The First of the Last Two Days

The Musee d'Orsay

Alright!  Here we are, in the middle of July (on my birthday, actually), starting to write about our last two days in Paris, in late May, almost two months ago.  Packing and getting to the airport, and then all we had to do when we got home, necessarily postponed any work on the journal (just as all these factors did last year).  We managed to get the Truro house ready for summer guests, then back to Oneonta for Fiber Fest and Abbey's 50th college reunion, and then right in to starting a major house reorganization, testing and reports at Milford Central, writing 200 "postcards to voters," and putting the rest of the travel journal and pictures into blog format.

Which is to say, doing the journal "from memory" takes on a different aspect when it's been two months.  We'll see how this goes.  Luckily, much of what went on was memorable, to say the least.

Well, it's Wednesday again, the third Wednesday of the trip.  It's hard to believe that we've crammed all that into just two weeks.  Which is to say, among other things, that we were tired.  Not tired of traveling, or tired of new experiences, but tired.  You may have noticed that there were no rest days, which was fine by us, but - we were tired.  

So it's important to note that we didn't think we were going to see Paris in two days.  That was not the plan, and to really get to know Paris, we'll have to return.  We had very specific things we wanted to do, and we did them:  The Orangerie, the Orsay, San Chappelle, and the Concierge.  Oh - and sit out on the street and watch Paris go by.

I think I mentioned that the Olympics will be coming to Paris in July (right about now, in fact).  Did I mention somewhere that the Paris airport workers were planning s strike for a week before the Olympics started?  Apparently the workers have come to a wage agreement with management - 50.6% of which is the French government.  Anyway, I think I did mention that Charles De Gaulle Airport was a mess, and seemed unlikely to be un-messed by July.  But throughout Paris, big projects were underway.  Our boat trip on the Seine was a last-minute substitution for a bus tour of the city; traffic was disrupted so much that a bus tour was impractical.  

Olympic Caryatids in front of the National Assembly

So - as noted, Wednesday.  Raining.  We planned to see the Musee l'Orangerie and the Musee Orsay today, both within walking distance (turned out we walked about 4 miles all told).  Off down the Champs Elysee toward the Place de la Concorde; cross the Place, and there's the Orangerie, right?

The former Place 
de la Concorde

Well, the Place was closed - the whole huge traffic hub - and had been turned into an arena of some sort.  We wandered around it for a while (in the rain), finally found ourselves on the other side, where the Orangerie was supposed to be, but, of course, no signs (apparently, the French don't do signs).  We took a stairway, sort of where we thought we should be going, and got lucky.  We were on line before it opened (and not that close to the front of the line).

The Musee l'Orangerie is located on the site of the orangery of the Palace of the Tuileries.  An orangery is a conservatory or greenhouse built to protect fruit trees from the weather.  The Tuileries was where the French kings lived from about the end of the sixteenth century until the end of kings in France, specifically 1871, when the palace was destroyed by the Paris Commune.  The orangery was built in 1852 for the Emperor Napoleon III (remember him?)  (Before that, oranges were grown in the Louvre.).  Where the palace stood is now the Garden of the Tuileries, and that's probably just as well.  The Orangerie, for some reason, was spared.  Anyway, the palace had a building specifically dedicated to growing oranges in Paris for the Emperor..  No wonder it was burned down.

And why did we want to go to the Musee l'Orangerie?  This is why:  water lilies.

Claude Monet, whose house and gardens (and water lilies) we had seen just two days earlier was, among many other things, a fan of series, among them haystacks, the Houses of Parliament in London,  and the west facade of the cathedral at Rouen.  But for the last thirty years or so of his life, he focused on water lilies, producing 250 paintings, nearly all of them from his water gardens in Giverny.

The stories surrounding the four big and four smaller panels in the Orangerie are many and fascinating.  Monet built a large studio on his property, designed huge easels, low to the ground with wheels, so he could move the giant pieces around.  He painted constantly, perhaps because he knew his eyesight was failing; he painted as WWI raged around Giverny because, he said, painting was calming in the midst of chaos.  His larger format paintings abandoned sky, horizon and ground, leaving only water, reflection, trees and flowers.  He intended them to be "an asylum of peaceful meditation."

