A Feast of Fat Things

"A feast of fat things"--that's exactly what our last day in Paris was.  We ate a lot of pastries.  In fact, that's all we ate!  They weren't cheap pastries either, but how often are you in Paris?  So we just tried not to calculate what the price tags would be in dollars!

Before our pastry lunch, snacks, and dinner, however, we met up with a wonderful professor I had had as a Master's student and that Rachel has had as well.  She was in Paris leading a study abroad group, and we all went to Notre-Dame Cathedral together.

It was a gray morning with occasional light showers.  Our professor was a little worried since she had to lecture to the students about the sculptures on the exterior of the cathedral, but I pointed out that a stormy day with rain was ideal for talking about things like gargoyles and Quasimodo.  Of course, we didn't really talk about the Hunchback of Notre-Dame--we mostly stayed with the non-fiction account of Paris's cathedral!

On the other hand, though, even though the nineteenth century cooked up all kinds of tales about monsters, ghosts, and spooky corridors in Gothic cathedrals, it is thanks to their renewed interest in Gothic buildings that Notre-Dame is still around today.

The cathedral started to deteriorate during the Renaissance when Gothic architecture fell out of style, and during the French Revolution medieval cathedrals and sculpture came to be negatively associated with the old monarchy and were often vandalized and damaged.

Today, most of the sculpture on Notre-Dame was restored in the nineteenth century.  This tympanum depicts the death and coronation of the Virgin Mary.  Although the church was originally dedicated to St. Stephen, it was later dedicated to Notre-Dame, or "Our Lady," in the manner of most French Gothic cathedrals.

Jamb statues of saints and Old Testament kings and queens greet you as you enter the main portal.

There is nothing quite so beautiful as a Gothic rose window, seemingly weightless and floating in the darkness.

It was too dark inside the cathedral for my camera to work very well, but I did get this picture of the medieval statue known as the "Virgin of Paris."  For centuries, Parisians have regarded her as the protector of their city.  Often at the conclusion of mass in Notre-Dame the congregation will turn to face the image and sing a hymn in her honor.

We left our professor and her study abroad group at Sainte-Chapelle, and Rachel and I went looking for a list of pâtissereies we had written down.

The displays in the windows made it very hard to decide what to get!  There was an unbelievable spread of cakes, tarts, puff pastry, and chocolate extravaganzas!

Meringue tarts with raspberries, pistachios, and rose petals for decoration?  We are definitely not in Kansas anymore!

We finally decided on a few pastries--a chocolate one with nuts and a cream one with raspberries and wild strawberries.

We ate them, along with a pear tart, on the steps of the Church of Saint-Sulpice.

But that wasn't the end of the snacking.  Our next stop was one of the most famous pâtissereies in Paris--Pierre Hermé.  Their selection of macaroons was extraordinary, and if even the little tiny ones hadn't been so expensive, I would have bought about a dozen of them.  Both the meringue part of the macaroon and the ganache or butter cream filling are flavored, so you get amazing combinations.  Rachel and I got passion fruit with milk chocolate (even though it was milk chocolate and not dark chocolate, it was still fabulous) and rose.

We also bought a marvelous creation of different layers of chocolate with fleur-de-sel caramel.  The slight saltiness to the caramel is what really made this a perfect pastry.  The chocolate decorations are very artistic, don't you think?

We ate our Pierre Hermé "feast of fat things" in a little garden next to the old Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près.

Then on our way to the Cluny Museum of Medieval Art we stopped at another pastry shop and bought an orange-flavored croissant--just in case we got hungry on the road!  Then we met up with our professor and her study-abroad group to go through the museum.  We were a little fatter than when we had parted company that morning!  The Cluny has a wonderful collection, including fragments of medieval stained glass windows that you can look at closely.  In a large church with the windows high above the ground, you don't have a chance of seeing the tiny details brushed onto the faces and clothing of the saints and angels.   

Here is a sobering sight!  Do you remember those Old Testament kings and queens on Notre-Dame Cathedral?  Well, here are the originals--or at least what remains of the originals after the French Revolution.  As if it weren't enough to guillotine the living king, they had to behead long-dead ones, too!

Unbelievably, before heading off to the train station to return to Holland and England, Rachel and I made one more dessert stop!  One of the students had told us about phenomenal gelato near the Panthéon, and they were right!  It was marvelous gelato, and since you could have as many flavors as you wanted in a one cup, we got mango, kiwi, coconut, lemon, and raspberry.  It took us longer than we planned to get to the train station, and we ended up having to sprint through those endless hallways in the metro system--up stairs, down stairs, up elevators, and through more corridors. Then you have to just sit still on the metro train and watch your watch tick away the seconds and minutes.  You start calculating how much more time it will take you to get to the train station, and then you look back at your watch, and then you nearly explode in stress, and then you try to laugh about it, and then you almost cry, and then the metro train doors open and you sprint again ahead of all the people, lugging Rachel's enormous purple suitcase!  Rachel very nearly missed her train, but fortunately she got aboard and was on her way back to London.  I made my train to Amsterdam, and I resolved to myself once again that I would always give myself plenty of time to get places in the future!

