Monday
11th May
Having decided that a trip was needed because of a
couple of tempting exhibitions there now seem to be five of them worth
seeing. I also want to attempt to visit the Louvre when the Flemish
'primitives' and Dutch Golden Age rooms are open and have a look at the
church of St Denis. Quite a lot to fit into three days! I think I'm going
to have to prioritise and prune. The exhibitions are Velazquez at
the Grand Palais, The Baroque Underworld, Vice and Poverty in Rome
at the Petit Palais, as is Claude Gellée, un Lorrain à Rome, From
Giotto to Caravaggio, the passions of Roberto Longhi at the Musée
Jacquemart-André, and Napoléon et Paris at the Musée Carnavalet. I might
ditch Velazquez as it'll be busy and queue-infested and I'm going to
Madrid next month anyway. On my last trip I interpreted the signs on their
doors in the Louvre as telling me that the rooms devoted to the art of
Flanders and Holland were only open on Thursdays, but the Louvre website
says that Thursday is the day when these rooms are closed. Which doesn't
explain why they were closed (to me) on a Monday. Can I go wrong planning
to visit on a Wednesday in that case?
I
understand that there are some people who book seats on aeroplanes and
trains that don't automatically have noisy and kicky children sitting
behind them. It's as well to have goals, and this child's seems to be
to embody the word "tantrum". All else has been
without snags, except that the bakers by the Eurostar terminal that did
superior Chelsea buns and fig rolls has disappeared. So as the green
pleasantness of Kent has now given way, post-tunnel, to a more French
greenness, and mid-day is long passed, a Pret tuna mayo baguette and a
blueberry muffin from Pain Quotodien are about to get scoffed.
They
were, the child went quiet, mainly due to it being taken somewhere else, and two
blokes started talking in loud voices about their jobs in the financial
sector, with one of them actually telling the other 'I work for
blah one of the major blah blah in the world ...' Then the child
returned and the mother decided it needed to sleep which meant the
window blind needed to come down regardless of the man sharing said
window reading quietly in the seat in front and his need not to have
his arm leaning on the window ledge lacerated by the metal handle of said blind suddenly coming
down. I exaggerate the laceration, but not the tendency of the needs of quiet grumpy grownups being seen as
entirely secondary to those of whingy children.
Paris is warm
and sunny, though, and as I know where I'm going, having stayed
around here a few times before, I get to the Mercure near the Sorbonne
in no time, am in my room and opening my window onto a very Parisian, but very sky-filled courtyard (see right) - it seems like ages since I've had a hotel room where you don't always need
to turn a light on.
Out
for an evening stroll and shop, I made for the local Fnac to get
my Louvre ticket for Wednesday, but what was once a Fnac is now
an H&M - not useful. I found my way to the big branch at Les Halles
and found that the reason I was bemoaning the shop's not selling music
CDs like it used to is because the Les Halles megastore goes down three
floors, and I'd not ventured that far down. The ticket shop is down
there too, and it's confusingly called Fnac Spectacles, sounding like
an opticians. Buying my Louvre-queue-beating advance ticket I also learned that you don't even need
to book a particular day anymore. After wintery London it's so
warm here my thoughts naturally turned to gelato. I found the Grom and
went for strawberry and coconut in the tub, and a confusing mixture of French,
Italian and English in the languages used to order the stuff.
Tuesday
12th May
Quiet
room, a good night's sleep, and the breakfast features good orange juice and coffee,
tasty muesli, and fresh pastries and bread. The wifi in the basement
breakfast room is so slow as to be pointless though, which is annoying
as I've got into the hotel habit of checking emails etc. over breakfast. And generally I am suffering again from The
Rome Difficulty. This is not a Robert Ludlum novel, it's the phenomenon
of a hotel's wifi blocking the upload of stuff, to one's websites for example.
From the ratp website I had gathered that it was possible to
load what we used to call a carnet onto a plastic card. But such gathering was
erroneous. After purchasing a good old cardboard carnet of ten tickets (which
is cheaper than ten separate) I made for Miromesnil and the Musée Jacquemart-André, noticing
on the way that the same route would suit for my planned trip to St Denis on
Thursday, so preventing the need for tedious research. Spiff!
