During my research I have had the opportunity to work with the diaries Vever kept in 1878 and 1900. This has provided me with a view of both his young adult life, as he was born in 1854, and his life in middle age. Two separate blog entries will provide a look first into his life in his mid-twenties, then into his life in the mid-forties. Vever filled his diaries with details about his personal and social lives, and the beginning of his career. With his brother Paul, he ran the family jewelry business, the Maison Vever, founded by his father when the family moved to Paris from Nancy during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. In the 1878 diary, Vever focuses mainly on his preparation for the Paris World’s Fair of that year. He also discusses other jewelers and their creations, as well as paintings and objets d’art that he acquires as a young art collector.

For a young, relatively affluent Parisian bourgeois, life couldn’t seem to get any better. He visited the Opera almost every night, where he would watch the performances (which he critiqued afterwards in his diary) and often go backstage to visit the performers. As a twenty-four year-old man, he paid most of his attention to the women, with whom he would exchange small portraits–similar to the way we exchange business cards or friend someone on Facebook.

Indeed, the diaries recount in detail Vever’s private life, including accounts of the many women he visited along with the one steady “girlfriend,” Henriette, to whom he was not yet ready to commit. Although he would never explicitly kiss and tell, it was obvious that he knew how to charm a woman. His social life also included visits to caf�s with his male friends and frequent dinners with his friends and family.

It has been fascinating for me to learn how modern Vever’s life seemed, or maybe just how much things have stayed the same over time. While technology is different now and we send e-mails and text messages when he was sending letters, Vever’s life seemed remarkably similar to my life at twenty years old. His journals made me realize that the past is not a foreign concept that we can never fully understand or relate to, but a previous time that has only just evolved in to the present.