A Woman's Paris ~ Joie de Vivre

Alan T Marty, MD, author and retired cardiac surgeon, was born in 1942 in Chicago and educated at MIT and Northwestern University School of Medicine. He trained in surgery at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (Now Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital), the University of California Hospital, San Diego, and then in cardiac surgery at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. After serving as a Commander in the US Navy, he started private practice in 1976 and retired in 1998. By that time he had published more than 500 scientific articles and for several decades served on the Editorial Boards of three medical journals.

In 1999 the Marty family moved to Paris where Emilie, their youngest daughter, attended the American School of Paris. While in the City of Light, Marty became interested in the German Occupation of Paris and in 2003 he started writing A Walking Guide to Occupied Paris: The Germans and Their Collaborators, a book-in-progress which has already been acknowledged in Cecile Desprairies’ book Paris dans le Collaboration, and in Hal Vaughan’s book Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War. It is also referenced in two books, not yet published: one on the Hotel Ritz during the Occupation by Tilar Mazzeo, and another by Ronald Rosbottom on Occupied Paris, When Paris Went Dark.

Alan is a member of The American Library in Paris and of H-France, an organization of scholars interested in French history and culture, and still serves on some editorial boards of medical publications. Alan lives both in Newburg, Indiana and in Paris with his French wife, Marie-Paule a former educator.

A Walking Guide to Occupied Paris: The Germans and Their Collaborators (A work-in-progress)

“Armed with an historically-informed exploratory spirit, I have, in fact, often encountered Paris’ endless capacity to evoke a mood, to surprise me with similar absent/present paradoxes, as detailed in A Walking Guide to Occupied Paris. True, gone today are the parading soldiers, the anti-aircraft stations, and most of the eyewitnesses. Yet, stone after stone, much of Paris is still like it was during the Occupation. So, whenever a particularly strong sense of place induces both wince-making and pleasing effects in me, the contained perceptual tension of simultaneously knowing the shifting chiaroscuro of the city’s dark/light history repeatedly fires my imagination.” —Alan T Marty

INTERVIEW

A Walking Guide to Occupied Paris: The Germans and Their Collaborators (A work-in-progress)

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” —Marcel Proust

AWP: You are the author of A Walking Guide to Occupied Paris: The Germans and Their Collaborators, a book-in-progress. What inspired you to write this book? What influenced your vision?

ATM: In March of 2003 we had just moved into a new apartment near the Hotel Lutetia. Beside the Lutetia’s entrance, we noticed some wall-plaques which revealed that in 1945 the hotel had served as a welcome center where families assembled in hopes of meeting their relatives returning from the German labor camps. On a whim, I entered the hotel and asked the staff what happened there between 1940 and 1944. No employee there could—or would—answer my question. Weeks later, after playing history detective, I discovered many chilling details about what the Germans did when their best counterintelligence agency, the Abwehr, occupied the Lutetia. Now, more attentive to the lost or silenced voices of the hotel’s past, I returned to the Lutetia. This time, while listening to soft jazz and sipping champagne in its art deco salon, I began to imagine fiendish ghosts dancing in the background. I soon felt a slight thrill of danger. The atmosphere became loaded with a sense of foreboding. Feelings of happiness mixed with terror. Mais, c’était magnifique! Insistent questions arose. Chief among these was: Why did encountering the past dark spirits of this hotel trigger a sublime experience now?

AWP: How have you been able to find a way of telling this story so that what people feel isn’t hatred, but a larger sense of the fragility of life?

ATM: As an MD, my training directed me to dwell on the “facts.” At first I treated historical sources as factual data and tended to view the Germans and their collaborators in black and white terms. It was easy to hate some, like the most ideological, narrow-minded, evil Nazis such as Theodor Dannecker (who directed the biggest roundup of Jews in Paris in July 1942). Then I learned that French liability laws were so strict that for decades after the war historians were reluctant to use the real names of collaborators for fear of law suits. A friend of mine who wrote Les Comtesses de la Gestapo felt compelled to use a penname to avoid lawsuits. Indeed, his publisher was sued several times by people who never knew the true story about their relatives. (The publisher won the suits every time as my friend had researched the issues thoroughly). Thus, I learned that the “facts” as printed in some history books might not be correct. I began to think in less black-and-white terms about collaborators. I began to ask myself what I would have done in similar circumstances. Professor Bertram Gordon, a friend of mine who interviewed several French collaborators decades later, found that the collaborators all felt they were patriotic Frenchmen who had collaborated with the Germans to save France from Communism. The only mistake these collaborators admitted to was having chosen the wrong side during the war. As to whether someone like me can tell the story properly is another matter. Time will tell.

