2 Exhausted 2 Write Quint-ennial
Vacation
"Sometimes
it's better to lose your map anyway
You may end up where you were going
Instead of where you thought you were"
– kendall brown
I printed 42-page itineraries for Gramma, the twins, and Alan and I so everyone would know where we were going and where we had been. The first page was headlined with the above quote. When I told people about the itineraries I was pouring so many hours and effort into, I said I knew God was laughing as I laid our plans. What I didn't know was that the angels watching me over God's shoulder as I laid our plans were laughing so hard they wet themselves.
April
28 - April 30, 2006 | May
1 - 3, 2006 | May 4 - 5, 2006 | May
6 - 7, 2006 | May 8 - 9, 2006
May
10 -11, 2006 |
May 12, 2006 | May
13, 2006 | Mother's
Day, May 14, 2006 | May
15, 2006 | May
16 -17, 2006
European
Hitchhikers We Picked Up '06 | Europe
2006 Archive | Newsletter Archive
So here's how it went down from May 12 to May 13 (You don't have to read any of the words! You can just look at the pictures. There will be no test.) :
FRIDAY May 12
"An American diplomat
is sometimes like a bull who carries his own china shop around with him."
– Winston Churchill
On this day in 1940, the Nazi blitz conquest of France began by crossing the Muese River.
We
began our tourist blitz of Paris at the Sainte-Chapelle next to the Palais
de Justice.
The
Sainte-Chapelle is the most beautiful ecclesiastical building I've ever seen.
Even the lesser lower chapel is positively gorgeous.
But because it is a tourist
attraction, and because the lower chapel is less awesome than the upper chapel,
and
because lucre is king, they've made the lower chapel (left and right) into
a gift shop (I cropped all vestiges of gift shop out of them -- click
image to see pre-gift-shop image of lower chapel). Granted, I did buy a CD
of John Dowland's* music performed there. But I couldn't help but remember
Jesus overturning the money tables at the temple.
*John Dowland went to Paris in 1580 where he was in service to the ambassador to the French court.He returned to England in 1606 and in 1612 secured a post as one of James I's lutenists. He died in London.
The
upper chapel's windows are sooooooo gorgeous one fails to notice that even
the floor one is walking upon is ornate -- until one's daughter points it
out to one.
The Sainte-Chapelle was built in the 13th century by order of Saint-Louis to contain the crown of thorns.
The
high chapel with its 600 sq. meters of windows, 2/3 of which are authentic,
offer one of the most complete sets of stained glass window from this era.
During the French Revolution, the chapel was converted to an administrative office, and the windows were obscured by enormous filing cabinets. Their all-but-forgotten beauty was thereby inadvertently protected from the vandalism in which the choir stalls and the rood screen were destroyed, the spire pulled down and the relics dispersed.
In the 19th century
Viollet-le-Duc restored the Sainte-Chapelle: 
the
current spire is his sensitive design.
A replica of the Sainte-Chapelle can be found in Chicago, Illinois. The St. James Chapelle of Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary, located on 103 E. Chestnut St, was built in the early 1900s.
It
was planned in 1241, started in 1246 and quickly completed:
it was consecrated on April 26, 1248. The patron was the very devout Louis IX of France, who constructed it as a chapel for the royal palace.
The palace itself has otherwise utterly disappeared, leaving the Sainte-Chapelle all but surrounded by the Palais de Justice, which carries on a single function of the palace, which was the site of the king's lit de justice where important aristocrats pled their cases before the king.
After
leaving the Sainte-Chapelle and walking past the Palais de Justice (both at
left) 
we
wandered down the pedestrian way to the Marché aux Fleurs, but not
before we found some pigeons to feed.
One
of the things on our list of things to do was feed pigeons, so standing with
the Palais de Justice behind us and the Marché aux Fleurs and Cité
métro stop next to us, we stopped to feed the birds some stale baguettes.
Marché aux Fleurs stalls are ablaze with color, and each is a showcase of flowers, most of which escaped the perfume factories of Grasse on the French Riviera.
