The Accidental Adventurer Literary Tour of Paris

As if you didn’t know, I like to read. I read everything: books other people like that I don’t, books that I like that other people don’t, books that I think are overrated, books that rip me apart and put me back together all in one sitting, children’s books and signs in foreign languages and instruction manuals and magazines and Tumblr posts and Facebook statuses and letters and my own writing and Wikipedia pages.

Does it surprise anyone that I happened to pick one of the most literary cities in all of Europe for my vacation?

“You never forget your first love. I have never loved anything half so much…” A love note that’s your’s for the taking.

We here at The Accidental Adventurer Tour Group would like to thank you for joining us–whether of your own volition or not–on this journey of discovery through the lives and locations of famous writers in Paris.

Paris is an essential part of any literary aficionado’s bucket list. As the birthplace of artists, artists’ careers, and art, Paris is full of an innumerable amount of sights and significances. The Literary Day Walking Tour seeks to narrow that number into a handful of easy stops, all within easy reach of one another and shouldn’t take more than half the day to get to. Writers of significance included on the tour are Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas. Please book in advance as this is our most popular tour and it fills up quickly.

Howdy! My name is Madelyne and I’ll be overly enthusiastic guide for your trip today! #nerdalert

Preface: Midnight in Paris

Someone had the brilliant idea of letting me be in charge of Literary Day. Everything in my life has been leading to this moment when I, Madelyne Mienke Marie Adams, have been given the responsibility, NAY the honour, NAY the privilege of being in charge of such a serious undertaking as a pilgrimage to some of the most hallowed haunts of the City of Light. To get on my level, a screening of Midnight in Paris the night before the tour is necessary.

“This store has rooms like chapters in a novel and the fact is Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky are more real to me than my next door neighbors and even stranger to me is the fact that even before I was born Dostoyevsky wrote the story of my life in a book called ‘The Idiot’ and ever since reading it I have been searching for the heroine, a girl called Natasia Filipovna.”
-George Whitman, from the Paris Wall Newspaper, 1/1/2004

Stop #1: Shakespeare & Co., 37 Rue de la Bucherie

We begin at Shakespeare & Co. Though not the original, still massively swoon-worthy: books and rickety shelves and low ceilings and an upstairs reading room and a writer’s hovel fashioned out of a few boards and furnished with a low, velvet, maroon sitting chair and yellow typewriter and fragments of notes from people all over the world.

You know how I said I wasn’t going to buy any souvenirs while in Paris, that I was traveling with the world’s tiniest suitcase and there was positively no room for anything else, that the only thing I would spend money on was food and transportation? I dropped fifty euros within five minutes of stepping foot in that store and, consequently, had to have Collin be my book mule for the flight home to Spain.

“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
-E. Hemingway

Stop #2: Ernest & Hadley Hemingway’s 1st Parisian Apt, 74 Rue de Cardinal Lemoine

You move to Spain. You know little of Hemingway except that you own a pair of glasses with his name on the inside arm in gold script and you’ve seen Midnight in Paris, oh, about, seventy times, and if you could marry Corey Stoll’s Hemingway mustache, you would. First, you read Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, then you read The Paris Wife, then finally you read The Sun Also Rises, and, before you know it, you’re hooked.  You’re a fan of the writing but you kind of think the author is a dick but you still feel this enchantment, even from the grave. Is this man so charismatic that even his ghost is alluring?

Hemingway’s first Paris apartment is your one and only do-or-die destination for Paris. Eiffel Tower? You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. Versailles? Whatever. Notre Dame? Just watch The Hunchback of Notre Dame; they never change anything in the Disney version.

Before you know it, you’re writing every last Google Maps direction–“past the bookstore, cut through Square Rene Viviani to get to Rue Lagrange. R out of parc onto Rue Lagrange, at end of parc, turn L to stay on Rue Lagrange…”–and, when you finally arrive and take ten pictures of the same plaque on the wall and number over the entryway, you follow the tenant who lives inside when she opens the front door.

You did it! You’re in the building. You’re in the building! In your extreme exhilaration, you try to take selfies, all of them terrible, but it doesn’t matter because you’re in the building and you just spent 50 euros at Shakespeare & Co and you might just pass out if you don’t eat a crepe right now.

