Oysters

Chesterton*  said ""He was a bold man that first ate an oyster."   We celebrated our 32d/22d anniversary last Thursday at Itineraire in Paris with a dab of oyster sorbert.  Take that, GK.
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*Or Jonathan Swift.  Or Roger Sterling.

Paris: Degas Nudes

Who said of the Folies Bergère girls--"ah zair faces are so sad, mais zair bottoms are so 'appi!" It's the Paris we dreamt of--men, anyway--back before we realized we could get naked and get wasted without every leaving home. There's another kind of French allure on display right now at the Musée_d'Orsay, France's national treasury of Impressionist (and kindred) art. It's Degas and the Nude--room after room of them, plenty of paintings, lots of drawings, a few sculptures. And even though it is (nominally) only one subject, it's one of those shows that lets you consider the whole arc of a career.  For who more than Edgar Degas, when you stop to think of it, ever observed the female body--sitting, standing, lying down, climbing out of the bath, toweling down, whatever--with such patient attention?

Of course you want to say this is art and not porn and you'd be right, but that doesn't mean it is not erotic.  I tried to say something about abstraction, timelessness, essence, like Cézanne. But Mrs. Buce says this misses the point: she said their never was an artist who inhabited the body with more convincing particularity, all the bones and joints in the right place, always the right balance between equipoise and action. I suppose we could both be right in the sense of Hegel's god who had to live through the particularity of the world, else be doomed to an eternity of abstract possibility. Anyway, it is here until July 1. Special ticket although it does come included in those multi-day passes. Definitely worth a side trip, perhaps even worth a transcontinental flight. 

Paris: French Letters

A couple of Parisian book notes, gleaned from hanging out at Gilbert Joseph on the Boule Mich,  One, Saint-Simon: it's not hard to find editions of his memoirs around Paris but what with the 17th-Century style and all those grand personages, comprehension can be daunting.   Happily, Livre de Poche has brought out a nice user-friendly title with the properly grand title Cette pute me fera mourier...--"this whore will be the death of me,."  There's a brief and accessible intro by François Raviez along with text notes and little insert-cues like you might find in a school translation text.  Which in a sense it is, although I expect the intended audience is French speakers, not English.  There seem to be some other volumes in the same series, including some notes by Prince Metternich.

Two: I long suspected that this existed and here it is--an edition of Montaigne's Essais in modern French.  I have to admit I have never had a lot of success with Montaigne in the original--a little too archaic and too much Gascon dialect.  Reassuring to know the French seem to have the same problem.

Oh, and a third: in another shop I saw a two-volume Histoire du XXe siècle by Raymond Aron.  Aron might qualify as kind of a French Tony Judt (or maybe Judt as an American Raymond Aron).  He's been dead for near 30 years now, but this seems to be a first-time publication.  Ought to be worth a read. 

Paris: My Favorite Spot in the Louvre

You know what it is? Glad you asked. No, not the Winged Victory or the Venus de Milo. Not the Code of Hammurabi, and not even the Vermeers although they, like all Vermeers are eye-popping.

No; I cast my vote for the Marie de' Medici cycle, Peter Paul Rubens' 24 billboard-size paintings that occupy their own room in the Richelieu Wing, second floor on the north side. It's a tic: I'm a sucker for neoclassical/rococo pomp--same reason that I like the Tiepolos that can put us immediately in touch with so foreign a world. Also, of course, because Rubens (like Tiepolo) is just good at what he does--dynamic, brimming over with vivacity and sheer brio. There is a distinction here: Tiepolo, you suspect, is in on the joke, but with Rubens it is just high spirits.

Also, again, the sheer absurdity of it all. Here is a woman never did a single earthly thing of note except throw a king, who returned the compliment on reaching his majority by chasing her out. Rubens, a consummate master at of knowing which side his bread is buttered on, went light on the domestic rancor and brought the story to an edifying reconciliation. All of which is enough one more item: is there anything more suitable to serve as so grand a center of so grand a museum, in so grand a city, at the heart of a (formerly?) grand nation?  

Paris: Along the River

Earlier in the week I carped about the fog but last night and today, the weather couldn't be better.  Tourists (of whom at the moment there are surprisingly few) had better hurry before it gets too hot.  We dined today at a modest place--rather, as modest as you can get on the right bank of the Seine, just north of the Île le de la Cité. Except for us, the place seemed to belong to the habituels--which is to say, it wasn't half full. We idled away a few minutes appraising the the threesome over by the wall,  at least our age, maybe older--bonus points for the one in the three-piece blue serge with red pocket hanky and discreet purple tie. Why three? We settled on the notion that they were a foursome and that the extra is the widower. So, he needs the company and they see no reason to break an old habit.  I've no doubt that a meal here was inferior to what you would have got at Tour d'Argent within sight range across the river, but I suspect it cost about a quarter as much and was probably a lot more relaxed.

