French culture. I have great respect for restaurant reviewers, and though their work may seem glamorous—it sometimes is—it is also very hard. It’s an all-consuming, full-time job, and that is why I urge you to consult the very good recommended cookbooks as well as restaurant guidebooks. Restaurant (and hotel) reviewers are, for the most part, professionals who have dined in hundreds of eating establishments (and spent hundreds of nights in hotels). They are far more capable of assessing the qualities and flaws of a place than I am. I don’t always agree with every opinion of a reviewer, but I am far more inclined to defer to their opinion over that of someone who is unfamiliar with French food in general, for example, or someone who doesn’t dine out frequently enough to recognize what good restaurants have in common. My files are filled with restaurant reviews, and I could have included many more articles, but that would have been repetitive and ultimately beside the point. I have selected a few articles that give you a feel for eating out in Paris, alert you to some things to look for in selecting a truly worthwhile place versus a mediocre one, and highlight notable dishes and culinary specialties visitors will encounter.
The recommended reading for each section in my book is one of its most important features and represents my favorite aspect of this series. (My annotations are, however, much shorter than I would prefer—did I mention that I love encyclopedias?—but they are still nothing less than enormously enthusiastic endorsements and I encourage you to read as many of the books as you can.) One reason I do not include many excerpts from books in my series is that I am not convinced an excerpt will always lead a reader to the book in question, and good books deserve to be read in their entirety. Art critic John Russell wrote an essay, in 1962, entitled “Pleasure in Reading,” in which he stated, “Not for us today’s selections, readers, digests, and anthologizings: only the Complete Edition will do.” Years later, in 1986, he noted that “bibliographies make dull reading, some people say, but I have never found them so. They remind us, they prompt us, and they correct us. They double and treble as history, as biography, and as a freshet of surprises. They reveal the public self, the private self, and the buried self of the person commemorated. How should we not enjoy them, and be grateful to the devoted student who has done the compiling?” The section of a nonfiction book I always turn to first is the bibliography, as it is there that I learn something about the author who has done the compiling as well as about other notable books I know I will want to read.
When I read about travel in the days before transatlantic flights, I always marvel at the number of steamer trunks and baggage people were accustomed to taking. If I were traveling back then, however, my trunks would have been filled with books, not clothes. Although I travel light and seldom check bags, I have been known to fill an entire suitcase with books, secure in the knowledge that I’ll have them all with me for the duration of my trip. The advent of lightweight electronic reading devices can make luggage much less heavy, but there are always some titles I absolutely have to have in a paper-and-cover format.
Each recommended reading section features titles I feel are the best available and most worth your time. I realize that “best” is subjective; readers will simply have to trust me that I have been extremely thorough in deciding which books to recommend. I have not hesitated to list out-of-print titles because some of the most excellent books ever written about Paris and France are (sadly) out of print (and deserve to be returned to print!), and are worthy of your best efforts to track them down—most of them can be found at libraries, used-book stores, or online booksellers that deal in out-of-print volumes. (Abebooks.com is my favorite online source.) A wonderful online piece called “Tales of the Unread,” at the nifty Web site The Second Pass, makes the observation that “publishers naturally want to tell you about what’s new or what’s evergreen. But most readers know the pleasure of somehow discovering and falling in love with a book that has fallen from view.” Great books are great books, whenever they were published, and what’s “old” to one reader is “new” to another. That’s the wonderful thing about books! There are undoubtedly titles with which I’m unfamiliar and therefore do not appear here, and I hope you’ll let me know if a favorite of yours is missing. Bibliophiles, no matter how many books they have, love nothing better than to discover yet another book or author on a subject about which they’re passionate.
I also believe the leisure reading you bring along should be related in some way to where you’re going, so these lists include fiction and poetry titles that feature Parisian or French characters or settings. (I do not always annotate these titles, as my aim is simply to inform you of the numerous choices available.) I’m especially fond of historical fiction, and recently I was pleased to discover that Roger Sutton, editor in chief of The Horn Book, a wonderful magazine dedicated to children’s and young adult literature, is, too. “Historical fiction,” he writes, “is not only one excellent way to explain our parents (or grandparents) to ourselves, it can also explain ourselves to ourselves, allowing readers to consider what they might have done, or how they might have been different, in circumstances unlike their own. We don’t read historical fiction to find out ‘what it was like back then’ so much as to get a fresh look at who we are now. And if I want to take another look at who I was then? All I have to do is remember what I was reading.” I do not adhere to the belief seemingly so prevalent at many periodicals today that unless a book or online source is utterly au courant it isn’t worthy of a reader’s time. I strongly believe that my books should evoke a sense of history and emphasize context, which has become increasingly important in today’s world. Reading a biography, a cookbook, a memoir, and a work of history, or reading a novel, a guidebook, and a photography or art book provides travelers with context.
Sprinkled throughout this book I have included the brief observations of a number of visitors to Paris and northern France—ranging from friends and colleagues to notable Francophiles such as Judith Jones, Mark Greenside, Mireille Guiliano, Steven Barclay, Barbara Fairchild, and Molly Wizenberg—describing their favorite sites or experiences from their visits. There are also interviews throughout the book, with Ina Garten, Suzy Gershman, Alexander Lobrano, and Patricia Wells, among others.
An “A to Z Miscellany” appears at the end of the book. This is an alphabetical assemblage of information about words, phrases, foods, people, themes, historical notes, and personal favorites of mine that are unique to Paris and France. Will you learn of some nontouristy things to see and do? Yes. Will you also learn more about the better-known aspects of Paris? Yes. The Eiffel Tower, a little neighborhood park in the twentieth, the Canal Saint-Martin, Notre-Dame, a perfect café crème, the Musée d’Orsay, Chartres Cathedral, Versailles, Giverny, and the experience of being the only tourist in the local bistro are all equally representative of Paris and its surrounding regions. Seeing and doing them all is what makes for a memorable visit, and no one, by the way, should make you feel guilty for wanting to see some famous sites. They have become famous for a reason: they are really something to see, the Eiffel Tower included. Canon number eighty-four in Bruce Northam’s Globetrotter Dogma is “The good old days are now,” in which he wisely reminds us that destinations are not ruined even though they may have been more “real” however many years ago. “ ’Tis a haughty condescension to insist that because a place has changed or lost its innocence that it’s not worth visiting; change requalifies a destination. Your first time is your first time; virgin turf simply is. The moment you commit to a trip, there begins the search for adventure.”
Ultimately, this is the compendium of information that I wish I’d had between two covers years ago. I admit it isn’t the “perfect” book; for that, I envision a waterproof jacket and pockets inside the front and back covers, pages and pages of accompanying maps, lots of blank pages for notes, a bookmark, mileage and size conversion charts … in other words, something so encyclopedic in both weight and size that no one would want to carry it, let alone read it. I envision such a large volume because I believe that to really get to know a place, to truly understand it in a nonsuperficial way, one must either live there or travel there again and again. Just as Henry Miller noted that “to know Paris is to know a great deal,” it seems to me that it can take nothing short of a lifetime of studying and traveling to grasp Paris. I do not pretend to have completely grasped it now, many years later, nor do I pretend to have completely grasped the other destinations that are featured in The Collected Traveler series, but I am trying, by continuously reading, collecting, and traveling. And I presume readers like you are, too. That said, I am exceedingly happy with this edition, and I believe it will prove helpful in the anticipation of your upcoming journey, in the enjoyment of your trip while it’s happening, and in the remembrance of it when you’re back home.
Tous mes vœux pour un bon voyage!