“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.”
-Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

Stop #3: The Pantheon, Place du Panthéon

While this wasn’t the original stop #3 on our Literary Day (it got nixed from the original schedule because we thought it cost money but then we found out our TIEs are the Fast Passes of historical places in Europe except FREER), we made it back by Saturday. After an endless parade of churches and buildings and gardens and museums and important stuff, the Pantheon took my breath away. I know something takes my breath away if 1) I can’t breathe, and 2) I look back later and find 20 pictures of the same thing from the same angle because somehow I think if I have enough pictures of it, it’ll make a difference.

Originally a church, it now houses the graves of the likes of Marie Curie, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile Zola, Louis Braille, (Kellie’s personal favorite:) Victor Hugo, and (my personal favorite:) Alexandre Dumas.

“One day the air was mild, the Luxembourg was flooded with sunshine and shadow…Marius had opened his whole soul to nature, he was thinking of nothing, he was living and breathing, he passed near this seat, Cosette raised her eyes, their glances met…”
-Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

Stop #4: The Luxembourg Gardens, 6e Arrondissement

All credit on this one goes to Kellie, I just mapped out the route. Also, she’s really good at recreating scenes from famous works. Ask her about her visit to the Roman Forum.

“Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.” -Gertrude Stein

Stop #5: Salon of Gertrude Stein, 27 Rue de Fleurus

I don’t care what you say, Kathy Bates is Gertrude Stein.

“What do I know of man’s destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.”
-Samuel Beckett

Stop #6: Grave of Samuel Beckett, Montparnasse Cemetary, 3 Blvd Edgar Quinet

Because dead bodies are an essential part of any literary tour, the last planned stop for our Literary Tour was the grave of Samuel Beckett. The week before Paris, I was in Dublin with a few friends. After a tour of Guinness and a free burrito but before 5 AM saw us trying to find a leprechaun outside of a club called Copper’s, we did a literary pub crawl where they pumped us full of Irish literary trivia and pints of Bulmer’s cider. The important part to this story is not that I almost won a t-shirt but that our guides informed us that Samuel Beckett, one of four Irishmen awarded the Nobel Prize (Seamus Heaney, George Bernard Shaw, William B. Yeats), happened to be buried in Paris, the next stop on our winter vacation holiday traveling trip. He was added to the list.

“Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.”
-Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Stop #7: Roof of Notre Dame, 6 Parvis Notre-Dame, Place Jean-Paul II

On Saturday, we used our Fast Pass TIE residency cards to get us into the never-ending staircase of Notre Dame. After a seemingly endless climb for someone who is mildly claustrophobic (I couldn’t tell if the heavy breathing was anxiety-driven panic or just plain breathlessness from climbing forever), we emerged to this: the view that inspired The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Well, maybe not the view single-handedly, but it definitely did inspire the Disney film version. Well, maybe not the whole film, it’s actually been quite some time since I’ve seen it. This is where I turn the Victor Hugo portion of the tour over to our resident Victor Hugo expert, Kellie (see Stop #4).

In case you didn’t believe how meticulous I was about This Day: “1. Start @ 117 Rue Saint-Denis @ 10 AM”

If interested, there is also a step-by-step Google Maps version of this tour floating around somewhere on the Internet.

As always, if you enjoyed the ride, please tip your guide!

2014

When I was a kid, my parents would take us to my grandparents house after mass on Sundays. My grandmother would supply the cake, then us kids would settle down in the kids room at the back of the house. My grandparents had a handful of movies that we watched with religious fervor: Mrs. Doubtfire; Land Before Time 1, 2, and 4; Who Framed Roger Rabbit; and The Sound of Music .

Lest you get ahead of yourself, like my friend Kellie when I was retelling this story to her the other day, this is not about my lifelong love affair with The Sound of Music. This is about my sister’s lifelong love affair with The Sound of Music and my subsequent lifelong anti-love affair with The Sound of Music.

My older, tyrant of a sister (additional notes: my sister is not actually a tyrant. I actually love her quite a bit but, when we were younger, I did not always like her. On the plus side, nobody can get things done quite like Katie. On the negative side, nobody can get things done quite like Katie so, watch out.) loved The Sound of Music. As in, would fake illness just to be sent home from school just to watch The Sound of Music on my grandmother’s couch. In my remembering of this story, every Sunday (but in reality was more like four times out of the total of Sundays we spent at my grandparents’ house) she would commandeer the tiny shared television set to watch The Sound of Music. On principal, I refused to stay in the room. Consequently, I have never seen The Sound of Music.

