Comments on Hollande's Speech

I'd like to thank Judah Bellin for sending me this link to the (translated) transcript of French President Francois Hollande's speech, made on the anniversary of the infamous Vel d'Hiv roundup in Paris.  Hollande actually made this speech during the week that I was in Italy, which is rather ironic, and could explain why I didn't hear about it when I was in Europe this summer.

The Vel d'Hiv roundup was a mass arrest of over 13,000 Jews living in Paris in the summer of 1942, when Paris was under German occupation.  Many were deported from Drancy to Auschwitz, and many others were interned, temporarily in the Velodrome d'Hiver (hence the name of the event).  The raid marked the beginning of such roundups in France.  By the end of World War II, approximately 70-76,000 Jews had been deported from France, to be killed in the death camps in Poland, especially Auschwitz.  Virtually none returned.

With that introduction, here are my comments on the President's speech:

"The infamy of the Vel d’Hiv was part of an undertaking that had no precedent and has no comparison: the Holocaust."  Unfortunately, there were precedents to the Holocaust.  The most obvious was the Armenian genocide which took place in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, also under the smoke-screen of war.  Estimates vary widely as to the number of Armenian murdered by the bands of thugs hired by the Ottoman government, from as low as 600,000, to over 1.5 million (my own advisor, Prof. Hull, believes that 1.5-2 million Armenians died in the genocide).  If these upper estimates are correct, than approximately the same proportions of Armenians died in the Armenian Genocide as the proportion of Jews who died in the Holocaust.  Although Kemal Ataturk (the father of the Republic of Turkey) was not personally involved in the massacred, he shielded many high-level former Ottoman officials from post-war justice.  Many members of Ataturk's administration were tainted, including his minister of education.  Hitler knew that Ottoman officials had evaded justice, and is on-record as having referred to the world's forgetting of the war crime.  Just as there is Holocaust denial, there is Armenian Genocide denial; the Turkish government still bars scholars from accessing the relevant archives.

"[The victims] believed that the country of the great Revolution and the City of Light would be a safe haven for them. They loved the Republic with a passion born of gratitude."  This statement obscures, and, indeed, the entire speech ignores, one of the most salient facts of Jewish Holocaust victims in France: they were not French.  The Vichy regime was conservative and nativist, and French antisemitism is not identical to German antisemitism.  Whereas the Nazis considered the most dangerous kind of Jew to be the fully assimilated one (and thus the one hardest to detect and to eradicate), Vichy accepted and even protected Jews who had been fully assimilated for several generations.  There were several Vichy-era trials of individuals suing to avoid being considered Jewish: some succeeded, by proving that they were observant Catholics, etc.; lack of circumcision was considered significant proof of assimilation.  However, in Inquisitorial fear of crypto-Jews, Vichy stripped thousands of recently-naturalized immigrants, many of them Jewish, of their French citizenship (including at least one woman in the region I studied this summer).  Moreover, many of the deportees were refugees from Poland, who had fled from the approaching German troops, and had fled to France, still in the time of the Third Republic (which had voted itself out of existence by investing Petain with full powers approximately two years before the Vel d'Hiv roundup).  Most deportees were not French citizens: Vichy even agreed to deport additional non-French Jews from the Unoccupied Zone, in exchange for promises from the Nazis that they would spare an equal number of French Jews in the Occupied Zone.  It was the unassimilated Jews, who felt the weakest feelings of allegiance to France, who were most likely to be deported.  By contrast, assimilated French Jews were more likely to have the connections and resources necessary to evade arrest; sometimes, this was nothing more than a tip-off from a sympathetic policeman, which could mean the difference between life and death for a family.

"Indeed, it was in Paris in 1791, under the National Constituent Assembly, that Jews had become fully fledged citizens for the first time in Europe. "  This statement should be highly qualified.  First, when the First Republican government decided to grant civil rights to Jews, as citizens, they ignored the Ashkenazim.  The first Jews to become French were actually the Sephardim, who had come to France from Spain, Portugal, and Navarre (sometimes by way of the Netherlands).  Second, the National Assembly desired to give (these) Jews everything as individuals, and nothing as a nation, the very sort of state-within-a-state which the forces Revolution opposed.  The granting of citizenship was more a strategy for homogenizing and uniting France than a humanitarian goal in and of itself.  The Sephardim were an easier population to work on than the Ashkenazim: it was the Sephardim, in the Netherlands, who, in the 17th century, became the first "secular Jews," i.e. Jews who did not live in Jewish communities (in some cases, ghettos/shtetls) ruled largely by Jewish law.  As a fully-assimilated American Jew who openly embraces secular culture, I clearly do not see this kind of development as detrimental: many more traditional Jews, however, do.

"Later, others had found in France a land of welcome, a chance at life, a promise of protection. "  This is correct.  Following the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) that resulted in Alsace-Lorraine becoming annexed to the new state of Germany, and inaugurated the French Third Republic, many Alsatian Jews found it safer to emigrate to France, and for their children to learn to speak a new language, than to live in a German state.  They were far more welcome in the pluralistic Third Republic; I met an Alsatian (i.e. yekki) family when I was in Paris, and had Shabbat dinner with them.

