Turning a Quarantine Into a Journey With Xavier de Maistre

Turning a Quarantine Into a Journey With Xavier de Maistre

Porthole of “Journey Round My Room” by Xavier de Maistre, photographs and special edition box by Ross Anderson, Arion Press, 2007
In a love letter to his apartment, Xavier de Maistre writes of his walls, windows, and furniture in
Journey Round My Room
,
as if he would rather be there than anywhere else in the world. Joyful descriptions of the objects and activities in his room, such as the “quiet pleasure conveyed to his soul” during the act of dusting a painting, or the ruminations on his bed and its “agreeable colors” (rose and white) that add “not a little to the pleasure” of lying in it. As he alights his focus on particular objects, he recounts stories and memories they evoke, such as an entire chapter dedicated to just his traveling coat, “made of the warmest and softest stuff I could meet with. It envelops me entirely from head to foot, and when I am in my arm-chair, with my hands in my pockets, I am very like the statue of Vishnu one sees in the pagodas of India.”
A journey of 42 days, Chapter III, “Journey Round My Room” by Xavier de Maistre, photographs and special edition box by Ross Anderson, Arion Press, 2007
De
Maistre’s
work is nearly 200 pages of such
contented
observations
of his small space. As the world has spent more than two years enmeshed in the COVID-19 pandemic in periods of isolation in our homes,
Journey Round My Room
may
feel
like a
familiar experience in 2022
. However, this work was written
in 1790, during the time of the French Revolution,
by a soldier sentenced to house arrest for 42 days, a literal
quarantine
.
A young soldier, de Maistre engaged in an illegal duel, and as punishment, was placed under house arrest in Turin, seeing only the servant who brought his meals (and dressed him and made his bed—quite decadent.) It was during this confinement to just his own room that de Maistre wrote this love letter to his surroundings. Likely an attempt to thwart boredom and unhappiness at his situation, his writings were a whimsical travel diary of his close quarters, published by his brother in 1794 as
Voyage Autour de ma Chambre
.
“Rooms” inside the shadowbox model of the special edition cover, “Journey Round My Room” by Xavier de Maistre, photographs and box by Ross Anderson, Arion Press, 2007
The Smithsonian Libraries and Archives has a beautiful copy of the 2007
Arion Press
edition of
Journey Round My Room
, as a part of the
recent gift
to the American Art and Portrait Gallery Library from collector Dr. Ronnyjane Goldsmith. The book is bound in pink and white cloth, a nod to the “agreeable” rose-colored surroundings of de Maistre himself. Ross Anderson contributed more than a dozen ghostly photographs of a generic room, using a low-resolution cell phone, and printed in gray tones on translucent paper.
Of particular note for the Smithsonian’s copy is the limited special edition’s housing—a 3-dimensional
apartment
for the viewer to “journey” throu…