 Last night we took some newbies to the Eiffel Tower; we traveled out on the Number 9 Metro to Pont de Sèvres. That puts you down just west of the Trocadero. From there you can't see the tower but you walk a few feet and look left and--wham, there is is, just as it looked in the iconic photograph with Hitler from 1940.

 I've puzzled over the name, "Trocadero;" I remember an old black-and-white movie where it is the name of a saloon run by a guy named Tony Rocadero. I guess I never credited that version; anyway, Wiki reports that Troc takes its name from a battle in which the French reactionaries mauled some insurgents in Spain in 1823; along with Hitler, ironic brackets for a monument to human reason.

 We capped the Tower with the de rigueur twilight boat ride up and down the river. Doubling the Île Saint-Louis, I happened to notice a woman hunched down on the concrete promontory, sheltering a baby.  The whole scene struck me as unutterably sad.  An odd response in a way: the night wasn't especially cold and I suppose there are shelters and anyway, she was probably no more miserable than any number of other homeless people around Paris or elsewhere. I can only guess it had something to do with the austere dignity of her surroundings.  

Paris: Église Saint-Sulpice

I've been in Paris a few times before but somehow I'd never made it to Église Saint-Sulpic, the rococo of all rococos, a massive pile tucked away modestly with its back to the action on the Rive Gauche.  We trekked out there Sunday morning to take in the organ music.  These guys have no illusions: they do mass but they understand that a good bit of their audience will be just tourists there for the entertainment and they plan accordingly.


Actually, there are two organs: one "large" (as they might say in grading olives) with 22 stops and one "jumbo," with 102.  Unless I badly misunderstand, we were hearing the runt of the litter, but it was plenty robust enough to fill the formidable 17-18C space.  A Bach prelude, a bit of César Franck and a fair amount of one Louis Vierne, hitherto unknown to me--apparently he began his career here as assistant organist in 1892.  Certainly worth a visit, as they say in the guidebooks, and probably worth a side trip.

Paris: The French Election, and Ours--Pick Your Brackets

The French don't do things our way (perhaps you knew?).  When it comes to elections they don't have a nice, dignified, orderly (heh!) primary followed by a nice, dignified general.  They have a first-round free-for-all followed by a runoff,   It can be confusing: they're still pegging the socialist Francois Hollande as the ultimate winner here, even though there is some reason to believe he might actually trail in the first round (and there's a surge for a candidate on his left flank, showcased in a rally at the Bastille just yesterday, which could upset things).

But still, it set me to thinking: what if Barack Obama had had to run in all those primaries over the last few weeks, along with the likes of Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann et al.?  Can we imagine a scenario in which he would have been knocked off in an early round, leaving it for, say, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney to slug it out in the true finals?

Paris: On French Parents and their Children

We spent a fair amount of the day in the company of French parents and their children--all of them strangers to us but all the more instructive thereby as an opportunity for observation.  There were two venues--one a fairly upscale restaurant peopled by Parisian families in Sunday dinner mode.  The other was the marionette theatre in the Luxembourg Gardens.

The marionette show was programmed for children, so no surprise we'd find a lot of kids there.  The restaurant--just say it seemed as if there were some sort of rule that you couldn't enjoy a Sunday dinner with your kinfolks unless you brought along s selection of five-to-eight year olds.  Still the main point is that in each place, the kids were fine. They did kid things: they giggled; they squirmed; they ordered hot dogs and (French?) fried potatoes.  But not one of them threw a tantrum, or otherwise morphed into a public nuisance. The attitude throughout was one of easy conviviality.

All of which confirms a prejudice of mine: the French are at their most attractive when dealing with their kids.  We all know that the English bully their kids (or simply ship them out, which may be the same); the Italians are bullied by theirs (remember the punch line, "he thinks she's a virgin and she thinks he's God).  But the French seem to have figured out how to develop just the right kind of rapport to keep the kids engaged and yet not out of line.  My friend Rusty asks: they treat them like adults?  No, not exactly. They treat them like kids, but like kids who deserve to be taken seriously.  My friend Kenny used to say that all he knew about life  he learned in kindergarten, although that he learned it as a teacher, not a student.  Which is, he said, they want attention, security and reassurance.  Which amounts, perhaps, to saying that you treat them like adults who happen to be kids.

It's an odd kind of irony when you consider how beastly the French can be to each other in moments of national crisis (except, in fairness, they really don't seem to have had a moment of national crisis for quite some time).  But it's a start.  And it makes for a pleasant ambiance in which to idle away a Sunday.