Recently Echinox published the translation of Paul Morand's Bucharest (1935), a book that must be put in line with Ulysse de Marsillac's From Pest to Bucharest (1869), F. Damé's Bucharest in 1906, and Dominique Fernandez' Romanian Rhapsody (1998), in addition to N. Iorga's introduction to the History of Romanians by Travelers, in order to know what the French saw here, what they chose to ignore, and what they understood over a two-hundred-years' span of time. I quoted before notes on their voyages to Bucharest by M. Cochelet in 1834, Saint Marc-Girardin in 1849, Florence K. Berger in 1877, Charles de Mouy in 1879, and Angelo de Gubernatis in 1898, all from the perspective of Bucharest's fundamental rule: contrast. The seductive synthesis of antinomies (ethnic and architectural, religious and artistic, geo-political and moral) or, on the contrary, the eternal, murderous disharmony changed Bucharest – and is still doing so – "not into a lesson in art", as Paul Morand says, "but a lesson in life: it teaches one to adjust to anything, even to the impossible." "You will not find here," he continues, "our French urbanism, our straight boulevards, our plazas looking like pleasant high-society salons… These sons of Rome did not inherit Roman rigidity. Nothing goes straight with them, neither politics nor streets, neither clothes nor automobiles. Sidewalks peel off, roads rise like slabs on Judgment Day. Constructions and demolitions take turns in torpid or ecstatic neighborhoods."A "carelessness cure" (une cure d'insouciance) is the Romanians' capital city in the eyes of the French traveler. "Here I learned," Morand writes, "that unhappiness may sometimes make you smile." Romanians are an "elastic people possessing to the highest degree the experience of the ephemeral and fatalism, a people that can swim very well, and they let themselves float down with the waves, knowing too well they'll reach the bottom in due time. A realistic people which fortune placed at the frontiers of Asia as a sentinel of common sense – the younger brother of cogitating reason." What did we use to be? – Morand asks himself. "A path for invasions", a "succession of catastrophes constantly devouring the Romanian princes", a "land of misfortune" which, in Paul of Aleppo's words, "has grown accustomed to holding nothing in possession, because it has always been dispossessed of everything it had," where a hundred meters of roadway will take you to two continents, two centuries, and two antipodal mentalities at the same time. "The golden crosses of the churches were glittering among the trees while at the lords' gates arose mounds of dung," Morand quotes Pierre Lescalopier's lines written in 1574; Brâncoveanu was "half Louis XIV, half mamamouchi"; further down, he copiously quotes Elizabeth of Greece, who saw Bucharest as a "city entirely made up of patches."In brief, it is a "curious, funny, picturesque, half-Oriental,s half-Occidental city enlivened by the motley costumes (…) No concern for the administration of property, coupled with that tendency to go into debt which has endured as a peculiarity of Romanians…"A mandatory exercise: perform a mental transfer of all these primarily historical-ethnic-geographical characteristics to the sphere of mentalities and you will understand, with bitter joviality, that the Bucharester, like Bucharest, "has preserved the love of the ephemeral and improvisation typical of the village, while major institutions have either confidential or horrible, shameful aspects." These remarks are not Morand's, but G. M. Cantacuzino's, an author that is so essential to the spirit and architecture of the city that he ought to be reread.
by Dan C. Mihăilescu
