So with a definite nod to “When in Rome...” and all that, here are a few more images from some of the more interesting, but admittedly touristy, things that we tourists saw or did during our week in Paris. In no particular order.
“Into the Louvre I did set foot on such an early morn
as seems to be the typical for France in days of spring.
There Mother Mary carved in stone sat with our savior born,
and not far off stood evident that victory with wings.
I thought the woodwork from Makira seemed a bit impure
— that is, the subjects of the piece were very face-to-face —
while sculptures of Osiris sat behind their glass secure,
not hinting at fertility, and, rather, seemed quite chaste.
Not even Aphrodite's bust could hope to find compare,
not with Benoist's "un femme noire" there hanging on the wall.
O, Bartolini's sweet "Dircé" had prettiness to spare,
though many thought da Vinci's girl the cutest of them all.
But of the many beauties I with selfish eyes did see,
the prettiest I saw were those who walked and talked and breathed.”
– “To the Ladies of the Louvre, 28 May 2001”, by Richard Finneran
I have talked to people who saw La Giaconda several years ago when she was just another painting among many on the walls of the Louvre. (Understandable, I suppose. “After all, monsieur, da Vinci was a Florentine and we are French. This is the Louvre, for heaven’s sake. You’re lucky we found a spot for her at all!”) But as the curators and no doubt the Ministère de la Culture discovered, when some 99 out of every 100 of the tourists who drop in are there to see the Mona Lisa – perhaps not exclusively, but certainly as a part of their visit – it probably is a good idea to give her a little more prominence. So shortly after entering the massive gallery, we saw her. I must admit to having been a little surprised myself, because I’d always been led to believe that it was a coloured painting, but there can be no denying that Leonardo clearly was a master in the use of the many subtle shades of grey.
And I should also mention that no matter where you go as you pass her by, her eyes seem to follow you.
For her part, Leslie had always expressed a desire to see something called the Winged Victory of Samothrace – having long ago studied the sculpture in a university Art History class.
(You can tell something is huge among the hoi polloi of the art world when they say “winged” as a two-syllable word – "WING-ed") And as it turned out, she (“she” because despite the lack of a helpful gender-determining head, those clearly aren’t Kevlar bullet-proofing pads on her chest) is beautifully placed in a staircase-dominating position. In “The Rape of Europa”, (mentioned here a while back – the book and related movie about the systematic Nazi looting of Europe’s great art), there is quite a heart-in-your-throat description of the unbelievable effort required to move – using manpower alone on an inclined plane – the 3rdC BC, 3-metre tall, two-ton Victory out the Louvre’s doors to where a crane could finally be employed to hoist her onto a large truck. Victory, by the way, is officially a statue of Nike, the Greek goddess of Olympic footwear. When I Googled her in a most ungentlemanly quest for the lady’s weight, I discovered that she also served as the inspiration for the famous Rolls Royce “Spirit of Ecstasy” hood ornament.
And here she is in a shot that gives you a perspective on her size, location and obvious popularity.
In a separate wing of the museum that was clearly devoted to more modernistic artworks, purely by chance we also found a magnificent sculpture of the famous Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, from the Alistair Sim film version of “A Christmas Carol”...
And of course, after so much militarism on this trip, we paused for many thoughtful pacifist moments in front of the ancient Greeks’ wonderfully allegorical representation of the message that, even around 100 BC, the world was thought to be a much more attractive place without arms.
Later, outside, we happened upon this wonderful fashion shoot for heaven only knows what,
but there’s no denying the visual impact that a fifty-foot long blood-red gown’s train makes amid the varying shades of greys and limestone tans that make up most of the Louvre’s exteriors. The photo doesn’t make it immediately clear, but it was quite a cool day, and in addition to the photographer, an assistant was standing by with a thick fur coat with which to drape the model while the photographer pondered each new sequence of photos.
Oh alright, for everyone who absolutely has to see the link to Dan Brown’s climactic conclusion to The Da Vinci Code, yes, we also saw this.
