The City of Light

Paris: City of Light
On our last full day in the city we were determined to fill every waking moment with great stuff, starting with the outrageous stained glass windows of the Holy Chapel of Sainte Chapelle, built by Saint Louis (the king of France) in the mid 1200’s to house fragments of the True Cross and the Crown of Thorns brought back to France after the Fourth Crusade and the sacking of Constantinople. Did I mention what a treat it is to visit hugely important medieval sites with your very own medieval art historian ? Then we headed straight for the Louvre and managed to see at least an eighth of it – the Egyptian, Etruscan, and Roman collections, plus Michelangelo’s ‘Dying Slave’, the Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa of course, the Winged Victory (sort of – kept passing it as we careened around), zoomed through many galleries of paintings including the enormous David canvases and Gericault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’, got lost at least fifteen times, and arrived at the staircase to the much anticipated Pavilion des Sessions (100 masterpieces of non-western art) with thirty minutes to spare only to find that that was exactly the time when the security guards turn you around and tell you to head in the opposite direction in order to exit the museum and yes, so sorry, but that particular collection will be closed tomorrow and the fact that you are leaving Paris the next afternoon matters not at all. Ah well, off we went to roam around the Tuileries and find dinner at a marvelous café opposite another marvelous church where we had another marvelous meal – Croque Monsieur and Croque Madame, which is essentially cheese toast but when the French make it on fabulous bread and add eggs and anchovies and black olives and white sauce it is a heavenly meal, with a salad on the side and Belgian lager on tap. After supping en plein air Anne-Marie headed out one way and I the other to the Plateau Beaubourg and the utterly enormous Georges Pompidou modern and contemporary art museum where I spent a very happy two hours with an exhibition of the incredibly naked and compelling portrait paintings of British master Lucien Freud, not to mention seeing the entire sweep of Paris from the height of the glass-walled exterior stairway of the museum. At 10:30 when I came out it was just getting dark and all the monuments were blazing in the distance so I made quite a few detours on my way back to the hotel via the underground, the RER train, and the sidewalks but boy was it worth it. The French do not stint on the electric bill in Paris, and the light show at Notre Dame, the Pont Neuf, the Eiffel Tower, and every other major bit of architecture in the city is just stupendous. Thankfully I remembered that the subway closes at midnight and made it back to my hotel with very sore feet and a very stiff neck from trying to take it all in. Wow. And more wow. Friday we packed up, checked out, loaded the car, and went out for another major dose of Paris before we had to leave town. I absolutely had to see the Egyptian obelisk that stands in the Place de la Concorde in the center of the Champs Elysees between the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe; and the bookstore at the Louvre was a must – found a cool biography of Joan of Arc in English and on sale, a guide to Celtic megaliths, a catalog with images of those masterpieces of non-Western art that I could not go and see in the Pavilion des Sessions on a Friday, and a comprehensive guide to the 100 most important art works in the Louvre. We finished up our tour of Paris with a uniquely overwhelming visit to the Musee des Monuments Francais, which if you can believe it has room after room of LIFE SIZE 19th and 20th century castings of hundreds of sculptures, entryways, tympanums, columns, facades, and gargoyles from what seemed like most of the churches in France. And that was just the first floor. When we’d had enough we stumbled out, got back on the subway, picked up the car, and headed for our next destination – Chartres.