We're splitting our time in Paris between two apartments. The current one is in the 16th then we'll move to one in the 6th. The former, on Rue Lauriston, is a couple of blocks from the Trocadero. It's a top-floor split level; the bedroom and large bathroom are upstairs, the kitchen and living room downstairs. I think I've already mentioned the tiny elevators, each about the size of a standing coffin.
The apartment has a view of chimney-sprouting rooftops in the foreground and, on a clear day, the Eiffel Tower in the background. The view resembles a movie set—I keep expecting Mary Poppins (I know, wrong city) to float down, singing, umbrella in hand. The neighborhood is the usual Paris attractive, a narrow street lined with a row of human-scale buildings, solid stone construction, and chock-a-block stores and cafes. C'est une adresse très pratique.
The owners, Don and Petie Kladstrup, are writers. He is a retired foreign correspondent for CBS, the American television network, and together they are authors of two books, Wine and War: the French, the Nazis and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure and Champagne: How the World's most Glamorous Wine Triumphed over War and Hard Times.
The Kladstrups purchased the apartment from another American writer, Joseph Amber Barry. Barry was a correspondent for Newsweek magazine and, once he retired, he wrote a number of books, one of them a biography of the French writer Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, better known as George Sand. The book is Infamous Woman: the Life of George Sand. So here's the amusing six degrees. When Barry was a college-aged youth, he was friends and a driver for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. He even drove the latter two on a tour of Spain. So, six degrees from Stein and Toklas.
