{"id":5838,"date":"2020-04-14T07:52:26","date_gmt":"2020-04-14T11:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=5838"},"modified":"2020-04-14T08:52:11","modified_gmt":"2020-04-14T12:52:11","slug":"back-to-france-during-my-michigan-lockdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/back-to-france-during-my-michigan-lockdown\/","title":{"rendered":"Traveling Back to France During My Michigan Lockdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Look me up whenever you come to Paris.”\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

That’s what famed author Edmund White said to me when we met at an awards banquet in D.C. in the late 80s.\u00a0 I was frazzled in the 90-degree heat that weekend and not prepared to meet an author I admired so much.\u00a0 He was the very first person I saw as I walked into the banquet and I probably gushed when I told him how much I admired his work.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

White surprised me with his very specific praise for a story I’d contributed to the anthology Men on Men 2<\/em>, a story that would become the title piece of my first collection a year later.\u00a0 Both the story and the collection would help get me national recognition, earn me scores of reviews, and start a series of book tours that ultimately led to readings on three different continents.<\/p>\r\n

White meant what he said.\u00a0 My spouse and I did look him up a few years later on a trip to France.\u00a0 We were taking advantage of a great exchange rate and basing ourselves in Paris for three weeks, planning day trips.\u00a0 When we asked White at dinner what we should make a point of seeing\u00a0 that tourists tended to miss, he didn’t hesitate: Vaux-le-Vicomte, whose official website is here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

I had never heard of this chateau only an hour’s drive from Paris.\u00a0 The team of artistic geniuses involved in building it for Louis XIV’s superintendent of finances, Nicolas Foucquet, was the same trio who later designed and built Versailles and its gardens.\u00a0 White assured us of two things.\u00a0 Versailles was mammoth and would be teeming with busloads of loud and cranky tourists (he wasn’t exaggerating).\u00a0 Vaux was more jewel-like and he’d be surprised if we would find more than a few dozen people touring the chateau and its exquisite grounds.<\/p>\r\n

He was right.\u00a0 The day we visited was sunny, and like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, <\/em>we were “drowning in honey” as we moved from one amazing room filled with gorgeous paintings, sculptures, furnishings to another–and then out into the gardens to enjoy elegant vistas that seemed almost too perfect to be real. <\/p>\r\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\r\n

That day and White’s advice came back to this week when I read the biography above of Foucquet, who was tried on a trumped-up charge of treason and for various financial crimes by the young king.\u00a0 Louis XIV wasn’t just jealous that Foucquet had the most beautiful dwelling in France,\u00a0 he was out to flex his muscles and show other rulers who was in charge in France.\u00a0 He was also moved by people scheming against Foucquet for complicated reasons that would make for a great miniseries.\u00a0 Foucquet’s long imprisonment in a remote fortress reads like chapters from The Count of Monte Cristo<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n

But despite his ignominious last years, he left behind a monument of architecture, painting, and landscape gardening that some call the most beautiful building in France.\u00a0 Even rooms with a less-than-august purpose were magnificent: Vaux was one of the first chateaux to have a dining room.<\/p>\r\n

\"\"<\/a> \u00a9Sylvia Davis<\/p>\r\n

Like millions of other Americans, I’ve had cabin fever for weeks now, but this biography opened up an unforgettable day for me, one that happened thirty years ago.\u00a0 It sent me to a closet where I keep my travel photo albums\u2014remember those?\u00a0 I hadn’t thought of them in years and realized now that each one is a doorway to another life, another time, and a very welcome escape.<\/p>\r\n

Lev Raphael is the prize-winning author author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery.\u00a0 He offers individualized writing workshops and manuscript editing at writewithoutborders.com.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

Twitter Vive la France!<\/em> photo below: (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) <\/span><\/p>\r\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Look me up whenever you come to Paris.”\u00a0 That’s what famed author Edmund White said to me when we met at an awards banquet in D.C. in the late 80s.\u00a0 I was frazzled in the 90-degree heat that weekend and not prepared to meet an author I admired so much.\u00a0 He was the very first … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[347],"tags":[1023,2242,2245,2251,2141,748,321,339,2246,2247,2244,2248,324,2252,325,2250,341,1022,2249,2243],"class_list":["post-5838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","tag-tt","tag-armchair-travel","tag-d-c","tag-dancing-on-tisha-bav","tag-dumas","tag-edmund-white","tag-fiction","tag-france","tag-lambda-awards","tag-lambda-literary-awards","tag-men-on-men-2","tag-short-fiction","tag-short-stories","tag-short-story-anthologies","tag-short-story-collections","tag-the-count-of-monte-cristo","tag-travel","tag-travel-tuesday","tag-vaux-le-vicomte","tag-versailles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5838"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5876,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5838\/revisions\/5876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}