My birthday weekend just happens to coincide with an Italian national holiday. How convenient. That meant that this year we had a long weekend and a chance to get out of town. Our first thought was to go to London. I'm so glad we didn't. It was the Queen's jubilee weekend and London was a madhouse in addition to being even more expensive than usual.
We went to Paris in search of baguettes, croissants, pastries, and crepes. We also found the Eiffel tower, the Musee D'Orsay, and the Champs Elysees and Arc de Triomphe. Notre Dame was closed because of the fire, but we saw the nearby Sainte Chapelle for our fix of Gothic glass. We went to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore and sipped hot drinks in the cafe next door. We didn't quite make it to Les Invalides, the military history museum, so we'll just have to go back.
We flew in and out of Beauvais on Ryanair. I don't know that I would recommend it. You arrive and you are still an hour or more outside of Paris. They do have a convenient shuttle bus service, but you are a long way out. EasyJet flies out of Orly on the south side of Paris. You can get there by Metro/train so it's a bit more convenient, maybe. With the shuttle, you get dropped on the north side of town, near-ish a metro stop, and then you still have to get to where you are staying.
We stayed in Montrouge, a neighborhood on the south side of Paris. It reminds me a bit of our neighborhood in Rome, outside of where tourists are likely to go, but well connected to the historical center. I'd stay there again, near the Mairie Montrouge metro stop. There is a cute little center with plenty of restaurants, pastry shops, and a square with a town hall. If you walked the other way from our hotel it got a little rougher, not bad on a Sunday morning, but not much going on.
The city was busy! On Sunday the area around the Eiffel tower was shoulder to shoulder crowds. It was less busy on the weekday evening when we first saw it, but still a lot of people. It seems like everyone who didn't travel for the past two years is traveling now. I've noticed this in Rome as well. Others have told me that Rome is busier this summer than before the lock-downs. I'm glad I got to see it quiet.
My Girl and I spent a morning in the Musee D'Orssay. It was amazing. This train station turned museum is just stunning. It houses art from 1848-1914, a completely different time period than what you see in Rome. It was refreshing to see. Most people go for the impressionists, but there is so much more. The 19th century neo-classical sculptures in the central hall were quite interesting to see after having seen so many of the works that inspired them.
Cavelier, Penelope
My grandmother gave me a little silvery tapestry of the Gleaners. It is rather old, she may have gotten it from her father. I don't remember at the moment. It is a favorite thing of mine. I enjoyed seeing the original.
Cordier, Woman from the Colonies
Rodin, John the Baptist
One of the famous clocks from the days of the train station.
Degas, Dancer age 14
Gustave Caillebotte, Raboteurs de parquet
Degas, Blue dancers
They say that Degas liked to paint both race horses and dancers. It makes me wonder about the similarities he saw between the two. Strength, physicality, grace, drama, performance, all for other people.
Monet painted Rouen cathedral many times trying to capture the changing of the light with the time of day and season. It is interesting to see how different the same subject can be.
Monet, Rouen Cathedral: morning sun
Here there are two very different depictions, both from the 1870s. One thing I found interesting about these is the different attitude of the women. The individual women outside are all strong warrior women while the women inside seem trapped as they hold up the sky and the African woman inside has a chain on her ankle. Carpeaux is known for his abolitionist work depicting enslaved people. The idea was to force people to confront the reality of the situation and the personhood of the enslaved. Only a few years later a very different Africa is depicted by a different artist.
We went back to the Eiffel tower since the boys weren't with us on the first go around. It is the must-see thing in Paris for a good reason. It was built for the 1889 World Fair with the idea that it would be disassembled after 20 years. The tower was saved when it was put into use as a radio tower in 1910. During WWI coded German military radio messages were intercepted thanks to the antennae on the tower.
Update:
This information sent me down the internet rabbit hole of reading. It's interesting to think of JMK traveling through Europe in the late 1930s. I'm sure he was aware of the political situation, but he could not have seen the future. His positive comments in a 1938 news article about the preservation and microfilming of family records in Germany have been take by some as support of the Nazis. I don't see it that way. As a past director of the Utah Genealogical Society, he was very interested in helping people access records to document their family history. The LDS church has long encouraged its members to research their families for the purpose of connecting with their past and providing religious ordinances, such as baptism, for deceased family members. More about this is available on the church website. Although there was a little bit of overlap in their interests, the reason for researching and documenting family history was quite different in Nazi Germany.
