Last summer, I studied French in a suburb of Paris called Issy-les-Moulineaux. I walked fifteen minutes uphill from the métro each evening, on sidewalks of winding roads and through hidden pathways bordered by brambles. The house where I stayed was inviting, creaky and lived-in: the showerhead faultily sprayed water this way and that, the cutlery was slightly blemished and footsteps echoed around both floors. Dark wooden bookshelves lined the dining room walls, filled with French translations of books I knew and loved, four Daphne du Mauriers in a row: Ma cousine Rachel, Le Général du Roi, L’Auberge de la Jamaïque and Rebecca. For the last, my host mother placed emphasis on the third syllable: Rebecc-ah! At the time, I was reading Yasmina Reza’s Art, a French play about the meaning of a blank white canvas. I adored the rich classroom discourse in the morning, the museum hopping, giggling on the métro and afternoon café chats.
At the four-week mark, however, Paris lost its charm. The culture I had so long romanticized started to feel pretentious and artificial. Maybe I felt a little lost; maybe I simply missed home. Some retailers, pedestrians and even museumgoers were hostile or inappropriate, and the blurry Polaroids of someone else’s family on the dresser made me long for my own. I missed the U.S. so much and craved a connecting thread, so I’d sneak over to Shakespeare and Company, the iconic English-language bookstore on Paris’ Left Bank. There was always a line, but I’d queue up behind the dark green facade until it was my turn.
Entering was like traversing a portal to home. The English titles, author names and book covers were a welcome respite from France. I felt incomprehensibly relieved to hear people speak English and see American and British titles laid out in beautiful and familiar piles. Though the bookshop itself was always crammed with shoppers and tourists, the upper floor offered dimly lit reading nooks. During free moments that summer, I’d escape to the bookshop and stare at the novels, routinely leaving with two or one but sometimes buying none. The small act of self-care anchored me; it felt like visiting home.
Flash forward a year, when I visited Albertine Books in Manhattan for much the same reason I visited Shakespeare and Company. I desperately needed a portal to a different place, only this time, that place was Paris. The truth was, after leaving, I immediately missed not only the city itself but also the opportunity to be a leisurely and detached flâneuse, the rich royal history of kings and court and the cultural emphasis on intellect, philosophy and big ideas. My appreciation only grew back at school, where I enrolled in French literature courses and reached for passionate, provocative francophone titles when reading for pleasure.
My language skills matured at a quicker pace when it came to reading versus listening or speaking. Though I was still nervous about speaking up or conversing outside of necessity, I could grasp heady French authorial voices and began working through passages fluidly. A few months ago, I even acted in a French theatre troupe’s soirée de théâtre, playing the lovesick daughter Angélique in scenes from Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire: “Crois-tu qu’il m’aime autant qu’il me le dit,” I asked (“Do you think he loves me as much as he says he does?”).
During this long, hot summer, I’ve made an effort to maintain my French reading skills by adding French books into my summer reading queue. I’ve enjoyed la plume of Philippe Besson and Françoise Sagan. I recently finished Maud Ventura’s Mon mari, a smashing success in both French and English, which I picked up from Albertine’s coup de coeur shelf. In it, Ventura writes of a woman follement (English: madly) obsessed with her husband.
With an impressive selection of over 14,000 titles from thirty francophone countries, Albertine Books is the only New York bookshop to offer a robust list of French and English books. I want to return because it feels like walking into Paris, a city I was ironically once eager to escape.
This particular transportive bookstore can be found inside the Upper East Side’s historic Payne Whitney mansion, built in the first decade of the 20th Century. The building at 972 Fifth Avenue has served as the Cultural Services of the French Embassy since 1952, and the bookshop opened in 2014. Entering the Villa Albertine, one walks into a marble rotunda, pillars orbiting a central statue of youth. To the right sits “The Venetian Room,” a space seemingly transplanted from an opulent 18th-century European mansion: mirrored walls, soft portraits and Meissen porcelain crowd the lavish interior.
The hall opens to the bookstore. On social media, Albertine Books is renowned for its hand-painted astrological ceiling, modeled after the work of artist Franz von Stuck on the music room ceiling at the Villa Stuck in Munich. Albertine’s ceiling is a deep, celestial navy, spotted with tiny gold stars and larger planetary and astrological symbology.
For non-Francophones, Albertine is still worth a visit: the reams of literature translated from French include works by contemporary authors as well as classics, perfect for engaging with French literature in a comfortable tongue. The inverse—American and global literature translated into French—also occupies much of the bookstore. Popular reads like Freida McFadden’s La Femme de Ménage, Harry Potter et la Chambre des Secrets and Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Tant que le café est encore chaud were fun to see there sitting alongside timeless greats like Jane Austen’s Orgueil et Préjugés or Homère’s Iliade. Of course, French authors take center stage—Leïla Slimani, Patrick Modiano, Alexandre Dumas and hundreds more. Upstairs, old and rare books are housed behind a glass screen.
When I missed home, Shakespeare and Company brought me back. Conversely, Albertine became my portal back to Paris. If I didn’t have other places to be, I would have stayed at Albertine for hours and hours, browsing and buying and browsing some more. French books—especially paperbacks—tend to be more affordable than American ones, and I left with two new ones and a bookmark without breaking the bank.