At any rate:  go read the stories of how these paintings got there.  Monet died in 1926; the exhibit in the Orangerie was opened in 1927, and he never saw them there mostly because he would not release the paintings because he was not quite satisfied with them yet (sound familiar?).  

The main floor of the Orangerie is made up of two long, narrow, oval rooms.  Each long wall has a large-format painting about 42' long and 6' 6" high.  At each of the two tightly curved ends is another, smaller painting (but still 6' 6" tall).  Eight paintings.  All this for eight paintings?

                                                                       Yes.

The Orangerie was crowded when we were there, early on a rainy Wednesday morning.  It was crowded enough that the size of the crowd affected our ability to understand and enjoy the art.  Something I simply did not understand:  so many of the crowd was there simply to have one member of the group stand in front of a painting for a picture.  And then the next member of the group would hand off the camera and pose.  And so on.  Here's the question:  What value did they think they were adding to these masterpieces by standing in front of them?  How did their presence in the pictures add value to these timeless paintings?  

It seemed a different kind of asylum than Monet intended.  "Peaceful meditation" was difficult indeed.

We did the best we could.  We got up close, examined brushstrokes, textures, colors - how did he do that, using those colors?  We stood back, or sat on the bench in the middle of the room, stealing peeks at the larger canvas between the photographers and their subjects.  We went from one room to the other, and back again.  It was a pretty moving experience, even considering the crowd, but we did not get the quiet, contemplative experience available when no one else is there.  We weren't able to fall into the world of color and light.

But we were there, and we saw, up close and in person, one of the most remarkable exhibits in western art.  Monet was old, infirm and, most terrifying, his eyesight was worsening - cataracts, before modern surgical methods were developed.*  Yet he kept at it, put everything he had into these canvases we are standing in front of.  Much of Monet is here, the anxiety, the grief (his beloved second wife Alice died in 1911), the frustration, the vision, the triumph.  

Ross King wrote a book about the painting of these pieces, and he called it "Mad Enchantment."  The canvases were given to the French state as a gift, inspired by the Armistice ending WWI, as symbols of lasting peace.  Monet worked closely with his long-time friend, Georges Clemenceau, one of the great political figures in French history; Clemenceau encouraged and supported him as he moved toward completing the masterworks.  And we got to stand right there and, somehow, be part of it.  

And the paintings were, for all the distraction, magical.  Huge, mysterious, giving up their secrets s slowly, colorful and engaging.  You can feel the monumental task that it was; the essence of himself that Monet poured into them.  You could fall in love with the flowers, the water, the trees, the light; you could find yourself inside that world, for a moment here and there:  quiet, cool, alive.

After about an hour, or a little more, we left,** and made our way to the Musee d'Orsay, across the river and down one very long block.

The Orsay is a hugely ornate Victorian train station, built in 1900 and in service as the Gare d'Orsay until it was demoted to local traffic, and other uses, in 1939, because its platforms were too short.  It was listed as a Historic Monument in 1978, and after a plan to turn it into a hotel was defeated, it was opened as a museum in 1986.  Most of the exterior was left in its Victorian splendor, including the famous clock (right).  It was conceived as a connection, in artistic time, between the classic works in the Louvre and the modern art in the National Museum of Modern Art (Pompidou Center)(look at the photos of this place - it's a blast!).  And the reason we were dedicating the rest of one of our days in Paris to the Orsay was because this art history time gap contained the entire Impressionist period, on the fifth floor.  And if you know us at all, you know you know we couldn't be within sight of the world's largest, and best, collection of Impressionist paintings and not get sucked in.

We stood in line to get in, but not for long.  But it is in the Orsay where the French unwillingness to post signs, directing visitors where things are, was the most frustrating.  We knew we wanted to get to the fifth floor, not because there were signs telling us what was where, and how to get there, but because my friend David had spoken many times about the Impressionist exhibit on the fifth floor.  After asking a lot of attendants, some of whom spoke English, we ended up taking a combination of stairs and elevator, and made it there.  