"The truth is that French police—on the basis of the lists they had themselves drawn up—undertook to arrest the thousands of innocent people trapped on July 16, 1942. And that the French gendarmerie escorted them to the internment camps.  The truth is that no German soldiers—not a single one—were mobilized at any stage of the operation.  The truth is that this crime was committed in France, by France."  Absolutely true, and most important part of this speech.  The Nazis could never have accomplished what they did in France, had they not received an enormous amount of aid from the French civil bureaucracy and police force.

"To his great credit, President Jacques Chirac recognized this truth, in this very spot on July 16, 1995. "  Whatever else I may think of former President Chirac, he did inaugurate the world's first museum of Jewish art and culture.  My cousin Bruno remembers it.

"France, country of the Enlightenment and human rights, land of welcome and asylum, France, that day, was committing the irreparable.  But the truth is also that the crime of the Vel d’Hiv was committed against France, against her values, against her principles, against her ideal."  The Enlightenment (unlike the Renaissance) was often antisemitic, with such monumental figures as David Hume and Voltaire making antisemitic (as well as racist) remarks.  Voltaire, who for the contemporary French, personified the Enlightenment, was one of the most antisemitic writers whose books I have ever read.  His Philosophical Dictionary reads like a angry screed against the people who he considered to be a barbarous tribe of Arab swindlers and murderers.  He misquotes and misreads to no end the copy of Rashi which he got his hands on (interestingly, his own idea of divinity is not too different from that of Maimonides, whom he never mentions, even once).  If Voltaire is truly representative of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment legitimately represents French ideals, then, no, the eviction of the Jews from France is not in contradiction to these ideals.  Iconoclast that I am, I believe that there is no such thing as any kind of lasting, essentially French value, principle, or ideal. 

"Honor was saved by the Righteous, by all those who were able to rise up against barbarism, by those anonymous heroes who hid a neighbor here, helped another there, and risked their lives to save those of innocent people. By all those French people who enabled three quarters of France’s Jews to survive."  This is all true.  However, the French police were also often very incompetent, especially in comparison to the Germans.

"We cannot tolerate the fact that two out of three young French people do not know what the Vel d’Hiv roundup was. "  I did not know this statistic, but it does not surprise me.  Nobody know any history anymore.

"The Shoah was not created from a vacuum and did not emerge from nowhere. True, it was set in motion by the unprecedented and terrifying combination of single-mindedness in its racist frenzy and industrial rationality in its execution.  But it was also made possible by centuries of blindness, stupidity, lies, and hatred. It was preceded by many warning signs, which failed to alert people’s consciences."  Yes, I would agree with the entirety of this statement.

"Every Saturday morning, in every French synagogue, at the end of the service, the prayer of France’s Jews rings out, the prayer they utter for the homeland they love and want to serve. “May France live in happiness and prosperity. May unity and harmony make her strong and great. May she enjoy lasting peace and preserve her spirit of nobility among the nations.” "  It's true: I've seen it.

~JD

Hillel Nostalgia

As usual, it's taking me too long to write the blog post that I want to write.  So here is my thought of the day, which came at the most inopportune moment.  Orly and Arielle, this one is for you.
I visited Rabbi Brian in his office at Anabel Taylor Hall on Thursday afternoon, discussing High Holiday planning, and this year's prospects for a viable KOACH community.  (On a side note, I'm not very hopeful.)  All of a sudden, while I was supposed to be discussing the next day's bonfire, and this Friday night's Shabbat dinner, a wave of nostalgia hit me, hard, and I drifted back three years.

It is 2009, this very same weekend.  I remember visiting clubfest in Barton Hall with my Mother, and meeting Rabbi Jason.  I somehow make it to Appel Commons, upstairs, that evening.  I meet Orly and Victor, and sit next to Rob Levine; somehow incredibly, someone suggests that I revive a defunct book club.
Then it is Sunday, and I go to Collegetown to see Andrew and Erica, and Andrew tells me to spend time with Arielle, who will keep me safe from Orly.
Monday, at the barbecue: I arrive too late to receive any food.  So does the poor homeless guy in the line in front of me.
Tuesday: I am in the former Bookery, with Rebecca as backup, trying to negotiate an order of books.
Classes begin.  Arielle sits next to me in my Islamic Civilization class.
It is Friday night again; I'm meeting Aaron Sarna, and trying to stay out of people's way.  I don't feel very welcome.
Another Friday night, and Becky is asking me, in the corner of 104 West!, by the hand-washing station, whether I can read the first Torah portion on Rosh Hashanah.
I'm struggling to read, despite my practice.
I'm in front of a scroll again, but back in my parents' synagogue, reading the fourth portion for Yom Kippur.  I hurry back to campus, having missed class (my Freshman writing seminar) for the first time, albeit with an excuse.  I make it to Initiation to Greek Culture, though.  That evening, my friend Nick helps me break my fast.
More time spins by, and I go home to to celebrate the first night of Sukkot with my parents.  After the holiday is over, I don't help Orly and Jacob dismantle the Sukkah: I miss out on fun and pizza.
I meet Sam Moss one night at Shabbat dinner.  Nice guy, who works for the governor.
Nathan Cohen asks me to write a devar Torah.  I get very excited.  It's supremely stupid, and I make a fool of myself, in front of everyone.  An older man approaches me in order to harass me afterwards, and Annie sticks up for me.  I feel pretty terrible for the rest of the night.