The Flower Market is along the Seine, behind the Tribunal de Commerce. Open daily 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
On
Sundays it is a pet market. The Flower Market hosted a Fred Astaire/Audrey
Hepburn scene in "Funny Face" so naturally I had to go there.
When
one is Chrissie, one must visit "Charade" and "Funny Face"
filming locations and one must drag one's family with one.
Next
on the agenda were lunch in view of Notre Dame on a bench near Shakespeare
and Company, and the RER station which would take us to the D'Orsay.
So we walked to Le pont Saint-Michel, the Napoleon monogrammed bridge that would get us to such places.
Of
course when one is so near Shakespeare and Company, eating one's sandwich
on a bench across from Notre Dame, one must go into Shakespeare and Company,
after finishing one's sandwich.
Outside
Shakespeare and Company is a Wallace fountain; fitting since one of the steps
inside the lop-sided, dusty, eclectic bookstore bears the inscription "live
for humanity":
Wallace fountains are public drinking fountains that appear in the form
of small cast-iron sculptures scattered throughout the city of Paris, mainly
along the most-frequented sidewalks. They are named after the Englishman Richard
Wallace, who financed their construction. A great aesthetic success, they
are recognized worldwide as one of the symbols of Paris. As a result of the
siege of Paris and the Commune episode, many aqueducts had been destroyed,
and the price of water, already higher than normal, went up considerably.
Because of this, most of the poor found that they were unable to get water
without having to pay for it. Even today, when water and hygiene are not a
problem for the vast majority of Parisians, these fountains are often the
only sources of free water for the homeless. Not only did the fountains accomplish
Wallace's philosophy of lending a hand to those in need, but they also served
to beautify Paris without making a spectacle.
The
philosophy of Shakespeare and Company's owner, George Whitman, is also helping
those in need. If you're in need of lodging, you can bunk down at the store.
You can stay if you read one book a day and work one hour a day in the shop.
After
meandering around the insides of my favorite bookstore in the world, we headed
for the nearby RER station which would take us most quickly to the Musée
d'Orsay.
It was fitting that we had to wait awhile in the RER station to get to the Musée d'Orsay, seeing that its building used to be a railroad station.
Originally
the Gare d'Orsay, constructed for the Chemin de Fer de Paris à Orléans
for the 1900 Exposition Universelle. It was the terminus for the railways
of southwestern France until 1939.
By 1939 the station's short platforms had become unsuitable for the longer trains that had come to be used for mainline services. Closed in 1939 it was afterward used for suburban services and part of it became a mailing center during World War II.
In 1977 the French
Government decided to convert the station to a museum and it was opened by
President François Mitterrand on December 1, 1986.
The museum is dedicated to all artistic production from 1848 to 1914. Paintings, pastels, sculptures, furniture and objets d'art, photography and documentary objects reflect the richness and diversity of this era.
I've
been reading the girls stories about Van Gogh, Degas, and Da Vinci since they
were toddlers, but their favorites were always the suppositional stories about
Marie Genevieve van Goethem (June 7, 1865 - ?), who posed for Degas' "Little
Dancer of Fourteen Years."
"Mommy, can we see the Little Dancer someday?" they'd plead. Well, today was the day.
I'm glad that in their eagerness to photograph Marie, they photographed each other.
When the Dressed Ballet Dancer was shown in Paris at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition of 1881, it received mixed reviews. The majority of critics where shocked by the piece. They thought it was ugly, that it looked like a medical specimen, in part because Degas exhibited it inside a glass case. Some considered the head and face grotesque and primitive.
Seeing-the-Little-Dancer was struck off our to-do list, and outside the museum we struck off yet another: eat crêpes.
We
managed to get on the wrong bus going the wrong way so many times that by
the time we were sprinting toward
Les Invalides and its L'Eglise de St-Louis-des-Invalides it was really a lost
cause. It would be closed. So close and yet so far.
