Le Musée du Moyen Age (Cluny)

Today after class, I found out that our afternoon meeting with Julien had been postponed  (sob), so I decided to see if I could visit the Musée Cluny with my student card. I walk by the Medieval Church in which the museum is concealed every day between my phonétiques and gramaire classes. Although the man at the ticket desk was a bit skeptical of my Sorbonne ID (which has my name misprinted as Monsieur Tyler Harvey), he eventually relented and let me in for free. Apparently my motive (to spend some quality time with 13th century tapestries and triptychs) was sufficiently transparent and I appeared innocent enough to gain entry. The beginning of the museum is an entirely deceiving disappointment. The configuration requires that visitors amble through room after room of Iraqi, Egyptian, and Syrian 12th century pottery before finding the real treasures tucked away in the back of the labyrinthine museum. The building is in fact a combination of the ruins of a Gallo-Roman bath from the ancient city of Lutéce (now Paris), and the transposed residence of the abbots of Cluny in Burgundy, which was moved to Paris by the head abbot in the 13th century. One of my favorite rooms is lit entirely by a concealed skylight, running along the back part of the ceiling, allowing light to filter through, decorating the statuesque fragments of Romanesque apostles (originating from the façades of Notre Dame and St. Denis). Although the museum seems to want to evade any sort of imposition of religious meaning, the spirituality of a room like this one truly constructs a weighty religio-historical context for the art works. My favorite piece, however, also happens to be the museum's rather understated treasure. Acquired in the 18th century, La Dame à La Licorne became most famous after George Sand described or made reference to the series of tapestries in several of her own works. There are 6 tapestries in all, the first 5 representing each of the five senses through the interactions of a central female, a lion, and a unicorn. The final tapestry is entitled À Mon Seul Désir, and pictures the woman removing her bijoux in a gesture of renunciation of all earthly pleasures for her sole desire, (to enrich her own soul), quite out of line with the sole desires of Parisian women today.  The tapestries were overwhelming in their sheer size, but also in their rich detail and poignancy. Before I left, I went in back to explore the incredibly kempt gardens, meticulously divided into about 12 plots. Each patch represents a Medieval value - my favorite was the garden of courtly love. 

La Villette

Last night Ericka and I ventured to La Villette near Porte de Pantin, to see the first cinema en plein air of the the film festival. In order to keep up this Parisian summer tradition, one must pay 2 euro (last year it was gratuit) for entry, a price that is in truth favorably disproportionate to the experience on receives. La Parc de La Villette consists of a cobblestone square with a cetral fountain, surrounded by large contemporary buildings including a science museum, a music hall, a performance theatre, and a hall of cinema. Directly adjacent to the hall of cinema is a huge field where we saw a large half-inflated white structure. After buying our tickets we quickly hurried to find a seat in front of the screen, which now looked like a giant Megalithic rock. We had some wine and Caprice des Dieux , my new favorite cheese, while we waited for it to get dark. The movie began around 10:30, entitled LouLou. It is a German adaptation of an originally Italian film, so the words mouthed are in German, the silent film titles were in Italian, and the subtitles were in French. It was not until just before the film began that I noticed a stage on the left, dwarfed by the massive screen. I realized as soon as the production started that the purpose of the stage was to provide a live sound track to accompany the silent film. The combination had an entrancing effect. the music was reminiscent of some of Stereolab's more recent work, but a bit jazzier and with classical undertones. The music also added a more complex level of comedy at certain moments to an otherwise very dramatic and ultimately tragic tale of a seductress. Although at several points people shouted things out, for the most part, the young crowd watched the silent film with almost monolithic reverence and attention. This baffled me, especially given the low entry fee. I think in the U.S., one would be hard-pressed to find such a voluntarily gathered crowd of 20 year olds who were culturally aware enough to be respectful during the outdoor showing of an old silent film. The experience was wonderful and La Parc de La Villette is a wonderful suburban escape from the heart of Paris. I hope to go back and see more films before I leave!

My Real Bed (Not Napoleon III's)

Quatorze Juillet!

