Ina Caro, an American writer and amateur historian who harbors a passion for France, had the bright idea a couple of decades ago of combining travels in that country with exploration of its tumultuous and endlessly interesting past. Usually accompanied by her husband, biographer Robert Caro, she set out on a series of automobile tours in which she visited historic sites in chronological order, beginning with the Roman conquest and ending with the late 19th century. She turned this into a book, “The Road from the Past: Traveling Through History in France” (1994), which has attracted a loyal following among her fellow Francophiles.
Now she returns with a variation on the same theme: “how to travel through French history chronologically while staying in Paris.” At first she planned to visit sites that can be reached via the Paris Metro, but then she expanded her itinerary to include those with stops on the RER (Reseau Express Regional), “an express regional train to the suburbs with connections at Metro stations throughout the city [that] connects Paris not only to suburbia, but to castles that were once in the countryside.” Then she added “the high-speed TGVs (Train a Grande Vitesse),” as she explains:
“I realized I could take either a regular train or the TGV to many of the historic places I wanted to see in France. Since the TGV travels at speeds over 200 miles per hour, I could reach all but one of the places I wanted to see in France in ninety minutes and most places in less than an hour, and be able to return to Paris the very same night. I could, much as readers of ‘Paris to the Past’ will be able to do, stay at my hotel or apartment in Paris and never have to pack or unpack. I could take a train from Paris, travel century by century, chronologically through time, and be back in Paris each night, usually in time for dinner. Unlike the time traveler in Michael Crichton’s book ‘Timeline,’ I didn’t need to be faxed to the Middle Ages, I could take the TGV from Paris.”
The reader should not be under the impression that this was a tightly scheduled itinerary in which one day’s travel followed hard upon the previous day’s. Though Caro does not give any specific timeline, it’s obvious that these two dozen journeys took place over several years and that many places were visited more than once. Caro could not have compiled the detailed architectural observations she records about, say, the Gothic Cathedral at Saint-Denis or the renaissance chateau at Blois, on visits of only a few hours. No doubt some incredibly intrepid tourist could do all of these tours in just over three weeks, but one shudders to think about the state of exhaustion in which such a venture would conclude.
Caro divides her book into five parts, the longest being the first: “The Middle Ages: Cathedrals and Fortresses.” The others are “The Renaissance: Cities and Castles,” “The Age of Louis XIV: Seventeenth-Century France,” “The Coming of the French Revolution: Paris in the Eighteenth Century” and “The Empire and Restoration: The Bourgeois Century.” She begins “by taking the Metro to the twelfth-century Basilica of Saint-Denis” and ends at the 19th-century chateau in Chantilly, which “is, I believe, one of the three most beautiful chateaux in France, the other two being sixteenth-century Chenonceau and seventeenth-century Vaux-le-Vicomte.” This gives her ample opportunity to write about buildings as well as the people who inspired, built and/or lived in them.
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