Garnerin’s wife, Jeanne-Geneviève, was the first woman to jump from a parachute. And his niece, Elisa Garnerin, made more than three dozen professional parachute descents between 1815 and 1836, according to the Telegraph in London. (Before her, the balloonist Marie Madeleine-Sophie Blanchard made more than sixty-five solo ascents, until an 1819 attempt proved fatal.)
Women frequently flew alone. That may have been because a companion is not technically necessary, as S.L. Kotar and J.E. Gessler write in Ballooning: A History, 1782–1900, or because the women wanted to make sure that any fame they garnered wouldn’t be attributed to a man flying with them.
But perhaps they did so simply because they enjoyed flying solo. After all, it wasn’t uncommon for early women explorers to have a taste for solitude. Take Marianne North, the Englishwoman who in the 1800s circumnavigated the globe unaccompanied, spending thirteen years traveling and skirting Victorian convention. Her paintings of flowers and landscapes hang at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, outside central London.
In her autobiography she recounts her travels, which she didn’t begin until she was forty. In Nainital in the Himalayas in India’s Uttarakhand state, she liked sitting in the sun. In Philadelphia, she walked the parks and Zoological Gardens enjoying idle days. In the Bunya Mountains of Queensland, Australia, she said she enjoyed “my entire solitude through the grand forest alone.” Today, a genus of tree and several plant species are named for her.
The spring afternoon felt like summer. People were painting, sketching, lolling in the grass, eating their lunches on benches. I made my way along a shady path edged with pink blooms, like Caillebotte’s man in the hat, sunlight flickering as I passed under a tree bough.
Window-Licking
Finding Your Muse
“Errer est humain, flâner est parisien”: “To wander is human, to stroll is Parisian.”
—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
South Pigalle, the neighborhood at the base of Montmartre, was once the “center of the flesh-and-feather shows,” as the New York Times described it in the 1960s. Today, it’s SoPi, the center of hipster brunches, quartier of man-buns, vintage guitars, and shops with names like Funky Junk and Finger in the Nose.
I spent a morning there at Buvette on rue Henry Monnier, eating brouillés saumon: scrambled eggs with salmon and bread, topped with a dollop of crème fraiche and two fat, lightly salty capers. Jazz lilted in the background and sunlight streamed through the open door, bouncing off the decorative tin ceiling tiles, not quite reaching back to the spot at the marble bar where I was sitting on an old-fashioned Toledo-style drafting stool.
On the bar were wire baskets of limes and lemons; little carafes of orange and grapefruit juice; striped straws and mason jars of black olives; bottles of wine piled like kindling in a shallow silver bowl. How French—or so it seems. The Paris Buvette is an ex-pat in disguise, an offshoot of Buvette in New York’s West Village.
I paid the bill and wandered across the street to a shop with a Photax camera in the window and a straw basket of used records on the sidewalk. A few doors down was Le Rocketship, a coffee and home design boutique. Looking in the windows felt like peering into an aquarium with tropical fish. There were Caran d’Ache pens in fluorescent pink and green; handmade ceramic mugs, each decorated with a single colorful dot; shocking yellow Japanese Washi paper masking tape. The previous day, in Le Bon Marché, I had admired bright white pencils in a canister, arranged like stems in a vase. What is it about office supplies that’s so irresistible? They seem to hold the promise of new beginnings.
In no hurry and accountable to no one, I went into Le Rocketship and examined Grand Voyageur leather journals, handmade copper lamps that looked like rockets, bright boxes of paper clips shaped like airplanes and motorcycles, a red metal platter that read “Come with me 2 Zanzibar.” Everything seemed to whisper, Let’s run away. It was the sort of shop where you want it all and yet, you suspect that possessing any one object would be unsatisfying. The joy was not in the owning, but in the looking; in seeing the sundries there, flocked together, like a pretty crowd at a garden party.