This scandalizes my Sound of Music-loving friends and family (ironically enough, I seem to be acquainted with a large number of people who have an emotional investment in favor of this film). I’m not entirely ignorant; I’m aware of the essentials: Von Trapp family, Sister Julie Andrews sings in mountains, something about curtains? Everyone who hears this story then resolves to be the one who finally gets me to watch The Sound of Music and yet, somehow, it hasn’t happened. Why do you think that is, you suppose?

This is my theory: while knowing what I want has always been kind of a hazy area, I have always known what I don’t. I don’t want to watch The Sound of Music. I don’t want to be told what to do. I don’t want to live a life without choices. I don’t want to settle. I don’t want to waste these opportunities I’ve been given: the opportunity to travel, the opportunity to be have a family who loves and supports me no matter where I am, the opportunity to be in Dublin for Christmas and Paris for New Year’s and Spain for the year, the opportunity to know what I don’t want, the opportunity to be ME.

The next year is kind of scary. I’ll return to the States and I’ll have to figure out the next step. In between now and then, I’ve got to figure out where I want to travel. I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to pay for this travel. I’ve got some writing to finish and some books to read.

This is not a New Year’s Eve post, though it might seem like one given the timing, but, surprisingly, it isn’t. I don’t care if you read this on December 31st or January 1st or Labor Day. This is a post about knowing what you want and what you don’t and not knowing anything and knowing that the not-knowing is okay too. Find one thing you know and cling to it–I know what I don’t want–and keep that as your truth and live your life.

I know that I don’t want to ever live a life that feels untrue to myself. I know that I want to be a happy. These are my guiding principles. Everything else that comes after this falls naturally into line: family, faith, adventures, writing, boys, stories, good hair, horses, water, Chacos, pizza, Tumblr, language, words.

This is a tree for me.

A List of Lists

Reasons Why I Love Lists

1. They’re just great, they really are. They need little to no prelude. Everyone knows what a list is, what happens when you make a list. The title explains it what may need to be explained so you skip lines of introductory bullshit and dive right in.

2. The titles can be as long or as ridiculous as you want. There is a freedom in titling something that far too few people take advantage of. Here are some great examples of when people have taken full advantage of titles.

“Tagram or The Storm or The Word of the Monkey or High Jumps or No One’s Eyes or Life of Another” or Indecisive or The Title is Better Than the Art

 

I call it, ‘Madelyne Travels Places and People Stand Behind Her with Cameras.’

3. Lists can be as brief or long-winded as you prefer. And, if you’re clueless on how to end an idea, you can always

4. Quit while you’re ahead and start over with a new number.

5. Going grocery shopping? Make a list! Procrastinating to the max? Make a list! Don’t know where to start or what to write about? Make a list! A list for every reason, for every seasons. Lists for all!

Things I Should Be Doing Instead of Writing This Post

1. Studying French.

2. Doing crunches.

3. Skyping with my family (Ma, we said 8 my time! It’s currently 9:30!)

4. Socializing with the world outside of the sporadically-heated living room.

5. Figuring out how to pay my credit card bill/working on getting my bank account unfrozen.

6. Buying a plane ticket home from Paris before I actually go to Paris and become stuck with no way home.

7. Not much else because this post has been long overdue so I should stop updating my Facebook status and just finish the damn thing.

Things I Have Been Doing Instead of Writing This Post

1. Writing. Lots and lots of writing. Writing in notebooks, writing e-mails and letters and postcards, writing on job applications, writing notes to my roommates, writing on Tumblr, writing Tweets, writing Facebook messages to friends near and dear to my heart who, much to my surprise, did not suddenly forget me as soon as I left the country. At the beginning of the year I set two resolutions for myself: become a runner and finish a novel. The first wasn’t a failure but it wasn’t really a success either. I was a runner for a short while, I still run on occasion. I’m powering through the second resolution as fast as my little fingers can take me before December 31st. (I will inevitably fail; I’ve spent more time traveling and Instagramming and riding horses and being distracted by general living than I have working towards either of these resolutions.)

