A Life in Paris – March 21, 1942

But the sweet light has returned. And that is stronger than everything. This morning, toward 11, I took the longest way to walk back home, along the quays…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

But the sweet light has returned. And that is stronger than everything. This morning, toward 11, I took the longest way to walk back home, along the quays. The air was silvery over the Seine, the palaces, the city, so peaceful. The sun was inflaming the poplar trees and the windows of the Louvre. The streets were just about empty. What silence! Never, for centuries, had spring set up its quarters so tranquilly in Paris. The river was bubbling. The nymph of the Seine had come into the city….Should I have turned my back on this felicity?

Jean Guéhenno

Notes:
• From Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944
• Jean Guéhenno was a French writer and intellectual who kept a diary during the WWII German occupation of France.

A Life in Paris – February 2, 1955

I went to see the Gilberts the other day (crossing the bridges over such a swollen Seine!)…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

I went to see the Gilberts the other day (crossing the bridges over such a swollen Seine!). […] I went up the Seine as far as Villeneuve-St-Georges and saw people rowing boats in the streets and leaving their houses by boat and it was terrible. All over France is was the same.

Sylvia Beach, to a friend

Notes:
• From The Letters of Sylvia Beach
• Sylvia Beach was an American who founded the original Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. She also published Ulysses by James Joyce.

Thoughts on Paris – January 16, 1867

I have sometimes commenced in my letters trying to give an account of beautie…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

I have sometimes commenced in my letters trying to give an account of beautie & twice I commenced a letter to Mr Holmes about the Galleries of the Louvre & Luxembourg, but the pleasure in seeing a picture cannot be conveyed by writing & I find the attempt contemptible. I can say a sunset picture is very fine with its red & yellow clouds, & if I go into rhapsody you admire my smartness and conclude the picture is a good one, but you really receive from it not the slightest pleasure or profit. […] The most in fact I could really do would be to send on a list of the artists & size of the frames.

Comparisons however may be made. A few of our pictures in the Sanitary Fair [in Philadelphia] have never I believed been surpassed; but I see here many just as good by the same men and thousands larger & grander as compositions.

The advantages here are nevertheless much greater than in America for students, a fine daylight school, & a professor who corrects sharply when one makes a hippopotamus of himself.

There is nothing of importance going on at Paris just now. The Seine is very high & there are fears it will still rise on account of the snows.

Thomas Eakins, to his father

Notes:
• From The Paris Letters of Thomas Eakins
• Thomas Eakins was an American artist.