And so I left them and went on my way, past Place Gustave Toudouze, a little leafy square crowded with tables and umbrellas for a tea shop, pizza joint, and Indian restaurant. At L’Oeuf there were shark puppets, bohemian bracelets, and rubber chickens. Handbags, some shaped like teddy bear heads, were displayed, if one could call it that, in a back room around the perimeter of the floor, the way a child might set up a pretend boutique in her bedroom. I stopped at the windows of Jamini, the Franco-Indian lifestyle brand, where patterned pillows and rugs with zigzags and peacock eyespots peeked out from painted metal trunks.
In the United States, we call this pleasurable wandering along storefronts window-shopping. In France, the pastime—faire du lèche-vitrines—translates to a more passionate name: “window-licking,” which seems to prioritize admiration over consumption.
For centuries the city’s shopkeepers have labored to catch the eye of the passerby. By the nineteenth century, Parisians were accustomed to walking the boulevards and streets to “ever-changing panoramas; continual exhibitions of masterpieces; worlds of sorrows, universes of joy,” as Balzac wrote. They passed elegant shop signs and strolled Paris’s arcades—covered passages, of which there were once more than one hundred. A handful from the nineteenth century still remain—like Galerie Vivienne, Passage Choiseul, Passage Jouffroy, and Passage Verdeau—featuring lanterns, sun umbrellas, and potted trees, as if their sleepy postcard and antique shops were outdoors and not beneath vaulted glass ceilings.
In an artfully arranged shop, in the right frame of mind, browsing alone doesn’t feel transactional but more like wandering an art gallery. In some places, the shop is also a gallery, like 0fr, the bookshop, publisher, and gallery where a visitor can stock up on graphic art, photography, and music and fashion magazines. This is shopping as experience, not necessarily for acquisition. Alone, we can develop our aesthetic sense at our own pace, be it for late medieval bedroom furniture at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, or the “bazar chic” style (espadrilles, striped bohemian daybed cushions) of the French model Inès de la Fressange at her boutique in the 7th arrondissement.
We can let ourselves drift toward the windows of a shop with piles of stamps from Bhutan and Vietnam, or to those of Librairie Maritime Outremer, where artifacts like a compass and sundial are scattered among books about travel. Exploring art, fashion, design, and plant shops—ceramic tableware at Astier de Villatte, spools of ribbonry and braid at Petit Pan Paris—might inspire a creative endeavor, decor for your living room, even how you want to spend the rest of your life. The supplies at Le Rocketship got me thinking not only about how I wanted my workspace to look, but also about what I wanted to accomplish there, while the vase of stark white pencils at Le Bon Marché simply instructed: “Begin!”
The writer and actress Lena Dunham of Girls (who used to describe herself in her Twitter bio as a “hermit about town”) has said that time alone helped her discover what it was she loved doing. “I spent a whole semester in college just knitting and watching old VHS tapes, and I consider it one of the happiest times in my life because I had a chance to connect to my passions and who I really am,” she told InStyle magazine.
It’s not surprising that Dunham found it to be one of the most gratifying periods in her life. Peak happiness experiences tend to be those that are “tightly linked to your sense of who you are or want to be,” as the professors and psychologists Elizabeth Dunn, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Michael Norton, of Harvard Business School, wrote. So it’s worth spending some time discovering what gets us excited, what gets us going.
Whatever our interest—playing the violin, tending a garden—it can, as Anthony Storr explained, be a significant part of what gives life meaning. “Even those who have the happiest relationships,” he said, “need something other
than those relationships to complete their fulfillment.”
Pursuing our natural passions is known as “intrinsic motivation,” or “doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable,” as opposed to external motivations, like work evaluations or other people’s opinions, as Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, psychology professors at the University of Rochester in New York, have described it. In our healthiest states, we are “active, inquisitive, curious, and playful creatures, displaying a ubiquitous readiness to learn and explore,” they wrote in Contemporary Educational Psychology, a journal.
To explore, we need only put one foot in front of the other.
