The 212 column revisits New York institutions that have helped define the city, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
In the children’s section of Albertine, copies of “Le Petit Prince,” stories of Tintin and Babar and other much-loved French classics are for sale beneath a sapphire-colored ceiling gilded with hand-painted constellations. What’s arguably New York’s most enchanting bookstore opened a decade ago inside the palatial Payne Whitney House, an early 1900s landmark built by the architect Stanford White on the southeast corner of East 79th Street and Fifth Avenue that’s served as the headquarters of the French Embassy’s cultural and educational activities in the United States for the past 72 years.
“Creating the bookstore saved our presence,” says Mohamed Bouabdallah, cultural counselor of France in the U.S. and director of Villa Albertine. At some point in the aughts, explains Bouabdallah, the French government considered selling the building, but then in 2009, when the French bookshop in Rockefeller Center closed, “there was room for a new one.” A few years later, a group of old offices at the Payne Whitney House were repurposed as Albertine.
It was one of Bouabdallah’s predecessors, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, who, at the behest of French president Charles de Gaulle, bought the Fifth Avenue mansion for the French Embassy in 1952. Along with the house came a life-size statue of a boy that had belonged to the home’s first inhabitants. It wasn’t until the 1990s that art authenticators attributed the sculpture to Michaelangelo; in 2009, the French embassy lent it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
To reach Albertine from the front entrance, you pass the statue’s replica in a little marble rotunda; its pillars hold up a dome-shaped ceiling decorated with ivy trellises and cherubs. On the wall to your left is a 1972 Beauvais tapestry, from a 1946 design by Henri Matisse. To the right is the house’s original reception area, called the Venetian Room, so filled with brocaded furniture, porcelain flowers and gilded glass that it’s like a mirrored box of rich French pastries.
Just beyond is Albertine, spread across two floors and conceived by Jacques Garcia, the French designer behind opulent hotels like La Mamounia in Marrakech and Hotel Costes in Paris. The bookshop exhibits some of his signature moody touches, like tiny sconces and oversize pendant lamps, both with pleated silk shades, and small benches and poufs covered in deep green velvet. Mahogany tables of varying shapes and sizes and pistachio-painted shelves display roughly 14,000 works of fiction and nonfiction, in English and French. There are rare first editions, including Colette’s libretto for the composer Maurice Ravel’s “L’enfant et les sortilèges” (1925), set behind glass. The works in translation are from metropolitan France and from other Francophone countries, including Mauritius, the Ivory Coast, Haiti and Rwanda. “Without the cross-pollination of languages that translation provides literature would suffer,” says Frank Wynne, a literary translator based in Dublin who visits Albertine whenever he’s in New York. “Without ‘Middlemarch,’ there would be no Proust.”
Every Harry Potter title, in French, is prominently displayed. They sell extremely well according to Sandrine Butteau, Albertine’s outgoing director. “People like to buy books in French that they have at home in English, so they can check [how well they’re] understanding,” she says. Albertine’s book club, which meets in the store once a month (membership costs $75 a year), tends to feature a title that’s also available in English for members who aren’t quite fluent but are keen to improve their French. In September, it was Honoré de Balzac’s “The Lily in the Valley” (1836), and earlier this month, the group read “Canoes,” a 2021 novel by Maylis de Kerangal.
The shop is named for Albertine Simonet, a love interest of Marcel, the narrator of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (1913). “We wanted the focus on a literary character,” says Butteau. “For people who don’t know Proust’s Albertine, it’s very beautiful, and it sounds very French. Of course, for the people who know Proust, it’s even better.” The bookstore’s name is incorporated into that of the city’s French cultural services — more broadly known as Villa Albertine — which includes residencies the embassy sponsors for artists and writers across the country. The embassy itself is also known as Villa Albertine, and frequently hosts discussions on literature, economics and art that are open to the public and often held in the second-floor ballroom overlooking Central Park. Once there was an all-night philosophy jam.
Smaller gatherings occasionally take place in what’s called the Atelier, a 700-square-foot-space on the fifth floor where, under the building’s vaulted roof, Helen Hay Whitney, one of the original inhabitants, worked on her poetry and children’s books in the early 1900s. The aerie was reimagined last year by the French Mexican designer Hugo Toro, who, inspired by one of Hay Whitney’s poems, “The Brook,” created a contemporary salon, with low-slung gold sofas, a green-patterned rug and interlocking oak tables meant to mimic lily pads. The Atelier reflects the embassy’s new initiative to spotlight French contemporary design.
Commissioned by Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne, a onetime treasurer of the Standard Oil Company, as a wedding gift for his nephew Payne Whitney and new bride, Helen, the house originally had about 40 rooms, likely a dozen or more servants and two or three dumbwaiters. It was one of White’s final projects, before the architect was killed in 1906, and was finished posthumously. “It seems so right that Albertine, this singular tribute to literature named for the heroine of Proust’s early 20th century masterpiece should be in a dazzling Gilded Age house in New York,” says Wynne.
A French presence has always been palpable in New York. Rich denizens of the Gilded Age enjoyed dining on rarefied French cuisine, while the women bought their clothes in Paris (as May Archer, nee Welland, did on her honeymoon in “The Age of Innocence,” Edith Wharton’s 1920 masterpiece set in that period). French writers and artists have always been drawn to the city, including, among countless others, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the great 19th century food writer (“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you who you are”) and the revolutionary artist, Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 joined other artists in taking over the Washington Arch (also designed by White) and declared Greenwich Village a “Free and Independent Republic.” In more recent times, the French literary star Édouard Louis, the author of “The End of Eddy” (2014), has made the city home. My own neighborhood, in Lower Manhattan, is replete with French bakeries, bistros and designer boutiques. But it’s at Villa Albertine, where centuries of French culture are wonderfully preserved, where the staff speak mostly French, that you feel truly transported — to a little piece of France hidden beside Central Park.
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