From
Giotto to Caravaggio, the passions of Roberto Longhi begins with a room of Caravaggio, who Longhi championed, then
a room of Caravaggisti, then the Giotto. These are two panels (Sts Lawrence and John
the B) which you wouldn't guess where by the man himself, look to be by two
different hands, and supposedly flanked a Madonna and Child now in the National Gallery in Washington
and which were painted for a chapel in Santa Croce. Room 4 is special,
containing a small panel each by Masolino and Masaccio, one from the Vatican
and the other from the Uffizi. Both gorgeous. A somewhat Ferrarese room next, with a
typically weird Tura and a panel depicting Peter Martyr trying to look casual
whilst reading with an axe embedded in his head. Two more rooms of Caravaggisti follow,
making you appreciate the man himself more, but with an impressive trio of
paintings of saints by de Ribera. The exhibition mixes stuff from the Longhi collection in Florence
with loans which were, on the whole, the better works. Worth a trip though. As
is the permanent collection, with an especially special Venetian room, containing a
fine and architectural big Bellini, and some superior works by Mantenga,
Crivelli (all three panels being typically fruity), Botticelli, Cima and
Carpaccio. Elsewhere you'll find good stuff by Guardi, Canaletto and Chardin
and typical stuff by Boucher. A sweet Vigee-Lebrun too and an atmospheric
little Supper at Emmaus by Rembrandt. I have a
soft spot for the architectural ruins of Hubert Robert, and
there's a
good one here, with cows. And a Panini (the painter not the sandwich).
The Giambattista Tiepolo ceilings and
his frescoes from the Villa Contarini up the Winter Garden staircase
deserve a
mention too. In the bookshop the catalogue of the exhibition turned out
not to be available in English, and there was no postcard of the
Masolino I fell for (or a fridge magnet or even a spectacles cleaning
cloth) but there was a bookmark.
 But enough of these semi-interesting aides to my memoire. It's
been a while since I've walked wide boulevards in short sleeves, so upon
quitting the JA I was happy to be doing so, and down the one named after Haussmann
himself, no less. And, after passing the Madeleine (the church not the cake) I got me a mozzarella and
tomato baguette and a San Pellegrino lemonade and consumed them whilst basking
in warm sunshine in the Tuilleries. On my way back to my hotel I also picked up a
slice of apple and poppy-seed flan, which turned out, upon eating, to have a considerable poppy-seed kick to it.
Wednesday
13th May
The
wifi in my hotel here really is the worst ever. Even in my room last
night it was all waiting and no action. Which is a shame because I'm
loving my sun-filled, stylish and handy-sized room otherwise. I'm not
paying €3.50 for a bottle on mineral water from the minibar though.
At
the Louvre my advance ticket lets me bypass the long and snaking
Pyramid queue. I head for the Flemish primitives in the Richelieu
wing, but the second floor is closed, and will open in half an hour.
Back to the beginning, then, and around to Sully and the appeal of the
word 'medieval' but this turned out to be merely the medieval
foundations of the Louvre building. So around to Denon, as usual, with
the Mona Lisa hoards. But I did discover that, facing Samothrace, if
you go sharp right and backwards you get direct to early Italian, for
some simple and reviving works by Lorenzo Monaco and Gentile da
Fabriano. I braved the swarming hoards to stand my ground in front of
some prime Fra Angelico, Ghirlandaio, Carpaccio and Mantegna, before
heading back to the relative calm of Richelieu and, after
wandering through some lesser and later stuff, eventually finding the
room (no.5) of the four Memlings and Van Eyck 's Madonna and Child and Chancellor Rolin, looking less than clean and much smaller than anticipated.
Also two by Rogier van der Weyden - a 'studio of' Annunciation
and a fine small triptych that could only be. After three hours I was
feeling a bit droopy so made for the bookshop, which is currently two
shops on the way out to the inverted pyramid, picking up a tasteful and
tempting little book on Corot before putting distance between myself
and the exhausting crowds.
Today's al fresco lunch was a cream
cheese, onion and pickled cucumber multi-seed bagel with salt and black pepper
crisps and a lemonade called Pulco, eaten in the Luxembourg Gardens. On
the way back an apple and cinnamon muffin was bought from Columbus. In
the evening I wandered around a bit and was asked directions by a
French person for the third time in two days - do I look so like I know
where I'm going? And French? I ended up in a local Italian called Il Pescatore, discovered when I was staying in the hotel opposite a couple
of trips back. I considered the asparagus risotto, but gamba are prawns, of course. Wondering why I sort of knew this I remembered - cat food sachets! Went for the old-fave Bufala pizza,
but here it's a blanche pizza, which I'd resisted so far, reasoning
that a pizza without tomato sauce isn't really a pizza. It was fine,
but I don't think preferable.
