No. Even by themselves the houses of this region, without the green and gray arc of hill forests above their roofs, are a force, at least many of them. Even on the plains they would assert themselves, and would form lovely and spirit-lifting horizons, one in conjunction with the other, as well as with the front and back yards, around corner after corner, off into mirror-polished depths.
And again, only as a result of this year have I recognized that the city of my childhood longings was not exotic but one exactly like the settlement here in the bay; that those white cities I later chased after through the decades were not the right thing. Or: the White City is nothing for me.
The bay also has white houses, but they are rare, and in contrast to the White City, which begins to glow only from afar, here the last white disappears at a distance, or one has to search for it. A century ago there was only one such building, which was also called La Maison Blanche. The façades display concealing colors, so to speak. Although yellow and red, even purple paint also occurs, nowhere does it make an impression of brilliance, or even of colorfulness. Yet the houses do not seem camouflaged in any way, but rather embody, in their distinctness and clarity, the fact we know as a house, and these house-facts stand, according to Karl Valentin, out in the open.
But isn’t it also thus in other suburbs? Perhaps. Except that the houses here appear more forcefully, precisely in that they are almost without exception smaller: if just as broad as elsewhere, they are lower; if as high, decidedly narrower. And since, on the other hand, the yards are often larger than elsewhere, the space between houses is entirely different from there. So much more air is visible, no matter how narrow the gaps, between and above the houses’ smallness.
It was this play of staggered in-between spaces that first brought back to me childhood images of a place of the future and rendered them concrete. And the play developed even more drawing power from other unique characteristics of the bay’s buildings. Almost every one of the thousand little houses, strangely angular or strangely spreading, had a form different from the one next door, and when two similar ones did occur, it was as rare as twins, and they always turned up far apart. Besides, they did not stand in a row anywhere, but rather each at an angle to the next, the barracks-flat one close to the street, the next one, towerlike, in back at the end of a bowling-alley-length vegetable garden, and then vice versa, and so on. And at every step you found the façades pointing in different directions, not only around the one pond or the one round, always unpeopled plaza called Place de la Concorde.
The yellow-and-gray sandstone, that common suburban building material, did not occur in the bay all along a street as elsewhere, but in isolation, likewise buildings of red brick and pale limestone, and the few stuccoed houses displayed from house to house not only different shades but also different pebbliness in their textures. Thus far I have encountered one or two whose walls reveal a pattern like the first application of mortar with the trowel, and just as many, each time again at locations far apart, where the stones, cut into hexagons, were accordingly laid in nature’s basic pattern, most noticeable otherwise in the cracks the earth develops during a drought.
Otherwise the houses tended to have no decoration, except for the chimney pots, often a veritable collection on a roof, one like a pretend factory smokestack with an upside-down flowerpot on top, the one next to it a many-winged miniature pagoda: hamlets in their own right. And on two southern façades thus far, separated by several streets, sundials revealed themselves to me, so unusually tiny — like insurance company decals — that they were a discovery if for no other reason. And on a garden wall, that row of concrete blocks, set on edge, in the form of dice whose black dots had meanwhile been whitewashed, and on a house wall a relief representing billiard balls and a queue.
All the houses in the bay huddled together in the broad hollow surrounded by wooded hills; none stuck up from a rise. None had a tower, an oriel, or turrets, or imitated a palace like quite a few in the neighboring suburbs, and none could be called a “villa,” except by a real estate agent. The one house that was somewhat more imposing resembled a forester’s lodge; the one, the only one, with an arched portal had probably once been a rectory. And in distinction to the other bays in the Seine hills, where one can repeatedly see, when out walking in the cookie-cutter side streets, a rounded Romanesque form here, a Gothic pointed cap there, in none of the established buildings here could I discover a single imitation of another building style, and probably nothing resembling a style at all.
For the architectural style of the Paris suburbs, the expression pavillon has been introduced. But for most of the local lodgings here that is not applicable. They look too unplanned, too little thought out. They are simply residences, or buildings of convenience; yet there is nothing provisional or hasty about them either. They have been standing and existing there in the forest bay since long ago, and are meant to last. I keep seeing them anew, singly and all together, as classic, less in the sense that they are timeless than that they are original, and then, too, in that they gave me a concept of everywhere, not just any old one, but rather a central one, particularly rooted in that place, indeed animated by it.
And I would never have assigned the population there to any particular people or any specific social class. A short while ago I read the remark of a famous architect from the metropolis beyond the hills, who, on the subject of the pavilions in the suburbs, whether ironically or seriously, praised the good taste of the petty bourgeois revealed in them. I do not know. At any rate I have never had any such thought in connection with the inhabitants of those classic residences in the bay here, to my delight.
As a result of the reserve the longtime inhabitants of the settlement brought to each of our encounters, I experienced all of them the same way I did their houses: as modest and untroubled — which is different from humble, or obsequious, and carefree. Each time I want to greet them, even though I do not know them, when they show themselves at their windows or garden doors, which occurs infrequently, and at times I have actually succeeded. And what a glow, a quiet, laconic, also playful glow, I received in return. I can say: In the old people in their cottages in the bay, and most of them are old, I have faith (I cannot say that of the other generations, certainly not of my own). If a single term for them ever came to mind, it was certainly not “petty bourgeois” but “cottager,” as they would say in the area I come from. And in their discretion, I thought, they combined the characteristics of saviors and the saved. Most self-deceptions are more farfetched.
Whether I am walking down the main street or down the hundreds of side streets: these residences appear to me every morning as houses in the purest sense, and still with the freshness of morning in the afternoon. And they form such varied in-between spaces with each other that the things within these spaces — the bushes, clotheslines, benches, and, way in back, the woods — or simply the empty space itself, can walk, drive, ride, or move along with me as I pass. The cheerfully rhythmic glimpses or onward-onward gestures form courtyards between the houses, if only with the breadth of a crack, and, when there is a little more room before the next house, they actually are that as a rule, rather than gardens, grassless, paved with crushed rock, occupied by rabbit hutches and chicken ladders (and soon I will also discover the first beehive there).