HISTORY: CLÍONA NÍ RÍORDÁINreviews Paris to the Past: Traveling Through French History by TrainBy Ina Caro WWNorton & Company, 388pp. £19.99
THE LATE TONY JUDT wrote lyrically in his essay The Glory of the Rails, published earlier this year in the New York Review of Books, about the importance of the train in history, suggesting that no other invention has shaped our physical landscape and modelled space to the same degree. Ina Caro, who sees herself as a time traveller, has also lit on the train as a means to carry herself and her reader back through centuries of French history. Her book Paris to the Past: Traveling Thorough French History by Trainprovides an itinerary for the tourist to travel chronologically from the 12th century to the 19th century.
In a series of 24 chapters and a coda, entitled "My Favorite Emperor and Me", Caro leads her readers from Paris, though which she travels by metro, to a range of cities and towns, all accessible from the capital by train in a little over an hour. The principle is one used in a previous work, The Road from the Past: Traveling Through History in France(1996): the complexities of French history are explored century by century, allowing for an appreciation of the development of architecture and the acquisition of a real notion of the story of France.
And Caro is nothing if not a storyteller. The dedication says it all: Ina Caro’s travel book is inscribed to Bob, “her Prince Charming”, who has never turned into a frog and has visited the castle of Sleeping Beauty with her, in a land of magical food where “fish and asparagus taste better than cake”.
Paris to the Pastis travelogue as fairy tale. There are the beautiful women like Marie de Rohan and the tragic Marie Antoinette. There are the villains, the infamous Marie de Médicis, for instance, suspected of being the instigator of the death of her husband, Henry IV. Readers are treated to a grisly description of the death of the red-headed assassin, François Ravillac. Marie de Médicis's saving grace, in Caro's eyes, was her construction of the palace in the Luxembourg Gardens, home to the present-day French senate.
Caro has her heroes too. The 10-year-old peasant boy, for example, who was to rise and become Abbot Suger, and whose “chubby little figure” is to be found in his enduring monument, the Basilica of St Denis. Caro writes beautifully of Suger’s inspiration and motivation; her writing on this and the other monuments of the age of cathedrals – Laon, Chartres, Reims, Rouen and so on – should inspire her readers to venture out, as she does, to explore buildings that are often left aside in the itinerary of those travelling to Paris. Caro on architecture is always excellent, analysing structures such as the chateau of Angers, or describing in great detail the Louis XII wing of the chateau of Blois.
She excels also at what she calls gossip, arguing that a little of it “helps us to understand larger historical trends”. We are treated to the tale of how the Widow Scarron schemingly pushed Louis XIV’s mistress, her friend Athenaïs de Montespan, aside, to wed him secretly after the death of his wife Marie-Thérèse. Alas, she who was to be known as Madame de Maintenon was never to be publically acknowledged as queen. Caro goes on to suggest mischievously that, in return for these secret nuptials, the essentially frigid madame was to endure the advances of the notoriously active king into her old age. All sources for the historical and architectural information are acknowledged, chapter by chapter, at the back of the book.
Charming and gossipy as the book may be, it is not to be used as a travel guide; rather, it should be read by the armchair traveller, or taken as a companion piece to other guidebooks. Caro herself refers repeatedly to her reliance on the Michelin and Gault Millau guides in her quest for good restaurants and hotels. She makes factual errors, also, in relation to her travel arrangements. Telling us that the Luxembourg Palace is open on Sundays, she reveals that she goes there on a private visit, obtained through personal contacts, on a weekday because she cannot interrupt her sacred Sunday ritual of breakfast and a stroll down Rue Mouffetard. However, the Palais du Luxembourg is open to the public on Saturdays, not Sundays. Ordinary citizens can also visit the senate in session and listen to debates. Caro’s fear that the orchards of Normandy might be transformed into asparagus patches at the behest of EU economists is the stuff of rural legends.
For me, though, the most revealing flaw comes when she suggests that one can take a TGV from Gare d'Austerlitz to Orléans. Austerlitz has no TGV lines, and as a result has seen a steady decline in its traffic since the introduction of the trains à grande vitesse. The high-speed trains have revolutionised travel in France, putting places such as Strasbourg, Lyons and even Marseilles in easy reach of Paris, at two or three hours' distance.
This feat, a tribute to French investment in the notion of civil society, is almost at odds with Caro’s conception of herself as a traveller. She repeatedly tells us that she hates crowds; she travels again and again to Versailles in order to visit it when no one is around; she shares with us the fact that, as first-class travellers, she and her husband enjoy assigned seats on the train. With the TGV system, reservations are obligatory, and all travellers, be they first or second class, have assigned seats. Nowhere does she indicate that by booking in advance it is possible to obtain cheaper seats and to travel to places such as La Rochelle for as little as €22. Cost is not a concern.
As Tony Judt pointed out, a transformational virtue of the train was that it opened travel to the masses, and is based on an underlying notion of collective benefit to the individual. Despite their centrality to the concept of the book, one sets Paris to the Pastaside feeling that Caro has no great love for trains or for what they represent; they are simply the means for her to marshal history into an orderly, well-mannered narrative. Thomas the Tank Engine would be quite out of place, after all, in the tale of the Sleeping Beauty.
Clíona Ní Ríordáin recently edited the bilingual volume Four Irish Poets/Quatre poètes irlandais(Dedalus Press). She lives in Paris and teaches at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle
