Greer Gilman's Blog, page 51
August 19, 2014
Light
I didn't quite open the Louvre on that Saturday in Paris, but by god I closed it down. My feet did not thank me.
Over the footbridge, turn right, a ten-minutes amble through the Tuileries: Louvre. So when did they put that ferris wheel out front?
Fortunately, I got lost on the way to my beloved Écoles du Nord (Van Eyck, Vermeer), because I found myself in a miraculous temporary exhibition, which my tutelary spirits had provided: Masks, Masquerades, and Mascarons! Bliss.
There were larvae; there were gorgons; there were death masks and droll figures from commedia dell'arte. There were opulent, outrageous costume designs for the ballets danced before the Sun King (eat your heart out, Inigo Jones). There were putti shielding behind gigantic satyrs' masks. There was that iconic image of a drowned girl, much adored by morbid poets, L'Inconnue de la Seine. There was a film of the clown Grock putting on his whiteface. There was a painted confrontation of chairs (as in conveyances), each with its masked man in fantastical hag-drag, with caps of ruched and pleated linen, like so, but six foot high. It was like the love-hate mating dance of birds of more-than-paradisical splendour. There was, by Hecate, a print of a 17th century French morris dancer! dressed (said the legend) as a pilgrim fox, with a lantern and a bushy tail. And there was a photograph by Atget of a statue in the Tuileries, of Autumn as a lovely stripling, either drawing back or sheltering in his hood, and holding, with a finger hooked through its eye socket, the mask of a grim old man. His winter face? Is Autumn going to let fall his cloak of leaves, stand naked? Or swaddle in snow?
No photography allowed, but (again providentially) I'd brought a sketchbook and a pencil, and went joyously berserk. (I was desperately tempted by the Masks catalogue, but it 1) weighs about 5 pounds; 2) costs a fortune; 3) is entirely in French; 4) will doubtless be available online.)
After that I regrouped with a cup of tea and a yogurt (which came in an adorable little glass milk bottle). Onward!
I visited my dear cool Magdalene by Rogier van der Weyden, crystalline as April and as chilly, all her summer in her sleeve. (I tried to paint her forty years ago for my course in historical art technique. She's graven in my gaze.) O my, that's a lovely room! There's the Van Eyck of the Chancellor Rolin and the Virgin, with the marvellous distance; there's the Quentin Massys moneylender weighing gold, beside his cool appraising wife. In a little cabinet nearby, there's Magdalena Luther, dead at thirteen, with her preternatural gravitas, her snakes of flaxen hair; that Dürer self-portrait with the thistle and the red hat like a sea-anemone. Why didn't I remember this temptation of St Anthony? He's being menaced by a mermaid waitress, a terrific hag with a distaff and an owl on her hump; and other fabulously monstrous visions. I snapped a picture of a nun snapping a picture of Gabrielle d'Estrées pinching her sister's nipple. Then I walked a long way round through a North Dakota of Rubenses to see their Georges de la Tours, his Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, his transcendently vermilion Adoration, and the others. Night and flame. And I worshipped at their two Vermeers (in utterly gorgeous marquetry frames): The Lacemaker and the Astronomer.
After that, I had just time to look for the Winged Victory of Samothrace. She is magnificent as ocean wind, as water, storm-glorious; and like the seaside, she is thronged. There was a cataract of sightseers, pouring both ways, up and down an endless flight of balustradeless marble stairs, as white as vertigo. I nearly got swept onto them, nearly toppled, but clung and backed away. I managed to persuade a guard that yes, I really needed to use the lift. Goddesses do dwell on perilous heights, and Nike is well worthy of the climb--but I don't like going downward. Not without a rail.
By then the museum was about to close, so I thought I'd get myself a little picnic from the cafeteria and go look in the Tuileries for that statue of Autumn.
(I can recommend the chain Paul--as found in museums and railway stations--to budget travellers in a hurry. They're sort of like Au Bon Pain only, you know, actually French. Baguette sandwich or mini-quiche, beverage, and pastry for round about 10 Euros. I do like their anglaise, which is flaky pastry filled with custard and lovely half apricots.)
But when I emerged--you don't choose your exit at closing time, the Louvre herds you--I came out into a downpour, a real duck-drowner. All that pale sand in the gardens had become the most unappetizing prison gruel, and there were light-footed African peddlers running about, crying, umbarumbarella! umbarumbarella!
And all of a sudden it was a long long way back to my nice dry hotel room, and my shoes were too full of feet.
Fell over.
Nine
Over the footbridge, turn right, a ten-minutes amble through the Tuileries: Louvre. So when did they put that ferris wheel out front?
Fortunately, I got lost on the way to my beloved Écoles du Nord (Van Eyck, Vermeer), because I found myself in a miraculous temporary exhibition, which my tutelary spirits had provided: Masks, Masquerades, and Mascarons! Bliss.
There were larvae; there were gorgons; there were death masks and droll figures from commedia dell'arte. There were opulent, outrageous costume designs for the ballets danced before the Sun King (eat your heart out, Inigo Jones). There were putti shielding behind gigantic satyrs' masks. There was that iconic image of a drowned girl, much adored by morbid poets, L'Inconnue de la Seine. There was a film of the clown Grock putting on his whiteface. There was a painted confrontation of chairs (as in conveyances), each with its masked man in fantastical hag-drag, with caps of ruched and pleated linen, like so, but six foot high. It was like the love-hate mating dance of birds of more-than-paradisical splendour. There was, by Hecate, a print of a 17th century French morris dancer! dressed (said the legend) as a pilgrim fox, with a lantern and a bushy tail. And there was a photograph by Atget of a statue in the Tuileries, of Autumn as a lovely stripling, either drawing back or sheltering in his hood, and holding, with a finger hooked through its eye socket, the mask of a grim old man. His winter face? Is Autumn going to let fall his cloak of leaves, stand naked? Or swaddle in snow?
No photography allowed, but (again providentially) I'd brought a sketchbook and a pencil, and went joyously berserk. (I was desperately tempted by the Masks catalogue, but it 1) weighs about 5 pounds; 2) costs a fortune; 3) is entirely in French; 4) will doubtless be available online.)
After that I regrouped with a cup of tea and a yogurt (which came in an adorable little glass milk bottle). Onward!
I visited my dear cool Magdalene by Rogier van der Weyden, crystalline as April and as chilly, all her summer in her sleeve. (I tried to paint her forty years ago for my course in historical art technique. She's graven in my gaze.) O my, that's a lovely room! There's the Van Eyck of the Chancellor Rolin and the Virgin, with the marvellous distance; there's the Quentin Massys moneylender weighing gold, beside his cool appraising wife. In a little cabinet nearby, there's Magdalena Luther, dead at thirteen, with her preternatural gravitas, her snakes of flaxen hair; that Dürer self-portrait with the thistle and the red hat like a sea-anemone. Why didn't I remember this temptation of St Anthony? He's being menaced by a mermaid waitress, a terrific hag with a distaff and an owl on her hump; and other fabulously monstrous visions. I snapped a picture of a nun snapping a picture of Gabrielle d'Estrées pinching her sister's nipple. Then I walked a long way round through a North Dakota of Rubenses to see their Georges de la Tours, his Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, his transcendently vermilion Adoration, and the others. Night and flame. And I worshipped at their two Vermeers (in utterly gorgeous marquetry frames): The Lacemaker and the Astronomer.
After that, I had just time to look for the Winged Victory of Samothrace. She is magnificent as ocean wind, as water, storm-glorious; and like the seaside, she is thronged. There was a cataract of sightseers, pouring both ways, up and down an endless flight of balustradeless marble stairs, as white as vertigo. I nearly got swept onto them, nearly toppled, but clung and backed away. I managed to persuade a guard that yes, I really needed to use the lift. Goddesses do dwell on perilous heights, and Nike is well worthy of the climb--but I don't like going downward. Not without a rail.
By then the museum was about to close, so I thought I'd get myself a little picnic from the cafeteria and go look in the Tuileries for that statue of Autumn.
(I can recommend the chain Paul--as found in museums and railway stations--to budget travellers in a hurry. They're sort of like Au Bon Pain only, you know, actually French. Baguette sandwich or mini-quiche, beverage, and pastry for round about 10 Euros. I do like their anglaise, which is flaky pastry filled with custard and lovely half apricots.)
But when I emerged--you don't choose your exit at closing time, the Louvre herds you--I came out into a downpour, a real duck-drowner. All that pale sand in the gardens had become the most unappetizing prison gruel, and there were light-footed African peddlers running about, crying, umbarumbarella! umbarumbarella!
And all of a sudden it was a long long way back to my nice dry hotel room, and my shoes were too full of feet.
Fell over.
Nine
August 11, 2014
Jackdaws
The Louvre was a fifteen-minute saunter from my blessed hotel--just across the river and through the Tuileries. But first I had to pass the beggars on the bridge. They're nowhere near as brazen as the Villonesque rogues in Aix--
negothick
will remember that pair--but they're cheeky as crows. A mort confronted me. Now anything really valuable was in the safe in my room; my money for the day and my museum pass were in an inside zipped pocket of my bag that even I find inaccessible, with the outside flap snapped over that and turned inward at my side, with my left hand clamped firmly on the top. Broad daylight. Passers by. I thought I'd hear her patter, for research. She was good. Decently dressed in a working-class way, like a shop assistant, her face all sorrow and amazement and concern. She'd just found a wedding ring! Some woman must have lost it. What heartbreak! Oh, la pauvre! Is it gold? I hefted it. (Right hand.) Trash, I said. You must have it, she said, for luck--and tried to slip it on my finger like a bridegroom. She was after that left hand. Nuh-uh. She slid it on and off the fingers of my right hand, still with the patter, trying to distract me. Nope. So she said, but you must have it. No one ever will marry me, I am forlorn in this world. I was afraid she'd fall on my neck weeping, and grope. So I said, Good luck finding the owner, and handed her a small coin from my pocket. Then she got abusive, but a large gruff man on a bicycle told her to piss off. And she vanished.
