Praeterita

I've been in Paris for nearly two weeks, teaching a class for the study abroad program of Columbia College Chicago. Instead of visiting the monuments and major tourist sites, I've picked up where I left off last year, wandering around without much of a plan, except to change direction as soon as I see a view down a side street that takes my interest. Last weekend, I meandered through the southern part of the fourteenth arrondissement towards the Parc Montsouris. On the way, you come across several buildings that were home to many artists and writers at seminal stages in their development. The first is the Villa Seurat, on the Rue de la Tombe Issoire: The site originally contained a house used by the great Post-impressionist painter Seurat, which is renown enough. But the current building, constructed in the 1920s in an art deco style, became a warren of studios that was home to an impressive hothouse of creative people: the great painter Chaim Soutine, writer Henry Mil...

There are reasons to believe that Parisians are not necessarily as enamoured of their city as the millions of starry-eyed tourists who go there every year. People with a longer acquaintance of the place, who are married to or have Parisian friends, talk about the dissatisfaction that the natives have with many aspects of life in the capital. Some of these complaints would be familiar to New Yorkers or Londoners: rents are getting higher all the time, you have to work too hard just to feel like you're barely keeping up, it's too depressing in winter and too hot in summer, traffic congestion is worse than ever, there are too many tourists, it's being turned into a tax-haven playpen for foreign billionaires. Some of the complaints are specifically French: ridiculously complicated and burdensome tax regime, a top heavy bureaucracy that slows down all interactions with officialdom, a general societal 'can't-do' attitude that can make a battle out of anything fr...