I was up at seven-thirty, and when I went into the living room to make coffee, A hopped up and gave me a big hug. "What do you want to do today?" I asked. "To go see the exhibition with the painting that makes me dizzy," she said. She had noticed the poster of the Robert Delaunay exhibition (in the south gallery of the Centre George Pompidou, the only part of the building open during renovations) and after seeing one of his paintings at the Musee d'Art Moderne, she decided that she wanted to see the show.
So after a breakfast of tartines (toasted leftover baguette and jam), we caught line 5 to Bastille, changed to line 1, and got off at Hotel de Ville. A quick walk north got us to the Beaubourg just after it opened. This and the next day were the only days I brought my SLR along, with the goal of shooting a few evocative scenes on the street.
The exhibit was quite nice; rooms were grouped chronologically, though there was also thematic grouping, since Delaunay went through phases of working on the same images or motifs. Besides copious amounts of text on the walls, there were old postcards, magazines, and even large projections of Gaumont and Pathe newsreels.
When Arju saw "La Ville" (1910), she said, "This is like pointillism and cubism in the same painting," an astute observation gleaned from study of the genres in the Musee Picasso and the Orsay. Z was more succinct: "It's all chopped up," she said.
She, of course, was quite taken with the Tour Eiffel series (and by the accompanying newsreel, which showed the ascent that she didn't get to make), and by spotting the vague shape of the tower in the Les Fenetres series. Through a set of English Rugby players to the Circular Forms, featuring "Disque", the painting that made A dizzy, and the exhibit was done. We went through once again, and thanked A for having brought us there, since we wouldn't have seen it otherwise.
It was 11:30. We were in a somewhat touristed and expensive part of town, but had time to go just about anywhere. Should we risk trying a new place? "Or should we just go to Astier again?" For once, we decided to be less adventurous.
It had been cool and overcast all morning, and a few drops fell, so we ducked into the Rambuteau subway, took line 11 one stop north to Arts et Metiers (which gave us a chance to see a platform with tubular walls covered in faux copper, riveted, and with displays from the museum of the same name, unfortunately still closed for renovations) and then line 3 to Parmentier.
"Bennett, cinq personnes?" the server asked, since we were five the last time; but we were only four this time, and our name wasn't Bennett, so we didn't get the nice corner table. But we were seated right by the bar, which meant instant service and a chance to eavesdrop on the conversation of the various servers.
I had foie gras de canard maison to start, which was actually better than the one at Bouillon Racine; N had the mushroom saute which impressed me on our last visit; and the kids had salmon rillettes, which they went mad over ("These are even better than pork!" A said.) A half-bottle of light Medoc helped all of it along, though I missed my glass at one point and sent the server into peals of laughter.
My main dish was an andouilette grillee, a little more pungent than the one on the Butte-aux-Cailles, as it was graded A.A.A.A.A ("Smells like cow poop," Z observed, though it didn't stop A from trying a bite). N's was a roasted fillet of salmon with fennel, and the kids shared a croustillant of cabillaud (cod) with spinach, which they donated to us. About this time our server came by and tried to convince another to go up and get the chef to make "steak hache" (hamburger), presumably for the younger members of the Bennett party. I thanked our kids once again for being so progressive in food matters; of course, we encouraged them in it right from the start, but that wouldn't have been enough without their enthusiasm.
They had earned their own desserts, and each chose warm cherries cooked in red wine with vanilla ice cream, which caused the server to "oh, la, la!". N and I both had soupe aux melons avec pruneaux (prunes), which was refreshing. Another great meal at Astier, and they only charged us 25F for the extra dessert. Would that I could convince them to move the operation a little closer to our home.
We asked the kids if they could manage another museum, and they could, so we headed down rue J.P.-Timbaud and into the northern part of the Marais, then down rue de Saintonge towards the Musee Carnavalet (I carefully avoided taking us by the playground just east of the Musee Picasso).
The sun was out and it was heating up by the time we reached the courtyard. "Who's that?" N said, pointing at the bronze statue. Z glanced at it and said, "Louis Quatorze!", though to be fair she would probably have said that of any bewigged aristocrat.
We had worried that the Carnavalet would be too inaccessible for the children, but we were convinced by a couple of pictures in the Eyewitness Guide (which had been lost for much of the trip but which I had uncovered a couple of days previous under a pile of clothes to be reworn) of Art Nouveau rooms. Ironically, those rooms were only open in the morning, so we missed them, but the children's hearts were won right at the beginning by the display of imaginative shop signs (a carved standing sheep for a butcher, for example).
Paintings of various Louises and their hangers-on were leavened by period rooms and period furniture which one didn't have to be an expert to appreciate, and we all liked the paintings of Paris in various stages of development (Z was particularly taken by Notre-Dame without its spire, and by a model of the islands of the Seine showing the old medieval quarter still surrounding the cathedral).
The Revolution seemed to get short shrift; I couldn't tell if it was just that it was a period of destroying artifacts, not creating them, or whether it betrayed some bias on the part of some curator. The best thing in this section were a couple of original Declarations of the Rights of Man.
The bookshop had a great collection of books on the city, reminding me again how little I knew about it. A quick trip down to rue St-Antoine and Rachinel for pastries and bread, and then we took the subway home from Bastille. I dashed off to the supermarket before it got too frantic with after-work shoppers, to try to find something other than cheese for the kids to have for dinner.
"Something other" turned out to be rillettes de canard for A (though the rest of us had some as well; they met with more favour from A than the ones N had had on the very first day in town) and jambon cru for Z. I had a glass or two of a Cabernet Sauvignon, a Vin de Pays de l'Aude which I'd bought at Au Bon Marche to cook cherries in before deciding it was too much work. The wine was pretty good for 17F.
After pastries (tarte Tatin, a creme brulee, and a chocolate eclair), I convinced the kids to go for a short walk in the neighbourhood, though their inclination was to stay in the apartment and play with the sofa cushions.
We headed south on Rue Bobillot and then Rue du Moulin des Pres to an area around Place de l'Abbe G. Henocque to where there were older brick houses, two and three stories high, some with Art Nouveau glass canopies outside. Then across an intervening stretch of older housing "projects" on rue de la Colonie, interspersed with newer developments in white, with that late-80's look. Down to Place de Rungis and into a little pocket area called the Cite Florale, with lovely two-story row houses covered with greenery that would not look out of place in quieter parts of Toronto. It was a slice of a Paris that hardly existed any more, seemingly predating Hausemann and his huge boulevards and five-story apartment blocks.
The sun had gone down but the scattered clouds were still bright above us. We walked north and over the Butte aux Cailles, with the small bistros and bars starting to fill with young locals, and groups of older men standing around on corners smoking and talking. Then home and Homer for some sleepy kids before bed.