Oh, and that hunchbacked witch? There's a platoon of her, all over Paris. I ran across three of her in three days, on and around the bridges, all in slightly different skirts and shawls and kerchiefs. Her face is always overshadowed, but some of her are quite young--you'd want to be, having to hobble and stoop like that all day.
Nine
negothick
will remember that pair--but they're cheeky as crows. A mort confronted me. Now anything really valuable was in the safe in my room; my money for the day and my museum pass were in an inside zipped pocket of my bag that even I find inaccessible, with the outside flap snapped over that and turned inward at my side, with my left hand clamped firmly on the top. Broad daylight. Passers by. I thought I'd hear her patter, for research. She was good. Decently dressed in a working-class way, like a shop assistant, her face all sorrow and amazement and concern. She'd just found a wedding ring! Some woman must have lost it. What heartbreak! Oh, la pauvre! Is it gold? I hefted it. (Right hand.) Trash, I said. You must have it, she said, for luck--and tried to slip it on my finger like a bridegroom. She was after that left hand. Nuh-uh. She slid it on and off the fingers of my right hand, still with the patter, trying to distract me. Nope. So she said, but you must have it. No one ever will marry me, I am forlorn in this world. I was afraid she'd fall on my neck weeping, and grope. So I said, Good luck finding the owner, and handed her a small coin from my pocket. Then she got abusive, but a large gruff man on a bicycle told her to piss off. And she vanished.Oh, and that hunchbacked witch? There's a platoon of her, all over Paris. I ran across three of her in three days, on and around the bridges, all in slightly different skirts and shawls and kerchiefs. Her face is always overshadowed, but some of her are quite young--you'd want to be, having to hobble and stoop like that all day.
Nine
August 10, 2014
Avocats
Still a week ago Friday, faint but pursuing.
Then, of course, I walked to the Place des Vosges itself, the first planned square in Paris, and a perfect one. The brick is between rose and salmon; the beautiful stonework is pale biscuit; the slates are that blue-gray of Paris. The windows are tall. Even the garrets are part of the architectural hierarchy. To London eyes, accustomed to a patched patchwork of timbers, jostling other patchworks in a crazy congeries, it must have looked drop-dead elegant. And vast--you could drop Great Court Trinity in it with room to spare. It raises an eyebrow at provincials, airily arrogant. You English little crawling wall-mice.
Of course, like the Dakota, everyone who was anyone would live here: Madame de Sevigné, Cardinal Richelieu...
Victor Hugo, as I recalled, had lived in a highly desirable corner apartment (merci Esmeralda, Cosette), now a museum, so I went in, mostly for the view of the square from his upper windows. Though his house is totally vaut le visite: he (or his mistress) had jaw-droppingly bad taste in chinoiserie, and his salon is a pinnacle of weird.
After that, I deserved tea. Catty-corner to the museum was a nice café (blackboards with curly writing, garçons in pillars of white apron). A regular came in just after I did--her usual table, her usual chocolat. She looked rich enough to be eccentric: asymmetrical white draperies--tunic and trousers, like a traveller in India--a tall straw hat the shape of the nipple on a baby's bottle, a good book. I watched her and the park. There wasn't one back in 1612, but there's a pleasant one now (in the sandy French manner) with a very Park Slopish vibe: the youngish rich, in unstuffy professions. There were nannies with beautifully engineered strollers. There was a couple of guys--young marrieds--asprawl on the grass, picnicking, lighting each other's smokes.
I bought a little supper on the way home from a shop called Au Sangliers: avocat garni (not a lawyer in a wig) and red-currant panna cotta. Mmmm.
The bus back swept past my longitude to--there-is-no-God help us--the Place Concorde. I took one look at the vertiginously over-caffeinated traffic and nearly lost my head; but remembered that I didn't have cross the thing to find the river, just look eastward for the Tuileries. That I did, and walked home cattycorner, musing on the uninvitingness of French parks. Always the serried regiments of plane trees, disdainful statuary, immovable benches, raked sand, a square of lawn laid out for display like a scarf in a shop window. But to my delight, the reigning birds are not pigeons but crows. The paths are full of corvids strutting, black as avocats, cocky as dammit. It's Down the Wall translated into French.
Picnicked on my little supper.
Fell over.
