Paris: Take Two

Chocolate: one of the greatest benefits the world has to offer. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Today weather in Paris was lousy, so naturally we headed of to the Louvre. Which was completely new to my aunt, and my mother had forgotten many things since it had been decades for her. So I went for a chronological approach and started out in the Mesepotamian section, with the oldest written law codex of the world, courtesy of Babylonian Ruler Hammurabi, hammered on black basalt. And a couple of other materials, but the black stone was what catches your eye immediately. There were so many Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian exhibits there that I wouldn’t be surprised if this collection of millennia old relicts of Mesopotamian cultures was unmatched. Alas, I could only serve with a vague recollection of Gilgamesh & Enkidu, and of Innana going to the underworld, as the Egyptians are more my forte. Besides, offering tales of Ishtar’s affair with Destruction and her eventual death in strip club (tm Neil Gaiman, in Sandman). would probably have been wrong. Would it?

Then it dawned on me that we should skip the chronological approach and head for the Mona Lisa fast because the hordes were coming, and if there is one thing a tourist does not appreciate when watching a legendary work of art the first time, it’s the presence of many other tourists. So we did that, and my aunt saw the Mona Lisa. Which left her strangely unsatisfied, a feeling I can empathize with. I could never understand the big deal about the Mona Lisa. There are paintings that I find much more amazing; heck, there are even Leonardos that I prefer. Back we went to enjoy other paintings and antiquities at leisure. I think my emotional highlight this time (it’s different during each visit), aside from the Babylonian heritage, were the landscapes by Corot in that cool, blue-ish or sometimes silvery light he uses. No wonder he spawned Pisarro, artistically speaking.

In the afternnoon, we had originally planned to do a walk, but it was still raining. So I used the advice shezan had given me as well as the Metro (the public transport system in Paris rules! A new train every two or three minutes, and it gets you everywhere) and took my two companions to a museum I had never visited before – the Musée Nissim de Camondo. Which is a mansion turned into a museum of a special kind – a window into another world. We saw the house as visitors around the turn of the century would have seen it, with gorgeous furniture and gobelins reaching back to the 18th century, all collected by the Camondo family. Here are some examples, under the cut:

( The past is another country... )

When starting the tour, we knew nothing about the Camondos but found out during the tour. They were an important Sephardic Jewish family who founded one of the largest banks in the Ottoman Empire. Two brothers came to Paris during the reign of Napoleon III., and remained there. Moise de Camondo lost his son Nissim in WWI and after his own death in 1935 left the house to the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, to be made into a museum named after said son. Nissim’s photo is in various places of the house, and we thought of the World War I senseless bloodshed, and my paternal great-grandfather, a painter, who died there as Nissim had done, leaving a widow behind. (And two children.) And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

There is an even worse tragedy haunting the house – Nissim’s widow and her children from a second marriage were brought to Auschwitz in WWII. We looked at the black and white photographs of the boys with their school ties, and of their mother Beatrice, riding in happier times, and were struck silent again over the reality and horror of it all.

After having visited every room in the house, including the kitchen and the bathrooms, we remembered being told that there was a holiday tomorrow (WW I armistice, as it happens), and went to the Lafayette (think Harrods in London or Macy’s in New York). Where I discovered proof of the French being privileged – they already had the second season of Alias out on DVD. Will now finally meet SpyMommy. Then it was time for an absolute treat – meeting shezan in person for the first time. She swept us away to the Café Angelina, which is where chocolates who die and go to heaven and up. Despite my deep fondness for the manna of the gods, I had never drunk hot chocolate before, and Paris is a very fitting place to start with the habit, so that was what I did, along with mother, aunt & shezan. Chocolate in a more solid form was bought by my two companions while I only gave it soulful looks and otherwise kept to my mini croissants and hot chocolate. (Well, I did buy one piece in the end, for a Munich friend of mine.) After this very satisfying end of our second Paris day, mother & aunt departed for the hotel and I first browsed through a lot of books at the bookstore next door to the Café Angelina, which is the oldest one offering English language books in Paris (founded 1809) and then dived, no longer constrained by my RL identity, into hours of fannish chat with shezan, lobbying for Heinrich Mann, James Boswell and Fernwithy’s Shifts, among other things. Life is good.

Tomorrow: churches, churches, churches!