The next week, it turns out that at least two people, two other freshmen, had been paying attention to what I had been saying.  One is Harry, and I can't really remember the other one's name, but she seems upset that I feel so ignorant around everyone else.  After nightfall on Saturday, she calls me, having gotten my phone number from Victor.  She says that her name is Peninah, and want to know if I would like to start studying with her.
I write a pseudo-Platonic dialogue for my Initiation to Greek Culture class, and Orly gets really excited.  She wants to read the whole thing.
Chanukah is approaching, and I attend some dreidel-making event, dragging Rebecca along with me.  I regret it afterwards.
There's some kind of doughnut-eating contest at the dining hall on the first Friday night of Chanukah.   Noah and Lazar both bet large piles of Chanukah gelt on me, with 7:1 odds against.  Nathan Cohen is the announcer, and very obviously loves his job.  Somehow, I end up out-eating the others.  Nobody can quite believe it, but Victor is very happly  I walk back to my dormitory, laughing all the way.
It's the end of the semester, and I'm at the kosher dining hall on a weeknight.  Another Freshman, who lives in Highrise 5, is leaving around midnight, and has a few hours to spend with me.  I can remember him having made comments about the Yemenite custom of eating chicken with one's bare hands before, but I don't want him to feel lonely, so I offer to spend the rest of the evening with him.  He teaches me the combination for front door of the CJL, and he ends up spending the rest of the night teaching me 1900 years of history, or so.
It's wintertime, and I return home.  I spend almost every day writing long e-mails to Peninah.

Then I realized that I was supposed to be paying attention to planning High Holidays, and that I wasn't being very respectful to Rabbi Brian.  For the rest of the day, I thought more about the first semester of my Freshman year, than I did about the first semester of my Senior year.

~JD

In JFK

I'm sitting in JFK International Airport right now, and will try to hammer something out before my commuter flight leaves for the Syracuse airport (and will probably finish the next day).  I've had a safe, ordinary journey, which ended my fairly boring last week in Tours.  Only 3 things happened the whole time, and two of them were Skype conversations (one of which was cut short), which is why I've been so silent about the end of my trip. On the flight from Paris to New York, I sat with a very young couple (as in, 25 or so).  It's weird to think that I'll be that age in just a few years.
But, let me review, first, my summer thus far (I'm quite sleep-deprived, and my eyes are crossing, so don't hold me accountable if I make a few typos).  It began with my brother Sam and some other significant people in my life graduating from Cornell, and me eating their cake (definitely the best part there).  Then, I flew off almost immediately with Rabbi Eli, Adam, Ben, and Alex to Tzfat.  I studied in the Yeshiva there with Rabbi Eli, Rav Asi, and their colleagues, and met some new friends, like Yossi, Dovid, Aron, and Jake.  I also read a lot on my own.  On the weekends, I visited biblical archaeological sites, such as Beit-El, Shiloh, and Gilgal.  I even made it to Jerusalem, and got to see Peninah there.
I flew to France, and spent my first four weeks or so in Tours, where I dove into the departmental archives on France in the time of World War II, looking in particular at the life and treatment of the Jews of Indre-et-Loire.  I visited a few castles; Sam visited me; I made crepes, and flipped them in the air; I helped make a minyan at a Sephardi synagogue.  I spent a single full day in Paris, where I cross-referenced names I had found in Tours in the Shoah Memorial.  I also stopped by Angers for a few days, to check up on a letter that I found in the Tours archives, and learned a little bit there about what happened in World War II in Loire-et-Cher.  I visited another castle, and then decided to leave for Italy.
I climbed a lot of stairs in Florence, looked at some famous doors and paintings, and visited the cathedral.  I remembered what it was like to be in a country with mosquitoes, of which France is free.  I had an aliyah in the most beautiful synagogue I've ever visited, and spent a day in Rome, where I was very hot, and visited some Roman ruins (also, sometime during the day, I crossed the border into Vatican city).  I made a stop in Milano, where I visited the Cathedral and the Sforzas.  Then, I was back in Paris, being inefficient, and worrying about my belongings being stolen, until I relocated to the hostel in Tours, where I've been since then, being magnificently incapable of getting my work done.
OK, flight boarding now!
~JD

Crazy People and Me

Rather than thinking about how much I still have left to write on my paper, I'm going to raise a question that I've had for several years; recent events have encouraged me to think further:

Why are crazy people attracted to me?

I am entirely serious.  Everywhere I go in the world, whether it's Paris, Tours, Florence, Tzfat, London, or even Ithaca, people who are drunk, or mentally disturbed are attracted to me, like iron filings are attracted to a magnet.  I don't know whether it's because I'm particularly gullible-looking, or that I look non-threatening, but people who are not in normal states of mind seem to find me an excellent person to approach, and begin pouring out what they have to say.  I have heard an embarrassing number of people pour out their life stories, or significant portions thereof, to me.  I've had a drunk man from the D.R. living in France start interrogating me about Bob Marley; I've had an unbalanced U.S. veteran start telling me about the last 20 years of his life; I've had a (homeless?) man in Ithaca tell me about why he thinks Cornell erected all of the fences on the campus bridges last year; I've had a homeless American living in Israel tell me what he thinks is wrong with the Chabad movement.  Please note that all of these people (and the others like them) are is in addition to various European con-artists and beggars, who also tend to target me.  Discussing all such encounters is too broad of a topic; for the moment, I'm only discussing who want my sympathy, not my money.