Nine
Then, of course, I walked to the Place des Vosges itself, the first planned square in Paris, and a perfect one. The brick is between rose and salmon; the beautiful stonework is pale biscuit; the slates are that blue-gray of Paris. The windows are tall. Even the garrets are part of the architectural hierarchy. To London eyes, accustomed to a patched patchwork of timbers, jostling other patchworks in a crazy congeries, it must have looked drop-dead elegant. And vast--you could drop Great Court Trinity in it with room to spare. It raises an eyebrow at provincials, airily arrogant. You English little crawling wall-mice.
Of course, like the Dakota, everyone who was anyone would live here: Madame de Sevigné, Cardinal Richelieu...
Victor Hugo, as I recalled, had lived in a highly desirable corner apartment (merci Esmeralda, Cosette), now a museum, so I went in, mostly for the view of the square from his upper windows. Though his house is totally vaut le visite: he (or his mistress) had jaw-droppingly bad taste in chinoiserie, and his salon is a pinnacle of weird.
After that, I deserved tea. Catty-corner to the museum was a nice café (blackboards with curly writing, garçons in pillars of white apron). A regular came in just after I did--her usual table, her usual chocolat. She looked rich enough to be eccentric: asymmetrical white draperies--tunic and trousers, like a traveller in India--a tall straw hat the shape of the nipple on a baby's bottle, a good book. I watched her and the park. There wasn't one back in 1612, but there's a pleasant one now (in the sandy French manner) with a very Park Slopish vibe: the youngish rich, in unstuffy professions. There were nannies with beautifully engineered strollers. There was a couple of guys--young marrieds--asprawl on the grass, picnicking, lighting each other's smokes.
I bought a little supper on the way home from a shop called Au Sangliers: avocat garni (not a lawyer in a wig) and red-currant panna cotta. Mmmm.
The bus back swept past my longitude to--there-is-no-God help us--the Place Concorde. I took one look at the vertiginously over-caffeinated traffic and nearly lost my head; but remembered that I didn't have cross the thing to find the river, just look eastward for the Tuileries. That I did, and walked home cattycorner, musing on the uninvitingness of French parks. Always the serried regiments of plane trees, disdainful statuary, immovable benches, raked sand, a square of lawn laid out for display like a scarf in a shop window. But to my delight, the reigning birds are not pigeons but crows. The paths are full of corvids strutting, black as avocats, cocky as dammit. It's Down the Wall translated into French.
Picnicked on my little supper.
Fell over.
Nine
August 6, 2014
Squidge!
Where was I? Oh yes, the Marais. Which means the swamp: it's urbanized squidge, the Back Bay of Paris, crossed with the Lower East side and Park Slope. There still survive a few tall tall half-timbered 15th century buildings, leggy as fireweeds, shouldering toward light and air. Aside from the boulangeries, there are dozens on dozens of distracting shops: hand-dyed silks at celestial prices, antique musical instruments, hurdy-gurdies and violas da gamba inlaid with ivory or rare woods, damascened French horns ...
The blue sign for rue Grenier sur l‘Eau was X'd out with tape, and a newer placard says Allée des Justes-de-Frances, with a wall of names of the righteous leading to the Shoah Museum. I felt bad about not going in--I had other research--though I stood for a long minute of silence. I was relieved to note a discreet police presence--guys in dark suits talking to their breast pockets, a cruiser--just along both sides of the museum. Tensions are high. Violence has flared.
I went round and round St. Gervais-et-St. Protais, looking for a way in, to no avail. It looked nailed shut. Damn. A Sphinx-like church, with Gothic hindquarters and a classical facade.
As time was getting on, I abandoned the book walk and cut across rue Rosiers: a used-to-be funky, still quirky street full of outrageous delis and fading bookshops, signed in Yiddish. There was (of course) an ecstatic Chabad guy out crying "Shabbat shalom!" Last words I ever expected to hear in France.
The Musée Carnavalet is a very fine hôtel, with charming formal gardens in the courtyards: knots of boxwood, convents of flowers. The entrance hall was just I remembered (only better painted and lit), with all the street signs of Paris, mostly in wrought ironwork, but with one larger-than-life wooden Turk: not selling tobacco, as I guessed, but cashmeres. Just as I recalled, there were the wonderful prints of the street cries of Paris (just a trifle later in the 17th century than I needed): ballad sellers, fruit and toys and faggot peddlers, a woman bagpiper. But I went round and round up and down the slippery stairs in increasing bewilderment: no doorway to the Renaissance. Nothing earlier than Voltaire. Nothing against later centuries, mind you: I loved the bad fantasy cover portrait of Napoleon, and Proust's bedroom, and Élisabeth de Gramont, the red duchess. But pas de 17ème siècle. I asked a guard: fermé, Madame. Bugger. But by great good fortune, I had circled back right by the chain-and-stanchions when a guide drew them back, and led a special group in. No arrière pensée: I slipped in after them, trying to look like one of Les Petites Amis de la Soeur de Gabrielle d'Estrée, or whatever the hell they were. And there, just round the corner, were the two paintings that I needed to study, of le grand carrousel at the Place des Vosges in April 1612. Vaut le voyage! The more fantastical--and therefore useful--scene turned out to be about the size of a wedding quilt. Also oil-glazed to a fare-thee-well, and facing bright windows, but I spent a very happy forty minutes or so, studying and photographing all the strange details that are eight blurred pixels in the images I've found online. Stuff I can use!
