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.

Day 1



Bibliotheque nationale de France

 We landed at  Charles de Gaulle Airport early Tuesday morning, which was waaay early by my internal clock.  I got downtown with a minimum of effort, and after getting myself all turned around for a brief time, found the Novotel easily.  The room wasn't ready, so I headed off to the nearest attraction: the Bibliotheque national de France. Four large book-shaped buildings surrounding a rectangular courtyard with a garden sunk so deep you're just looking at the tree tops from the access level.  I tried to go into the main reference room and LIS collection: no one ever thinks to lock up the LIS books.  But they were here, and a very nice young woman informed me that I had to get a pass at the main desk.  I nodded and smiled and backed away feeling like an imposter.  I hadn't come to do RESEARCH, just to goop at all the books.  One more dilettante caught in the filter.

After getting into my room at the hotel, I headed out for the Latin Quarter.  But, as so often happens in Paris, the city just took me and I followed.  I drifted off to see the Mosquee de Paris, lured by the prospect of their tea room, which the guide book recommended as a place to have a baclava and mint tea. But the tea room turned out to be a full-blown restaurant, with prices to match, so instead I followed a sign for the Pantheon.  Upon reaching it, I decided to go into the smaller Eglise Saint-Etienne Du Mont, first.  I was touched by one of the chapels right back in the ... what's the term... clerestory?  The walkway around the back of the alter.  The tomb of Pascal was next to one piller, with the tomb of Racine next to its partner on the other side.  Pascal and Racine... if eternity consists of eternally breaking up into small groups, I'd say they were both fortunate.



Pantheon

 Then across the road to the Pantheon: that cathedral that was later turned into a secular celebration of France's government and culture.  The Foucault's Pendulum swings steadily where the altar would have been, showing us how we humans, while undoubtedly surrounded by mysteries, occasionally muster up the brains to solve some of the more brain-cracking ones.

Looking at the statues surrounding the central area, I was struck by the gender divisions.  While the main actors in dramas like the French Revolution were men, their muses were largely female. Typical, I suppose, but still: after all these years of hearing aggression attributed to testosterone, it pulled me up short to see the battle being led by Muse-type women with startling measurements and drapery that's always falling down.  It put me in mind of Katherine Hepburn's line as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter, remembering how she rode bare-breasted on Crusade: "Louis had a seizure and I damned near dies of windburn, but the troops were dazzled."

The crypt underneath the Pantheon is a Who's Who of French history.  Everyone who's anyone is there: it's like a select party of the best and the brightest.  And, like so many elite parties, dull as a long wet weekend.  Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Dumas, Brailled, Curie.... they may have been cool when they could say and do things, but the conversation has begun to flag, and they all look the same anyhow: long and rectangular.  I was glad to get into the sunshine.

I browsed the bookstores in the French Quarter, feeling very cosmopolitan and educated.  After a quick meal I wandered over to Sainte Chappell, and found myself just in time to hear one of their regular evening concerts.  An artist I didn't recognize played the Bach Goldberg variations, and she was marvellous.  Unlike other versions I've heard, this one was light: like a big balloon floating among those indescribable stained-glass windows.  The acoustics aren't crisp, they way they are in some concert halls, but after each variation she paused and let the sound spiral away.  She'd sit for a second in silence, and then the hands would go to the keyboard, and she'd assume a whole new persona for each variation: sometimes solemn, sometimes playful, sometimes wistful, sometimes majestic.  She did some Chopin for an encore, and it was out of this world.

I emerged from the concert to see a full moon hanging over the city, and walked back to the hotel along the Seine, stopping first to get a crepe (I'm missing the LWB pancake breakfast, so I'm entitled).  The river banks were full of action: people were ballroom dancing in one place.  It's true what the guidebooks say: the river is an integral part of Parisian life.

Tomorrow it's the Louvre and its environs.  That and preparing my paper, as well as my class for Thursday.