What prompted me to write this entry was my series of encounters with one of my hostel roommates.  He is Parisian, but his girlfriend threw him out of his apartment, so he had no choice but to crash in a hostel.  He is a radical left-wing exponent of conspiracy theories, and is editor of a magazine of which he is the only contributing writer; I don't know if it has ever been published.  He has also written a book.  He told me that he had the idea for the book when, after reading the Bible ten times, he had a dream in which Queen Esther showed him his manuscript of a book about India on the monitor of a computer with an all-red keyboard.  He proceeded to show me the electronic version of his book, magazine, etc., and to begin to describe to me all of his other ideas, including conspiracy theories.  On two occasions, I've needed to politely excuse myself from his company, because I was going to be late (both times I was entirely truthful).  His English is quite good, and we communicated back and forth, alternating language.  He is one of the reasons I did not feel comfortable staying in the d’Artagnan.

I'm not saying this in complaint, or in denunciation: I know the man's name, but I'd rather not write it, for fear that this will somehow come back to haunt him.  I’m bringing it up to ask: why me?

There are three possible answers:

1) Either the way I look, or the way I hold myself, or the pheremonic signals I exude indicate that I am someone who will not protest to listening to otherwise unusual stories and narratives.

2) I look and appear the same as everyone else, but unlike everyone else, I actually stop to listen when crazy people start speaking, whereas everyone else pretends that they don’t hear, and walk very, very quickly away from the offending presence.

3) Actually, everyone has these encounters.  I just haven’t noticed it.

I can only think of one occasion in which I have seen a drunk person (on Saint Patrick’s Day) walk over to one of my friends, rather than me, and start talking to him.  My friend (no, I won’t say who it is, but he sometimes reads this blog) responded very warmly and politely, as is normal for him.  In other words, this happens at least sometimes to other people; I don’t know whether this is reassuring or worrisome, because it means that other people sometimes also experience these uncomfortable moments.

OK, everyone have a good weekend (and a Shabbat Shalom, for those to whom it applies), enjoy the remaining weeks of summer vacation, etc.  There is someone on the other side of the world thinking of you right… NOW!

~JD

Fontainebleau and Vaux-le-Vicomte

                I finally made it to two French chateaux in Ile-de-France I should have visited months ago.  I got out of bed a little before 7:00, and bought an all-day Ile-de-France transportation pass from the Gare de Lyon, in central Paris.  I took the RER southeast, well outside the city limits, and after about 40 minutes of Kindle-bliss, I hopped off the train, into a light drizzle at the town of Fontainebleau.  I easily found the bus waiting outside the station, jumped on, riding for just a few stops, and piling out with the rest of the riders at the stop aptly named “chateau.” 

                From the outside, Fontainebleau doesn’t look particularly impressive.  It has a fairly broad park (it was raining, so I didn’t explore too much), but except for its size, and a particularly fancy entry staircase in the shape of a broad horseshoe, it could be just another 17^th-  or 18^th-century bourgeois mansion, kind of like Cheverney.  But no, the Chateau de Fontainebleau is a royal residence, and an impressive one, too.  Although the original keep on the site dates from the 12^th century, the current edifice dates mostly from the time of Francois I (i.e. from the early 16^th century), and is the only French royal residence left entirely intact.  It isn’t as monstrous as Versailles, as grand as the Louvre, as picturesque as Chenonceau, or as imposing as Chambord, but it’s certainly one of the most interesting castles I’ve visited, and all the more worth the visit after seeing how the Italians preserve their historic monuments.

                The tour of the chateau begins with the apartments of Napoleon I, who made the castle his principal residence.  For this reason, they have a lot of his junk: one begins to wonder who conserved all of it, all of these years, and why it was not all lost.  The man certainly had a lot of ornamental swords, ceremonial outfits, and sets of shaving supplies.  He even had one of those cool forks which have joints in the handle, so that campers can stick them in their backpacks without impaling themselves on the tines -- except that Napoleon’s were made of gold, and campers’ aren’t.  Some Napoleon fan even saved his traveling chamber pot.  No, there was some pretty cool stuff there, that made me think of my Mother, the costume historian -- the suit that Napoleon wore to his imperial anointing, as seen in David’s famous painting, for instance.  Later in the tour of the museum, I was also surprised to find his throneroom -- complete with a throne, the identical twin of which I’ve seen in the Napoleon III apartments in the Louvre, golden bees and all.  Napoleon was into these bees: you can see them embroidered onto many of his royal outfits, if you look closely enough at paintings of him.  The irony is that these golden bees were symbols of French royalty; the French Revolution really had come full circle!  One of the greatest ironies was in the commemorative book made for his anointing ceremony (a lot like the programs for college graduations, but in hardcover), which gave the date of the ceremony as Frimaire, Year XII of the Republic, using the Revolutionary calendar to date the ascension of the Consul to his status as Emperor, and thus the end of the French First Republic.  Now we’re on the Fifth, which still hasn’t exceeded the length of the Third, even… What form of government will the French have when our grandchildren are our age?