More anon.
Nine
The blue sign for rue Grenier sur l‘Eau was X'd out with tape, and a newer placard says Allée des Justes-de-Frances, with a wall of names of the righteous leading to the Shoah Museum. I felt bad about not going in--I had other research--though I stood for a long minute of silence. I was relieved to note a discreet police presence--guys in dark suits talking to their breast pockets, a cruiser--just along both sides of the museum. Tensions are high. Violence has flared.
I went round and round St. Gervais-et-St. Protais, looking for a way in, to no avail. It looked nailed shut. Damn. A Sphinx-like church, with Gothic hindquarters and a classical facade.
As time was getting on, I abandoned the book walk and cut across rue Rosiers: a used-to-be funky, still quirky street full of outrageous delis and fading bookshops, signed in Yiddish. There was (of course) an ecstatic Chabad guy out crying "Shabbat shalom!" Last words I ever expected to hear in France.
The Musée Carnavalet is a very fine hôtel, with charming formal gardens in the courtyards: knots of boxwood, convents of flowers. The entrance hall was just I remembered (only better painted and lit), with all the street signs of Paris, mostly in wrought ironwork, but with one larger-than-life wooden Turk: not selling tobacco, as I guessed, but cashmeres. Just as I recalled, there were the wonderful prints of the street cries of Paris (just a trifle later in the 17th century than I needed): ballad sellers, fruit and toys and faggot peddlers, a woman bagpiper. But I went round and round up and down the slippery stairs in increasing bewilderment: no doorway to the Renaissance. Nothing earlier than Voltaire. Nothing against later centuries, mind you: I loved the bad fantasy cover portrait of Napoleon, and Proust's bedroom, and Élisabeth de Gramont, the red duchess. But pas de 17ème siècle. I asked a guard: fermé, Madame. Bugger. But by great good fortune, I had circled back right by the chain-and-stanchions when a guide drew them back, and led a special group in. No arrière pensée: I slipped in after them, trying to look like one of Les Petites Amis de la Soeur de Gabrielle d'Estrée, or whatever the hell they were. And there, just round the corner, were the two paintings that I needed to study, of le grand carrousel at the Place des Vosges in April 1612. Vaut le voyage! The more fantastical--and therefore useful--scene turned out to be about the size of a wedding quilt. Also oil-glazed to a fare-thee-well, and facing bright windows, but I spent a very happy forty minutes or so, studying and photographing all the strange details that are eight blurred pixels in the images I've found online. Stuff I can use!
More anon.
Nine
August 5, 2014
Le Squee!
Mont Saint-Michel! Mont Saint-Michel! Mont Saint-Michel!
Nine
Nine
August 4, 2014
Cobbled up
Friday at last! Woke full of ambition and energy: I had a Mission to the Marais. I've known for ages that the next tale in the Sirenaiad (as I've taken to calling the Ben stories: the Mermaid saga) will have a crucial scene or two set there. I wanted some local color; I wanted a good look at two paintings in the Musée Carnavalet.
Getting there was a piece of cake. (Did I say that I love this hotel?) Round the corner, cross the footbridge, and there you are: bus stop. Took me straight past the Louvre to the Hotel de Ville. Ten minutes.
I'd found a lovely little book of walks in Paris, the sort that tells you to peep through the gates at no. 37 for a glimpse of a beautiful courtyard, built by so-and-so for his mistress the précieuse. The problem, as I discovered, is that all the tours begin at the nearest Métro stop, and all the maps, artistically, are islets, and how does this bit of jigsaw fit into where I am? No cellular, no wifi, and my paper map was blotched with locations of the Galeries Lafayette at all the crucial junctures.
Once I'd found Rue François Miron, I thought I deserved a little breakfast, as described above ("Marchons! Marchons!"). The next thing I found after that was an exquisite boulangerie, Au Petit Versailles du Marais, painted with gleaners. Their sign boasted a 2nd prize for traditional baguettes, Paris-wide, which evidences a serious passion for things floury. Inside was paradise, with a ceiling pretty as a tea cup, and O my! such things! Besides, as the bell rang, the guy behind the counter looked up and exclaimed that my new hat was beautiful. (It is blue, of course, and Cecil-Beaton broad.) After much contemplation, I chose their tarte tatin, which goes on my short list of wow: no cassia, just pure alchemy of apple, of a dark dark perfect amber, cyrstallized yet soft.
More anon.
Nine
Getting there was a piece of cake. (Did I say that I love this hotel?) Round the corner, cross the footbridge, and there you are: bus stop. Took me straight past the Louvre to the Hotel de Ville. Ten minutes.
