I Didn't Visit the Musee D'Orsay

April in France is magical. April in Paris is the best! I hum “April in Paris” just thinking about it. Don’t know that tune? Find a good rendition on YouTube. Then go to Amazon and listen to Sally Stevens’ song “The Paris Song” on her album “Things I Should Have Told You.”

I am writing this and smiling. I can’t help but smile with Paris songs in my head and memories in my heart.

It’s kind of like Hawaii, another magical place where getting there can be a challenge, but once there, it’s practically perfect. I do wish these favorite places weren’t everyone’s favorite. In Hawaii, haoles own, work in, and inhabit concrete lavish buildings and hotels. (Google defines haole as white Americans.) I can’t help but wish that Hawaii belonged more to the natives than the latecomers. In Paris the problem is not so much American tourists as all the tourists from the whole world. It’s too well loved. At least enough Americans think they don’t like the French so we aren’t the only ones overrunning Paris.

 I spent last Friday and Saturday with Sally and our friend Joan from UCLA days. Joan is widely traveled via Elderhostel, while I prefer to go independently with the necessity of talking to people.

Saturday the three of us went to the Getty Museum,  the perfect place to spend some a beautiful day. Sally is a photographer, so we first visited that exhibit and were awed by [I forget his name]’s work. Part of the exhibit included videos and commercials he’d done. Sally and Joan went in there, but I didn’t. One of the commercials was for Calvin Klein (I think). Completely unexpected, the sound track played Sally’s soprano obbligato (not really unexpected since she did record it, but unexpected in the context of a trip to the Getty)! “That’s me!” she whispered to Joan as a model dived into a pool. The model didn’t look at all like Sally, even given the years between. Noticing Joan’s blank stare, Sally explained, “The music!”

 Have you noticed how little you pay attention to background music? Yet it sets the scene. Without it, you wouldn’t know how to feel about what’s happening on screen. Sally has made an excellent career of such music, having a clear, high voice and a deep understanding and knowledge of music. When I hear the young people at the high school who “sing” and think that their next step is Hollywood, I don’t burst their bubble because they wouldn’t believe me. There’s always an exception – the hick from nowhere who becomes super popular via YouTube. But to have staying power, you have to have the depth and the work ethic. Sally has worked – “hard” is too easy a word for how she’s worked – since she was 20. She’s been honored by her peers with about all the awards possible.

I got off track, but it was a good side trip. What I wanted to share was that Joan was aghast that I hadn’t visit the d’Orsay Museum or the Orangerie when Mary and I went last year. Well, we didn’t want to. But there I was at the Getty in the gallery for Impressionist painters, looking at the Cezannes, the Monets, and a Van Gogh that I’d seen hundreds of times in prints. The reality of them in person overwhelmed me. While my books seemed to lie when they said Cezanne was such a vanguard leader, or that Monet’s haystacks were revolutionary, the real live paintings testified of the truth of their greatness. 

I cried, the experience was so powerful. Right there in the gallery with all kinds of people around, I stood crying with Sally’s arm around me, worried that something awful might be wrong. When I told her, she understood. She’d felt the same about seeing Van Gogh’s “Vincent” scrawled in the corner of his irises.

Joan, however, was puzzled, but made a wise comment: “It’s a good thing you didn’t go to the d’Orsay.” 

I’m still smiling. My next trip to Paris will be in deep winter when no-one is around. I’ll go to the Musée d’Orsay and drink it all in, day after day, and then go dancing down the Quai.

Gambling and the Sacre Coeur

When we were 21, Mary and I began the first leg of our cross-country, and ultimately around-the-world, jaunt from Mary’s home in Newport, CA. We first drove to Las Vegas where my sister and her husband were performing as backup singers for I forget who. I guess I didn’t write a letter home, since the only note I could find about it was this reference when we were in Biarritz, France, 1962.

“Last night we went to the casino, an elegant building overlooking the ocean. We arrived with three whole dollars to gamble, but they took $1.20 from us at the door, leaving us with only $1.80. Mary’s friend Jacques, who works there, gave us a cup of coffee and we watched as other people drifted in and began to play. Finally we got very very brave and went to the two-franc minimum table (40 cents). By a well-planned strategy of only playing red or black, we won and won until our 40 cents increased to $3.00! Knowing luck was with us, we cashed in $1.00, got a pretty pink chip, just one, and graduated to the 5-franc table. Again, we won.