                Despite the Napoleonic aspects of the visit, there is a very literal royal (Vallois as well as Bourbon) stamp upon the house -- because the various residents literally stamped and carved their initials onto all available space, wall and ceiling!  Francois I loved the letter F, and placed it, along with his other personal symbols of the salamander and the triple fleur-de-lis, all over his house.  His son and successor, Henri II, made the finishing touches on certain rooms, including one of the main dining rooms, and had the prerogative, therefore, of covering the surfaces with the letter H, with interlocking crescent moons (his own personal emblem), and the initials C and D, for his wife and mistress, respectively (just like at Chenonceau).  There was also an AA who made her mark at Fontainebleau (no, not you AA, but feel better!), namely Anne of Austria, mother of Louis XIV, especially in one of the two chapels (she was a deeply religious woman, after all).  I saw just a few back-to-back block Ls, too, characteristic of the biggest L of them all.  His successor, Louis XV, left a completely different kind of royal L behind: cursive, and, when paired, facing the other L head-on.  Although it seems as if I’m rambling, I’ve never seen so many royal initials displayed so prominently in any chateau.  I think that all of these people were trying to make a point: they owned this space.

                Only a small portion of the chateau is on display to visitors, but there is a great deal of art and furniture, even in this section.  The collections also have a historic dimension: I saw the table where, according to lore, Napoleon signed his resignation in 1814.  I did not see where Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau, which revoked the famous Edict of Nantes of his grandfather, Henri IV, (it had given legal recognition and protection to Huguenots).  To be honest, that was the only event I had previously associated with Fontainebleau, so missing this, wherever it might have been, was a slight disappointment.  Nevertheless, there was so much to see at Fontainebleau!  There is the same array of royal bedchambers, chapels, wall and ceiling paintings, fine furniture, art objects, dining rooms, dancing halls, busts of famous Roman dudes, allegorical art, biblical art, classical art, seasonally-themed art, etc., at Versailles: for better or for worse, my eyes are just beginning to glaze over.  I

                It was nearly 3:00 pm by the time I left Fontainebleau.  I boarded the train in the direction of Paris, uncertain of whether or not I would stay on or get off when the train stopped at Melun, the closest railway station to Vaux-le-Vicomte.  I hadn’t eaten, and was tired from my visit to Fontainebleau; then I realized that I might never visit France again for years, and I thought about what I know certain friends and Mothers I know would do if they were in such a situation had such an opportunity to visit another chateau, and I felt my legs, of their own accord, stand me up and walk me to door, when the train stopped at Melun. 

                One reason for my hesitation was that I knew that the only ways to access Vaux-le-Vicomte are 1) by car, 2) by shuttle, and 3) by taxi.  I don’t have my own car here, and the shuttle only runs on Sunday, so I knew that I would need to take a taxi, in order to make it across the highway, and reach Vaux-le-Vicomte.  It was a 20-euro ride each way, according to the taxi driver waiting by the train station, a cost which I would normally not pay to access a single castle (this was in addition to the cost of my train ticket and of the entrance fee itself), but I reminded myself that I would kick myself for years for passing up the opportunity if I didn’t jump for it now, and that I had swallowed many such fees in Italy.  Louis would have taken a taxi, had he been around today.

                Vaux-le-Vicomte, like so many other chateaux in Paris, boasts that it inspired Versailles.  In my honest opinion, very few of these claims are sincere this, and, what’s more, encourage teleological thinking in the history of architecture and landscape architecture.  Vaux has a very real claim to inspiring Versailles, though.  For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Nicolas Fouquet, superintendant of finances under Louis XIV during the Sun King’s minority, hired the architect Vau to design him a splendid mansion.  The place had extensive gardens, which Fouquet hired the most important gardener (what we would now call a landscape architect), André Le Notre, to design, and included the world’s first fountains that shot the water upward in a jet (you need good engineering for that).  Fouquet was the friend, patron, and protector of many of the artists and intellectuals of the day, most famously, of La Fontaine and Moliere.  The Cardinal de Mazarin, who called the shots for the young king much as the Cardinal de Richelieu called the shots under Louis XIII (think The Three Musketeers) died in 1661, and Louis eagerly rose to take the reins of the kingdom fully in hand.  At this time, Fouquet’s job gave him immense power over the finances of the kingdom: every single bill approving the use of royal funds required his signature, thus giving him a tremendous veto power.  He had also been close to Mazarin.  In 1661, he invited the king, and everyone who was anyone in the French court, to a gigantic party at his house, a kind of open house.  Moliere had even prepared a new comedy-ballet especially for the occasion, Les Fâcheux (and by “prepare” I mean “write, direct, choreograph, and lead in”).   Louis didn’t take the party the way Fouquet had intended -- though it was nominally in honor of him, Louis considered such an evident display of wealth and power to be a threat.  Also somewhat in fear of seeing Fouquet become a new Mazarin or Richelieu, Louis had him arrested by none other than the Sieur d’Artagnan (yes, back to The Three Musketeers again -- he was a real person), and belligerently pursued his trial.  It was no longer a time when a king could straightaway order the execution of an innocent man, and so, the trial dragged on.  During this time, papers were discovered in Fouquet’s possession, indicating that Fouquet had fortified his fortress of Belle-Ile, to withdraw to, with his family, should fall from favor, as he did.  After three years or so, he was imprisoned, too few judges having voted for execution, and he died in prison in 1680.  Louis got his wish, and the post of superintendant of finances was abolished, and Louis had to sign every spending bill -- every one -- himself.  Fouquet’s job was unofficially taken by highly-efficient and quasi-despotic Jean-Baptist Colbert, who became Comptroller-General of Finances.  My Mother can tell you all about this guy, and his economic policy, and how he kidnapped lacemakers. 