(It’s tough to ignore. The pyramid now serves as the main entrance to the museum.)
On another evening, we strolled around the St-Germain neighbourhood to find that it is a veritable nest of small galleries and art shops, each in turn a miniature exhibit – that could probably be called, collectively, “Why won’t anyone buy my art?” Go figger.
I confess that the only reason I took this next shot – which photographically is firmly ensconced under the “ho hum” category – was so that I could throw it up on a wall-sized projection, point to it and say without the faintest trace of irony... “And this... is the Opera of the Phantom!”
In another nearby part of the City, Leslie tried to discover whether or not she could find a single item that was priced at more than the entire cost of our trip. She found it in this window.
Oh – on a related note, at the end of my last post I promised to provide information about where in Paris one could buy a hamburger and fries for about $50 Canadian. You’ll need to zoom in to see it, but on this menu
posted on the wall of a restaurant named Le Dali in the Hotel Meurice on the Rue de Rivoli, under “Main Courses” you’ll see an item named the “Chef”, described this way: “Hamburger and home-made French fries”. At the time we were there, its price – 35 Euros – was roughly the equivalent of $50 Canadian. I Googled le Dali and discovered the prices are likely due not so much to the fact that it’s a restaurant in Paris, as they are due to the fact that le Dali is an eatery in a five-star Dorchester hotel whose resident IT department, according to the hotel’s own website, “will provide laptop computers as well as secretarial and translation services”. Well, it seems to me that any hotel willing to provide its guests with laptop secretaries doesn’t deserve to be criticized for serving a burger and fries in exchange for a Canadian Mint portrait of William Lyon Mackenzie King. (But trust a five-star hotel to gussy up lap dancing for its business trade.)
There are a couple other visits that were highlights for us that I want to mention before we leave Paris and this trip behind. And both are related to major tourist stops.
“Hark to the cheering
Songs rising high,
Hark, hark to the roar,
As her ranks go marching by!
Shoulder to shoulder,
Chanting her glorious name,
Burn high your fires,
And sing along for Notre Dame.”
– Chorus to “Hike Notre Dame”.
(Hmmm... Now that I come to think of it, this probably refers to the other one in Indiana.)
But Notre Dame – the Cathedral – is spectacular.
Here’s a less typical view showing its derrière and its architecturally renowned flying buttresses.
The day we visited, as we were slowly strolling the aisles with our heads tilted up to see the stunning high stained glass work, all of a sudden a massively amplified “Shhhhhh!” erupted from the cathedral’s sound system. As we watched, a teen choir entered from somewhere in the vicinity of one of the transepts and took up a position at the juncture smack in the middle of the cathedral – what clergy architects call, with infinite good sense, the “crossing”. And for the next hour, we sat and heard a sublimely beautiful concert.
Afterwards, I encountered several of the young choristers doing exactly what we had been doing before their hymn-sing, walking slowly around, caught up in the streams of rainbows created by the day’s brilliant sunlight flooding through the huge overhead stained glass windows.
After I thanked them for making our visit so nice, a brief chat determined that they were a youth choir from Plymouth, England and plainly they were still awash in the euphoria of having just performed in the very heart of Notre Dame Cathedral.
“Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”
– John Donne (1572 – 1631)
The Pantheon is home to the remains of dozens of French heroes, literary giants, scientists – Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Pierre & Marie Curie and Louis Braille have all found a final rest here.
(Well, “final”, so long as no political movement arises that leads to any dis-interments, as has happened to several of its one-time residents, including Jean-Paul Marat, considered a hero of the Revolution at the time, especially after his murder at the hands – and dagger – of a royalist sympathizer named Charlotte Corday. In 1795, perhaps because of his links to the Marquis de Sade, who eventually abandoned the Revolutionaries out of disgust with their methods and wholesale efforts to wipe out the country’s aristocracy, Marat fell out of favour with the French Citizens who had first designated the Pantheon as a mausoleum for “great Frenchmen”. His remains were unceremoniously removed from the Pantheon and he lies today in a cemetery beside the nearby church of St-Etienne-du-Mont.) Here’s Paris getting frisky by placing a somewhat more modern attraction outside the site of its most famous crypts.
