An Agoraphobe in Paris

A dispatch from the city of lights

Hi all,

Many thanks to my favorite editor and not incidentally damn good writer David Swanson for pinch-hitting last week, as I was off … in Paris of all places. Usually I measure where I go in terms of steps from my apartment; Paris is by all measures very far from my apartment. But I went with someone I love, and that made it easier. The world is so big! How overwhelming and how beautiful. I wrote recently about how the act of writing was beginning to feel like devouring myself from inside, and some measure of cure for that, I think, is to do some deliberate Living separate from writing, even if it is in cliché form (Paris, June, amour, etc). Heat, light, the green Seine, avenues named for my favorite poets.

I tried to avoid The News, but it was a bit on the nose to see the now-infamous indictment photos of gigantic boxes of nuclear codes and such in a tackily overdecorated bathroom immediately after visiting several actual palaces. Now I have seen Versailles; Mar-a-Lago is Versailles by way of QVC, and made for the indulgence of the world’s millionaire middlemen—and lords and auto dealers and multiply divorced cosmetic dentists. If the French throne plundered its country and then entire continents to build its own magnificence, the Floridian version is penny-ante pilfering, of dignity, of authenticity, of public good. It’s easier to wax rhapsodic in a palace when all the kings are dead. Ours are very much alive, and undeclared, a toilet clog of humanity.

While I didn’t smuggle back any classified info in my carry-on, there was a certain parallel element of tragic farce in this deliberately constructed romantic cliché. Panic disorder remains a bitch, although I am now finding it funny that I went berserk in that very same palace of Versailles—it is all extremely long and very crowded and hot corridors with no exits, and the trapped animal inside me rioted—so we bolted through the Hall of Mirrors and the Queen’s Apartments practically bowling over elderly Australian tourists, as if we were under enemy fire. I am lucky to be loved with all my bad angles. At any rate I am back now, and giving David a much-needed break.

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Of course there are ten million words to write about Paris, and most of them have been written; all that Gothic architecture and tartare au boeuf and colonialism and protest and war and poetry and, and, and. I bought an obscene amount of jam and pâté back with me; only one jar shattered, leaving me to excavate a gigantic mound of pomelo jelly from out of a carry-on bag in the vestibule at Charles De Gaulle Airport. (In the end I sacrificed the jam and the bag. and I’m pretty sure I ate a shard of glass. But the cans of canard survived, so all is well.)

I will say that the slightly under the radar Museum of the Art and History of Judaism in the historically Jewish Le Marais neighborhood is one of the more quietly moving places I have ever been; there is a statue of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain accused of treason in the genuine fin-de-siecle antisemitic conspiracy known as the Dreyfus Affair, in the courtyard. He’s holding the sword that was ceremonially broken in scorn at his framed-up misdeed.

The museum has his torn-off epaulettes, too, but also a riot of Judaica from all the corners of Europe, particularly printed matter: prayer books, books of customs, elaborately decorated scrolls and arks to hold Torahs and menorahs from Provence and Toulouse but also all over Italy, Germany, Romania, Amsterdam—the whole continent really, going back nearly a millennium. So often the whole history of European Judaism is summed up in its tragedy, but these objects tell a vivid story of the many centuries that preceded it, vivid, rich, alive—the words on a Hebrew prayer book from 1312 in Germany are the same ones I was taught to say, that I still know by heart. I felt myself a taut and trembling link on a chain of unfathomable length, of world-spanning breadth, and it took my breath away.

In a less solemn and more puerile moment, here is me sitting on a cannon at Les Invalides, where Napoleon is buried. (The World War I exhibit was closed! What else was I supposed to do?!)

All in all I think the Napoleonic Wars may become my next obsession—I bought a biography of the man, and perhaps this next phase in my chronic but very earnest dillentantisme will finally force me to finish War and Peace. I have always admired immoderate tombs, and the enormous immuration of the hero in Les Invalides absolutely ticked every mark (gold domes? a twenty foot high marble coffin? ceiling paintings by masters? yes, yes, yes). I love gigantic memorials; I’d like one the size of my ambition and desire—to wit, gigantic, and completely out of proportion to my achievements. And gilded, please.

Tell me your best and silliest vacation stories and recommend me books about Napoleon! I love you all, and I missed you.

A bientot,

Talia