                But Vaux-le-Vicomte lives on.  Unfortunately, the dome was under construction, but I could visit Fouquet’s private quarters, as well as the main castle, and the very extensive gardens.  Although they have some decent historical background, and some OK art, the visits are neither particularly informative, nor do they offer particularly memorable artwork.  Still, in many ways, it is easy to see how, if you took Vaux, and stretched it out until it was the size of Chambord, it would turn out looking something like Versailles.  The castle has good background information on Fouquet’s trial, and has done a good job identifying all of the artists, mathematicians, playwrights, poets, etc., who depended upon him.  The Fouquet family emblem was a squirrel rampant, which is depicted in painting and tapestry across the house.  Apparently, when Colbert seized some of Fouquet’s tapestry’s after the latter’s disgrace, arrest, and imprisonment, he had the embroidery of the squirrels removed, and his own emblem, that of a snake, replace it.  The ceilings and walls of the house were painted by Charles Le Brun, who went on to work at Versailles, just like Le Notre.  Not all of the ceiling paintings are finished, though: in one case, there’s nothing but an oval with clouds.  Perhaps some muse or allegory was planned to actually feature in the painting, but Le Brun never had the opportunity, because Fouquet was arrested first?  It seems likely.

                The castle also had a temporary exhibit on Le Notre, and the various gardens he designed.  He ended up being ennobled by Louis, and even had the opportunity to design his own coat of arms.  His design featured a cabbage, and three silver snails.  He was a very modest guy, and everyone at court liked and admired him -- he had no enemies.  I really wish someone who studies landscape architecture and such had been with me to appreciate (and explain to me) the 3D models. 

                It was nearly 6:00 pm when I finally left the castle proper, and walked out to the gardens.  I had a nice walk around the statues, which are, unfortunately, not in good repair.  Lack of maintenance has caused some of them to become so covered with moss and lichen that that they are no longer recognizable as the figures from Greco-Roman mythology which they once represented.  It would be a good place to have an enormous royal party, which was probably the point.

                When I left the castle, at about 6:40 pm, I realized that there were no taxis waiting.  I don’t think that there was any way for visitors who hadn’t driven to Vaux to make it home.  I realized that I either had to ask another tour group for a ride, or be stranded.  The group leaving right behind me was speaking English, and I asked me if they could drop me off in a town with a train station, it didn’t matter where, exactly, on their way back.  I realize that this probably wasn’t the safest thing to do, but they were friendly, and didn’t begrudge me the seat, or, as far as I can tell, redirect much from their route (they were driving in the opposite direction of Melun, which was only 10 minutes away).  I took the train back to Paris, took the Metro back to the d’Artagnan, and, the next morning (i.e. today, Tuesday), took the SNCF train back to Tours, to stay at the hostel there until  I leave on August 8^th.

                I’m sorry that I’ve relocated again, but I was not entirely safe in my hostel in the 20^th arrondissement, according to what the Rabbi’s wife told me on Shabbat.  So now, I have 8 days to relax, read… and write!  I’ve got about 19 pages of my thesis written, and hope to have finished the 1^st draft by the time I arrive back home in Ithaca.

                I’m thinking of you all!

~JD

“Every man, in the state of nature, has a power to kill a murderer, both to deter others from doing the like injury, which no reparation can compensate, by the example of the punishment that attends it from every body, and also to secure men from the attempts of a criminal, who having renounced reason, the common rule and measure G-d hath given to [hu]mankind, hath, by the unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all [hu]mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a lion or a tyger, one of those wild savage beasts, with whom men can have no society or security” (John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 2.11).

In Paris, Thinking of Ithaca

Hello cool people!

It’s been a very quiet week for me, here in the booming metropolis of Paris.  I arrived at the d’Artagnan hostel late on Monday night, after a fairly uneventful train ride from Florence, via Zürich, during which Henry James (and others) kept me entertained.

