a blind flaneur

Édouard Manet. Woman in a Bathtub. 1878-79.pastel on paper 55×45cm. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.
Méry Laurent was the model for Odette, the actress who married Swann in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. She also was Manet’s lover and muse for a time, when she modeled for this pastel.
Jeffrey Meyers writes in Impressionist Quartet (p. […]

Prise de la Bastille by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
The first time I came up from underground at the Bastille Metro stop, I imagined hearing the prisoners’ chorus from Fidelio as they sang “Luft und Leit.” On some rational level I knew what awaited me above ground, but on a deeper, more archetypal plane, I […]

Two 19th-century illustrations depict Place de la Bastille in the years before and after Victor Hugo ’s description of the Elephant in Les Misérables IV.6. 2: [above left] Elephant caparaconne d’or by Alvoine, from the time of Napoleon; [below left] La Colonne de Julliet, from the time of Louis-Phillippe.
The source for these illustrations is […]