I'd found a lovely little book of walks in Paris, the sort that tells you to peep through the gates at no. 37 for a glimpse of a beautiful courtyard, built by so-and-so for his mistress the précieuse. The problem, as I discovered, is that all the tours begin at the nearest Métro stop, and all the maps, artistically, are islets, and how does this bit of jigsaw fit into where I am? No cellular, no wifi, and my paper map was blotched with locations of the Galeries Lafayette at all the crucial junctures.
Once I'd found Rue François Miron, I thought I deserved a little breakfast, as described above ("Marchons! Marchons!"). The next thing I found after that was an exquisite boulangerie, Au Petit Versailles du Marais, painted with gleaners. Their sign boasted a 2nd prize for traditional baguettes, Paris-wide, which evidences a serious passion for things floury. Inside was paradise, with a ceiling pretty as a tea cup, and O my! such things! Besides, as the bell rang, the guy behind the counter looked up and exclaimed that my new hat was beautiful. (It is blue, of course, and Cecil-Beaton broad.) After much contemplation, I chose their tarte tatin, which goes on my short list of wow: no cassia, just pure alchemy of apple, of a dark dark perfect amber, cyrstallized yet soft.
More anon.
Nine
August 3, 2014
A number of things
Still jeudi.
I left Shakespeare & Co. with a little book bag: recto, "Stars, hide your fires, let not light see my black and deep desires"; verso, "Bard-en-Seine 2014--Shakespeare's 450th birthday." Sweet.
All I had to do was follow the river, and tea and pillows awaited. Sadly, however, the walking apparatus had packed in. It was a long slow draggle, lightened just a trifle by the scenery and the shop windows. Many little galleries and genuine antiques: like Etruscan, or at worst Directoire. Fauteuils in marquetery. Faience. My dear!
Fell over.
By great strength of will, I made that nap an hour, so I could get to the Musée d'Orsay, which was open late. But first, actual food. Sadly, their Café de l'Ours, with its beautiful sleek white life-size sculpture of a bear--in septentriones sempiterne--was just closing. I so wanted to sit bestride or astride it, in honor of Exit. The next café I tried--the Papa Bear--was scarily expensive; but the Mama Bear, behind one of the clocks, was just right. Duck foie gras (I shouldn't but I do love it) on vanilla brioche, with pineapple marmalade; and a salad of infantine chard. Just right for a summer evening. And you can walk out on the rooftop from there and admire Paris, brooded over by vast allegorical figures. Heaven knows what they're meant for. This was built as a railway station, so perhaps Diligence and Aspiration. Or the Nine Muses of Steam. That left a good hour and a half for the Impressionist galleries. More happy recognitions: wait, that's here? Renoir's pair of paired waltzers, the elated and the elegant, a Manet haystack soaked in pink light as a Eastern sweet is in honey. And little girls breathing O! at the Degas dancer in her ragged pink skirt, her chin up to confront her future. Diligence and Aspiration.
A toddle home, and so to bed.
Nine
I left Shakespeare & Co. with a little book bag: recto, "Stars, hide your fires, let not light see my black and deep desires"; verso, "Bard-en-Seine 2014--Shakespeare's 450th birthday." Sweet.
All I had to do was follow the river, and tea and pillows awaited. Sadly, however, the walking apparatus had packed in. It was a long slow draggle, lightened just a trifle by the scenery and the shop windows. Many little galleries and genuine antiques: like Etruscan, or at worst Directoire. Fauteuils in marquetery. Faience. My dear!
Fell over.
By great strength of will, I made that nap an hour, so I could get to the Musée d'Orsay, which was open late. But first, actual food. Sadly, their Café de l'Ours, with its beautiful sleek white life-size sculpture of a bear--in septentriones sempiterne--was just closing. I so wanted to sit bestride or astride it, in honor of Exit. The next café I tried--the Papa Bear--was scarily expensive; but the Mama Bear, behind one of the clocks, was just right. Duck foie gras (I shouldn't but I do love it) on vanilla brioche, with pineapple marmalade; and a salad of infantine chard. Just right for a summer evening. And you can walk out on the rooftop from there and admire Paris, brooded over by vast allegorical figures. Heaven knows what they're meant for. This was built as a railway station, so perhaps Diligence and Aspiration. Or the Nine Muses of Steam. That left a good hour and a half for the Impressionist galleries. More happy recognitions: wait, that's here? Renoir's pair of paired waltzers, the elated and the elegant, a Manet haystack soaked in pink light as a Eastern sweet is in honey. And little girls breathing O! at the Degas dancer in her ragged pink skirt, her chin up to confront her future. Diligence and Aspiration.
A toddle home, and so to bed.