“The other players were interesting to watch. Once, by mistake, a man took the chips I'd won and walked away with them. There was quite a commotion when the other men at the table caught up with him and made him give them back. Poor man, he was probably just frustrated since he had usually played red when I played black or vice versa, and lost. The other people at the table tipped the house sometimes as much as $10.00! We ended up with our $3.00 increased to $9.00!

“The casino wasn't as much fun as Las Vegas because the atmosphere is all business with no bands, no noise, just gambling.”

The gambling bug must have lain dormant in Mary for fifty years, because it surfaced when we went to Sacre Coeur. What a circus surrounds this brilliant white architectural wonder built on the highest hill in Montmartre!

The streets from the metro stop are like an Arabian bazaar crowded with colorful shops, shoulder to shoulder tourists, side-alley drug deals, and thieves, with a background noise of shouts, bargaining, amplified music, and live musicians.

In one block were the sleight-of-hand artists. Each had set up a table in the middle of the walkway where he deftly switched three cups over and under, then stopped and the person who had given him 5-francs got to choose which cup held the token. Rarely did anyone win, and never did they win twice.

After watching a few times, Mary knew the secret. See her in the picture handing over her 5 francs. She watched intently as the man switched the cups, then tapped the left one. Nothing. She had lost. The onlookers begged her to try again. She did. And lost. She was finished. Cured. The gambling bug was gone, and we kept walking, leaving his accomplices to find another victim.

The stairway looked too steep to climb. I remembered the many steps up to the Fourviere in Lyon and didn’t want to repeat that experience, so we rode the funicular up to the top. Well worth it. (We walked down.)

This is the fabled area where composers and artists lived in the 1800’s. Little signs point out where Van Gogh shared space with his friends. Today’s portrait artists, their easels next to outdoor cafés, make excellent pencil or charcoal drawings of tourists. I am envious of their skill, never having been good at portraits. What’s to become of them, I wonder. Art is not a well-paid profession and jobs are few, even for the exceptionally talented.

On the broad steps a man with a guitar sang American folk music, pleasing a huge crowd that was also being entertained by the basketball/gymnast specialist. This guy could do anything with a basketball (except, perhaps, get it in the basket). Spinning it, he stood on his hands, climbed the light pole, hung himself out at a 90 degree angle, threw the ball and caught it, always spinning. Agile as a monkey, he performed impossible tricks, and didn’t get nearly as many francs thrown into his hat as he should have.

Finally we entered the Basilica of Sacre Coeur, or Sacred Heart. It’s iconic for Paris, but few know that it was built in the 1880s as penance for the sins of the people of Paris. Surely, reasoned the church authorities, Parisians had sinned, for how else could the Prussians have been able to lay siege to the city from September 1870 to January 1871, cutting off all supplies and starving the people? A menu at the time from the Latin Quarter included such delicacies as:

* Consommé de cheval au millet. (horse)

* Brochettes de foie de chien à la maître d'hôtel. (dog)

* Emincé de rable de chat. Sauce mayonnaise. (cat)

* Epaules et filets de chien braisés. Sauce aux tomates. (dog)

* Civet de chat aux champignons. (cat)

* Côtelettes de chien aux petits pois. (dog)

* Salamis de rats. Sauce Robert. (rats)

* Gigots de chien flanqués de ratons. Sauce poivrade. (dog, rats)

* Begonias au jus. (flowers)

* Plum-pudding au rhum et à la Moelle de Cheval. (horse)

How could this happen to a city like Paris, in a civilized world? I had thought things like that stopped in the middle ages. Naïve me.

During the siege, pigeons and balloons carried communications to the outside world. It’s not so long ago, is it? One hundred and forty years. Wars are still with us, continuously, fought with weapons and communications far different from back then.

Somewhere on this trip we saw a poignant, monumental painting of a young man, slain, lying on the ground naked, surrounded by a few people. The story was that he was a duke, and since his uniform had been stolen, only his long fingernails allowed him to be identified. I wonder if royalty didn’t cut their fingernails even for battles. Or maybe it was only the duke’s idosyncracy.

Ah, but I must take you inside the basilica! (I could be wrong about the details. They requested no pictures be taken, and I respected that. Do look at the link.)

Picture this: From the circus atmosphere outside, you enter into a celestial simplicity of white and gold mosaics. It takes you a moment to believe what you see there. Rather than a narrow gothic aisle of high stained glass windows, the vast space opens up like the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. From behind the faraway altar, streaming upward across the entire arch of the seemingly boundless dome is Christ, the Lord of All, his arms spread out to encompass everyone, no matter how vile. This is the only major work of art in that church. Along the walls, spaced well apart, are very small mosaics, all in the same style. The clean, crisp simplicity grabbed my heart. When the knickknacks and jumble are cleared away, there is left only the essence, which is Christ.