Since then, I have been procrastinating, and, to be fair, not really getting much done.  I’ve written a little bit more than eleven pages of the thesis that I’m required to submit to the Einaudi Center as the result of my research.  I’ve also met my friend Margo, who I met on Birthright, whose family just moved to Paris.  Other than that, and a quick trip to Victor Hugo’s house, I haven’t accomplished much, either in the way of work or pleasure.  Over the next few days, I’m planning to visit the royal chateau of Fontainbleau, and, if possible, the chateau of Vaux-le-Vicompte (the latter is difficult to access).  I’d also like to try to see Bruno at least once before I return overseas.  Other than that, I don’t really have any concrete plans for people or places on this side of the Atlantic.  That’s why I’m itching to get home, because I have so many commitments there!  I’m worried that the semester will begin without my having had enough time to spend time with my parents and my friends in Ithaca, or without my having had enough time to prepare for the dozens of commitments I have (studying for the GRE, getting back in shape after all of my lack of exercise in Europe and Israel, planning High Holidays, picking blueberries with my Mother, sitting down and talking to my Father, translating a French book for a friend of mine, de-squirreling the CJL, finishing certain books, etc.).  I’m living in a hostel room with half-a-dozen other men, at least one of whom is sleeping in the room, whenever I either leave or return, no matter what the time.  I’m living out of my suitcase, have no cooking facilities or even a refrigerator, and have no privacy.  My best workplace, the Mémorial de la Shoah, doesn’t have Wi-Fi, and doesn’t even allow me to drink from my water bottle while I work.  There’s no atmosphere that isn’t tense, where I can relax and unwind.  That being said, if one of you is willing to Skype, please let me know!  There’s a large enough lobby in the hostel such that our conversation won’t necessarily be overheard, especially if the time you choose is late in the evening.

So that’s where I am right now, and why I haven’t updated my blog recently.

Shabbat Shalom!

~JD

“I was by the strangest of chances wondering how I should meet him when the revolution unmistakably occurred.  I call it a revolution because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe precipitated.  ‘Look here, my dear, you know,’ he charmingly said, ‘when in the world, please, am I going back to school?’” (Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, ch. XIV).

Milano!

I left Florence this morning, but I haven't yet left Italy.  I came to Italy with the intent to visit three cities: Florence, Rome, and Venice.  I realized, however, that other than the Doge's palace, there really isn't any particular site in Venice that I wanted to see.  The history of Venice is fascinating, throughout the age of the Crusades and into the Renaissance, boasting such famous figures as Marco Polo and Titian, but the city itself didn't really attract me.  At least, not now.  If I were with someone, things might be different, but on my own, I am mostly interested in the concrete history and art history around me.

For those of you who don't pay excruciating detail to my travel schedule, on my way to Florence, I changed trains in Milan, en route from Paris (by way of Zürich).  I don't know too much about the history of Milan, and my main source of knowledge about the city is from Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad.  Although it's been a while since I've mentioned Mark Twain, just as was the case when I arrived in Europe a year ago, I constantly think about how he considered and portrayed his European excursion (were it not for him, the word "beggar" would never appear in any of my blog entries), and I've tried to make this blog a 21st-century version of the Quaker City Letters, of which The Innocents Abroad is mostly a redaction.

So, why not stop in Milan?  With my Hosteling International card, a night in Milan is the same cost as a night in Paris, and I fly out of CDG Airport on August 8th no matter what, so why not spend a day in Milan?

So I took a 2-hour train ride, purchased a map and a 24-hours unlimited public transportation card, took the Metro to the suburbs, dropped my bags off at the Youth Hostel, and went to explore the city.

My first stop was, of course, the Cathedral.  It was the only tourist attraction I knew of before I arrived, and it's also where all of the other tourists were flocking.  It's Sunday, meaning the real flock is also flocking, for Sunday Mass.  Before I even entered, I circled the building once, very slowly.  The exterior ornamentation is so intricate!  It has a very Renaissance feel: there are no flying buttresses, the entire building is built of shining white marble, and the statues everywhere -- everywhere on the outside, are both realistic and highly expressive.  There is almost no empty space, no place where there isn't a gargoyle with a pipe in its mouth, a tormented saint, or a churchman raising his hands in blessing.  Even in the complex veins of the great stained-glass rose on the apse side of the cathedral, statues are seated, with parts of their bodies on the inside, others on the outside, the window pane cutting a dorsoventral axis down their upper bodies (their legs hang down on the inside).  The pointed arches, however, have all the accessories of Gothic Flamboyant architecture: all the tufts, points, and blossoms.  The central tower, above the apse, is currently covered in metal scaffolding, but you can still see a golden bishop hanging on to the steeple.

Because Mass was in session when I visited, tourists such as myself were cordoned off from actual attendees.  Relegated to the edges of the nave, I could see the stained glass and the architecture of the ceiling without disrupting the bishop's sermon.  Perfect.  The inside is also very ornate, although not nearly to the degree that the outside is.  The stained-glass windows looked as if they had all been constructed in different eras: they seemed to vary not only by historic style, but by budget: in several frames, more panes than necessary seemed to have been left colorless.

I left the cathedral, and walked northwest, on my way to the city's second major landmark.  On my way, I passed a mounted statue of Garibaldi, honoring the Risorgimento.  I've seen many such monuments in my brief stay in Italy, it's given me insight into how Italians think about their history.  As I've mentioned, in France, I was surprised to see that the war most commonly honored with monuments was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, followed by World War I.  There are very few statues in memory of World War II (with the exception of the Shoah Memorial in Paris), although there is monument to the French soldiers killed in Vietnam, in Paris, if you know where to look.  Likewise, in Italy, both Milan and Rome have had gargantuan memorials in honor of Victor Emanuel II, the first king of a united Italy, and Florence, too, has a decent-sized memorial to him (he is also one of the few people with the honor to have been interred in the Pantheon in Rome).  The critical years of Italy's political (though by no means cultural or economic) unification, at the end of the 19th century seem to be regarded as the most illustrious days of contemporary Italian history.  French historians define "contemporary history" as "after 1789;" perhaps in Italian historiography, "contemporary" means "after 1870?"