Les Invalides in Paris, France consists of a complex of buildings in the 7th arrondissement containing museums and monuments, all relating to France's military history, as well as a hospital and a retirement home for war veterans, the building's original purpose. It is also the burial site for some of France's war heroes.
It is a huge campus and
we nearly ran from one end to the other toward that golden dome. 
I kept praying we could squeeze in before they closed the doors. It was ridiculous to pray about it. But I did anyway. Wheezing, we mounted the steps to find the doors wide open. My info on their hours was outdated: they were open an hour later than I'd put into our itinerary!
Under the golden dome's rotunda is the sarcophagus of Napoleon Bonaparte. I consider him to be a genius gone bad. One can argue all day about how good he was and how bad he was. But at the end of that day there's no denying -- he's a chunk of history. And so we went and stood before his tomb. The history of it all. Wow.
But
we didn't stand there awestruck for long! A block or so away was the Musée
Auguste Rodin at 77 rue de Varenne, and it would be closed in an hour.
Once we reached Rodin's
gardens, 
Kilory
had no eyes for the sculptures, only the grass, and upon it she flopped. In
National Lampoon's "European Vacation," daughter Audrey collapses
on the steps of yet another Parisian site to see. The son hails Dad: "Great!
Are you happy, Dad? She's dead!"
I'd kept waiting for Gramma to drop. We'd kept asking "Have we killed Gramma yet?" Kilory insisted she wasn't done in; that she merely liked the feel of the velvety grass. She wasn't fooling anybody.
Since
1919, the sculptures of Auguste Rodin have been housed in a mansion known
as the Biron Hotel. The mansion was built by a hairdresser named Abraham
Peyrenc in the17th century when Paris Left Bank was still uninhabited. Peyrenc
had come to Paris to seek his fortune and upon striking it rich ordered the
most superb house Paris had ever seen to be built in the Faubourg Saint-Germain
area. ... Fortunes change, governments change... Plans were made to
demolish the mansion and replace it by rental apartments. In the meantime,
it was divided into several small lodgings. The beautiful surroundings attracted
artists including Henri Matisse, and August Rodin rented several rooms in
which to store his art. The rooms became his studio. In 1909, Rodin pleaded
with the government not to destroy the house but to make it a museum of his
work. He donated all his property, correspondence, and pieces of art to the
state, and finally, in 1916, the government agreed to convert the Hotel Biron
into a museum for him.
Our
favorite café on Rue Cler was swamped, so we ate further down the rue,
before heading off to the Arc de Triomphe. We took the bus to save our feet,
but the bus was so crowded we had to stand almost the whole time -- in Paris
traffic.
Once at the Arch we climbed the seemingly unending spiral of stairs to the top, huffing and puffing.
"Have we killed Gramma yet?" Almost. She was seeing her dead grandmother beckoning her to come toward The Light. So was I.
Gasping, we made it to the very windy top and rested our feet there while waiting for the sun to go down and the lights to come up.
Commissioned
in 1806 by Napoleon, shortly after his victory at Austerlitz, the Arch was
not finished until 1836.
There are four huge relief
sculptures at the bases of the four pillars. These commemorate The Triumph
of 1810 (Jean-Pierre Cortot); Resistance/War, and Peace (both by Antoine Étex);
and The Departure of the Volunteers, more commonly known by the name La Marseillaise
(François Rude).
The day the Battle of Verdun started in 1916, the sword carried by the figure representing the Republic on the La Marseillaise broke off. The relief was immediately hidden to conceal the accident and avoid any undesired associations or interpretations as a bad omen.
April
28 - April 30, 2006 | May
1 - 3, 2006 | May 4 - 5, 2006 | May
6 - 7, 2006 | May 8 - 9, 2006
May
10 -11, 2006 | May 12, 2006 | May
13, 2006 | Mother's Day, May 14, 2006 |
May 15, 2006 | May
16 -17, 2006
European
Hitchhikers We Picked Up '06 | Europe
2006 Archive | Newsletter Archive
We hope you enjoy your visit.