Boats on the Seine
The downstairs chapel of Sainte Chapelle
We walked by Notre Dame, but it was closed because of the fire a couple years ago. Instead we visited the nearby Sainte Chapelle. We've seen a lot of Gothic churches this year, but I wanted to see this one after seeing photos of the stained glass. It didn't disappoint.
The upstairs chapel of Sainte Chapelle is breath taking. It is a masterwork of Gothic stained glass. There are 15 windows, each 15 meters high, arranged on three sides of the chapel. We were there on a rainy day so we didn't get the full effect, but it was still so impressive. Even more impressive is that it was built in only 7 years. With so many windows it is a bit overwhelming to try to study each one and decipher the stories they tell.
The Nativity in glass
Cute kids and a rather trippy Art Nouveau Metro sign
We found a couple of places with amazing food. The first place was a little crepe place in Montrouge. The owners were so friendly and chatted with us in English. One of the owners is from Brittany in Northern France. The crepes there are made from buckwheat, not wheat flour. They have a crispiness that wheat crepes are missing. A buckwheat crepe filled with goat cheese was amazing. The traditional butter sugar crepes for dessert were equally good.
For dinner on my birthday John found a Vietnamese restaurant also in Montrouge. I wasn't thinking about Vietnamese food in France, but it makes sense. France was in Vietnam for many years so there is a connection there. There is good Indian food in England and good Vietnamese food in France. It was the best dinner I'd had in months. I think that part of the reason I enjoyed it so much is that it is so different from French and Italian food. Italian food is good, but sometimes you want something different. The Japanese and Thai restaurants we have in our neighborhood in Rome haven't been very good. Imagine bland Thai food! It's a disgrace.
Sheltering from the rain at the Arc de Triomphe
We had a great weekend. It was a bucket list stop for My Girl. Paris is a city with so much to see it is only possible to scratch the surface in the few days we had. We went at our own pace and saw what we wanted to. Do I want to come back? Sure, but not in the summer and I'd probably go to Provence or back to Normandy first.
After reading this post, my aunt sent me some information about the tapestry I mentioned. In 1937 my great grand father James Mercer Kirkham (JMK) went on a 5-6 month assignment for the LDS church to Europe, including Germany, to learn about and encourage the preservation of genealogical records.
James M. Kirkham brought back from Europe in 1938, three Tapestries – one for each single daughters Zelda, Alice, and Bessie. Bessie ended up with all three (remember Alice came to live with Bessie). Bessie gave one it each of her three granddaughters.
James was in European countries and especially Germany representing the Church on business, studying and pioneering microfilming of records. The Germans had developed the technology for filming records. They wanted to document blood lines – pre–War Nazi period. The technology has been a blessing to millions for documenting family in genealogical records.
James Immigration record is attached to him on Family Search. He came back from South Hampton (assume England) 25 February and landed in New York March 4, 1938. A report of him pioneering microfilming records for the Church was in an article in The Church News 20 plus years ago.
The Genealogical Society had been watching the development of microfilming technology for several years as a cost effective way to preserve and make historical family records more available. I found a master's thesis on the history of microfilm for family record preservation that was surprisingly interesting. This thesis mentions JMK on pages 10-11. It mentions his trip to Europe and specifically his interest in the work being done to microfilm records in Germany. He met with local church leaders and visited record archives to become familiar with their collections.
After JMK returned to Utah, the secretary of the Genealogical society said, "In view of the perilous
state of world affairs, it seems that we must not delay in availing
ourselves of every reasonable opportunity for securing the precious records so necessary in our work." By the end of 1938, records in the US were being filmed and negotiations were underway for filming records in several European countries. Sadly, the war brought an end to the European efforts for a time. During the war microfilm technology advanced quickly. Filming was able to begin after the war starting with records in Denmark and England.
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