Paris! City of High Spirits and Old Ghosts

Two illustrated books, one from 2017 and one from the early 1900's

The headlines this week have used up my emotional energy.

For example, Florida state Senator Blaise Ingoglia sponsored a bill to ban the Democratic Party. And, Sean Hannity said it’s actually all the other media that’s being dishonest, not Fox News.

It’s time to book an armchair vacation.

I’ve never been to Paris. But I’ve read so much about French artists and writers that leafing through illustrated books about the city seems like revisiting old haunts.

A Paris Year is a lighthearted journal filled with Janice MacLeod’s notes, photos and drawings. She says Paris is a walking city and her book is a stroll through the streets and through the seasons. If you’re looking for a relaxing bedside book, this might be it.

She notes that when you see an “N” engraved on bridges and buildings, you wonder which Napoleon it refers to. The emperor or the architectural mastermind?

Above: “Angelina’s café serves the world’s finest hot chocolate,” MacLeod writes. “I watch the old gents and dames on display, the men in suits, the ladies draped in jewels.”

The author made a friend through an online meetup group, and arranged to meet her at Chez Julien. She found that the French sense of time is not as precise as an American’s.

Shown above is a public bicycle stand. The Paris bike sharing system is called Vélib', a combination of ("bicycle") and liberté ("freedom"). You buy a subscription; the first 30 minutes of your trip are free, with no limit to the number of trips you take in a day.

MacLeod’s classic French baguette in A Paris Year reminds me of another book of a different period, in a much different mood, Eugène Atget’s Paris.

Two books, two authors, two views of Paris. Top: Janice MacLeod in 2017; bottom: Eugène Atget, 1857-1927

A boulangerie (bakery), 1910

The black and white photos in Atget: Paris were taken in the late 1890’s and the early 1900’s. The book’s dust jacket says that Eugène Atget was not the best photographer of Paris, but he was the first modern one. He was obsessive in recording the city’s streets and suburbs, leaving us thousands of snapshots of daily life, the essence of the city.

But portraits of people, which I’ve favored above, were unusual for Atget. Most of his photographs were of deserted streets and buildings.

It has been said,

Atget’s Paris often appears devoid of people partly due to his photographic method. Dry plate technology had freed photographers from the studio, but these plates were still quite ’slow’, requiring longer exposure times. So if people in the scene moved they became blurs, ghostly half-captured outlines, or were not recognized by the camera as figures at all.

In a time of rapid progress, Atget stuck with the old large, slow wooden camera, a heavy burden to carry across Paris. Many of his photographs retained their ghostly mirages to a lesser or greater degree.

This pair of books reminds me that Paris is different for everyone who has a different viewpoint, for the tourist, the shopkeeper, the streetcleaner, the elected official, the taxpayer, the refugee, the student, the soldier, and for the armchair traveler, me. And isn’t there a kind of Paris everywhere?

A Paris Year: My Day-to-Day Adventures in the Most Romantic City in the World by Janice MacLeod, St. Martin’s Press, NY, NY, 2017 can be found on the Transylvania County Library biography shelf, “B MacLeod”

Atget: Paris, Introduction by Laure Beaumont-Maillet, Ginko Press, CA, 1992

Quote about Atget’s photographic technique