In fact, walking can significantly boost creative thinking. While we might certainly encounter stimulating things along the way, researchers at Stanford University found that it’s the very act of walking, even indoors on a treadmill facing a blank wall, that helps new ideas flow. Participants in the Stanford study were encouraged to talk aloud to a researcher while walking, so it’s unclear if the results would be the same for solitary strolls, though anecdotally there are countless examples of thinkers, artists, and everyday Joes and Janes having their creativity sparked by perambulating.
In Paris I walked everywhere. Well, almost. Some places require a key, like Avenue Frochot in the 9th arrondissement, where behind the gate with the blue sign that warns Voie Privée (Private Way) are the former homes and workshops of artists and writers, from the creator of The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas, to Jean-Paul Gaultier, the creator of the cone bras Madonna wore during her “Blond Ambition” tour in the 1990s, as well as Victor Hugo (who stayed there with his friend, the writer Paul Meurice), Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and Moreau. Walk around to Place Pigalle and you can see that the street dead-ends at a graffitied, corrugated wall between a Monop’ (a smaller Monoprix) and a pharmacy. A passerby wouldn’t have the faintest idea of what was on the other side. Only the striped cat asleep in the middle of the street knows.
Happily, there are more roads accessible to strollers than not. I walked through Canal Saint-Martin, where I went to buy Bensimon sneakers (the French cousins of Keds and, in my opinion, more comfortable), and browse the coffee table books at Artazart. Garbage and empty bottles floated like ducks in the canal’s pea-soup water. But in the right light—when a ray of sun shot between the trees that lined the water, backlighting lovers on a footbridge—it had all the romance of a Monet bridge over water lilies.
“People who open themselves to the beauty and excellence around them are more likely to find joy, meaning, and profound connections in their lives,” wrote Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside.
Paris makes this easy. It’s attractive, charming, historic, and walkable—qualities that research by the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit organization, found contribute to making an ideal shared space. I walked the medieval streets of the Marais, the Bois de Boulogne, the cobblestone hills of Montmartre. I passed petanque courts and apartments with striped awnings, stopping to browse French creams in a Monoprix or stand in a boulangerie line—one time catching a waiter dash in and reemerge, his tray piled with croissants as if in some period farce.
“Oh! to stroll about Paris! What an adorable and delightful existence!,” wrote Balzac. “To walk is to vegetate; to stroll is to live.”
I chose to live.
* * *
About an hour and a half west on foot, in the 16th arrondissement, the sidewalks climb high above the city. You don’t necessarily realize just how high until you pass a staircase that falls off into nowhere, or look down from the traffic circle at Place du Costa Rica to the nest of train tracks around Pont Bir Hakeim.
On weekdays, it’s quieter in this wealthy residential neighborhood than in other central areas. You can find yourself walking alone for vast stretches between Haussmannian mansions, lost in thought. Had I not glanced to my left as I was passing Avenue de Camoens, a sleepy, dead-end street where ivy drips from the balconies of stone mansions, I would have walked right past an unobstructed view of the Eiffel Tower.
It was a fortuitous sighting. There were no onlookers with smartphones at the ready. There was no one at all. I crossed the boulevard and walked toward a streetlamp on a stone balustrade at the end of the street where flights of stairs, some green with algae, plunged down. I looked over the trees and the gray and silver rooftops, far from the crowds at Champ de Mars.
When I eventually returned to the sidewalk, I turned onto a quiet, sloping road whose limestone mansions seemed as if they would go on forever, though every now and then there was a chance to break away—a place where a balustrade disappeared and in its place was a staircase down to who knows where. Some stairways are wide. Others, like rue des Eaux, are narrow alleys between buildings, shaded and mossy at the edges. I was on rue Raynouard in Passy, formerly the outskirts of Paris, where Benjamin Franklin lived during his ambassadorship to France, and trees and streetlamps accompany a pedestrian along the way.
At one point the sidewalk jagged, and there was neither staircase nor mansion—just a freestanding stone archway with wide, teal French doors, like an image from some Surrealist painting. One of the doors was closed, while the other had a large knocker. Beyond it lay a steep flight of stairs. I went through the open door, under the decorative wrought-iron transom, and took a step down.