2. Reading, widely and voraciously per usual. I’m growing a collection of books I am impervious to purchasing when I find them in English: An American by Henry James, 2 new Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s, a book of essays by David Foster Wallace that I spent 7 happy hours annotating on the bus home from Madrid. On the Kindle, I’ve recently finished Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (um, WOW), and have on deck The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (happy belated MAt!) as well as The Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang (a surprisingly compelling work of non-fiction, which is normally not my cup of tea). Mom found two Barnes & Noble giftcards that some of my girls from camp sent me and three brand new books (Someone Else’s Love Story, Joshilyn Jackson; The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt; The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway) are on their way to me via my parents’ suitcase.  

3. Figuring out how I can be warmer. This includes thinking of something new every five minutes that my parents can bring whenever they visit in two weeks (Tresemme hair products, fuzzy socks, blue sweatpants I was forced to leave behind when my bag weighed too much at the airport). This also includes pushing my limits of how many layers I can stand to have on my body at one time (I’m notorious for eschewing pants; I am currently wearing two pairs and my soul dies a little bit with each layer). Last night, for example, I wore to bed: 1 long-sleeved shirt; 1 Cowboy’s vs Crohn’s sweatshirt, hood up; 1 pair of yoga pants over 1 pair of leggings; four pairs of socks with said yoga pants tucked inside sock layer number 4; 1 pair of gloves. Spanish insulation is no joke because there is no insulation there to even joke about. We do have a heater but I like to call it The Gas Box of Death because it involves an open flame and reeks of gasoline. There’s a heater in the living room but, if you run it for too long, you can blow a fuse and the entire apartment loses electricity (oops).

4. Compiling a musical playlist called ‘Sweater Weather.’ (This is obviously the most important of all my endeavors.)

Things I Will Be Doing Instead of Writing More Posts

1. Thanksgiving! Not real Thanksgiving, but an amended, ex-pat version in Almeria on Friday night with lots of American friends from Sevilla. I’m bringing mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and I’m only just now realizing how much pressure that is considering the only thing I’m certain I can buy at the grocery store are potatoes and yams and what else goes in those dishes?

2. Parents! My parents are coming in 12 days! They’ll be here for 10 days. We’re spending the first weekend in Granada, the second weekend in Madrid, and I’m sure I’ll be a sulky baby by the end of the trip because I won’t want them to leave and we all know how great I am at expressing my feelings.

3. Dublin! Did I mention I’m spending Christmas in Dublin? I’ll be entirely unreachable for two weeks because I’ll be doing things like finding an Irish husband, drooling over the Trinity College library, spending too much time in pubs trying to find an Irish husband, and crying because it’s so cold and my poor, thin Southern blood can’t take it. Oh! And visiting with friends from the summer like Sam and (maybe) Dean and Hannah Mae!

4. Paris! Did I mention I’m spending New Year’s in Paris? Did I mention that Midnight in Paris is only one of my most favorite movies of all time? Did I mention that I’m obsessed with ex-pat writers of the 20s? Did I mention that we found a great apartment to rent on the Right Bank? Did I mention that I’m just writing more questions because I can’t find enough words to truly express how excited I am and every time I start to think about it I kind of scream a little and my brain stops thinking and doing the words making thing and I kind of just incoherent and processing becomes difficult? Did I mention that I will live in this apartment in the third arrondissement for seven days and pretend like it’s seven years and eat too many baguettes and read The Sun Also Rises (you didn’t think I ordered it from B&N for its literary value did you?)? Did I mention I haven’t bought my plane ticket back to Spain because I haven’t gotten around to it yet but I joke it’s because maybe I’ll never leave but it’s also kind of not a joke?

Things

1. Art

It’s like the Where’s Waldo of paintings except, instead of looking for Waldo, you’re looking for any shape that makes sense. Also, if my posture looks contrived in any way, it’s because I’m falling over; I tripped over my own feet.

2. Palacio de Cristal

Fall leaves are a foreign concept to me.

Self-proclaimed architecture nerd.

Sweet mother of mercy, can I die here?

3. Belen

Belen’s hobbies include practicing English, keeping it tight, and adopting wayward and lonely Americans. (All trips to Granada provided by The Kindness of Belen’s Heart)

4. River feet

Barefoot in the Rio Darro in mid-November, there have been better life choices made.

5. Secret passageways

Doin’ the secret cave dance, yah yah yah!