Finding the romantic in Paris

By Zoe Samios

Nestled in a quiet courtyard down a cobbled Parisian lane, a petite building in soft pink with green shutters bustles with visitors on Friday afternoon.

It’s the day before Valentine’s Day, and the glittering boulevards in the city of lights are stocked with gleaming tinsel packages and heart-shaped everything.

The visitors are gathered for ostensibly the same purpose: to celebrate the beauty of the various manifestations of human love – if in a slightly different expression. They’re in the Museum of Romantic Life, a tiny stand-alone town house at the far end of a tea garden, to explore the art of the romantics.

At the foot of Montmartre in the 9th arrondissement, downhill from the Sacre Coeur, the building dates from 1830 and belonged to the painter Ary Scheffer.

Scheffer, fond of Faust themes and taken by the Romantic period in the first half of the 19th century, lived in the house for much of his life and entertained an array of eminent guests.

They included pianist Frederic Chopin, painter Eugene Delacroix, opera singer Pauline Viardot, composer Gioachino Rossini and writer Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin better known as George Sand.

Sand’s imprint is unmistakable on the museum, and her mementoes are encased under glass displays along the ornately papered walls.

Trinkets, jewels, feather pens, medals are arranged as souvenirs of lives long past – including, most strangely, a large lock of Sand’s hair encased in a bejewelled locket.

Sand was an inveterate traveller and documented much of rural life at a time when provincial character was one of the most defining aspects of French people’s lives. Her prose was whimsical but witty, and often illuminated broad truths.

But she was also entrenched in Romanticism for another reason: a series of love affairs that have become a part of her legacy.

She had affairs with poet Alfred de Musset and Chopin, and became associated with her famous quip, “There is only one happiness in life. To love and be loved”.

She also wrote artfully about nature, and this was one of the binding aspects of Romanticism as a movement. Began partially as a response to the Industrial Revolution that swept through Europe bringing manufacturing and automation with it, Romanticism was an attempt to re-assert the value of emotional experience and ineffable intuition.

With their rich sensual paintings and serious literature, artists of the Romantic period exerted extensive influence over their time – an influence which resonated through generations that succeeded them.

Their ideas may have also found new resonance at a time of increasingly digitalisation.

“They believed that what exists within the human, the inner landscape, is transcendent,” a tour guide explained to a group of visitors, who milled in a brocade room.

Outside in the gardens, couples lounged in wire chairs as the sun crept low in the sky.

Ideals of the artists or not, romance was unmistakably at play.

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