I could have stayed there a long time.

Montparnasse

Every time I return to Paris, I feel the same uncanny exhilaration and familiarity, as if I’d lived there forever, but as a stranger. As a stranger, because otherwise even the nuances would become too familiar to be awed by them. Each morning and afternoon I’d stop at the same boulangerie, call out a cheery, “Bonjour, Madame!” and ask for a baguette. I’d tuck it under my arm and rush home to enjoy it with cheese and fruit and hot tea. It would become as ordinary as, as – eggs and bacon. It would cease to be exciting and different. (It would still and always remain comfort food.)

Let me be a traveler and a stranger, testing the oddest foods on display, taking chances on the narrow streets winding out of sight, stopping in at tiny stores to ask where I am.

Our return to Paris from Nancy came by a different route than we’d ever taken before. We had to pay strict attention to the change points on the metro map, denoted by green, blue, or red. All was going well until we got off at Blvd. Montparnasse and couldn’t find the hotel. I called and got the address. You’d think that would have been the first step, but I had thought the directions off the web site would be good enough. We walked and walked, but neither the address nor the hotel appeared. I was annoyed because obviously I had not understood telephone French, so I begged Mary to call this time.

She did a great job. Starting with, “I don’t speak English!” she plowed on, and finally discovered that we’d come about 7 long blocks too far. The metro stop was correct, but we’d walked in the wrong direction.

“Not my fault!” I would have pleaded earlier, but we were both too foot-weary by that time to care whose fault it was.

The hotel was elegant, used for expensive tour groups and well-heeled travelers. We approached the desk, scruffy and train-worn, with backpacks making our weary shoulders bend frontwards.

I’m pretty sure this was the hotel I grabbed off the Internet at the last minute because the one I previously booked turned out to be in the red light district. The price on this one was high but within range, and the area was definitely safe. After booking the room, I got a return email saying something like, “Congratulations, you have reserved our cheapest room!”

An elevator whisked us up to the third floor (or 2^nd floor, depending on whose system you use). Our key unlocked the door that opened to paradise!

Beautifully decorated, the enormous room had a tiny kitchen area, a big TV (showing BBC serials in French, of course), a terrific bathroom with heated towel rack, and tall windows opening onto the street. We were amazed! Cheap never looked like this!

It didn’t last long. Within a few hours, a leak in the bathroom over the toilet had dampened even my spirits and made a small pool of water on the floor.

I did not want to change rooms! Mary insisted on complaining to the management, but I kept thinking and saying, “We can step around it. We can wear our shoes. We can cover our heads with a towel. We can . . .”

Mary complained. They looked at it. We were quickly moved to another room, same floor, different view.

The new room was even larger than the first, but had a courtyard view, meaning we looked down into the neighboring restaurant’s outdoor seating area. Tall buildings surrounded it, giving a stark background to the tall lacy trees growing in the patio. Though it wasn’t the street view, it turned out to be good nighttime entertainment.

In the evenings, we ate at the middle eastern snack bar that formed the street entrance to the restaurant. There, we watched stylishly dressed patrons descending the stairs to the romantic outdoor patio.

Afterwards, we went back to our room, opened the window and drapes and spied on the diners below, letting the hum of their musical voices accompany our games of double solitaire far into the night. I think the last diners left around 1:00 a.m., long after I was asleep.

I think I’ll wait to share more about our return to Paris because there’s so much to tell. After substitute teaching all day, my brain needs to rest awhile. Too bad there’s no outdoor restaurant here in the desert on a cool, full moon night.

The Boy in the Blue Hat

Our last five days in France, we were back in Paris, this time in the Montparnasse district.

A couple of days before leaving California, I had learned that the hotel I had reserved on the right bank was in a redlight district. Panicking, I opted for more expensive and left bank Montparnasse, figuring that after 4.5 weeks we might want a bit less of La Boheme. It was a lot more expensive, but hotels were filling fast so I grabbed the cheapest room at the Villa Luxembourg while I could.

Montparnasse: The name stems from the nickname “Mount Parnassus" (in Greek mythology, home to the nine Greek goddesses – the Muses – of the arts and sciences) given to the hilly neighbourhood in the 17th century by students who came there to recite poetry [from Wikipedia].

Wait! I’m off track! I want to tell you about the Boy in the Blue Hat!

