Our plan for our last few days in Paris went like this: say goodbye to friends, check out a few new places, and tire out Panda so she sleeps on the plane and doesn't relapse into separation anxiety. (Final grades for each component of this plan: A, A, and F, respectively.) In an attempt to kill three birds with one RER ride, on Monday, May 31, we headed about 15 minutes south of Paris and met Damien at the Parc de Sceaux.
Damien lives in Antony, so the Parc de Sceaux is "his" park just like the Parc des Buttes Chaumont is "our" park. It's always fun hanging out with Damien, but it was especially nice also having a guide to what turned out to be a much larger space than we expected. Originally the grounds of the Château de Sceaux constructed by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of Stephen), the park includes a rose garden, a number of grand canals with fountains, a reconstructed château that houses the Île-de-France museum, fancy outbuildings, playgrounds, a sports complex, and lots of shaded paths.
Despite all this baroque beauty, we will always remember the Parc de Sceaux for the exciting discovery we made there: the park has not one, but TWO - count them - TWO off-leash dog areas.
This is clearly only possible because it's outside of Paris, and because the community of Sceaux is the 44th wealthiest in France. Paris can't even conceive of dedicating greenspace to dogs, even though it'd go a long way towards getting people to use leashes and ramasser. The off-leash areas were especially amazing because they were in wooded areas, rather than within gravel or dirt enclosures, so they seemed remarkably and sustainably clean. Needless to say, Panda was jumping for joy. Literally.
At the end of the day, we were sad to have to say goodbye to Damien, but happy to have discovered the Parc de Sceaux. We'll have to include a special appendix in our "Year in the Herbe" coffee-table book for superior and dog-friendly greenspaces outside the city.
Sorry to leave you hanging on that last post. I promise, it's worth the wait.
Our final stop of the evening was the nef (nave) of the Grand Palais. Like the Petit Palais, the Pont Alexandre III, and several other Parisian landmarks, the Grand Palais was constructed to host the 1900 World's Fair. It's an immense building, different parts of which host various temporary exhibitions. (The nef has also been known to host basketball matches, according to Damien.) Normally, tourists can only visit the nef under the auspices of an exhibition, but we got to see the vast empty space for the architectural pièce-de-résistance that it is.
With its fabulous Art Nouveau-influenced ironwork, its awe-inspiring proportions, and the fancy colored light projected everywhere, we would have been satisfied just seeing the place. But as befits an event as noble and epic as the Nuit des Musées, a surprise awaited us: the perfume maker Francis Kurkdjian had designed an art installation that floated thousands of light-refracting bubbles through the nef'svoluminous interior.
We found ourselves in a surreal universe of sheer joy, where all was sparkling, luminescent, weightless. And yet again, this wasn't enough, for Kurkdjian's bubbles carried scents that contributed to a sense of euphoria in everyone present. From various corners of the hall, the magic bubble machines broadcast waves of pine, citrus, lily-of-the-valley (perhaps in honor of May 1st?), and other olfactory delights to the eager and receptive noses of anyone not suffering from allergies.
The installation inspired wonder in its audience, transforming jaded, tired adults into giggling, re-energized children. If that was one of the goals of "La Nuit des Musées" as a whole, then I say: Mission accomplished.
Say nearly all museums in Paris were exceptionally open for free between 6pm and 1am on a balmy Saturday night in mid-May. What might our reaction be?
If you guessed "unbounded excitement followed by super-hardcore running around," you guessed right! For on the recent "Nuit des Musées," we combined our love of free museums with our preference for unusual sight-seeing experiences, ones that made us feel more like residents and less like tourists.
After starting off the evening right - with an epic apéro chez Adam and Rachel - we set off for the Jardin des Plantes and the complex of museums that surround it. Bizarrely, the complex is known as the "Muséum national d'histoire naturelle" (rather than musée - anyone know why?). Within the "Museum of Natural History" group, we wanted to visit the museums of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy, of Mineralogy and Geology, and the Grande Galerie de l'Evolution, but only the last was open. For once, we waited in a long line (30+ minutes). Luckily the hordes of French children waiting with their parents kept us plenty entertained. And then, when we finally entered the building, we immediately forgot the line.
If you think these pictures are overwhelming, then you probably shouldn't visit the Grande Galerie. This is one of those museums where you could spend an hour moving 15 feet, and not just because of the crowds. On the other hand, if you get a kick out of life-sized models of animals and/or late-19th-century, World's Fair-style architecture, if you like accumulating a museum experience over several visits, or if you like watching little kids have the time of their lives, then boy oh boy is the Grande Galerie for you! And for us. We made an excellent first choice for our Grand Night at the Museums.
Next stop: a museum chosen not for the interest of its content, but for the unusual nature of an event they were hosting. The Musée de l'Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris doesn't normally have a lot going for it - they charge 4 euros for three rooms of displays on the history of the public hospital system of Paris. Maybe if we were public health geeks we could get into it, but they focused too much on administrative changes and technological advancements, and not enough on some of the super old buildings that house the hospitals. In its favor, employees of the Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris (APHP) were performing chamber music live during our visit. Against its favor, the employees were not all that talented, and this is what we had to look at while they played:
In case the picture is unclear, this is a model of a hospital room souped up with all the latest technology, and a ballerina taking a break between performances. Performances of what, we don't know, because we didn't stick around to find out. The "museum" - even the "live" parts - just couldn't capture our interest.
The whole reason we showed up had nothing to do with technology or administration, and everything to do with something the hospitals excelled in circa 1830: serve soup to the poor. That's right! For La Nuit des Musées, the Musée de l'Assistance blah blah blah pulled a recipe deep from its archives and produced vats of a characteristic bouillon, which (uncharacteristically for a 19th-century reenactment) was served to us by a fancy-looking chef.
