Day 2

Wednesday, September 21, 2010

Again, Paris took control, and I ended up just following wherever it led me. I made a late start, thanks to the time zone difference, and walked along the Seine towards the city center. As I approached the Pont de Tournelle, I jumped at the sight of a figure floating just above the trees, looking down at me solemnly. It turned out to be a massive column on the Pont de Tournelle, with that tall figure, whose name I've now forgotten, looking down the river. My own movement gave it the appearance of rising above the trees in an admonitory manner.

I meant to go directly to the Louvre, but the gardens of the Eglise Julien de Pauvre enchanted me, and I sat in the shade and read, while the traffic of Paris honked and roared around me. The church itself, the oldest working church in Paris, is cool and solemn and unpretentious.

Finally, I stirred myself to get to the Louvre, and got there in time for a lovely long lineup. I got in eventually, and made my way to the Richelieu wing, thinking to go to the Flemish and Dutch masters. But I first found myself among some impressive French sculptures, and I wandered around them on my way up to the 2^nd floor. One display captivated me: a large (rather gaudy) statue of Peace, high on a pedestal. She didn’t impress me particularly, but the two flanking statues did: d’Alembert, an 18^th-century philosopher who contributed to Diderot’s Encyclopedia on the left, and Montaigne on the right. D’Alembert had a look of keen intensity that made me gulp nervously and resolve not to speak until I’d mastered all the logical implications of what I was going to say.

The Montaigne statue, on the other hand, radiated the urbane friendliness that shines through his essays. Like the essays, the statue had a pose of informal, disarming friendliness. Like the essays, you only had to spend some time with it to realize the impeccable execution and control that lie beneath that friendliness. Looking at the marble figure, I felt that I was greeting a friend, just as I feel when I read Montaigne. And as with so many of my friends, I went away warmed by his presence, and yet vaguely aware of secrets.

I spent some time with the paintings, but they didn’t grab me, except for one portrait of a French flute player that had only one working eye. But what an eye. That eye missed nothing, and that face forgave nothing.
I needed a break, so I went down for a quick coffee, and then found myself in the Greek and Roman sculptures, and realized that, for some reason, this was going to be a 3D visit: sculpture and not painting. I don’t know why, because I know absolutely nothing about sculpture, but that’s what I was meant to see on this trip.

The galleries were crowded, and part of the fun lay in the ludicrous behaviour of the museum visitors. I saw a middle-aged woman of a stolid, no-nonsense bearing, complete with glasses and severe expression, posing for her husband beside an anonymous satyr in full, drunken nudity. I wondered whether this was her fantasy of stepping out, or the husband’s fantasy, as he snapped the camera, of how he still looked. 

There was a gigantic statue of Pallas Athena looking remarkably like a drag queen. And of course the Venus de Milo, posing wearily above a sea of upraised hands holding cell phone cameras. When I was last there, video cams were all the rage: perhaps it’s finally dawned on people that she’s made of marble, and she’s not going to move.  I wanted to give the same advice to the people who would have their pictures taken while gesturing towards a nude statue with looks of comic horror or comic lust.  But then, there's a picture somewhere of me trying to hold up the leaning tower of Pisa, so I'm in a glass house.  At least it wasn't like the school trip in the Canadian War Museum, with giggling teenagers having their smiling pictures taken against a panoramic depiction of Passchendaele.

But it was the faces that grabbed me. Caligula, with lean features that suggest both scholarly zeal and intense emotion. If I were casting the role of Angelo in Measure for Measure, I’d want someone who looked like that. Agrippa, looking fearfully intelligent and quite mean. A wonderful version of Hadrian, looking the essence of the engineer: eyes that measure everything they see, a face set in competent resignation, and a mind behind it perpetually calculating. Looking at this guy, you could imagine him going out and building that wall all by himself.

Above all, 2 different busts of Marcus Aurelius. I’m not familiar with Aurelius, except as he’s reported in Machiavelli. But I kept going back to look at his face. There was a world of thought in that face, as well as tons of sadness.

All in all, I felt a frustration similar to that I felt in the crypt beneath the Pantheon: wishing that these people could still talk. But this frustration was more enjoyable, because in a sense the faces were talking. The voices didn’t belong to the originals, so much as to the artists who appropriated and interpreted the originals. But the galleries were full of voices, and I was almost maddened by the fact that I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

After the Louvre, I walked through the Tuileries, wishing irreverently that the French weren’t quite so fond of wide open not-very-shady gardens. I found the trees and lingered in the shade, and then proceeded to walk for miles in the city off the Rue de Rivoli. I tried to get a ticket for the Opera Garnier, but it was a black tie gala, and I was decidedly underdressed.