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!
The Accidental Adventurer 