The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David Mccullough

Author:David Mccullough [Mccullough, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Physicians, Intellectuals - France - Paris - History - 19th Century, Artists - France - Paris - History - 19th Century, Physicians - France - Paris - History - 19th Century, Paris, Americans - France - Paris, United States - Relations - France - Paris, Americans - France - Paris - History - 19th Century, France, Paris (France) - Intellectual Life - 19th Century, Intellectuals, Authors; American, Americans, 19th Century, Artists, Authors; American - France - Paris - History - 19th Century, Paris (France) - Relations - United States, Paris (France), Biography, History
ISBN: 9781416571766
Google: lQaPIYIfcM8C
Amazon: 1416571760
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Sooner or later all the newly arrived Americans crossed the Seine to walk the labyrinth of narrow streets in the Latin Quarter. Or to see the great inner courtyard of the Sorbonne, or the Luxembourg Palace and its magnificent gardens. Or take in the “curiosities” at the Jardin des Plantes, including the famous Zarafa, the only giraffe in all of France, which stood eleven and a half feet high, even higher when she stretched her neck.

The quantities of books to be browsed among in one little shop after another, and the low prices, even for rare books, were astonishing. A student could buy “a library on the street from a quarter of a mile of books at six sous a volume,” reported an exuberant Sanderson. “I have just bought Rousseau in calf, octavo, at ten sous!”

Here, too, in the Latin Quarter were the poor. Compared to the Right Bank, it stood apart “as if the city of some other people.”

To the west, on the same side of the river, was the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the Seventh Arrondissement, the quiet neighborhood where Cooper and his family lived. Farther beyond stood the Hôtel des Invalides, the immense gold-domed barracks and military hospital built in the days of Louis XIV.

Père Lachaise, the city’s largest, most famous cemetery, was a good walk back over the river to the northeast. There one could stroll among weeping willows and some 50,000 grave markers and the marble tombs of the eminent dead of France.

Or for those with the stomach for it, there was another popular attraction of which no mention was to be found in Galignani’s Guide. At the Paris morgue on the Île-de-la-Cité unidentified bodies taken from the Seine were regularly put on public display. Most of the bodies had been caught in a net stretched across the river for that purpose downstream at Saint-Cloud. Some were murder victims, but the great majority were suicides. Stripped of their clothes, they lay stretched out on black marble tables, on the chance someone might claim them. Otherwise, after three days, they were sold to doctors for ten francs each. Crowds of people came to see. As Sanderson noted, “You can stop in on your way as you go to the flower market, which is just opposite.”

Joining the throngs of promenading Parisians, the Americans walked the length of the Grand Avenue of the Champs-Élysées, nearly two miles, from the Place de la Concorde gently uphill to where Napoleon’s colossal Arc de Triomphe, under construction since 1806, was at long last nearing completion. On a fine Sunday three or four thousand elegant carriages went rolling by on the avenue, in a show of fancy horses and the latest high fashions.

At a corner along the way, at the rue de Berri, stood the stone mansion where Jefferson had resided. Another few miles beyond the city was what had once been Benjamin Franklin’s splendid estate on an elevated setting in the village of Passy. Less than a mile beyond that, at Auteuil, was the mansion where John and Abigail Adams had lived.

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