Alive on Arrival

How Thomas Jefferson, Eduoard Manet, and I managed our arrivals in Paris

On Fridays I run excerpts from The Road to Elsewhere, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (You can find the first entry here.) It tells the story of my road through Paris, London, and Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living.

How wonderful was it that in France, even in 1978, that it wasn’t a mere train that I took to Versailles, it was an “iron path” there, which even I knew was the literal translation of chemins de fer. I’d genuflected in front of the Edouard Manet painting by that name at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., depicting a red-faced Parisian lady with a puppy and a book in her lap, facing the painter, while a little girl—back to the viewer—grasps the iron barrier that frames the scene, watching a passing train. All we see of the train is a trailing cloud of steam.

Maybe I was that little girl, grasping at the iron bars, observing the freedom beyond.

And I was more than ready to meet my Victorine Meurent, the florid lady of …