A few weeks ago I had the chance to visit the ‘Musée de Nissim de Camondo’ in Paris. Nestled on Rue de Monceau is a hidden courtyard that hardly stands out among all the beauty around it. It’s the same neighborhood where a large part of the Rothschild family lived, Proust, Zola and then the Camondos; a Jewish family of bankers who probably owned one of the most beautiful houses in Paris – before the story had such a tragic end. A year before my visit, my university gave me Edmund de Waals “Letters to Camondo” – an epistolary novel written many years after the death of the original Camondo.

The book leads through the family’s life story using the rooms and objects that are still in the museum today and tells about style, the 1920s and the war, which changed this family so permanently. About a father who never wanted to change anything in the house again after his son disappeared. About a love story that somehow could have gone well. As much as one wishes for everything to turn out well – in a way it probably does – at the same time one wonders how all the rooms can be so untouched by the scandals, the suffering, the times.

Stylistically one of the most beautiful books I have read in a long time and all the more impressive once you actually enter the house. The foyer alone with the sweeping staircase to the top is breathtakingly beautiful and unlike other houses that have been turned into museums this one still maintains the feeling of home.

What is it to leave something, leave someone?… The space holds the chance that they have not gone.