Holding the paint-chipped railing I descended lower and lower until I was far beneath the level of the street, on the other side of a vast wall. There, on a little cobblestone patio, stood a house unlike any other I’d encountered. It was a pale, low-slung cottage, with teal shutters that matched the double doors at the top of the hill: number 47 rue Raynouard—Balzac’s doorstep.
He lived in an apartment in that house for about seven years, beginning in 1840, where it was not uncommon for him to work up to sixteen hours a day, writing and rewriting, including books in his series The Human Comedy. The house, now a museum, is just right for wandering alone. The stairs are narrow, and the wood floors creak. Visitors there are quiet and slow and often on their own. On display are books from Balzac’s personal library, proofs with his corrections, his work table and armchair, Rodin’s studies for a sculpture of the writer’s head, and Balzac’s 1834 walking stick “bubbling with turquoise,” as he described it, on a gold knob with thin tassels—a cane that he said had more success than all his works.
On the walls are original editions, manuscripts, and half-man, half-beast lithographs by the French artist and sometime Balzac collaborator J.J. Grandville: elephant men, bird people, a dog with the head of a man, a snake in women’s finery. The caricatures almost demanded a kind of intimacy of engagement, to be viewed one at a time, one person at a time.
Outside, below the thick ivy overtaking the latticework on the high wall to the street, is a small garden with assorted green metal chairs and benches amid the roses, overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Relaxed and nonchalant, it lacks the size, symmetry, and manicured perfection of the city’s formal gardens which, you don’t necessarily realize until you’re standing in its grass, comes as a relief. I thought of my friends’ happy backyard garden at the house by the bay.
Along a narrow dirt path around the bushes, a man on a garden chair was engrossed in a book. Beyond him, toward the back of the house, past the roses with soft petals beginning to brown and curl at the edges, were a pair of crumbling sphinxes. Their front paws were broken; their noses, too.
At one point after Balzac’s death, Marquet de Vasselot, a member of the Société des Gens de Lettres, a writer’s group that was commissioning a statue of Balzac, proposed that a sculpture be made portraying him as a winged sphinx. Ultimately, the public monument was entrusted to Rodin who, somewhat controversially, depicted Balzac in the dressing gown (it has subsequently been likened to a bathrobe) he wore around the house while writing and drinking copious amounts of coffee.
The sphinxes in the garden had lion’s bodies and h
uman heads and were crouching on either side of the path beside the house. You can make a game of finding sphinxes around Paris: outside the Hôtel de Sully, in the courtyard of the Musée du Louvre’s Gallerie des Antiques, around a fountain at Place du Châtelet, on the quai Aimé-Césaire along the Jardin des Tuileries.
Beyond the Eiffel Tower, it looked like rain. I sat on an empty bench. There was no waiting for better weather. There’s no waiting for ideal circumstances to enjoy the garden, to count sphinxes, to be open to wonder.
“The time to savor,” Bryant said, “is now.”
PART II
Summer
Istanbul
NERVE
Üsküdar
The Art of Anticipation
The more I surrendered to myself, to the self that would not be limited and narrowly defined, the more glorious a time I had with me and with life. I stayed open, ready, breathless even, for adventure.
—Eartha Kitt, Rejuvenate! (It’s Never Too Late)
Our little ferry looked like a life raft compared to the colossal tankers it was skirting on the Bosporus, the storied strait that slices between the hills of Europe and Asia. None of the passengers seemed concerned. People dangled their legs off the back of the boat and leaned over the bars along the sides, turning their faces to the hot breeze, the white sailboats, and the blue water sparkling in the sun. August in Istanbul.
Men circled the wood benches of riders, carrying trays of tea and neatly arranged snacks, trying to drum up customers as we moved farther from the European shore and the high walls of the Ciragan Palace Kempinski, the sumptuous hotel where I had recently checked in. There, beyond the palm and pink blooming Erguvan trees, in guest rooms with beds with tasseled canopies, it was easy to slip into an Ottoman-era fantasy.
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