MUSEUMS, MONUMENTS,
AND GARDENS

I threw myself on a bench and began to wonder if there was anything better in the world worth doing than to sit in an alley of clipped limes smoking, thinking of Paris and of myself.

—GEORGE MOORE,
“IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS,”
Memoirs of My Dead Life

I stand for a long time on the Place de la Concorde, where there is as much sky as in a Russian rye field or a corn field in Kansas.

—NINA BERBEROVA, The Italics Are Mine

In Paris the past is always with you: you look at it, walk over it, sit on it. I had to stop myself from grabbing Gwendal’s arm as we walked up the narrow passage to the entrance: Pardon me, sir, I couldn’t help but notice; the cobblestones outside your door are older than my country.

—ELIZABETH BARD, Lunch in Paris

I had never really wanted a photograph of a picture before I saw Millet’s Man with the Hoe. I was about twelve or thirteen years old, I had read Eugénie Grandet of Balzac, and I did have some feelings about what French country was like but The Man with the Hoe made it different, it made it ground not country, and France has been that to me ever since.

—GERTRUDE STEIN, Paris France