Travel books don’t, as a rule, capture my fancy, and perhaps Ina Caro’s Paris to the Past: Traveling Through French History by Train, which did, shows why. The territory that it covers couldn’t be more familiar to me — unless I  actually visited all of them. I know a lot about the churches and castles that Caro visits on a series of day trips, especially about the personages who built and enjoyed them. I won’t say that I didn’t learn anything from Paris to the Past, but learning was not the point. Spending virtual time with Ina Caro was the point. It would sound snarky to say that this book is all about her, but it is very much her distinctive sharing of encounters with grand old piles and the tittle-tattle that still echoes in them that gives the book its substance. 

The wife of Robert Caro, eminent biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Ina Caro has already written a book about her earlier travels through France. For many years, the Caros spent their vacations driving around France, and Ina arranged their itinerary so that it corresponded to the chronology. Touring the Loire valley, they visited the famous chateaux in the order in which they were built. If there is a better way of instilling history in the human mind, I’d like to know what it is. 

Traveling chronologically worked not only historically but architecturally, since architecture not only reflects both the spirit and needs of its age, but also evolves over the years, one style developing from another. Each age or style incorporates certain aspects of its predecessor and eliminates those that have become obsolescent or undesirable. For example, arches change. The soaring rounded Roman arch found at Orange, Arles, and Nîmes, built to overwhelm with its magnificence, crumbles. Its stones litter the years of the Dark Ages before it begins to rise again. When it rises, it is first the squat, rounded arch of the early Christian Church. Over the centuries, it rises higher and higher, and is transformed from austerity and simplicity into the elaborate storytelling arch of the eleventh-century Romanesque arch. And then, when at the very pinnacle of this beauty, for example, at Vézelay in Burgundy, it is transformed again into the pointed Gothic arch of Saint-Denis. Over the next period of three hundred years, the Gothic arch evolves from simplicity to flamboyance and then, when simplicity is once again desired, it becomes the simple arch of the early Renaissance. 

To visit the relics of the past in this way animates the evolution of style in a way that easily accommodates all the facts and figures that you can stuff into your head — in their chronological order. 

At some point, the Caros rented an apartment on the Left Bank and liked it so much they gave up driving around and staying at provincial hotels. The author soon discovered, however, that this need not put an end to sightseeing. The French railways had improved over the years to such an extent that the bond between time and distance was broken: a TGV might get you to Orléans in the little more time that a regular train would take to get you to Fontainebleau. The RER commuter trains radiating from Paris made local trips more convenient as well. And there was always the Métro. Paris to the Past is the result. 

Saint-Denis is the first stop, and it sets the tone, because both the abbey itself and getting there are more pleasant than they were when Caro paid her first visits. It’s a happy beginning, because Abbé Suger, the extraordinary monk who advised his former classmate, Louis VII, while overseeing the construction of the first building that we recognized as Gothic (those pointed arches), is one of Caro’s favorite historical figures. She manages to make him sound like one of us, but without wallowing in cloying anachronism. “I should mention that most of what we know about Suger comes from his autobiography. … And, I should emphasize that, like most autobiographies, Suger’s should not be totally trusted.” 

Caro divides all of day-trippable France into five parts: the Medieval, the Renaissance, the Golden Age, the Enlightenment, and the Napoleons. That’s six cathedrals, three fortresses, two Renaissance châteaux, four palaces, three towns, one restoration, and Joan of Arc. And lots and lots of Paris. She goes to Blois; I wondered why she didn’t go to Chambord until I took a look at its location at Google Maps. It’s in the middle of nowhere! As you can tell, I haven’t been. I wish that she had visited Chinon, because that’s he hometown of my friend JR, but perhaps it’s just as well that she didn’t, because she might have had something for saying which loyalty would require me to hate her.

Caro’s favorite place is probably Vaux-le-Vicomte, and she devotes a few very readable pages to a very positive portrait of poor old Fouquet, making it clear that it was not the big party that did him in. Fouquet was already doomed. He had attempted to buy the influence of Louis’s first maîtresse en titre, the (otherwise) saintly Louise de La Vallière — that was a mistake! So was fortifying a private island off the Breton coast. “Fouquet seems not to have taken the measure of the man with whom he was dealing,” Caro writes, “while Louis understood Fouquet all too well.” Another favorite figure is François Premier, who does seem to have fallen into historiographical decline. “As hard as I have tried, I haven’t been able to get Bob, who remains fascinated by Napoleon, even slightly interested in Francis.” Now, there’s a marital discussion that would make for fun eavesdropping. As for Louis XIV, like most admirers of the Sun King, Caro has little good to say about the Widow Scarron, and one senses that her visit to the château at Maintenon is designed to provide an opportunity to say lots of bad. 

Paris appears in four of the  five parts, a reminder that, while Paris is full of old buildings, the really old buildings were not built all at once, but have survived, by the grace of whatever deity oversees cities. (Caro doesn’t mention that the Sainte Chapelle was subjected to the post-Revolutionary travail of being put to use as a granary; perhaps it wasn’t!) Her chapter on the Louvre reminds me how much France has changed in my lifetime. It was the excavations for I M Pei’s celebrated pyramid that uncovered remnants of the foundations of Charles V’s Fourteenth-Century fortress — proof that the artist of the nearly-contemporary Très Riches Heures wasn’t daydreaming when he drew the building. 

Caro closes with Mozart at Palais Garnier (she does not mention Opéra Bastille), where, at the last minute, Ina and Bob are able to pick up some fantastically expensive tickets for “the best seats in the house” — for a matinee. This must make it easier for Caro to imagine the opulent jewels and dresses that appear on the opera nights of our time only in severely anorexic form. Paris has changed so much that it’s perfectly all right to go to the opera in the middle of the day, wearing whatever nice street clothes you had on at lunch. The fact that the true theatre of Napoleon III’s empire took place on the grand stairways, not in the auditorium, is not lost on Caro, but she doesn’t mind that the present doesn’t get in the way. “When we entered the theatre, I looked at the ceiling, designed by Marc Chagall, which was definitely not nineteenth-century neo-baroque, but somehow worked.”

Sitting there in this glorious palace built in a city filled with palaces, my mind drifted back to the soaring cathedrals, the moated fortressees, and opulent castles I had visited, and I could think of no better way to end my magical journey through time. 

Now, that’s an ending!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2011 at 6:00 pm.