AWP: What was it about this past that beckoned you to see behind the veil of ordinary tourism?                  

ATM: For the past year I have been trying to investigate why the darkest stories about the Nazi occupation of Paris can help enhance our aesthetic navigation of Paris today. It turns out that “Dark Tourism” is a whole academic discipline! Professors Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone from the University of Central Lancashire, for example, wrote an entire book about it: The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, (Channel View Publications, Bristol, 2009). Their book, however, does not explore how knowing sinister history enables our brain to grasp the fearful delight of the sublime. Because I am a physician, I have been studying the neurobiology involved. Recently, neuroscientists have confirmed what Edmund Burke intuited about the sublime over 250 years ago. Only if our self-preservation is at first threatened can our mind forge particular brain links and visceral feelings, both of which are needed to provide such neuro-sensory magic. Our effervescent and emotional engagement with the dark history of the City of Light has the power to shape the never-seen, never-experienced past into a more immediate experience. Imagining dark history can then stimulate the combinatorial processing centers in our brain and enable us to empathize with people who lived in various places in Paris. So far, I have analyzed more than 100 scientific papers and have written more than 70 pages about the neurobiology of the sublime as it applies to the art of walking in Paris. In brief, my conclusion is that Paris can truly appear more beautiful to and even have greater significance for those who know the city’s dark side. No paradise is complete without its snakes—something feared which acts as a kind of attention searchlight that inspires both dread and exhilaration beyond reason’s grasp.

AWP: Your research is exemplary. How did you accumulate and obtain this information? From civil and court records, memoirs, letters, eyewitnesses, among others? Was the information primarily in French? What were the challenges, and how did you uncover these stories?

ATM. Yes I used all of the above. I studied both French and English sources plus a few German ones. One of the most important ways I got my information was to network with various historians, librarians, archivists, and writers. I have over 150 such people on my contact list. For example, I have lunched with Jacques Delarue, an historian who started life as a police detective after the Liberation, and have become good friends with Cyril Eder, the pseudonym of the author who wrote Les Comtesses de la Gestapo. I have also eaten meals with historians like Robert Paxton, Cecile Desprairies, Annie LaCroix–Riz, Hal Vaughan, Tilar Mazzeo, and Ron Rosbottom. Drs. Stefan Martens from the Deutsches Historische Institut in Paris and Bernard Mouraz at the Service Historique de la Défense of the Château de Vincennes let me study different editions of the German telephone books in Occupied Paris. The American Library of Paris has some archives of interest as well. Some challenges include trying to decide which items are factual, and finding where some items are hidden. The French have prevented access to much of the information about Coco Chanel, for example. More information about Chanel can be found in British and German archives, according to Hal Vaughan. French police arrest records are another good source of information. Some archives, like those from Neuilly, seem to have been picked clean by the time I investigated them.

AWP: What was the most surprising thing you learned about each event in time, chronologically or geographically by arrondissement?

ATM: The answers would take up lots of space as my book is nearly 600 pages now and my index of names covers over 1,300 people and organizations!

Here is one surprising thing I learned on when I had lunch with Jacques Delarue: After the Liberation, Michel Skolnikoff, one of the richest black marketeers in Occupied Paris, escaped to Madrid with over one billion francs worth of jewels. So the French police dispatched a bounty hunter who captured him and injected him with drugs to keep him quiet. On June 10, 1945, on the way back from Madrid, Szkolnikoff died of a drug overdose. The bounty hunter panicked and set the car on fire to make it look like an accident. Delarue, who was a police detective before becoming an historian, told me the Spanish police found Szkolnikoff’s fingerprints in the car, but the French judge refused to certify that it was Szkolnikoff’s corpse in the car. As a result, Szkolnikoff’s wife was denied her inheritance, as she could not prove he was dead. The French court demanded close to 4 billion francs from his estate in 1947.

AWP: During your research, where wouldn’t you go? What wouldn’t you do?

