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Hayley Rosado ’09 (Montclair, N.J.) is a Marquis Scholar with a double major in English and mathematics. She spent three weeks this summer in Paris taking the interim-session course A Moveable Feast: American Writers in Paris taught by David Johnson, associate provost, and Bryan Washington, associate professor of English. Below is a first-person account of her experiences. Many students share their experience and images of interim-abroad courses in “Through My Eyes, In My Words.”
Paris is a grey city. In America, we think of grey as dull and colorless, and boring; or, at least, I did. In Paris, grey is the color of the mist that hangs low over the distant Eiffel Tower when you wake up in the morning and walk out onto your balcony, before the sun comes out, before your roommate wakes up, before the day has properly begun. Grey is the color of the cobblestones laid unevenly between high buildings lined with bright red and yellow awnings and shop windows full of warm bread, lemon cookies, and aging cheeses on the bustling Rue Mouffetard. Grey is the color of the ornate stonework that lines the apartment buildings on the side streets of l’Opéra district; buildings that were built before America was America, and while Paris was still made of winding, narrow streets. In Paris, grey is not dull and boring, but simply the beginning of the spectrum.
Our first days in Paris were mostly close to the hotel. We explored the Montparnasse district thoroughly, with all of its café-lined main avenues and quiet side streets, and the Vaugirard area, where our hotel was. As we became more comfortable with the Metro, we ventured farther out.
Our classes were held in the morning, and we were free to roam in the afternoon. Most days we were not given specific destinations, but, on occasion, we would have various assignments. Our first assignment was to go out in different groups to explore various areas. My group was assigned the Marais district. It was there that we found the Pompidou Center, an enormous modern art museum to which we went back several days later, that appears to have been built inside out. Adjacent to it is the Stravinsky fountain, which is a pool of water with colorful, peculiar statues everywhere in it. We followed different roads through quiet areas and past hotel courtyards, through the Place des Voges, the oldest square in Paris where Victor Hugo spent his years, and all the way down to the Bastille.
Our second assignment was to go on an expedition to find as many of the places that Ernest Hemingway mentioned in his Parisian memoir, A Moveable Feast, as we could. That trip took us to Hemingway’s first apartments, to Gertrude Stein’s apartment, to a series of cafés in Montparnasse and the area around St. Michel, and through the Luxembourg gardens. We kept a list of the places we had visited and, the next day in class, when our professors looked over our lists, we were awarded tickets to a boat tour down the Seine.
In our classes, we discussed relationships and society in the novels and excerpts we had read. Much of the reading dealt with being an American thrown into France, about having no connections and no understanding, and being entirely lost. We discussed being a flaneur, a café-dwelling, people-observing, distinctly Parisian type of person, and attempted to become flaneurs ourselves. Our most regular assignment was to keep journals of our experiences, as though we were Hemingway, Baldwin, or even Sedaris. Though I enjoyed the reading, most especially A Moveable Feast and Giovanni’s Room, being in Paris gave a mutual understanding to the reading that was entirely unique to the experience. There is no experience quite like being forcefully thrown into a culture to which you have surprisingly little to relate and having to learn how to communicate, to act, to travel. The texts we read were more than stories about floundering people in a foreign city; they were a voice to the struggle we had to navigate Paris.
On Wednesdays, rather than having class, our professors would take us to various attractions around Paris that they felt were imperative to our education. Our first trip was out to Versaille. We spent the entire day walking through the king’s and queen’s quarters where audio tours taught us about the extensive genealogy of the French royalty, seeing the Hall of Mirrors, and wandering the incredibly vast gardens. The highlight of my trip was the small farm that the palace kept, where puffy white sheep and cows grazed.
The second Wednesday was to the Louvre. The old Dauphine’s castle was too extensive to see any substantial portion of, but we went through American art, Italian sculpture, Renaissance painting, Spanish painting, Oceanic art, Napoleon’s apartments, and French sculpture. Another day, after class, the professors took us to the Musee L’Orsay, which was a train station originally built for the World’s Fair, and later converted into a museum. The main attraction was a temporary exhibition of famous Impressionist paintings, but we spent hours wandering the Rodin terrace, the late French sculpture, and the paintings. After five hours, we had seen less than three floors! On another day, the professors took us to L’Orangerie, where the most enormous Monet water lily paintings were displayed.
On our own, we would split off into groups to explore any section of Paris that sounded appealing. One of our first trips was up to the Montmartre district. We got out of the Metro at Pigalle and walked up steep, old streets where vendors were selling paintings and prints, up to St. Pierre, one of the oldest churches in Paris, and then to Sacre Couer. Sacre Couer sits atop a hill to the north of greater Paris so it looks out over most of the city. Our arrival in Paris was shortly preceded by the election of a new president, Sarkozy, and splattered across the church were dripping red blotches of paint that made the church seem as though it had been shot.
On another day, my roommate and I found the entrance to the catacombs and went down. On either side of the long corridors, in the heavy dark, were the largest bones of millions of Parisians, their skulls facing outward in simple patterns. Along the ceiling was a heavy black streak for the early explorers, lest they should lose their way. That same day we went to the west side of Paris, to the Bois de Boulogne. It is an enormous park that is strangely quiet during the day, though the highways leaving Paris run all around it.
The day we were there, men kept approaching us, asking if we would like tickets but, not knowing what they were for, we refused, until we realized the French Open was being held less than a hundred feet from where we were walking. Also there are the rose gardens that Marie Antoinette kept, where literally thousands upon thousands of roses were in bloom, and peacocks, swans, rabbits, and cats patrolled the lawns.
On a whim one day, my roommate and I decided to take the train out to see the Chartres cathedral. It was raining that day, but the cathedral was majestic in its grey stone. We sat inside for hours, letting it rain, and writing in our class journals. The trip was cheap, and easy to make, and so a few days later we decided to take another train out to Vernon, which borders Giverny, where Monet lived. There is a bus that runs between Vernon and to the little town, and when we got off, the first thing we found was a meadow in bloom with poppies. We got to see his home gardens, and the water lily beds, which were green and in bloom.
For lunch, we would most often go to small sandwich shops where we would get hot paninis on fresh baguettes with strong cheese and tomatoes. Across from our hotel, the men who worked the night shifts knew us and would respond happily in their partial English to our partial French. They asked us about American customs, and American teenagers as Whitney Houston and Wham! played in the background. Though a few Parisians chided us for our lack of French, most of the people we met were excited to test out their English, and to ask us about our trip, and about America.
On the last weekend of our trip, we went to visit the Cimetierie du Peré Lachaise, where Maria Callas’ ashes are enshrined, and where Auguste Comte, Oscar Wilde, and Rossini are buried. We visited the Chateau de Vincennes, an enormous castle that was the French army headquarters at the beginning of World War II, and the German Nazi headquarters at the end. We had ice cream at the famous Berthillon’s ice cream store, and it was so good. On our last day, most of our class got together and climbed the Eiffel Tower together. It was warm and we had gotten dressed up and all of Paris was lit beneath us.
Afterward, we went out as a group to eat at a restaurant near our hotel.
The morning before our flight home, my roommate and I went across the street before breakfast to buy fresh French delicacies for people at home. While the woman was wrapping my order, she asked, in English, “you like chocolate?”
“It’s for my family,” I said, in my slowly improving French. She beamed.
“Your family? Welcome to Paris!” Welcome, indeed.