Nine
August 1, 2014
Beached
Still jeudi. It looked like a very nice bed in that hotel--it is--but I figured if I crawled in, I would wake at midnight, and no Paris! So I fortified myself with a cold shower and sauntered out, humming Judy Collins. There was the Seine, and the sunlight, and all the bookstalls on the quais, just opening. Pleasantly random stuff: pages cut from antiphonaries, pictures of Jim Morrison, sets of Sartre, naughty posters from all manner of decades, cats, can cans, Ted Sturgeon in French...They drew me on. Pont Royal, Pont Neuf, and hey, what is it with this love locks thing? All the footbridges were glittering with pledges, triple-armored like tarasques.
At the Ile de la Cité, I crossed. Still no plan: I was just enjoying things as they came. I found a lovely little paper-and-pen shop, and bought a pencil sharpener--I had to mime one, as my French wasn't working--for the sheer pleasure of it. I found a café selling glaces de Berthillon and bought two boules for breakfast--chocolate and salty caramel--and ate it on a bench beside some aquiferous green ladies. There were people filling water bottles at their little shrine, and the ladies felt like the nurses of Paris.
When I came to Notre Dame, I burst out laughing. It looks so very much like itself, like its drawing in David Macaulay. Like Stonehenge, it's smaller than you remember it, so more endearing. And it's frizzy with gargoyles. ("They are leaning out for love; and they will lean that way forever...")
It was inside that the jetlag hit me. I did manage to light a candle for my mother, as the founder of the feast; I even half-murmured a fragment of the Kaddish. (The difference between English cathedrals and French ones, I note, is that people actually pray in French ones: they fall to their knees in adoration.) But I was spent. I sat for a long while on a rush-bottomed chair, vaguely thinking I should stagger on and wrap myself around some lunch. And I sat.
After some while, I got up, and started hobbling now that way, and now this, backtracking, and buzzing in circles. I came upon the bridge to the Ile de Saint-Louis, guarded by a small brown spirit. At least, a Roma boy, no more than nine or so, sat playing the accordion and nodding off, still playing. He looked chained, as if they'd sacrificed his spirit when they drove the piles. I wasn't going to cross that bridge.
Quartier Latin, I thought. Lunch. But I felt ensorcelled myself. I was walking on a pair of beehives, hirpling like a hag; I was half-conscious. Every street was a hell of jackhammers; every café, hazed with Gauloises. Just stop looking, I thought. Go down a side street. So I did, and at once came upon a pleasantly quirky little place that did tea and cream puffs, with a perfect view of the cathedral. Except as I sat down, a witch, bent double like a question mark, hobbled in among the tables, walking spells. Hooked nose, fantastical black rags: she looked like I felt.
Reading my guidebook as I drank my tea, I discovered I was just around the corner from Shakespeare & Company. Cool! Never been there. And it, too, looked just like itself, endearingly. The inside is even better; and I want to live upstairs. The children's nook is both a lair and an outlook; the back room has a disreputably grinning old piano, on which a visitor was playing soft chords and arpeggios; but the front room was a little paradise. Imagine a ceiling of mediaeval timbers; a floor of worn terra cotta; and three-and-a-half walls of old books, floor to ceiling. Against the fourth wall is a battered broad wooden table--a writer's table if I ever saw one--with an old typewriter on it, and a tall open window with a fan in it, and a windowbox of lavender, and a view of the Seine. It's kept as a reading room, in memory of Sylvia Beach. To my dismay, I was too far gone even to browse properly; but I sat on an old leather couch and breathed books, and felt Paris waft agasinst my face. And after half an hour, my soul was restored.
More anon.
Nine
At the Ile de la Cité, I crossed. Still no plan: I was just enjoying things as they came. I found a lovely little paper-and-pen shop, and bought a pencil sharpener--I had to mime one, as my French wasn't working--for the sheer pleasure of it. I found a café selling glaces de Berthillon and bought two boules for breakfast--chocolate and salty caramel--and ate it on a bench beside some aquiferous green ladies. There were people filling water bottles at their little shrine, and the ladies felt like the nurses of Paris.
When I came to Notre Dame, I burst out laughing. It looks so very much like itself, like its drawing in David Macaulay. Like Stonehenge, it's smaller than you remember it, so more endearing. And it's frizzy with gargoyles. ("They are leaning out for love; and they will lean that way forever...")
It was inside that the jetlag hit me. I did manage to light a candle for my mother, as the founder of the feast; I even half-murmured a fragment of the Kaddish. (The difference between English cathedrals and French ones, I note, is that people actually pray in French ones: they fall to their knees in adoration.) But I was spent. I sat for a long while on a rush-bottomed chair, vaguely thinking I should stagger on and wrap myself around some lunch. And I sat.
After some while, I got up, and started hobbling now that way, and now this, backtracking, and buzzing in circles. I came upon the bridge to the Ile de Saint-Louis, guarded by a small brown spirit. At least, a Roma boy, no more than nine or so, sat playing the accordion and nodding off, still playing. He looked chained, as if they'd sacrificed his spirit when they drove the piles. I wasn't going to cross that bridge.