ATM: Hard to say! In April 2009, one of the scariest places I visited was at 11 rue des Saussaies. My friend Gilles Thomas introduced me to Pierre-Edouard Colliex, the Chef de Service de Sécurité du Ministère de l’Intérieur, who gave us permission to see several of the “Geôles du Résistance” (interrogation cells) where the Résistants were held and tortured during the Occupation. Normally these are not open to the public due to the fragility of the graffiti and inscriptions scratched on the walls by the prisoners. In the basement, I also saw some poison gas-proof underground shelters with signs written in German.

AWP: Sense of place is central in your writing and treated often like a character. You take the traveler on a fascinating journey through Occupied Paris—inside buildings, crossing streets, the black market, auction houses, houses of couture, actors and singers, artists and filmmakers, authors, and businessmen—what are the different things that motivate you when you are writing?

ATM: Curiosity mostly. I have no family connections with the Occupation, and no axe to grind. I still get fascinated, however, by how the military-industrial complex gets away with its war-profiteering. For instance, the American corporations in Occupied Paris made huge profits. Even though Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau showed FDR lots of data about how Ford, IBM, ITT, and the Chase Bank were defying the Trading with the Enemy Act, and nothing was done about it. Ford made 30% of the trucks for the Wehrmacht, but when the Allies bombed Ford’s manufacturing plant outside Paris, the US government even compensated Ford for the damage.

AWP: You write about the black market where all sorts of products were bought and sold. What was this access to power and profitability? Did it have a postwar life well past the Liberation?

ATM: The Germans used several banks including Barclays and Chase to pay black marketers and transfer funds. The Vichy government had to pay the Germans millions of francs per day for the cost of the Occupation. That was the main source of the cash used to finance the black market. The two richest black marketers in Paris were both Jewish: Joseph Joinovici and Michel Szkolnikoff. The reason the Nazis dealt with these Jews instead of deporting them was because the Nazis could trust their merchandise. Joinovici and Szkolnikoff did not try to cheat the Nazis, as did some of the others.

I believe the black market persisted after the Liberation, but I have not studied this. American soldiers were supposedly involved in black market activity in post-war Paris, according to some sources.

AWP: During the Occupation, the number of “authorized” houses of couture diminished. How were women able to procure clothing at the grand couturiers?

ATM: Yes the number of couture houses diminished from 85 to some 50 from 1941 to 1943. Many women had difficulty finding stylish clothing, but some 20,000 women benefitted from special designer couture cards that gave them the right to buy clothing. The shortage of raw materials led to the use of imitation fabrics like rayon, viscose, newspapers, wood, and straw. Women became experts in the art of recycling and substitution. Since the Germans requisitioned most of the leather, the hairdressers collected hair which, when combined with Fibranne, produced a fabric which allowed the fabrication of footwear.

AWP: Who were the designers who stayed in Paris during the Occupation? Who fled Paris?

ATM: Jacque Fath, Jeanne Lanvin, Nina Ricci, Robert Piguet, Maggy Rouff, Marcel Rochas, and Lucien Lelong stayed in business during the Occupation. Both Chanel and Schiaparelli stopped selling clothing but their perfumes were still for sale. The Jewish furriers were exempted from arrest as the Wehrmacht needed fur for winter combat uniforms. All the other Jewish designers either fled or were arrested.

AWP: Were there any cases brought against Paris couturiers after the Liberation? Were fashion designers essential to France’s recovery?

ATM: None of the 55 cases brought against Paris couturiers resulted in a conviction after the Liberation. After the war, the government needed foreign currency. Lucien Lelong’s reputation suffered badly, so he retired. But Dior, Balmain, Balenciaga, Ricci, and Fath all went on to have dazzling and lucrative careers, along with many others.

AWP: Your writing includes a touching anecdote from Picasso’s mistress, Françoise Gilot, about Picasso, Matisse, and the BNCI. Can you share it?

