The bookshop La vie du rail has moved. For many years, it was in a tiny shop in an obscure corner of a major Paris railway station, Gare Saint-Lazare, as shown here in my photos from ten years ago. But since my last visit, the bookshop seems to have moved Read More …
This large mural in the entrance hall of the Gare de l’Est (East Station) in Paris shows soldiers in August 1914 saying goodbye to their families and boarding a train to go into battle at the beginning of the First World War. The mural was painted in 1926 by an Read More …
The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is one of the fourteen museums that belong to the city of Paris. It takes up the entire eastern wing of the Palais de Tokyo and has a permanent collection of “over 15,000 works illustrating the major currents of twentieth and twenty-first century art”. Read More …
For many years in the 19th and 20th centuries, 18-20 boulevard Saint-Denis was the address of a publishing company called A. Taride, which specialized in “maps for cyclists and automobiles” and in guidebooks of Paris and other parts of France. My lead photo in this post is a sketch from Read More …
Rodolfo, Marcello, Schaunard and Colline are astronauts on a doomed space ship. The engines are inoperative. Supplies of water and oxygen are running low. In the face of death, they start hallucinating, recalling their carefree but impoverished youth in Paris many years before. This is the situation in Claus Guth’s Read More …
The Cognacq-Jay Museum has nothing to do with Hennessy, Remy Martin, Courvoisier, or Martell. Rather, it was named after Ernest Cognacq (1839-1928) and his wife Marie-Louise Jaÿ (1838-1925), the founders and first owners of the Samaritaine department store on Rue de Rivoli in Paris. Cognacq and Jaÿ both grew up Read More …
The Théâtre Antoine is a large Italian-style (horseshoe-shaped) theatre dating from the year 1866. In its first decades it quickly became famous for hosting the first Paris productions of controversial young foreign authors such as Ibsen, Strindberg and Tolstoï, among others. In the nineteenth century, when people were somewhat smaller Read More …
This Wallace Fountain is one that I’m sure I have overlooked a few times, because in the afternoons and evenings (weather permitting) it is surrounded by the tables and chairs and customers and waiters of the nearby café and restaurant. In the mornings, however, it is out in the open. Read More …
The church of Saint-Séverin is in the Latin Quarter in Paris, just 400 meters from the Notre-Dame cathedral and 600 meters from Sainte-Chapelle. I must have walked past the Saint-Séverin Church hundreds of times over the years, without ever going inside, but my curiosity was finally aroused when I read Read More …
The Théâtre La Reine Blanche (The White Queen Theatre, or the Queen Blanche Theatre) has an unusual subtitle: scène des arts et des sciences (stage of the arts and the sciences). The theatre’s website explains: “At La Reine Blanche, we consider science to be an integral part of the wider Read More …