I was able to watch les Feu d'artifices (fireworks) only twenty feet from my doorstep! (note the Eiffel Tower lit up on the left)

La Rochelle

For the 4th of July, my roommate Louise invited me to her hometown, La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast of France. After a few small setbacks with my train ticket, I arrived Friday evening relatively unscathed. Louise  met me at the station and we walked into the heart of the small seaside town, which felt like a medieval version of Newport, RI. Her friend Alic joined us for dinner that evening with her brothers, (her mom, who works as a librarian, also sings on the weekends at a night club, and had to leave almost right after we arrived). Her 10-year old brother Hugo had just adopted a 2-week-old kitten, which he vigilantly followed around the house like an overprotective father. The next morning, I woke up to the restless noise of the kitten-sans-nom pawing at the bottom of my bunk bed. Soon after we had our morning tea, Louise's cousin Cecile came over. We made a picnic and then departed a vélo for L'île d'Oré, a tiny island about 8 km from Louise's house. When we went behind the house to get the bikes, I discovered mine was a 1980's rusty blue one-speeder, which served me very well, despite the difficulty on the hills. The beach was absolutely amazing and littered with delicate starfish with transparent limbs like gently curving twine. That evening Louise took me to La Giunette, a phenomenon she told me was very specific to La Rochelle. It turned out to be a cavernous 18th century bar, the only one in town opening at the dubious hour of 3:00pm. It was crowded with huge antique wooden barrels, and the walls were lined with empty glass bottles in which all of the drinks are served (mixtures of white wine, limonade, and one's choice of syrup-my favorite was peach). My last day, Louise decided we would take another bike ride, this time to explore the trails running alongside the coast. Apparently my antediluvian bike that had performed so well the day before was not up to the task. The chain came off just outside of town, which was great, because I was really hoping to reinforce the stereotype of American obesity. Cecile offered me her bike, and she rode on the back of Louise's to transport the vélo en panne. Ultimately, the humor of the whole situation ended up serving as a positive ice-breaker though!

My Bed

La Sorbonne

This morning was my first class at La Sorbonne. I sat with a Turkish girl, a Brazilian, and a boy who made it clear he spoke Catalan and NOT Spanish. I was happy the common language in our group was French, because I noticed all the Americans swiftly defaulting to English, (which is hard to avoid!). I discovered in class that my building in the Quartier Latin, Rue de Fouarre, is directly next to the church where Dante attended Sorbonne church services. The street Fouarre takes its name from an antiquated French word for hay or straw. Supposedly in the 14th century, in an act of defiance, the students sat in the square upon bails of hay in order to elevate themselves physically above the teachers, (and metaphorically contest the idea that teachers are inherently superior to students). I love to think of defiant little Dante mulling over images of his professors in Inferno while genuflecting in the medieval romanesque church that I walk by every morning. The literary and historical significance of the Quartier is entirely tangible, and it is nice to be surrounded by students again. It also gives me more confidence to be rebuilding my grammatical foundations, which was a bit deteriorated after not having taken French institutionally for a year. 

Pictures pending!

Julien et Sacre Coeur

The other day we met Julien, our encyclopedic guide of Paris. I was told that I would be able to recognize him very easily, although what Ludmilla (our director) offered me was only a vague description of his appearance including that he walked with a cane. However her words served me well and I spotted him as soon as I exited the metro- a petite man in his mid-twenties dressed head-to-toe in black, bedraggled hair extending in every direction, a scraggy uneven mustache, (because his hand was broken and couldn’t shave his mustache easily), and a shiny black cane. He greeted me with a big kind smile and an unforced handshake. Julien is essentially an affable anarichist, who should have lived in the late 19th century, and who works as a ghostwriter – loosely translated he is by far the most intriguing person I’ve met since I’ve been in Paris. He reminds me of a jollier version of a Zola character. I am so fascinated by the way his mind works – the way he smirks mischievously as we walk by three stoic police officers, the way he is constantly either hand-rolling or smoking cigarettes, and his endless stores of knowledge about high culture, history, and virtually EVERYTHING about his city. Naturally, he hates Sacre Coeur, where he took us for our day expedition, and warned us that we were about the enter Disneyland or Hell, although he did consent that it offered a good view of the city, which we had the “right to appreciate.” He speaks of everything in terms of rights, for example, as American students in Paris, we “do NOT have the right” to spend our time under the Eiffel Tower, or we will surely be wasting our visit. He also showed us the way in which you can see the outlines of the different arrondissements, which I hope will become more definite to me by the time I leave Paris!