ATM: The Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie was one of several banks to collaborate with the Germans. Yet the BNCI also protected its Jewish employees and paid them to do work off-premises. Francoise Gilot wrote that Picasso stored some of his and Matisse’s paintings in the BNCI vaults: “There were three large rooms full of paintings down in the basement: two for him and one for Matisse. The manager of the bank was a friend of both of them. Because Picasso was Spanish, it would have been difficult for the Germans to touch his property if his papers had been in order, but since he was persona non grata with the Franco regime, his situation was precarious. And since both he and Matisse were classified by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’ artists, there was all the more reason to be apprehensive. The inspectors were two German soldiers, very well disciplined, but not very bright he told me. He got them so confused, he said, rushing them from one room into the next, pulling out canvases, inspecting them, shoving them back in again, leading the soldiers around corners, making wrong turns, that in the end they were all at sea. And since they were not familiar with his work or with Matisse’s, he said, ‘Oh, we’ve seen these’. Not knowing one painting from another, they asked him what all those things were worth. He told them 8,000 francs—about 570 English pounds in 1965 money—for all his paintings and the same for Matisse’s. They took his word for it. None of his things or Matisse’s were taken away. It must not have seemed worth the trouble.” (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, page 37)

AWP: When you started writing about Occupied Paris, did you have a sense of what you wanted to do differently from other authors whose work you had seen?

ATM: I tried to bring human interest to several locations in Occupied Paris, to name names, to relate anecdotes, and to mention what happened to the Germans and their collaborators after the war. While I included the French collaborators, I looked for and found information about the Anglophones who collaborated with the Germans in Paris. This latter aspect is very different from what I have seen others write about occupied Paris.

AWP: Do you feel that you’ve brought a physician’s point of view to a territory that had, for the most part, been an historian’s territory in the accounts of WWII and the Occupation of Paris?

ATM: Maybe yes and maybe no. Aldous Huxley was a visiting professor when I attended MIT, and I was impressed by the way he utilized science to give significance to the totality of an ever-widening human experience. Huxley’s approach plus the workings of my scientific mind may have played a role in my essay The Art of Walking in Paris & the Neurobiology of the Sublime. But it is hard for me to believe that history itself can be reduced to selected facts and the purified simplicities of scientific exposition. When researching for my Walking Guide, I soon learned that “facts” are not history—facts only become history when someone puts them into a cohesive whole, a story. Still, much of my Walking Guide just tries to stick to the facts. In that way my physician’s point of view has prevailed. I have tried to avoid editorializing.

I guess studying history in a systematic way can look like science. But history depends mostly on narrative knowledge, much less on scientific knowledge. There are, of course, some objective elements to history: science-minded historians can apply statistical analysis to refine the objectivity of historical “facts,” and thereby discover unifying principles. Surely, scientific methods can help evaluate the authenticity of documents. But, on the other hand, I remember what Huxley once said in a lecture at MIT: “Animated by an anti-scientific spirit, Keats drank destruction to the man who had explained the rainbow and so robbed it of its poetry.”  Like medicine, history writing is still as much an art as a science. As for the Occupation of Paris, what happened, happened. But what I think happened has become an ever-changing dynamic over time. That is what makes writing the Walking Guide more exciting than writing medical articles.

AWP: What things do you feel haven’t been said about the Occupation and Liberation of Paris that you are trying to explore in your work now?

ATM: I am particularly interested in understanding the role that American corporations played in Paris during the Occupation. Many U.S. companies earned money simultaneously from both the Allies and the Axis. For instance, according to sources I cite in my book, ITT, which had a Paris branch at 46 Avenue de Breteuil, provided the Nazis with sophisticated communication equipment and helped supply ingredients for the bombs and artillery shells that marauded Allied troops. Further exemplifying the connections between ITT and the SS leadership, Sosthenes Behn, the U.S. President of ITT, even flew to Madrid in 1942 to meet Dr. Gerhard Westrick, the director of ITT operations in Germany, and Walter Schellenberg, an SS intelligence leader who owned a lot of ITT’s stock. Yet at the Liberation, Sosthenes Behn drove a jeep down the Champs-Élysées in his new role as a communication expert for the Army of Occupation. Behn’s right-hand man, Kenneth Stockton, who had remained joint chairman with Westrick of the German branch, also rode in Behn’s jeep. This time Stockton was wearing the uniform of a three star brigadier general. In 1946, Behn was awarded the U.S. Medal of Merit, and a few years later, ITT received millions of dollars in compensation for war damage to its German plants!

AWP: How did the writing of A Walking Guide to Occupied Paris influence your essay, The Art of Walking in Paris & the Neurobiology of the Sublime?

