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Paris
We TGVed in from Touraine and met Chad, dropped our luggage in our Paris hotel, and went to Gare du Nord to start meeting trains, knowing that the trip from London on the Eurostar is, due to refugees, an uncertain thing. Sure enough, on the second train we met, here came Sienna's tired but smiling face, heads up among the heads-down throng! | ||
 "the kids" at our first Paris dinner together |
With only a single miscue, we got her back to our hotel below the Tour Eiffel, and gave her a few minutes to decompress, and then we all agreed, we were HUNGRY, so we ventured forth into our district, near Rue Cler, intent on taking the French up on their claim of excellent food. The sidewalk café we found was adequate, but that didn't much matter to me, because I ate across the tiny table from my elder daughter. |
In the after-dinner dark, walking back to our rooms, Eiffel's Erection kept beckoning at us indecently between the buildings, and we went as if commanded toward it. It's a BIG one! Standing below, leaning your head back to look up, is, as one of our guidebooks said, almost scary. It was a perfect star-twinkly night, and we could tell from ground level that the view from above would be spectacular. Even so late -- after 10pm -- this is one of the world's biggest tourist draws, but the line at the north tower was reasonable. The same guidebook told us that the second level was enough, but we ran a quick poll, and all but Rochelle insisted that only the summit would do.
So THAT's where all those little models of the Eiffel Tower come from. Can you imagine how many have been sold since 1888, when the first million tourists (!) rode to the top? The tower is a machine for sucking money out of the pockets of people from around the world ... and not a single one seemed to mind, ourselves most especially included. Maybe this tells you something about what kind of travellers we are, that this was the most memorable part of our Paris visit. |
 siren lights in the sky, calling us
Later, we all agreed it was the best $10 we spent in Paris.
One queues interminably and then crowds into two separate elevators to get to the top, the first to the second stage at about 400 feet, then the second to the windy top at something like 960 feet. We paused at the second level and walked all the way around, enjoying the shops and the hubbub of polyglot tourists, but knowing that Paris would reveal herself more dramatically from the top.
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It was indeed a crisp and glorious night, with the boulevards and monuments of the City of Light laid out below us, the Seine just discernible in the dark, the tower's beacon stabbing out into the night. |  |
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It was windy on the very top, and Sienna and Rochelle swore the tower was swaying. Behind the glass on the summit's lower deck we spent a long time, even though both Chad and Sienna were flagging and we knew we had a big day ahead. We were among the last hundred to queue and head down in the upper elevator, packed in like sardines. Arriving at the second level, while looking around for the queue for the down elevator, Chad and I spotted the down stairs sign. Exhilarated, we were off! Could we beat the ladies? Probably not, but it was something physical to do. The stairs are rhythmically regular, perfect for racing down except for occasional glaring lights shining up into our eyes as we zipped down two at a time. Steadily the ground approached us, but were we fast enough to beat the queue and the elevator?
At the first stage, a mere 95 feet above the base of the tower, we hit a glitch: the down stairway was closed! Sizing up the queue for the down elevator, we checked out another pylon ... closed! And another ... closed! |
 Mom and boy in Gay Paree |
Finally, we found the down stair and completed our giddy descent, knowing that after some 500 stairs, we'd pay tomorrow. It was wonderfully physical, pounding down the stairs. Only a hundred stairs from the bottom we blew by some other tourists fearfully climbing down.
Even at midnight, when we emerged from the pylon, the square below the tower was crowded, and we momentarily despaired for finding our family ... but only a moment later we glimpsed them emerging from the east pylon. Had we beat? Who cared?? Giddily, tired and happily reunited, we made our way back to our hotel.
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Next morning, we hit the Louvre as soon as early morning laundry, the opening of our chosen pastry shop, and lingering jet lag would allow ...and we were there before the worst of the crowds, gliding right in with our museum passes. As we had at the Tower of London, we headed for the jewels, or, in this case, the Mona Lisa.
Dear reader, I am saddened to have to inform you that it's a joke. Yes, the photo at right is a joke, but at the Louvre, Mona is a third the size shown, and barely visible behind thick grey glass and a forest of heads. |
 Mona's in the eye of the beholder |
 The original Mona's enthralled fans
photo credit: Chad Abramson |
What ARE they looking at? Even if you fight your way to the front of the mob, you can't see any details. The lighting is dim, the grey glass leaches any brightness out of the original -- the experience is inferior to seeing a properly prepared picture of the painting on TV! |
Fortunately, the Louvre contains many other gems, so many that not every one is thronged with admirers. Here's a little known Caravaggio I'd never even seen a reproduction of before that stopped Sienna and me in our tracks. How human! How glorious!
