A Day at the Museum and Other Final Resting Places
Ten years ago, when I traveled to Paris after graduate school, there wasn’t a real depth or interest in the Paris museums. Truth be told, by the time we got to Paris “museum burn out” was in full affect. So, today was an opportunity to make up for those missed hours.
Being the first Sunday of the month, all public museums in Paris carried free admissions. But, to get to the center of town, I had to pass through the fresh market. The first customers of the day were picking through the best produce and many of the stands were still under construction by the operators.
Taking this picture, the vendor caught me out of the corner of his eye and said, “One Euro. Photo is one Euro.” In surprising speed I darted back, “One Euro? This is Paris not Africa.” The patron laughed so hard he actually bent at the waist. Turning to me the customer said, with a broad grin and accent, “Enjoy your stay in Paris.”
This market openly displayed the French love of food. The tour guide, yesterday, said that, “One sure way to know who is a tourist is to find the people who are walking and eating at the same time.” He continued, “The French respect, even honor, their food enough never to rush the experience by multi-tasking.” (This is true if smoking, talking, and reading don’t count as “multi-tasking”.) So, love of food starts with great ingredients and the market provided almost everything, from beautiful fruits, ...
vegetables, …
fish, …
shellfish, …
cheeses, …
and even more exotic breeds of vegetables, like broccoflower.
Exiting the subway at the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde was just a short walk away. This was where the majority of beheadings from the French Revolution were exacted. Louis the XVI and Marie-Antoinette were both executed here. At one point there was such a thirst for revenge that over 1,300 people were beheaded in a single month. It was said that the stench of blood was so thick that horses refused to enter the square. The bloodlust was so complete that the mobs even took the head of the founder of the French Revolution, believing that he was no longer radical enough. The uneducated mobs even went into Notre Dame Cathedral and cut the heads off of the statues, believing them to be images of noblemen. Someone must have been embarrassed upon finding out that the statues weren’t aristocratic at all but images of the saints.
In the corner of the Place de Concorde is the five star and very exclusive hotel Hotel de Crillon, where the winner of the Tour de France receives one night of room and board after victory. Another perk is that the hotel allows the champion to raise his nation’s flag on the roof top center pole. When Lance Armstrong won the tour seven times, guess which flag he chose to fly? Yepper, the red, white, and blue, colors of the nation of Texas.
My free museum day strategy was to go to the permanent exhibit of Monet's water lilies, housed at the old Orange House in the Tuileries Gardens. Disappointingly, the museum didn’t open until 12:30pm and it was only 9:30am. So plan “B” was walking towards the Musee D’Orsay.
Looking across the river, there were easily a thousand people already in the quay and tour buses pulling up to unload even more “free museum day” enthusiasts.
Plan “C”, if the museums are going to be packed, I may as well go to one of the biggest houses of art in the world, the Louvre. The line by the pyramid, main entrance, made the Musee D’Orsay gathering look diminutive. So, I headed past the machine gun wielding security guard to the side, or “Lion’s Gate”, entrance.
My reception was the complete opposite of those standing for hours in the main courtyard. Simply walking up to the door, which was clearly void of tourists, the security staff were bored, chatting, or reading. Looking up, they waved me through the metal detectors and x-rayed my rucksack.
The nearly empty “Pacific” exhibit was a good warm-up for the rest of the museum. I really enjoyed the character and expression of these palm wood carvings.
This head should need no introduction, as it was a gift of the Chilean government to the Louvre of one of Easter Island’s massive stone Moai Heads.
Making the trip upstairs towards the more traditional exhibits, someone must have let the word out about the side entrance because in a matter of half an hour the line was mounting.
The Mona Lisa is the single most visited item in the museum. The painting itself is actually quite small and is mounted behind glass and protected by a wooden semi-circle railing and museum guards.
The entertainment is not so much in seeing the work, because you simply can’t get a good view, due to pushing crowds, lack of proximity, and diligent guards who keep the processional flowing, but enjoying the circus of the crowd. So go to try to see Da Vinci’s painting and be satisfied with actually seeing more of the human event.
As long as we are in this part of the museum, let’s take a diversion to talk about Napoleon, again. He decided it would be a good idea to be crowned “Emperor for Life” of France, so held a coronation ceremony. In the proceedings, held in Notre Dame Cathedral, he knelt before the pope, then took the gilded laurel leafs from the papal grasp and crowned himself “Emperor”. With this self-coronation he would be beholden to no earthly man or entity. This presented a challenge for the painter commissioned to document the event with a massive mural. The people would not rally behind a painting of Napoleon belittling the Pope, so he painted a scene of the newly instated Emperor crowning his wife as Empress.
(The section photographed is maybe an eighth of the total painted canvas scene.)