Quartier Latin, I thought. Lunch. But I felt ensorcelled myself. I was walking on a pair of beehives, hirpling like a hag; I was half-conscious. Every street was a hell of jackhammers; every café, hazed with Gauloises. Just stop looking, I thought. Go down a side street. So I did, and at once came upon a pleasantly quirky little place that did tea and cream puffs, with a perfect view of the cathedral. Except as I sat down, a witch, bent double like a question mark, hobbled in among the tables, walking spells. Hooked nose, fantastical black rags: she looked like I felt.
Reading my guidebook as I drank my tea, I discovered I was just around the corner from Shakespeare & Company. Cool! Never been there. And it, too, looked just like itself, endearingly. The inside is even better; and I want to live upstairs. The children's nook is both a lair and an outlook; the back room has a disreputably grinning old piano, on which a visitor was playing soft chords and arpeggios; but the front room was a little paradise. Imagine a ceiling of mediaeval timbers; a floor of worn terra cotta; and three-and-a-half walls of old books, floor to ceiling. Against the fourth wall is a battered broad wooden table--a writer's table if I ever saw one--with an old typewriter on it, and a tall open window with a fan in it, and a windowbox of lavender, and a view of the Seine. It's kept as a reading room, in memory of Sylvia Beach. To my dismay, I was too far gone even to browse properly; but I sat on an old leather couch and breathed books, and felt Paris waft agasinst my face. And after half an hour, my soul was restored.
More anon.
Nine
Marchons! Marchons!
Aha! A café in the Marais with a late petit déjeuner and wifi--bliss. Au chocolat.
I confess that Thursday--not without its glories--was a trifle overfraught. Charles de Gaulle is a tartine compared with Heathrow: customs in a blink, charming agents of tourism, eager to sell you four-day museum passes and offer directions. Except that--
There's a wasp investigating my croissant. Hey, when did French breakfasts start including a soft boiled egg with toast soldiers? Lovely!
--except that, Le Métro was fouquet. Line C was replaced by shuttle buses. That was a long long trudge down subway platforms, up escalators, through turnstiles, down blocks of gleefully raging traffic, to an unclearly wrong bus stop where the signage ended, and was replaced by volubly confabulating French, whom I could barely hear at all, being somewhat deaf. (I forgot to bring ear stents for the landing.) I was rescued by a beautiful Ethiopian? Somali? (she looked like Sofia Samatar) with the most extraordinary green eyes. "I live here," she said. She directed me to the tail lights of a vanishing bus--Service Castor--and a throng of the bewildered and dismayed. It was like the left bank of the Styx, but with cameras and rolly bags.
It was only when I got on said bus that I realized I'd been standing by the Seine all this while, just beyond the construction fences. And I rolled on in a state of high glory, past Pont Neuf and Pont Royal, to the Musée d'Orsay, which has a couple of clocks worthy of a Belle Époque Harold lloyd, and a rhinoceros in their front courtyard.
More anon.
Nine
I confess that Thursday--not without its glories--was a trifle overfraught. Charles de Gaulle is a tartine compared with Heathrow: customs in a blink, charming agents of tourism, eager to sell you four-day museum passes and offer directions. Except that--
There's a wasp investigating my croissant. Hey, when did French breakfasts start including a soft boiled egg with toast soldiers? Lovely!
--except that, Le Métro was fouquet. Line C was replaced by shuttle buses. That was a long long trudge down subway platforms, up escalators, through turnstiles, down blocks of gleefully raging traffic, to an unclearly wrong bus stop where the signage ended, and was replaced by volubly confabulating French, whom I could barely hear at all, being somewhat deaf. (I forgot to bring ear stents for the landing.) I was rescued by a beautiful Ethiopian? Somali? (she looked like Sofia Samatar) with the most extraordinary green eyes. "I live here," she said. She directed me to the tail lights of a vanishing bus--Service Castor--and a throng of the bewildered and dismayed. It was like the left bank of the Styx, but with cameras and rolly bags.
It was only when I got on said bus that I realized I'd been standing by the Seine all this while, just beyond the construction fences. And I rolled on in a state of high glory, past Pont Neuf and Pont Royal, to the Musée d'Orsay, which has a couple of clocks worthy of a Belle Époque Harold lloyd, and a rhinoceros in their front courtyard.
More anon.
Nine
July 31, 2014
Mirabile dictu...
I find myself in Paris. Golly. This was not planned; but something fell through with a clatter on Tuesday, and when life hands you lemons, make citron pressé. The magnificent Barbara came through with a lovely hotel, steps from the Musée d'Orsay and the Seine. It's a lovely bright cool morning, and I am sitting by a courtyard with a woodland garden. The hotel greeted me with the best (properly brewed) pot of English tea I've had in France, sympathetic little biscuits, and free wifi. I could get used to this.
Ah, Paris!
Nine
Ah, Paris!
Nine
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