Le Grand Musée du Louvre

On the first Sunday of every month there is free admission at the Louvre Museum.  "Perfect," Rachel and I thought--"How lucky that we'll be in Paris that day!"  I suspected that there would be longer lines than usual, but we were both shocked when we arrived!  At the secret, underground entrance to the Louvre through the subway--the entrance that supposedly no one knows about--there was a two-and-a-half-hour wait.  The main entrance was even worse with about a five-hour line.  "Look on the bright side," said Rachel, "This proves that people all over the world still love and appreciate art!"  But we were more than a little discouraged.  We decided to try back later after Rachel had a chance to visit Sainte-Chapelle, the little, late Gothic palace chapel built by St. Louis IX to house a precious collection or relics that he bought from Constantinople.  You feel like you've entered a jeweled reliquary when you go inside since the walls are almost completely made of colored glass with thin stone supports and bands of metal holding the pieces in place.

It is very easy to get to Church in Paris since the ward meets right downtown.  You cross the Seine River near Notre-Dame and then walk past the magnificent, nineteenth-century Hôtel de Ville in the Place Châtelet.

The chapel is a two-minute walk from the Centre Georges Pompidou, a famous contemporary art museum with multicolored pipes decorating the exterior.  After Church was over Rachel and I tried the Louvre again.  The main entrance line was much shorter than before, but pretty soon a Louvre employee came by with a sign saying that it was still a two-and-a-half hour wait!  We decided we just couldn't take that much time, and we walked away feeling really dejected.  We decided to try the "secret," underground entrance one more time, but we didn't have much hope.  Amazingly, there was no wait at that entrance--we just walked on in!

As we climbed the stairs and started walking through the galleries we looked through the windows at the huge line snaking its way through the courtyards outside.  We kept wondering if we had accidentally taken a wrong turn underground and gone in through the V.I.P. entrance.  It was so unbelievable that there could be such a discrepancy between those two entrances!  Maybe it really was a secret entrance!

The Louvre is a monumental museum.  There are three or four floors, and each floor goes on and on and on ...  Rachel half joked that the Louvre really ought to give away some of its collection to smaller museums and share the wealth!  And there is quite a bit of wealth in the Louvre--there are rooms of enormous Jacques-Louis David canvases, corridors of brightly colored northern Renaissance panels, and halls of Italian Renaissance masters.  It's like walking through an art history textbook.  You keep turning the corner and seeing some other "crown jewel" in the canon of Western art!  The Louvre has the complete collection of paintings commissioned by Queen Marie de' Medici from Peter Paul Rubens.  Marie was the Italian wife of the French king, and after her husband died she became the unpopular monarch of a disgruntled group of subjects and aristocrats.  So she called on Rubens--propaganda artist par excellence--to help restore her public image.  Rachel and I spent about four hours in the museum, but the first time I visited the Louvre I wandered through those galleries for eleven hours!

I wrote a paper once on this beautiful Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Angelico.  Fra Angelico is one of my favorite Italian Renaissance artists.  He was a Dominican friar and painted devotional frescoes on the walls of his fellow monks' cells.  Rachel and I also saw a fifteenth-century French painting that I've done some research on, and I got to take some good photographs of it.  Standing in front of it in person, you notice important details that you've never seen before.  

Even after that first, exhausting, eleven-hour stint in the Louvre, there were still rooms I hadn't been to.  I had never seen the apartments of Emperor Napoleon III, who reigned in the mid nineteenth century, and so Rachel and I walked through them.  There was a lot of gold and crystal chandeliers!

Here is the dining room.  How would you like to go to a dinner party there?!

The Louvre has a number of "cult images"--works of art that always have a crowd of devotees surrounding them and taking pictures.  Sometimes the public adoration makes sense, sometimes it doesn't.  Here is the Nike of Samothrace, enshrined beneath a vaulted ceiling and at the summit of a stone staircase.

And here is the greatest and most inexplicable "cult image" of them all--Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.  The worshiping throng was about five rows of people thick, making it nearly impossible to see the painting.  Actually, I think the painting itself is not nearly as interesting as all the fans lifting up their cameras and cell phones to get a picture!

We were pretty exhausted after the Louvre, but while walking through the streets across the river from Notre-Dame, we stumbled on the large, impressive-looking Church of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet.  We walked inside to look around.  Mass was being celebrated, and so we sat down towards the back.  I suddenly realized that this was no ordinary Sunday evening mass.  This was a traditional Latin mass.  During the 1950s and '60s the Second Vatican Council dramatically changed the Catholic liturgy.  The most obvious change was that mass was no longer said in Latin, but the rituals, gestures, and length of the mass were also altered.  Occasionally the modern version of the mass is said in Latin, but it is fairly rare to see the old, pre-1960s, Latin, nearly-medieval mass.  That is what we had stumbled upon!  It was like we had gone back in time.  The priest was wearing the old-style vestments, facing the altar, and reciting the blessings in Latin with a heavy French accent.  The women in the congregation were mostly wearing black lace scarves over their hair, and many people were listening to the whole service on their knees.  One old man near Rachel and me was kneeling on the stone floor with a tiny prayer book in his hands with yellow pages.  He looked like he had stepped out of a nineteenth-century painting.  It was a fascinating end to a wonderful day!