How badly framed, lighted, and displayed! Sorry friends, but here's where the rant against the Louvre starts. If you're a fan, skip ahead to the next page. |  |
 Louvre ceiling detail |
The French aren't clear about the purpose of the Louvre. To impress all comers with the puissance and acquisitiveness of their French forefathers? If so, it works. Some rooms are art in themselves, and paintings are lost. Many of the French paintings are bombastic, self-conscious, and overwhelming -- art by the yard. The entire collection is displayed uniformly badly, like sides of beef in a cooler. The Louvre is a fancy warehouse that diminishes its riches by concentrating them into insignificance, like Andy Warhol's repetitions. So much better, I think, for art and viewers alike, to show a few works sensitively and well, as at Veluwe or Coimbra. |
The main thing you see at the Louvre is mobs of people -- bewildered, foot sore, but bent on maximizing their cultural intake. Call it cultural gourmandise. I could only feel pity for the poor British lady who said to me, "How long do you think it would take to really see all this ... twenty five years?"
Is there a way to prepare for this experience? Brush up your arrogance, enjoy a few good art books, and get very clear that this is a superior collection in number, but inferior in terms of great pictures. Better yet, don't bother. The Louvre is grossly over-rated. |
 a minor hallway |
 Blue comes to art |
By deliberately steering myself through a historically arranged cycle of inferior madonnas and severed heads -- I counted 12, but by official count there are 47 -- I was able for the first time to really appreciate the essence of the Rennaissance. Sure, it was about perspective and mastery, but what really lifts Rennaissance art out of the mud is the first serious use of vibrant, radiant, heavenly, impressionistic blue. Here's some in a detail from, I believe, one of the anonymous "masters". Even filtered through camera and computer, the blue glows. |
To get a grip on the effect of so much art, I spent some time on a balcony watching the milling throng under the Louvre's new pyramid -- a safe "no art" refuge. One reason folks congregate here is that with its harsh lines and hard surfaces, it's more comfortable than the crowded galleries. If the purpose of art is to uplift, the Louvre has found a way to invert the intention effectively.
"I'm sure it was there when I peed this morning!" |
 wandering the artless pyramid in shock
Having visited a number of "minor" museums, loved them, and gained from them a great deal of understanding and appreciation, I couldn't help but take the fellow pictured at left as my personal Louvre totem. There he stands, alongside five buddies, gathered from some nameless and now meaningless Greek temple, his penis hacked off by French moralists, in a cold but bombastic hall, unlabeled, without apology. Is this how we're meant to feel at the end of the Louvre Experience? |
We hoped for more at the Pompidou Center's Museum of Modern Art, and when we found the unlabelled fifth level and its treasures, we felt somewhat compensated. Again, an inferior but pretentious collection with a very few gems, mostly pieces by unknown artists. The museum is unfriendly and stark, does a bad job of providing postcards of its treasures, and so I can't share with you.
The Pompidou Center is itself an interesting sculpture, a work of art in its own right that still manages not to detract or distract from the art it houses.
And another thing: I don't care what the guide books say, the café is a rip off! |
 Pompidou sculpture pool, Montmartre in distance |
 Notre Dame's east facade
Impressive, yes, because these monuments, and the Louvre, and all Paris, are the work of humans laboring over centuries to hold back wildness and uplift the heart. With nature and the human heart now in danger, the denatured quality of citified humanity is most apparent in a so-called "great city" like Paris where so much energy is devoted to looking over its shoulder to its past to determine which way to go. |
We walked along the Seine -- fearfully polluted and hemmed in all sides by whizzing cars driven impatiently -- trying to sense the romance attributed to this city. Well, there were plenty of public displays of affection, wish fulfillment at its finest.
With several unused tickets in our Culture Vulture Museum Pass, we visited Saint Chappelle and Notre Dame on the Isle de la Cité. When you remember that this is a big, crowded, and tourist ridden city, these are impressive sights. Uplifting? Not for this traveler, sorry. I was disappointed by Paris, as I was by London; "great city" strikes me as oxymoronic. I'd seen Gay Paree and I was itchin' to get back down to the farm!
central doors detail |
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