The reason we are are not still there is because we were exhausted after three hours, and I was in a lot of pain.  The Ta Da Chair was of limited use; I could sit against a wall to regain a head of steam, but you can't lean against a wall and look at a painting, at least not on the fifth floor of the Orsay.  Nevertheless, we saw the whole exhibit, and some of it twice.  Many of the great Impressionist paintings were there, as well as many we had not seen images of.  But in every case, we stood before the original, just as the artist had, and saw it with both his (or her)*** eyes, and ours.  Those brushstrokes were laid on a hundred and fifty years ago by someone who could see light and color like no one had before that time.  And we were right there, right up close, deconstructing in our minds, astonished, delighted.  

The Cafe Campana

I'll dispense with the 5,000 word essay, and just say that if we had the opportunity to go back tomorrow, we'd jump at it, and spend another three hours enjoying genius.  We had lunch in the Cafe Campana, sort of right under the back of the outside clock (not the famous one).  The cafe is a modernist design extravaganza all on its own.  We each had a sandwich and salad that were really good.  We wandered in, and got lost in, some other galleries, mostly because we were looking for a bathroom; when we got there, a woman had somehow locked herself in the bathroom. That was interesting.

Then, with difficulty again, we found our way downstairs; Abbey looked in on a Toulouse-Latrec exhibit she wanted to see, and I rested in anticipation of the long walk home.  We found our way out, walked past the National Museum of the Legion of Honor, down the Quai Anatole France and across the Passerelle Léopold-Sédar-Senghor, a pedestrian bridge over the Seine, at the south end of which is a statue of Thomas Jefferson.

We did walk home, but stopped to sit in the Garden of the Touleries, which was very pleasant until it began to rain.  We thought we would be able to sit in the garden and watch the Seine go by, but you can't see the Seine unless you're on the wall (foreground of pic left) or right down on the level of the river.  During our two days in Paris, which were centered around the Seine, we saw many people right down on the river - jogging, walking, playing with children, sunbathing.  But up in the Tuilieries, we could not see the river.  We enjoyed sitting there, nevertheless.  We were in Paris!  We were sitting in the Garden of the Tuileries!  But it was raining.

We deployed our rain gear and kept walking, all the way back to the hotel, and sort of collapsed on the bed.  Abbey was feeling like she had a bad cold coming on, so she rested and I went out again, to the convenience store around the corner, which we had passed on the way to the Champs Elysée, and managed to figure out how to buy the elements of a mediocre dinner, involving a sandwich and chips and... I forget.  A forgettable meal.  I don't remember, but it was probably an early night, and we slept well.

  

NOTES:

* - I look up a lot of stuff when I write these journals.  That's half the fun!  And I discovered, while making sure I was right about modern cataract surgery, that there was actual, successful (occasionally, and after a fashion) cataract surgery as long ago as 500 BC.  I'm going to quote the whole thing because it's so fascinating: (trigger warning: needles in eyeballs)(citation links are live in the original):

"One of the earliest surgical interventions for cataracts, dating as early as the 5th century BC, was a technique called couching, which comes from the french word “coucher” meaning “to put to bed.” In this method, a sharp needle is used to pierce the eye near the limbus until the provider can manually dislodge the cataract - typically into the vitreous chamber - and out of the visual axis.

However, the lack of aseptic technique and rough nature of the procedure resulted in poor outcomes[4]. Some common complications include secondary glaucoma, hyphema, endophthalmitis, and often results in blindness. Unfortunately, couching is a traditional procedure that is still used today in parts of the world like Northern Nigeria and West Africa due to a multifactorial combination of unfamiliarity of modern procedures, fear of surgery, and preference of relying on traditional methods[4][5]."

 ** - For some readers, the time to leave probably came some time earlier.  Sorry.  Monet is a big deal to me, and being right up in his face is an even bigger deal. 

*** - Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot were brilliant Impressionist painters, and if you haven't heard of them, it's (probably) entirely because they were women.