Not surprisingly, the plaque marking Braille’s tomb is touchingly (hah!) overlaid with a lucite plate containing the same information in braille.
And an interesting side note. Hanging from the centre of the Pantheon’s enormous dome is _the_ Foucault’s Pendulum,
the device with which French scientist Léon Foucault (whose surname, despite the obvious temptation visited upon teenaged physics students the world over, is actually pronounced foo-KOH) plainly and convincingly demonstrated in 1851 that the earth rotated on its axis. (Of local interest to Ottawa residents, there is a smaller scale version of the same successful experiment on display in Carleton University’s Herzberg Physics Building, where it is suspended straight down the centre of the building’s multi-storey staircase. Its sphere is at the 2:00 o’clock position in this photo.)
(From the full story of its construction, here.)
And with that, I’m thinking it’s about time to move off the Continent and get back to my usual whining. For us, the mark of a successful holiday is the feeling that, when it’s over, we’re ready to come back home and, in this case, the timing was indeed, just right. Our driver-conducted trip from the Rive Gauche to Charles de Gaulle airport reconfirmed for us the incredible wisdom of having abandoned any intention to try and drive ourselves around a city whose street layout appears to have been inspired by the debris pattern created by the Vesuvius explosion. And even the airport itself is a small city, with four massive terminals, each with a complex network of arrival and departure ramps to test visitors crazy enough to approach it in a wheeled conveyance. We’d still be there, watching our car rental bill with alarm as it mounted daily with each new effort we made simply in an attempt to find the way to exit Paris. I highly recommend leaving that city’s driving to someone else. The cost? Who cares? The value in stress relief alone is a more than sufficient justification.
But we still had one last kicker to get through. Our final return flight leg was a commuter flight from Montreal’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau (formerly Dorval) Airport to Ottawa, at an altitude that never exceeded 11,000 feet. The aircraft was considerably less soundproofed than the heavies that make the transatlantic crossing and we were seated very close to the thin rear bulkhead that separated us from the luggage compartment... and one very upset little dog.
From Montreal take-off roll to engine shutdown at the Ottawa arrival gate, you would have thought someone was back there with the poor little guy – gleefully plunging pointed objects into his little canine body. You thought Baby Duck whined? You haven’t heard whining. This dog’s howls of distress could forevermore have been uploaded as an audio file on You Tube as a new aural definition of “pathos”.
I took about 1100 photos while we were overseas. Along with 75 pages of handwritten notes. Leslie took hundreds more. I’ll be revisiting them from time to time and if a photo or note should happen to resurrect an interesting memory, I’ll add it as a French footnote. Maybe I’ll start my own 3-F addendum series to future Ducks. (French Filler Footnote).
If you are considering a trip sometime, drop me a line and I’ll be happy to pass along some of our acquired wisdom. (1. Make sure you secure a four-digit security code on at least one of your credit cards – remember? 2. Don’t drive in Paris. If you can manage it, don’t even drive INTO Paris! 3. Do visit at least one of Canada’s great French battlefields of either WWI or WWII – Juno Beach and points inland, Vimy Ridge, Dieppe, Beaumont Hamel, Passchendaele. You will come away with a deep pride at being Canadian, a pride that comes not only from within, but also from what the French will express to you about how much they value the sacrifice that those fields and their terribly sad cemeteries represent. 4. Did I mention don’t drive in Paris?)
(Source: tobeckyw.files.wordpress.com)
To quote Rick at the end of “Casablanca”, “We’ll always have Paris”. And there’s one set of lucky stars we can all, I think, thank. Keeping Baby Duck focused on France for the past trio or so of months has kept me from ranting about all the political shenanigans that erupted around the ill-thought Canadian “coalition” that rose and fell over the Christmas holiday this year. And saved you, as a result, from having to wade through linguistic obscenities the likes of which you could never imagine.
You’re welcome.
À la next time!