About ¾ mile from our hotel was Le Jardin du Luxembourg (gardens, playgrounds, palace, etc.). Every morning while Mary finished sleeping and making up, I would amble over there for an hour or more of blissful reflection. Up Blvd. Montparnasse I strolled, turning left on the street by the fountain at the Place Observatoire, going alongside the long narrow parks where children play and dogs are forbidden, past the College of Pharmacy, and finally entering the garden through the tall ornate metal gates. I wandered in a timeless world where tree-shaded, chair-lined, wide paths criss-crossed the immense palace grounds. It would be early enough for most Parisians to still be abed, having been up late the night before, so only gardeners and joggers joined me there. After meandering along various paths for awhile, I would usually end up at the area dominated by two sculptures, one of a deer family with buck rising majestically over doe and fawns, and the other of a male lion majestically rising over his kill, an ostrich. Every day I thought, “How odd. An ostrich.”

One morning I sat longer than usual, eventually closing my eyes so I could hear the songs of the birds more clearly. I probably dozed as the morning sunrise warmed the air, because I remember becoming aware of whistling in the distance. The tune was gay, like something from the romantic 19^th Century rather than our own prosaic one. Curious, but also reluctant to be disappointed, I slowly opened my eyes to search for the whistler.

Across the grass, farther than the next path, and just beyond the border of green trees, danced a young boy in a blue cap, twirling, leaping, pirouetting, flying in and out of the long morning shadows – while his unseen companion whistled and another contributed marvelous tinkling bubbly laughter that filled the air with bright sparkling light.

Watch them and don’t breathe!

I tried to imprint them on my eyes, in my ears, so as to have them forever in my heart.

Try to hold onto them a moment longer while I tell you another story about Luxembourg. When I got home, I was rushing through an online catalog of Impressionistic paintings from around 1900-1910. Suddenly my eyes stopped to stare at a singular one. When my brain detoured back to it, I saw my chair in the Luxembourg Gardens right where the Lion rises over the Ostrich! Someone was sitting in my chair, a lady from another century clothed in black, but otherwise the scene was exactly as it was for me in the mornings of my last five days in Paris.

Was there a Boy in a Blue Cap in the painting, just beyond the row of trees? I hope so. I hope boys will always feel free enough and happy enough to dance through the gardens, laughing and whistling while the world swirls around them.

[Unfortunately, hours of searching for that image to share with you have produced nothing. The best I could do was the one of the deer where the trees are still leafless - news-e.hoosta.com - not full of green like they were that early week in May.]

I know I promised more of St. Malo for this blog, but the boy in the blue hat wanted to be remembered. Next time, back to St. Malo!

Beginning with Food

I finally found the first disk of photos so now you can enjoy my delightful discovery of the patisserie (pastry shop) only two blocks from our Paris hotel. Is it any wonder I succumbed? They also sell bread, which, joined with soft, flavor-full cheeses and some pate, makes a perfect sandwich. Along that short block, we could buy fruit, fish, deli things with no name, sausages, vegetables. On one day there was even an outdoor market.

Do you know the English film “Enchanted April?” Four women rent a villa on the Italian coast to escape the rain and gloom of London. The trip there is long, cold and wet. They arrive by buggy at night, suspecting that the whole thing was a mistake and that they should have stayed home. The next morning, early, one of them wakes and opens up her shuttered window onto sunshine, singing birds, flowers, and the glorious Mediterranean below. It is April in Italy. For us, it was April in Paris.

After arriving on the 5^th at Orly outside of Paris, finding the Metro (subway), climbing with our backpacks up and down interminable corridors and stairs in the Metro, asking questions, following directions, we finally llimped into the Hotel du Commerce. It’s a small hotel on a tiny street on the Left Bank. Hauling ourselves up three narrow winding stairways cloaked in darkness (later we found the light switch), and down a one-person hallway, we found our 8 x 18 ft. inexpensive ($50 a night for two) room.

Opening the door, here’s what greeted us: Bright colors, one bed large enough for two, a sink, and a tall screenless window opening to an unencumbered view of our part of town. Across the way, apartments with balconies full of flowers and trees; on the street below, students sitting outside the bars talking and smoking. Cars managjing somehow to go both ways on the street, missing trucks and bicyclists.

The toilet is down the hall, just like home, and the shower is downstairs near the reception desk, not quite like home but it was OK. The breakfast room (pictured) was bright and happy. Several times we did our shopping then brought it back here to eat. I felt as if I was in a scene from the opera, “La Boheme,” or the movie, “Gigi.”

At the desk, you see Laurent, our charming and helpful host..

This gentle little corner of Paris was the perfect place for us to begin our lightly-planned adventure.