ATM: It provided the raw material, the seed-bed issues. It inspired me to ask meaningful questions, and to approach Paris with a special aesthetic attitude. It made me wonder why my physical travel experience could be further optimized by knowing pertinent historical facts about the locations I visited.

WRITING

AWP: Your career has taken you from the practice of medicine and the writing of scientific articles into the world of historical travel writing. When you started writing, what was the most difficult thing for you to learn?

ATM: How to use Microsoft Word! When I was practicing cardiac surgery, I could dictate what I wanted to write and voilà, my secretary would bring me the paper almost ready to send to the publisher. I still have a lot to learn about Microsoft Word.

AWP: Did scientific medical writing stand in your way when you were starting to write historical travel?

ATM: It still does. Several friends have told me that writing fiction could get my story across more effectively. For now, I just try to relate the facts, such as who did what and where. And what happened to them after the war.

AWP: In general, what opportunities or challenges do you experience as an American expatriate writer in Paris?

ATM: My greatest challenge is pronouncing the French language correctly. I took Latin and Spanish in high school—those languages were a lot easier to pronounce.

AWP: Do you keep a journal? Is there a temptation to keep a journal just to preserve what you’ve experienced?

ATM: I write down and try to file my thoughts and ideas on pieces of paper, but Marie-Paule dislikes the mess that results as the paper piles up. Keeping a journal would be a neat idea.

AWP: Could you talk about your process as a writer?

ATM: It is a haphazard process: writing, rewriting, waking up with new ideas, re-writing, reading everything relevant I can find. Before I write, I try to exercise on a treadmill or by walking. If I don’t exercise early in the morning, it does not get done.

AWP: Together with Marie-Paule, you have lived and worked in the U.S. and Paris. How has this experience, coming from the practice of medicine in Indiana to a writer in Paris changed your world?

ATM: I have found two good ways to explore Paris: on foot, and narratively. Glimpsing the sheer beauty of Paris on foot has its momentary pleasures. But, besides the visual signals, if I mentally add the narrative signals, my aesthetic appreciation becomes more intense and long-lasting. Acknowledging the historical terrain, that oft unmentioned giant gorilla in the living rooms of World War II Paris, can disrupt the thoughtless exploratory method I used as a mere tourist who primarily focused on the physical territory. The price I paid when I was a mere visitor was that my mind tended to move and remain in the same banal terrain of development. The richness of felt meaning I now reach has profoundly shifted the way I relate to Paris.

AWP: What is it about writers and Paris?

ATM: I can only speak for myself. Strange to say, in Paris I am okay with being a foreigner, looking décalé, off-beat, out of step. I used to get upset when, before I said anything, a Parisian would immediately recognize that I was a foreigner—even if I were wearing French clothing from head to toe. Such reality-dodging strategies did not work in my case. Now I am willing to embarrass myself. It is stimulating to dwell outside of my comfort zone. I get to understand a different way of living, to taste a distinctive lifestyle. It gives me a sense of adventure. My frames of reference change. Living in Paris awakens my creativity.

AWP: What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever been given?

ATM: For medical articles, Dr. Dwight Harken, a pioneer heart surgeon at Harvard, told me that when I quote something in a first draft, I should clearly cite my references so that I won’t lose them. Dr. Lester King, who accepted me into the AMA Medical Journalism Fellowship program, taught me to be concise. He made me review a book or write an abstract of an article in one hundred words or less.

AWP: Your essay The Art of Walking in Paris & the Neurobiology of the Sublime examines how ordinary travelers can glimpse the sublime in Paris today. What are you trying to explore in this work? Why is this message significant, especially today?

ATM:  Attention-grabbing tales from the Occupation can deliver an emotional wallop that arouses our neural machinery. When we mentally stand in the shoes of real people—not just the ghosts of yesteryear Paris—we can understand Occupied Paris through their eyes. Their tales of fear and terror thrill us since we know we will not be harmed. Feeling safe, our mind can then experience what Edmund Burked called “a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror; which as it belongs to self-preservation is one of the strongest of all passions. Its object is the sublime.” This poetic use of fear shocks us into a deeper, more critically alert awareness of Paris as it was. It de-sequesters the grim and bloody past and generates a rupture in our usual touristic expectations. Such aesthetic judgments offer an emancipatory space that allows us to reconfigure our interpretative strategies and extract morally informative meaning from our travel. Sometimes it is what a location in Paris symbolizes for us that becomes what we are judging aesthetically.

