“The Cologne City Hall, located quite close to the Cathedral, is one of those charming harlequin buildings made of pieces from all times and morsels of all styles that one meets in these old municipalities that are themselves, with their laws, mores and customs, constructed in the same way.” This Read More …
When the French author Victor Hugo arrived in Cologne in 1840, the first thing he went looking for was the cathedral. He was, after all, the author of a gigantic best-selling novel about the cathedral in Paris, which in the eight years since its publication had made him famous and Read More …
When the French author Victor Hugo arrived in Cologne in 1840, he did not immediately go looking for the Rhine, as I had been expecting. Since his book was called Le Rhin (The Rhine), and Cologne was the first place he visited that was actually on the Rhine, I was Read More …
Victor Hugo was 35 in the year 1837, when this bust was sculpted by his friend David d’Angers. By that time, Hugo had already published his novel Notre-Dame de Paris (known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), as well as several volumes of poetry and plays such as Hernani Read More …
The street that is now called rue Corvisart, (after Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, the personal physician of Napoléon I) was formerly called rue Champ-de-l’Alouette (Street of the Field of the Lark). It is in the Croulebarbe Quarter of the 13th arrondissement. In the novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, Jean Valjean led Read More …
When I was staying in a studio apartment on Rue Broca, in the Croulebarbe quarter of the 13th arrondissement, I decided to take a walk up the street to see what there was to see. Rue Broca is not a very long street, only four blocks, but it used to Read More …
For over eight centuries, from 980–1795, a large swath of what is now Belgium was ruled from Liège by a succession of Prince-Bishops (Princes-Évêques), who as the name implies were both the secular and the religious rulers. Separation of church and state was a concept whose time had not yet Read More …
During his long career, Giuseppe Verdi composed twenty-six operas — or twenty-eight, depending what you count as what. The following list is the 28-opera version, with the year of the world premiere in parentheses after each title. I have listed the opera titles in different colors: Red means I have Read More …
The Museum of the Sewers is one of the few places in Paris that was not closed down by the coronavirus pandemic — but only because it was already closed for other reasons. This museum, which is in fact down in the sewers at the south end of Alma Bridge, Read More …
In July 2014 I took a guided walking tour (in French) of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter of Paris. We met at the exit of the Métro station Mabillon, because this is a small station with only one exit, so there was no danger of anyone picking the wrong one. Our guide Read More …