Stepping Into a 1920s Paris Apartment, From Fifth Avenue
She shrieked again when I revealed the secret, the thing I had not told her at breakfast: that the Chareau exhibit featured a virtual-reality re-creation of the apartment. (Credit for the mesmerizing display goes to the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro.)
She put the virtual-reality headset to her eyes and was transported to the summer of 1969, the first time her parents had taken her and her siblings to Paris. Her father, by then in his 40s, had finally decided it was safe to go.
He had stayed away since shortly after World War II, worried that the French authorities would pull him aside in the customs line at the airport and send him back to the army. He had served in Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces. He left the army with a letter from Georges F. Doriot, himself a French émigré who had served in the United States Army, promising him a place at the Harvard Business School.
As my father-in-law told the story — and he told it often — his real motivation was avoiding the next conflict, in Indochina.
See the full story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/01/nyregion/stepping-into-a-1920s-paris-apartment-from-fifth-avenue.html?_r=0