ART OF LIVING

AWP: Some men and women are predisposed, each in their own way, toward a passion for Paris: through fantasy, family or cultural context. How did your interest in Paris unfold?

ATM: My interest in Paris began when I met my wife Marie-Paule, who was living in Paris in 1972. We returned every summer but spent most of our time in Saint Malo until 1999 when we rented an apartment in the 7^th  arrondissement while our daughter Emilie attended the American School of Paris. That led to our purchase of our current apartment in the 6^th arrondissement.

AWP: What is the best part about living in Paris?

ATM. The food—fresh food we can buy at the nearby street markets, and the delicious food in the restaurants.

AWP: Describe your own “Paris.”

ATM: We love the 6^th arrondissement. Our end of the rue du Cherche Midi near Montparnasse has really spruced up since Gerard Depardieu built his mansion across the street from us, and since a new 4-star hotel, La Belle Juliette, replaced an older hotel two blocks east of us. The neighborhood contains everything we need: a hardware store, a Poissonnière, several butcher shops, wine stores, bakeries, hair dressers, five different Metro lines within walking distance, several excellent local restaurants, etc.

AWP: Name the single book, movie, work of art or music, fashion or cuisine that has inspired you.

ATM: Les Comtesses de la Gestapo by Cyril Eder has inspired my quest to learn more about the dark history of Paris. The author is a real historian who had worked in the French National Archives.

AWP: What is the last book you read? Would you recommend it?

ATM: An interesting book I read recently is Freedom Sailors, edited by Greta Berlin and William L. Dienst, MD. Several members of the crew that broke through the Israeli blockade of Gaza describe their adventures here, so the writing is a bit uneven. But it certainly held my attention. When we were in Paris a few years ago, one of the editors, Greta Berlin was being interviewed on CNN. I recognized her as one of my high school classmates.

AWP: Tell us something we don’t know about Paris.

ATM: Your readers probably know a lot more about Paris than I do. Some of them, however, may not have heard what Picasso supposedly said to a German officer who asked him if he actually was the maker of Guernica: “No, you are!” he said. Picasso’s reply long remained engraved in people’s memories as a brilliant affront to the enemy. After that, whenever Germans visited his studio, Picasso had to take special precautions. Pablo would ask Françoise Gilot to follow them to make sure they didn’t plant any documents that they could “find” later. He was always concerned about that, (according to Alan Riding’s And the Show Went On, page 184).

NOTE: Regarding non-medical writing, I would appreciate finding volunteers who want to critique my Walking Guide and/or the essay The Art of Walking in Paris & the Neurobiology of the Sublime. My email address is aempmarty@aol.com

You may also enjoy A Woman’s Paris® blog, French Impressions: Alice Kaplan – the Paris years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, on the process of transformation. Author and professor of French at Yale University, Ms. Kaplan discusses her new book, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, and the process of transformation. By entering into the lives of three important American women who studied in France, we learn how their year in France changed them and how they changed the world because of it. (French)

Stars, Stripes and Seine: Americans in occupied Paris 1940-1944, by Alan Davidge. 5,000 Americans refused to leave Paris after war broke out in September 1939. Who were they? Read the stories of how Josephine Baker, Sylvia Beach, Arthur Briggs, Drue Leyton, and others lived and breathed Paris during the war.

D-Day Travel Guide: For American visitors to Normandy, France, by Alan Davidge, D-Day tours historian, Normandy. Alan has managed to seek out a number of places of significance that do not usually feature in guidebooks. Guides included. 

Normandy never forgets: WWII monuments and memorials in France (part one), by Alan Davidge, D-Day historian for tours in Normandy. Alan shares a number of places of significance and remembrance. Guides included. (Part two)

A Woman’s Paris — Elegance, Culture and Joie de Vivre

We are captivated by women and men, like you, who use their discipline, wit and resourcefulness to make their own way and who excel at what the French call joie de vivre or “the art of living.” We stand in awe of what you fill into your lives. Free spirits who inspire both admiration and confidence.

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening. — Coco Chanel (1883 – 1971)

Text copyright ©2013 Alan T Marty, MD. All rights reserved.
Illustrations copyright ©Barbara Redmond. All rights reserved.
barbara@awomansparis.com