As dusk brought a cool spring air to the beautifully appointed courtyard of this former hôtel particulier, a bowl of rich beef bouillon was just the thing we needed to warm us up and energize us for our next and final stop, the highlight of the evening, the
Let's just get it out of the way: Ravel is my favorite composer. Daphnis and Chloé might be the only piece of music that can make me swoon. In college, I did my junior-year independent work on Ravel's opera-ballet, L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, and my man Maurice (the myth, the legend) will likely play an outsized role in my dissertation. I love, looove, luurrrrve Ravel. All of this makes Ravel's house, "Le Belvédere," my Graceland.
The only problem is that unlike Elvis's abode, you can't get to Ravel's house using public transportation. That's why, despite multiple attempts at planning some combination of métro, train, bus, and hitchhiking, I only finally made it to Le Belvédere two weeks ago, thanks to Damien and his car.
Ravel purchased his home in Montfort-L'Amaury in 1921 after receiving an inheritance from his uncle. According to our guide, who doubles as the museum's curator and caretaker, Ravel chose this specific house for the majestic view from its porch.
Ravel chose wisely. And not just in terms of the view. He also filled the house with strange and wonderful things. Here, the curator describes a cabinet full of plateware.
Damien: And this silverware?
Curator: So the silverware - the spoons, the silver on the bottom there - were gifts of Ida Rubinstein, the dancer, for whom Ravel wrote Boléro.
Me: She was a great patron, too.
Curator: Yes, a great patron - she gave lots of money. And at one point she dated a Guinness - you know, the beer - so, lots of money there, too.
Furniture, dishes, toys, paintings, even wall stenciling - all bear witness to the lovable and inscrutable eccentricity that was Ravel's.
There's the escargot that flips over to become an ashtray . . .
. . . the miniature porcelain canapé presented as a gift by Germaine Tailleferre, and the foot-cushion under his desk . . .
. . . and an incredible quantity of other knick-knacks, many of them purposefully gaudy.
And that's just the stuff in his study. The rest of the house is equally wacky and delightful.
I wish I could spend a month just creating an inventory of all the items in all the rooms of Ravel's house - that's how weird and fantastic everything seems. I mean, the guy had a secret passageway built behind his sitting room. He was an early adopter of taking showers. He bought a woman-shaped bell made out of ceramic but painted to look like metal, so that when you ring it, expecting a satisfying peal of sound, you instead hear a dull thud. WTF!!!
As much as I loved the house and the accompanying garden, which also manifests Ravel's eclecticism, one part of our tour stands out as the obvious highlight of the day, and perhaps of this entire year.
I played Ravel's piano. Here's how it happened.
When we first walked in, the curator took one look at my camera and said, "You know, photography is forbidden." I replied, "Oh, I didn't realize that. I was just hoping that, since I'm writing a dissertation that's partly about Ravel, I might be able to take some pictures - you know, for research purposes." She said, "You know what? I'm tired of this being forbidden and that being forbidden. Take all the pictures you like. What else is that you have there?" She was looking at the book of Ravel's piano music I had brought with me. "It's Le Tombeau de Couperin. I was kind of hoping that I might be able to play it on his piano." (If I've learned anything in Paris, it's that it never hurts to ask, and you should never feel bad when your request is met with rejection.) She responded, "Of course! So what if the Mayor doesn't want anyone touching the piano - it's there to be played, isn't it?" Damien and I agreed wholeheartedly.
And so it was that I came to butcher Ravel on his very own piano. I started with the first part of the Prélude from Le Tombeau de Couperin.
Giving up on a challenging movement I hadn't practiced in around 10 months, I apologized for playing so poorly, telling the curator I was "ashamed." But she told me I needn't be ashamed, saying "Well, Ravel couldn't play his own pieces either, so there you go."
Next, I played all the way through an easier movement, the Menuet, from the same piece.
At the end of this one, you can here the curator cackling, "Oh boy, he's happy now!" I sure was. And I can't wait to go back for more. Surely, that house is full of mysteries that remain unsolved. Ravel wouldn't have had it any other way.
We are now beginning our 7th month here in Paris, and let's just say we're beginning to think about stretching every euro so that we make it home with at least a few centimes in our pockets. One easy solution: visit FREE museums! That's right, there are some free things in Paris (not many, though). The museums in Paris that are free are those run by the city of Paris. A few weeks ago, we visited the Musée Bourdelle, and this past weekend, along with our friend Damien, we checked out the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Albert Gleizes, Les Baigneuses, 1912
The collection runs the gamut of post-impressionist 20th-century artists, styles, and media. If you're looking for big names and famous works, you should probably check out the Centre Pompidou, Musée de l'Orangerie, or the Musée Picasso, which are all "national" museums. But the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris has received its fair share of donations over the years, and there's lots of interesting stuff to be found.
Jacques Lipchitz, Personne assis jouant de la clarinette II, 1920
Modigliani, Brauner, and Cueco
Along with its sister-museum across the way (the Palais de Tokyo), the museum is a hot spot for temporary exhibitions and contemporary installations. When you go, be sure to check out the Salle noire (black room) and its installations by Christian Boltanski. In one, you can browse hundreds of phone books from all over the world. Damien discovered long lost family members in Italy!
Another highlight of the museum is the big, colorful reinstallation of a massive painting executed by Raoul Dufy for the 1937 Exposition Internationale. It's a celebration of the history of electricity - thanks, Ben Franklin!
Thanks, City of Paris, for running wonderful, free museums like this one! Can't wait to visit another one next weekend!
In September 2009, Maggie, Louis, and Panda moved to Paris, France. Follow along as we have an amazing adventure. Read the archives for more on how we got here.
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