In 1922, Hachette published in Paris and London a small English-language guide by Paul Joanne, Paris in Eight Days and a Day in Versailles. Its promise was generous: “By conforming exactly with our directions, even if he has but eight days to spend in Paris, the tourist may rest assured, when he leaves, that he has missed no single object of any importance.” The visit was to begin on a Thursday, so that no one would have to spend two Sundays in the city, and the first morning unfolds from the Place Vendôme to the Madeleine and Saint-Augustin, through the Jacquemart-André and the Asian collections of the Musée Cernuschi, across the Parc Monceau, and then, a little before the Arc de Triomphe, to the Russian church on rue Daru, “built 1859–1861 in the Muscovite-Byzantine style.” Reading it now, one lingers on that line, because an Orthodox cathedral would hardly appear on anyone’s first day in Paris today, and because in 1922, five years after the Revolution in Russia, the church on rue Daru was becoming one of the places where an exiled aristocracy and intelligentsia gathered, something the guide, attentive only to architecture and frescoes, leaves entirely unsaid. Even the opening hours keep a trace of their moment, the Jacquemart-André being open, the guide notes, “on Thurs. before the war, and now on Fri.”
Thirteen years earlier, in 1909, another book, La Ville Lumière, led its readers along some of the same streets with a different kind of attention, its preface announcing quite openly the intention to point out, along the way, quelques-unes des importantes maisons de commerce (some of the important commercial houses) of the capital. On the rue Saint-Honoré, after the house where the curious came to watch the carts of the condemned pass during the Terror, and the apartment where Robespierre lived with the carpenter Duplay, the walk arrives at number 364, an old hôtel once inhabited by Madame de Maintenon, whose first floor, in 1909, housed the salons of Mme Georgine de Champbaron’s Maison d’Hygiène et de Beauté, where ladies were promised relief from wrinkles and freckles, and something like une éternelle jeunesse (an eternal youth). A photograph shows the treatment room with its sumptuous decoration preserved, one of those interiors most of us will never enter, which may since have been sold, divided, emptied during the war, or simply forgotten behind a façade we pass every day.
Both books presuppose a city already arranged to be looked at, with its museums open on given days and its churches described down to the sculptor of each chapel, an arrangement that took shape over little more than a century. The Revolution nationalised the property of the Church in 1789, then, from 1792, that of the Crown and of the noble families who had fled abroad, and paintings, sculptures and tombs accumulated in depots across Paris, among them the former convent of the Petits-Augustins, where Alexandre Lenoir gathered what he could save and later opened it to visitors as the Musée des monuments français. The project of turning the Louvre into a museum had circulated for decades under the monarchy, and the Revolution carried it through, inaugurating the Muséum central des arts on 10 August 1793, one year to the day after the fall of the king, while in 1801 a decree sent part of the national collections to fifteen cities in the provinces, so that the idea of patrimoine, of a common inheritance to be kept and also shown, slowly found its form in the middle of upheaval.
Read side by side today, these books have something of archaeological layers, each one recording what its moment believed a stranger ought to see, on which day and in what order, what deserved a paragraph and what passed in silence, and I return to them with the curiosity one feels before a stratigraphy, wondering what our own itineraries, so sure of their Louvre and their Orsay, will reveal to someone who opens them in a hundred years. Fynda grew partly out of that curiosity, and out of the wish to show the city as a friend who knows its history might, someone willing to stop with you in front of a door no guide would have chosen.
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