Modern Travellers, Eternal Poets: Masha Peugeot
We met on a Tuesday morning in the 16th arrondissement. Coffee, a table on the side with leather chairs. She speaks the way she thinks. Very freely indeed, going from Moscow winters to a safari in Africa to a deja vu in Geneva at age ten, without losing the thread. Because for Masha Peugeot, all of it is connected. Every city, every departure and most importantly every moment of arrival. Travel is how she understands herself.
Masha is a food and hospitality expert, and the creative mind behind Volzhenka. Based in Paris, though she would be the first to tell you that being based somewhere and belonging to it are two different things.
We invited her to join our series Modern Travellers, Eternal Poets, a portrait project by Des Épigraphes.
"A souvenir is a smell. A feeling somewhere here in the stomach. Sometimes a dream."
She is suspicious of memory. Just like someone is when they love something enough to question it.
"Our memories are not our memories," she says. "We add things. They are creations of our minds."
What she trusts instead is the body. The smell of the tarmac when you step outside an airport. The feeling in the stomach that tells you something happened here, something that mattered, long before you can name what it was. These are the souvenirs she likes to collect despite being impossible to pack and in a way, impossible to lose.
Her first real travel memories are from her childhood. Growing up in Moscow, winters at minus thirty, a world that was cold and enormous and familiar. Then the first trips abroad changed the scale of her life. Africa stays with her most. She was the only child in the group. The savane, the animals, the sounds and the colors so far from anything she had known. She relived all of it years later on her honeymoon: the same landscapes and the same feeling in the chest. As if the child she had been had gone ahead to prepare the ground.
"It's the real berceau of life," she says. "It makes you feel."
What Masha brings when she travels
Masha is real and she won't pretend she travels light. Before arriving somewhere she already has a picture in her head of what the city calls for, what it will ask of her. She adapts. That is, she says, the real art of it.
"A location is a temple. The people who get frustrated travelling are the ones who want the city to come to them. You have to go to it. Slow down. Let it in."
Short trips frustrate her for this reason. You need time to chew, she says. Otherwise you swallow without tasting anything.
What she always looks for, wherever she lands, is the vintage market, the antique store, and the small gallery that holds the city's past. "The past of a city will help you understand it." Beautiful objects are her favorite things to bring home. Real proof that she was there, and that she paid attention.
"I was never particularly in love with Paris before. I fell in love with Paris when I moved here."
This is something she says plainly without avoiding it. Paris was not obvious to her. It became obvious.
She describes herself as always a traveller in her own city. Someone who can come back from a trip somewhere and suddenly see Paris the way a visitor would. Fresh, a little overwhelming, extraordinary in ways that daily life makes invisible. Travel gives her that. She goes away so she can come back and see it properly.
"Let's treat this city as if we've never been," she says. That is her approach. To Paris, and perhaps to most things.
She feels most spiritually aligned here. That is the word she uses. Aligned. It took time, and the city earning it. Which is, after all, how Paris tends to work.
Paris by Masha Peugeot
Her Paris is generous and unhurried. She knows where to eat, where to look, where to shop and definitely where to escape the craziness of the city.
French classics at Chez Georges or Paul Chêne. Italian that belongs to its neighbourhood: Cibus, Casa Bini. The Asian scene is where she pays attention to what's new: Bar Omi, Yoshinaga for omakase.
For shopping, Preclothed for fashion finds, Astier de Villatte for something beautiful to bring home, the vintage jewelry boutiques around Place Vendôme when she is looking for high jewelry worth keeping.
For art, the Bourse de Commerce is her constant. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs for design. And the hôtel particulier museums, where art exists at human scale : Musée Rodin, Maison de Victor Hugo, Musée Marmottan Monet.
She wanders Saint-Germain-des-Prés near rue de Furstemberg, its fabric shops and vintage galleries. Galerie Chevalier Parsua for tapestry. And on quieter mornings, the streets between Trocadéro and Passy, coffee in the garden at Maison de Balzac, where the city feels very far away and very close at the same time.
And suddenly, we understand Volzhenka did not come from nowhere. It came from years of arriving in places and paying close attention to what people eat, how they gather, what a table says about where you are. Masha Peugeot has been collecting that knowledge since she was a child sitting in the middle of an African savane, the only one her age, already watching.
And she is still watching.
