Above is an 1867 portrait of the French artist Édouard Manet by his friend Henri Fantin-Latour. It is from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Institute’s site informs us: “Finely dressed and carrying an elegant walking stick, influential French artist Édouard Manet appears before a stark background evocative of his own paintings as well as photographic portraits of the time. This depiction confronted the public perception of Manet as a radical bohemian painter of coarse and confrontational compositions (for an example of this, see his Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers). Fantin-Latour instead portrayed him as the genteel man-about-town he actually was.” Indeed, Manet was to my own wandering mind a flâneur, a term used by Charles Baudelaire four years before this portrait was painted in his essay “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” (“The Painter of Modern Life”), which was focused on another artist, Constantin Guys, and was serialized in three installments in Le Figaro. Baudelaire used the essay to foster philosophically the nouvelle idée that artists break away from the academic coddling of their canvases in order to free themselves to engage with the felt ephemera of the more widely seen world, to stroll into its many societal and cultural and visual strata to be experienced before they more daringly documented with their brushes what they had in their le tour á pied brushed against. Baudelaire was not suggesting they enmesh their brilliance in the muddying of the mundane but to hone their art by redefining what it meant to be at home in a changing world, a world which not only so newly anticipated being seen but also alluringly longed to be worthy of the blankness of their canvases that awaited anew themselves.
“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes,” wrote Baudelaire in Le Figaro. “His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus, the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.”
Because of the historical time period in which the term was brought forth by Baudelaire, the flâneur was considered to be male, and its feminine terminology, the flâneuse, came into later use. Marcel Proust wrote of his own female version however in his overly lovely way and referred to her as a “passante,” but even that might have been a reference to an earlier poem by Baudelaire, “À une passante,” which was published in the magazine L’Artiste in 1855 and was collected in the second 1861 edition of his Fleurs du mal. Francophile Edmund White wrote a lovely book, not overly so, in 2001 about his time living in Paris and titled it The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris. In it he wrote, “Americans consider the sidewalk an anonymous backstage space, whereas for the French it is the stage itself … Americans are particularly ill-suited to be flaneurs. They are always driven by the urge towards self-improvement. In New York you can tell by people's body language that no one cares what other people think of them, whereas in Paris everyone is judging everyone and the only people who have this American-style insouciance are the insane.” Another American writer, the monologuist Cornelia Otis Skinner wrote in 1962, "there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city.” Honoré de Balzac writing in 1826: “Strolling is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. … To walk is to vegetate; to stroll is to live. To stroll is to enjoy, it is to collect witticisms, it is to admire sublime paintings of misfortune, love, joy, graceful or grotesque portraits; it is to look into the depths of a thousand existences: for the young, it is to desire everything, to possess everything; for an old man, it is to live the life of young people, it is to embrace their passions.”
Me? I am “circumflexible.” I am a flâneur in Paris. In London: a flaneur. I am an old man living a second youth.
Above two fellow Parisian flâneurs, heralds of spring themselves, eyeing these lilacs, other heralds of spring, and stopping perhaps like me to wonder if something so wondrous could actually be real. They were. I stop often along the sidewalks of London or Paris or wherever I might be now in the world where I live as a pilgrim and wonder too if this life I have manifested could , in fact, be real. It is.
Each day - like those blank canvases in Baudelaire’s time that were awaiting anew to be filled with an artistic life itself lived in new ways - I set out on this stroll through my new way of living. A new way of further documenting it will be these Wednesday newsletters in which I will let you know what I’ve found along the way here in Paris or my upcoming time in Santa Fe and New York City and Tangiers and Tunis or Provincetown and Vienna - an interesting side street you might like to visit yourselves some day, the best apple tart I’ve found, where to pee when the need can no longer be denied and you will not be denied entry when heading to a toilet in a hotel or bar, what cafes where the staffs will let you sit and work on your computer without running you off when you’re still sipping your coffee a couple of hours after having ordered it. This WEDNESDAY NEWSLETTER #1 is free to all subscribers, but starting next week #2 will be for paid subscribers only - like the POEM FOR A SUNDAY I now curate for paid subscribers and the latter two of the three SATURDAY RUBRICS and the complete chapters of the novel I am writing here in installments.
In the meantime, here is a little taste.
BEST APPLE TARTS IN LONDON - AND COFFEE AND PRICES
I first discovered St. George on King’s Road in Chelsea after a visit to the Saatchi Gallery . I loved it immediately. Cool well-cast staff. Cool clientele. Great inexpensive pastries and sandwiches and coffees. So I was thrilled when a branch opened up in the West End on St. Martin’s Lane. It became my new hangout where I’d go sit at the large table in the back and work for hours. The coffee is scrumptious and I had a collective crush on the baristas. But the apple tarts are - only about 2 pounds or 2 pounds 50 each - quite divine. As you can tell from the above photo, I could never just eat one. Closed on Mondays.
BEST CROISSANTS AND CINNAMON BUNS IN LONDON
Around the corner from where I live while in London is the bakery and cafe Hart & Lova. It is tucked away on 213a Belsize Road in Kilburn. I have yet to find a better croissant anywhere in the world and I am a croissant snob. Believe me: I’ve looked. The search has even included Paris where I am right now. The cinnamon bun is also great and comes with or without frosting. Although honestly, I’m a fan of the cinnamon swirl at the Prets in both London and Paris. Hart & Lova is closed on Monday and Tuesday.
MY NEW FAVORITE CAFE IN PARIS WITH THE MOST AMAZING SIDEBOARD OF PASTRIES - ESPECIALLY THE LEMON MERINGUE PIE
I am one who can develop crushes on cafes. My newest is on Le Loir dans la Théière in the Marais at 3 rue des Rosiers. I was told the other day that one can’t just order coffee and dessert during lunch but has to wait until 3 p.m. Instead of being frustrated, I looked on it as another opportunity to stroll about for a bit. The place reminds me of my favored hangouts of the Greenwich Village of my youth - sort of seedy but that’s what makes it so cool. It is certainly not fancy nor does it flaunt itself by fluffing up its appearance in ways that point up a desire to be something it is not. Its attraction is that it owns its age in the way that the most striking of French women and French men do as they, acknowledging and accepting acknowledgment without the flimsy need for affirmation but with the deeper flair of the flâneuse and the flâneur, take visual notice of the narrative through which they are mindfully navigating the magnificence of their more than duly lived daily lives. Open Monday - Friday 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Next Wednesday: more acknowledgments here …
Divine. I was there for these moments, looking over your healed shoulder!
I absolutely love this post! Baudelaire’s exquisite writing about flaneurs: “For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world…The spectator is a prince, who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.“ Wow
Balzac: “To stroll is to live.”
Edmund White: “ Americans consider the sidewalk an anonymous, backstage space, whereas for the French it is the stage itself.”
You as a flaneur strolling through your pilgrim life. And what better place to stroll and contemplate your canvas than Paris where you are now living and where you return each day to your tiny, temporary, garret home above the rooftops.
I love how you wove all of these pieces together. I love that you will be sharing more about what special treasures and pleasures you find along the way in your new way of living.
I look forward to beginning my Wednesdays here.