There are works that even in broken incompleteness are still magnificent. Winged Victory is so known and loved in its broken state, that I wonder if the same impact would be had if it were complete.
If she still had her head, this would be the view from the staircase of the massive crowds filtering past in a blur of motion to find the Mona Lisa.
When visiting the Louvre, don’t forget to look out the windows.
The central location provides some great glimpses of the city sites.
The line at the main entrance simply will not subside, as the human “ant trail” extends for hundreds of meters.
The architect of the unloved pyramid, remnant contribution of the Jacques Chirac administration, was I.M. Pei. Amusingly enough, he had promised many things, of which the French bought off. First and foremost, he promised that the pyramid would be “invisible”. (Ok, can I sell you some swamp land in Florida too?) I.M. Pei also promised that there would only be a single pyramid, of which there are actually five. The general populous hates the structure, but they hated the Eiffel Tower too and that seemed to work out well enough over time.
Inside, the main entrance is a brilliant combination of pyramids and airy curves.
I especially liked the floating helix entry staircase.
For you “Da Vinci Code” fans, here is the epicenter and infamous inverted pyramid meeting the smaller uprising pyramid, the supposed location of the holy grail. (An interesting side note, is that the “Rose Line” that plays such an integral roll in the book was actually a modern art street installment from the 1990’s.)
It was exciting to see the ancient Greek statuary, because photography was not allowed in Athens and the similarity between the pre-classical Greek Cycladic Idol carvings bares such a resemblance to the massive funerary heads found half a world away in Easter Island (but just upstairs in the Louvre).
One of the ironies of a museum like the Louvre is that the artifacts here are much better preserved and of better quality that the remaining relics of the actual country. This was true of the second century AD Egyptian Coptic Christian artifacts in Berlin and the even higher quality pieces in the Louvre.
After hours and thousands of years of artwork reviewed, it was time for a break. Heading outside the sky was changing and the clouds seemingly couldn’t decide whether or not to dump their contents. Hopefully, it would clear, as the Eiffel Tower was on tap for sunset.
For you movie and tv buffs, there are two scenes captured in a single picture. The iron bridge spanning the Seine, the only one of its kind, was the final meeting place for Mr. Big and Carrie in the finale of “Sex and the City”. Behind the iron bridge is the former La Samaritaine department store, host of a great roof top perch and scene from Borne Identity.
With three hours before sunset, I scoured the tour guide for something to fill the gap. Not far away are the Paris Catacombs, something not seen every day, and they are a little tricky to find. Leaving the subway, look for the lion guarding the intersection.
Then look right for this meager shack of a building next to a park, and that is the entrance.
The history of the catacombs is first as a limestone mine. The foundations and much of the structural stone for Notre Dame was actually quarried right under the streets of the city. In fact, the East Bank was so heavily mined that the surface buildings started to sag on top of their undermined earthly foundation. So mining began to be closely monitored by the city and structural reinforcement was added.
However, back in the middle-ages, when disease tormented the city, the leadership decided that the overcrowded cemeteries were to blame. So the plan to move millions of corpses underground was hatched and the catacombs took shape.
Femur bones and skulls were stacked to form barriers for the remains.
A flaming cauldron was kept burning by miners to encourage the flow of oxygen in the subterranean caverns. (Now just the pedestal remains.)
The tour really wasn’t creepy, especially after having visited the Killing Fields and Auschwitz, but a curiosity of the human condition. Surprisingly, some French kids were even picking up the bones to check them out.
The exit is almost as innocuous as the entrance and simply spirals up several hundred steps to a street door.
Now, it was time to head for the Eiffel Tower to catch a view of the city and as the evening was coming.
The wait on the ground level, for tickets and an elevator ride to the second level, takes about fifty minutes. In that time the sky had blackened.
After a quick look around, there is another quay of about half an hour to be lifted to the top observation deck. From there, the city comes to light, but in the blustery wind the tower itself is not stable enough for a long exposure shot. Somehow, I got lucky in a brief wind tunnel break to capture a picture of the French version of the Statue of Liberty, perched on a bridge. Ten years ago, the river didn’t look like the carnival light show that it is today.
Paris is known as “The City of Light” for the freedom of enlightening knowledge, not the kilowatt variety. Somehow, in recent years the misnomer has become a much more popular alternative. Even the tower lights up like a giant strobing monster every hour. It was so spastic that my camera didn’t know where to focus.
After the ten-minute flurry, Paris regained composure and settled into post card form.
Now, well after nine in the evening, I took the subway back to the Centre Pompidu to SKYPE my sister. There is no eardrum piercing screeching as trains pull up, ala NYC, in the Paris metro system. This is due to the fact that the trains run on rubber mounted tires, instead of steel wheels.
Notre Dame has become my fulcrum point for the walk home at night and some how always commands a picture.
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