Thursday
14th May
Deciding
what to do on my last full day, it narrows down to a choice of two. St
Denis is medievally tempting, but it'll always be there, and the
Baroque Rome exhibition won't. Having had two days of galleries tips me
away from the Baroque and towards the Gothic. A leaning confirmed by
the Rough Guide telling me that there's a walk back into the centre of
town along canals from St Denis that reveals Paris's 'rusty
underbelly'. How can I resist?
The
young woman I complained to on the front desk about the hotel's WiFi
yesterday follows up, and when I apologise for lapsing into Italian she
tells me that they have si in
French too, but it denotes contradiction. The streets are oddly empty
and some shops oddly still closed as I make for the Metro after 9.00
this morning. The route to St Denis that I spotted earlier in the week
turns out, geographically, to be a bit indirect, but it does avoid
travel and changes in the centre, so I go for it anyway. I decide that
Paris's is my favourite metro system, mostly for it's often
impressively decorated platforms, and that evocative hum as the train
doors close. It also has a station named after one of my favourite
biscuits and another named after one of my parents' favourite singers.
I haven't spotted one ebook being read though, maybe due to the famous
French hatred of Amazon.
Leaving Saint-Denis Basilica station
I find myself in Paris's arm-pit, it seems - very urban and grimy. And I pass a market selling
some very depressing second-hand stuff. Also it feels like Sunday. And
there's a service going on in the Basilica, which has its facade half
covered in scaffolding and half glowing and clean. In the tourist
office I find out it's a 'free day', the feast of the Assumption, and
that the Basilica opens for tourist business at 12.00. So I get given a
map with a walk through historic Saint-Denis. The shopping street
predictably has a KFC and a (closed) MacDonalds, with shops selling
sports shoes and cheap sparkly clothes, and not a Starbucks in sight,
which is something.
Returning from this exploration I find the
service at the church turning out. The nave is visited and a guide book
bought, but the nécropole royale doesn't open until 12.00. So I go and
do some of the walk, and it may be historic but it ain't pretty. Back
to the Basilica again and the bells are chiming. And of course there's
now a queue for the nécropole, but as you wait you can see the need for
the cleaning in the grubbiness down this side. My doubts that I'd made
the right choice in coming here today were laid to rest by the tombs
and the crypt and the apse area generally - a treat to be in, and well
worth the price of admission. But there's no denying that Saint-Denis
as a district is one of real poverty. It's like having Westminster
Abbey in Hackney. It makes you realise how touristic areas are usually
in prosperous parts of town, usually the centre of course. So if you've
ever wondered if a tourist attraction is enough in itself to make an
area prosper Saint-Denis seems to suggest not.
I got off the
metro at Montparnasse so as to approach the Luxembourg Gardens from a
different direction and with a different lunch. Well it was a cream
cheese bagel again, but it was a poppy seed (pavot)
one this time and from a joint called Still Good. The spot for a sit
was over by the tennis courts and chess players and it was cool and
looking like rain. Which it started to do just at the top of the street
to the hotel, and is now (a half hour later, and after a fire alarm
going off, twice) doing with gusto.
Friday 15th May
I have a couple of hours before I need to head to the Gare,
so the Cluny Museum beckons. Tapestries, stained glass, statues, unicorns
and ivories, yes, but some very Northern-looking altarpieces too,
including most of a retable from Norfolk! The Roman baths here are a looming and
favourite space too (see photo right). Back to the hotel for my case and some replying to
nature. The Metro journey and check-in are swift. Twenty minutes wait in
the terminal with nowhere to sit, as is usual here, but we were allowed to
board five minutes early. And there are no noisy children sitting, or
kicking up fusses, anywhere near me. And the man in the seat next to me goes and
sits in an empty seat behind. Miracles! I finish my book, have an undersea
doze, and type some more of this. Having left Paris at midday I'm home
before 2.30 and soon tucking into late-lunch veggie samosas from the
shop at Tooting Bec tube station, with mango chutney and attendant cats. |
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