APRIL 11, MONDAY

VANITY FAIR

Yesterday was Susie’s second day in Paris. After wandering around Montmartre on her first day we were ready for an adventure. It was a beautiful sunny day with the temperature rising during the day until it was almost to 70 degrees. We decided to take the 85 bus from Pigalle to the Louvre instead of the Metro, so that we could see more. We got off at the Louvre by the Seine on our way to look for a paper store up the river. We had only gone a few hundred yards when we came upon a large department store with SAMARITAINE in huge letters above floors of awninged windows. There was a line of people outside waiting for it to open and as they entered we decided to go in, too. and explore. We had never heard of Samaritaine but once inside were astonished by what we saw. Inside was a huge open space with elaborate ironwork in an Art Deco style originally completed in 1910 but redesigned several times since, closing for its last incarnation from 2005 to 2021, opening in its final form just two years ago. The many departments of the department store are operated by famous brands right out of Vanity Fair. All the workers are dressed elegantly, the men in stylish black suits.

It was a photographers dream. Everything was brightly lit, in beautiful vivid colors and imaginatively designed. To get a stunning photograph, a Vanity Fair quality photograph, all you had to do was to point your camera in any direction. Everything was studio quality.

Of course everything was outrageously expensive and some things were almost kooky in their originality and everyone walking through except for Bill and Susie Mosher were dressed as if about to meet the Queen. But it didn’t matter and we weren’t the only ones gawking and holding our cell phone cameras at arm’s length.

We spent a half hour going up an down the elevators to all six or more floors including elegant restaurants on the top floor.

But while we were dazzled, we weren’t entirely comfortable. For one, we felt like country bumpkins in the big city, and looked like it. But more than that our delight in the colors and shapes and wild good taste were tempered by the fact that we disapproved of everything at the same time.

For a little while I almost forgot my identity, my values, my disapproval of the Capitalist system with all of its success in production produces a lot of stuff that is frivolous and distributes goods very badly, not by need or usefulness, but by artificially induced desire. And here I was, giddy, in the middle of all this frivolous opulence.

So I took my photographs and then we walked down streets of shops with beautiful windows and had a take out inexpensive hot pizza at a boulangerie on a tree shaded square and found the paper store and a Japanese store that I had been told about and then, worn out, walked back along the Seine where people were out jogging or sitting at river side cafes or picnicking beside the river and then took the Metro back to Montmartre and collapsed.

But the experience haunted me into the evening. I realized that I had stumbled onto questions about cultural differences, class differences, what it is to be an American, that will keep me wondering for the rest of my time in Paris.