Boulevard du Palais This is a Wallace Fountain that I must have walked or cycled past dozens or even hundreds of times over the years, without ever stopping for a closer look — which is perhaps not surprising, since Paris has over a hundred of these ‘large model’ fountains (the Read More …
In 2017, I returned to the Lucernaire and saw two more shows there. The first was an adaptation of the novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, adapted and directed by Manon Montel. I was curious to see how she would condense an 1800-page novel into a 90-minute play. The solution Read More …
In the 1st arrondissement of Paris, equidistant from the Louvre, the Palais Royal and the Bourse de Commerce, there is an elegant nineteenth-century passage called Galerie Véro-Dodat, with wood-panelled shop fronts, black marble columns and paintings on the ceiling. The Galerie was named after its developers, who by coincidence were Read More …
There is a persistent urban legend about American tourists going to the Place de la Bastille in Paris and feeling cheated when they discover that the Bastille Fortress isn’t even there any more. Perhaps this has really happened at one time or another, but I think most tourists from all Read More …
The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a Paris neighborhood that begins at Place de la Bastille (first photo) and stretches about 2 km eastward to Place de la Nation. The word Faubourg means “outside the walls”, now usually translated as “suburb”. In the Middle Ages this neighborhood was in fact outside the 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 original title of Victor Hugo’s blockbuster novel included the year, 1482. He chose that year because it was still in the Middle Ages but was a year without any outstanding historical events that might have interfered with his story. Many of the crucial scenes of the novel (known in Read More …
“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 …
In 1840 the great French novelist Victor Hugo, author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and later Les Misérables, spent three days in Bacharach and wrote an enthusiastic description in his book Le Rhin (The Rhine), first published in 1842. “I have spent three days in Bacharach, a sort of Beggars’ Headquarters 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 …