I arrived at the Palazzo Sforzesco.  This is exactly what it sounds like: a palace formerly owned by the Sforza family, including the infamous Ludovico "Il Moro," active in the late 15th century.  It's a real military fortress, well-fortified with towers, a moat, crenelations, etc.  It was built in the first half of the 14th century, and as Milan was serially occupied from the 16th until the 19th century, various foreign powers controlled it, although the architecture and decoration always remained distinctly Lombard.  The story of the fortress's occupants helped refresh me on this contested region of Italy.  The Spanish invaded Milan in the 16th century, and remained there until the early 18th century, when the Austrians (i.e. the former Holy Roman Empire) kicked them out; in 1796, the French, in their early post-revolutionary zeal, seized control, but lost it after the fall of Napoleon in 1814.  The Austrian Empire remained in control, in spite of the Revolutionary hiccup of 1848, nearly right up until the official unification of Italy in 1870.

Remember my observation about how contemporary Florentines milk their city's history for all that it is worth, even charging tourists to enter church interiors?  In Milan, entry to the Palace, its grounds and gardens, and all of its museums, is entirely free of charge.  Also in contrast to Florence, Milan has included detailed descriptions of all of its items on display, sometimes to an overwhelming degree.  Its collections are extensive: everything of historic interest in Lombardy seems to make its way to this single palace, even fragments of wall frescoes.  For this reason, it has several permanent collections, of prehistory, Italian painting, ancient Egypt, 

Seeing the mummies on display on an Italian museum reminded me of one of the most memorable scenes in The Innocents Abroad, in which Mark Twain and his friends decide to annoy their tour guide by pretending to be incredibly stupid.  Allow me to share it with you:

The guide was bewildered-- non-plussed. He walked his legs off, nearly, hunting up extraordinary things, and exhausted all his ingenuity on us, but it was a failure; we never showed any interest in any thing. He had reserved what he considered to be his greatest wonder till the last--a royal Egyptian mummy, the best preserved in the world, perhaps. He took us there. He felt so sure, this time, that some of his old enthusiasm came back to him:

"See, genteelmen!--Mummy! Mummy!"

The eye-glass came up as calmly, as deliberately as ever.

"Ah,--Ferguson--what did I understand you to say the gentleman's name was?"

"Name?--he got no name!--Mummy!--'Gyptian mummy!"

"Yes, yes. Born here?"

"No! 'Gyptian mummy!"

"Ah, just so. Frenchman, I presume?"

"No!--not Frenchman, not Roman!--born in Egypta!"

"Born in Egypta. Never heard of Egypta before. Foreign locality, likely. Mummy--mummy. How calm he is--how self-possessed. Is, ah--is he dead?"

"Oh, sacre bleu, been dead three thousan' year!"

The doctor turned on him savagely:

"Here, now, what do you mean by such conduct as this! Playing us for Chinamen because we are strangers and trying to learn! Trying to impose your vile second-hand carcasses on us!--thunder and lightning, I've a notion to--to--if you've got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!--or by George we'll brain you!"

I really, really wish that I could write like that.

Anyway, the Palazzo at Milan is well worth visiting, and still has the personal collections of some of the Sforzas.  They are incredibly proud of having what looks like Ludovico's cocktail glass, as well as numerous chests, coffers, and cabinets, which somehow always manage to survive (perhaps because, unlike metal, they can't be melted down?).  They also have the world's best collection of the artist.  Bramante, a contemporary and acquaintance of Leonardo da Vinci.  The Palace has numerous paintings and engravings by him, and even a series of 12 tapestries, representing the seasons, begun in 1501, prepared for a wedding which Louis XII attended.  Yes, even in Italy, there are two French monarchs I can't seem to escape from: Louis XII and Francois I.  For instance, back in Florence, I saw a wonderful wall-painting of Francois I kneeling in supplication before Pope Leo X. In any case, the curators of the Palazzo Sforzesco had painstakingly organized the 27 rooms of exhibition by chronology and medium.  They have some very well-preserved late-medieval painted wooden sculptures, which is very rare: too many people of "good taste" in later eras decided that painting on wooden sculptures was crass and vulgar, and made no effort to preserve it.  I saw a good collection of 16th- and 17th-century wonderkammer objects, of the kind I've grown used to, visiting so many French mansions.  Although the Italians are not as absolutely obsessed with furniture collection and classification as the French are, I saw a few disgustingly-ornate 17th- and 18th-century tables in Louis-Quatorze and Louis-Quinze styles, although they don't assign them these names.

Then, I noticed that it was about to rain, and I still had a train to book for tomorrow (not to mention food to find) and I left the museum, in a room with austere 17th-century Flemish paintings.

I am thinking of you all!  Love to each and every one of you!

~JD

"Naught displeas'd was she, but smil'd thereat so joyously, that of her laughing eyes the radiance brake and scatter'd my collected mind abroad" (Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradise, Canto X).