Rain, Rain, and more rain! Objective: la Musée d’Orsay. We were off at a late start due to
everyone taking showers. It is
noon before we reach the museum environs, and it is packed. Line upon line, lines of people
crossing; no one seems sure which line he or she is actually following.
I strike up a conversation with the couple in front of me,
who are from Florida. Tom has
found some people from Alabama.
One of the museum personnel who is trying to get some order to the
lines, sees Tom with a cane that he has been using for walking. The museum person takes us up to the
front of the line, and we take our new friends with us.
Once inside, we all go our separate ways through the
sardines packed into the museum.
The museum has been renovated and was closed from 2009 through 2011 to
better organize its Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collections. Frankly, it didn’t seem much different
except that the paintings have been moved around and having museums move and
redisplay their collections is not unusual. I happened to glance a sign that said some of the d’Orsay’s permanent collection were on
loan elsewhere, so it was disappointing not to see Manet’s Olympia. The rooms where one might have seen
some of Monet’s large canvases were closed.
And, another major disappointment, there is
and
Do
any of the visitors pay attention? Maybe some, but most, no. Some walk around the museum with their cameras hung about
their necks, while many more start using their phones to take pictures a bit
more surreptitiously. I try to
take a picture of a favorite Rosa Bonheur over the heads of the crowd and am
caught.
Upstairs is a favorite view through the big clock toward the
Louvre, Sacre Coeur, and L’Opéra Garnier. Mom waits for me. Tom has gone ahead somewhere in the
crowd. When I get ready to leave,
I discover that I have lost my jacket. I start retracing steps while looking
for it. I have lost 2 gloves, on
separate occasions, to Paris already!
Thankfully, someone has picked it up and put it on the railing in front
of the clock! Whew!
Does that stop me?
It is not possible to have a leisurely stroll through the
museum. At some spots, you are
herded from room to room. Try to
go against the flow? Even
worse. Try to sneak a picture
without having someone standing in front of it, each taking his or her own
picture with a phone? Only if you
are lucky! Either that, or you are
in such a rush to be sneaky that your picture is blurry. I have yet to get a nice picture of
Whistler’s Mother. However, Van
Gogh’s church at Auvergne is good this time—with a phone!
I realize I have missed a favorite Monet when an artist who
has bee copying the painting is wheeling her easel past us. Mom and Tom have found a spot to sit,
so I rush back to find it.
We find an elevator to descend rather than the escalator
that had taken us up to the 5th floor. We have
to stop to see the Post-Impressionists on the 2nd floor. Mom and Tom claim a bench, and off I
go. A plaster cast of Rodin’s
Balzac marks an entryway to Gaugin and Van Gogh.
There is another Rodin sculpture, Thought, which is Camille Claudel’s head coming out of a block of marble.
There is one of Camille Claudel’s versions of L’Age Mur, Mature Age.
The d’Orsay visit is so exhausting, we are in search of familiar territory and food. We take the 69 BUS (mes soeurs!) to the top of rue Cler in the 7th.
On previous visits to Paris, our family
has stayed at Hotel Muguet in the 7th,
just a block away from rue Cler, and
two blocks away from La Tour
Eiffel. The rue Cler neighborhood
has received a lot of publicity from Rick Steves’ recommendations, so it is not
“our little secret” anymore. One
of Rick Steves’ new programs on Paris shows him and his French travel book-writing
partner seated in front of our favorite restaurant, La Terrasse, which is where we are headed for lunch.
While the décor in and out of La Terrasse is the same, the wait-staff seems quite different. The waiters have never been totally
unfriendly, cold, or what some might take as rude, but our waiter, Lorica, is
very gregarious. After I give my
order, he winks and clicks at me.
He does this several times.
I tell Mom, he thinks he’s cute.
Mom says, he is cute! He
asks if I want ketchup and mustard with my frites, and I say no, le poivre
(pepper), and he says, like the French!
From our spot at the window, we see all of the 7th
go by. There is a main metro stop,
Ecole Militaire. We watch the numbers of the busses that
go by, les gens avec les chiens.
Mom proposes we go back to rue Cler to pick up the next morning’s
breakfast of croissants and pain au chocolate and une baguette. I stop for chocolate and caramels at A La Mere de Famille. Mom gets a few caramels that she later
thinks she has lost and is sure that a little old man has picked up and
eaten.
Tom is in charge of the
wine, which we have been buying at grocery stores. Grocery-store quality wine in France is far superior to
grocery-store quality wine in the states; however, I did see a bottle of Gallo,
hardly premium California wine!
Rue Cler is a
primarily pedestrian street; however, some cars and delivery truck are allowed
in. On our way to the Ecole Militaire metro, as we leave the
pedestrian area, a man in a car starts honking at Mom and Tom to get out of the
way. The female passenger rolls
down her window and yells at them.
Tom shakes his cane at them.
A couple behind Mom and Tom agree that the people in the car should not
have been so impatient.
We are able to take the metro back to our apartment in the 5th
with only one change, just as the rain returns in full force. Wine, and cheese,
and bread, and CNN, and BBC.
Tom
discovers on his AOL News page that it is a good thing that we had not gone
toward Notre Dame where a French writer has committed suicide at the altar in
front of about 1500 tourists and parishioners. What a shocking thing to have happened. Details are slowly revealed. The writer and blogger, Dominique Venner,
who:
had links with France’s
far-right nationalist party. Before killing himself,
Venner published an article on his website, in
which he spoke out against
France’s adoption of a “vile
law” legalizing gay marriage and
adoption. He
urged activists to take measures to protect “French
and European
identities.”
He also wrote “There will certainly need to be new,
spectacular, symbolic
gestures
to shake off the sleepiness...and re-awaken the memories of our
origins...we
are reaching a time when words must be backed up with
acts.” It
is believed the statement was a potential reference to his suicide.
So he kills himself because people who love each other want to live a full life. I will never understand. Joie de Vie! Just doesn't seem like he was a true Frenchman. I love following your blog. I almost feel like I am along - Almost. The photos are tres magnifique. Although c'est ma secret honteux to view your illegal snaps!
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