Book Review: The Angel of the Left Bank by Jean-Paul Kauffmann

If you’re seeking Catherine Deneuve in the Saint Sulpice marché bioligique held on Sundays (and she shops there) or to find faults in a NYTimes bestseller with scenes set in Saint Sulpice (you know the one and there are faults), read this book for a quest into memory, a journey uncovering the damp stones of Saint Sulpice and Delacroix’s masterpiece.

"The Angel of the Left Bank," is a jewel, totally unexpected. A journey, unfolding, petal after petal of Delacroix’s life, history and Kauffmann’s own quest. Was Delacroix the illegitimate son of Talleyrand, as later rumored? Was Delacroix’s inspiration for Jacob garnered from Biblical allegories or his contemporary, the painter Hein? Or was he wrestling, as Jacob in his famous mural Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, with the idea of God? Or like Kauffmann, are we all wrestling with the ‘angel’ finding our own moment of truth?

Arcane, wistful and dogged, Kauffman is a researcher after my own heart. An author who tramps to the seaside town visiting a hotel room where Delacroix once stayed to find imprints of his past. Describing himself as the ‘Maigret of the Argonne,’ Kauffmann follows Delacroix’s trail to a chateau once in the Delacroix family for clues and a journal discovered just twenty years before. He illuminates Delacroix’s flochetage - short interlaced brush strokes - as vividly as the tortured eight years Delacroix took to complete the mural. And the magnificent backdrop of Saint Sulpice designed by Servadoni, the Opera set designer. The secret rooms, tunnels and tower aeries still in use by artists as ateliers. Kauffman weaves Delacroix’s past and the present with a deft, engaging touch never letting go. And I didn’t want him to. His fascination with Delacroix, stemming from his first visit to a Rennes museum as a schoolboy, fills the pages with an irresistible luminosity. Kauffman’s own quest parallels Delacroix’s with his questions of life and God.

But then if you’ve been to Saint Sulpice, trod the worn pavers, breathed in the cold air of the stone and seen Delacroixs’ mural in the flickering light of holy tapers you’ve felt that, too. A magic moment caught in time-wavering and elusive. Like the ‘esprit d’escalier’ as the French say, that something you wished you’d said that only comes on the stairs after you’ve bid your host goodbye.

Saint Sulpice, it’s tower still unfinished, is a living breathing organism in the firmament of Paris today, battered by pollution, the damp and the leak from the bell-ringer’s water closet–triumphant and scarred with secrets within.

You can meet Cara at Café Society in Napa on Saturday May 8.