I was up by 6:15, though everyone else slept on. I turned on the bathroom light and read guide books and the Pariscope sitting on the floor, my feet under the sink. Around 8:30 I made coffee (preground Illy Caffe in a paper filter); Z stirred, then came to join me, beaming broadly and chattering, and the others gradually rose. Breakfast was pain aux figues and pain aux noisettes et raisins from Poujauran (both were exceptional), and a ripe striped melon.
It was wet outside, though not raining at the time we left. I carried my large black daypack, with sunglasses, sunscreen, kid sweatshirts, the Michelin plan de Paris, one guidebook (usually the Rough Guide, and rarely consulted), my pouch with wallet and Newton computer, and various odds and ends. No one else carried anything.
We got into the subway about quarter to ten, took the metro north on line 7 to the Musee du Louvre stop. As on previous trips, we were going to beat the lineup going into the pyramid by entering directly from the metro, but there was a long line there too, as it was the first Sunday of the month and admission was free. Later in the afternoon I spotted a newer entrance at the far southwest corner, and decided to try it on a subsequent visit.
Leaving N and K in line, I took the kids over to the Virgin Megastore and they had a blast for about fifteen minutes listening to discs on headphones (thumbs up for Cesaria Evora, thumbs down for Diana Krall). When N and K reached the store, we joined them, and got quickly through the X-ray checkpoint. It was about 10:30.
We headed for the Egyptian antiquities first; this section had been extensively remodeled since our last visit, with much better arrangements, detailed and informative labels, translations and explanations, and thematic groupings. The kids seemed to get a lot out of it, looking for eyes of Horus and canopic jars, asking about exhibits and then telling each other or one of us what they had learned. For me a highlight was the room of sarcophagi, upright and slightly ajar so we could see the fine work inside.
On previous trips I had toted two 35mm SLR cameras, one for prints and one for slides, and then replaced the print camera with a small Yashica point-and-shoot (which, ironically, took even better pictures). This trip, I made the decision to leave the slide camera in the hotel room, taking it out only on a couple of days on which I would take small pictures, not grand vistas or shots of monuments. This made the pack lighter and prevented me from constantly thinking in terms of good shots, falling into that habit of trying to possess or reduce something to human scale by clicking a shutter. The point-and-shoot came along, but was reserved for kid snapshots, and I had brought along a disposable plastic camera for each kid as well.
This choice was confirmed as I watched people posing in front of this and that (the guards seemed to have given up trying to stop flashes, as most people do not know how to prevent them on their cameras now) and, even worse, people walking through with video cameras held to their eyes constantly, seemingly experiencing the entire museum through their tiny, grainy viewfinders.
We made our way slowly through to the Mesopotamian exhibits, whose power had always impressed me across a gap of almost five thousand years. A and Z kept recognizing items from the books on the Louvre I had borrowed from the library. But they were getting tired, it was nearly noon, and quite humid and crowded in the museum. I snuck them a small cookie each, smuggled in in my waist pouch and popped right into their mouths so as to contravene the rules as little as possible, and we continued through the Antioch mosaics, the French sculpture court, and down to the glass pyramid again, intending to walk through to the other side.
However, we noticed the museum cafe, and decided that the kids would last longer if we fed them properly (the original plan was to go for an hour more, eat at the Carrousel food court, and try to get back in, though if that line we saw in the morning was any indication, it wouldn't have worked anyway). We ate simply -- saucisse de Toulouse for the kids, tartes salees for us, well done for what was essentially fast cafeteria food -- and were back to the museum again quickly.
Through the Greek antiquities (including the Venus de Milo, which A examined carefully from the back, that being the side without the crush). The kids continued to listen to N's explanations of styles and motifs (her training in classics coming in very handy), and looked for Greek gods and depictions of myths they knew from D'AullaireÕs book.
Up the staircase to look at the Winged Victory of Samothrace, ("Nike!" exclaimed A when she saw it) and into the section on Italian painting. The recognition quotient picked up on all our parts. Cimabue, Giotto, Mantegna, Veneziano, Fra Angelico, Uccello. We spent some time with the Leonardos in the hall -- the Virgin of the Rocks, dark and murky, and the Virgin with St. Anne (which Z later proclaimed her favourite).
Z wanted to see the Mona Lisa, which she'd been crowing about as she spotted it in every book on Paris she looked at, so we went around the corner, but her eye was taken by Veronese's Marriage at Cana (a companion to his Feast in the House of Levi, which weÕd spent time with the previous summer in Venice). She pointed out where the artist had painted himself in as a musician, and I pointed out the other artists he had painted in (some of whom had pictures nearby) and how the violas were being held like guitars instead of under the chin in the modern style. Then N took her off to see the famous dame, standing behind virtually everyone else in the room.
Briefly into the hall of large-format French paintings to look at the J-L David paeans to fascism, the nice self-portrait of E. Lebrun with daughter, and of course Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, A's favourite from 1996. Then we took the elevator down and left the museum proper, stopping at the bookstore to browse for a while, and pick up a couple of kids' books.
We had planned to walk in the Tuileries, but much of it seemed taken up by a fun fair complete with tall Ferris wheel, and to top if off, it started raining as we approached the Arc du Carrousel. I had just enough time to point out the horses on top whose originals all of us had seen close up in Venice last year, then we had to put up umbrellas (we had only brought two, packed at the last minute, and K's made three) and headed towards the Marche St-Honore to get the kids a snack at Le Pain Quotidien. But all tables were taken, outside and in, with people eating jam tartines and drinking orange juice.
N took the kids in and came out with another sticky lemon tart. They ate it standing in the central hall of the new glass Marche, but Z was thirsty and started to lose it, bursting into tears and demanding to go home. She agreed to settle for a drink and a short stroll. We walked down av. Opera (the Opera, behind us, cowering under scaffolding) but could find nothing open but expensive cafes. Finally I left them in the Palais Royal pillar sculpture, which the kids immediately took to climbing on, and went scouting for water and cold juice.
Once the kids had something to drink, they were amenable to spending some time in the Jardin de Palais Royal. They ran around with each other, giggling and plotting, and we vegetated on a bench under a dense canopy of shade trees. At about 5:15 we walked back through the sculptures, now populated by people on wheels, and dodged more rollerbladers in the Place du Palais Royal just south. None of them seemed particularly adept; I could not tell if it was a recent craze, or just that they didn't get enough practice in this urban setting. We took the metro back to the apartment and the kids drew for a while.
For dinner we walked south (it was raining again, harder and with more wind, and we all got a bit damp) to rue Tolbiac and a restaurant called Lao-Thai, mentioned in the old Guide Routard and the Rough Guide. We ordered two of their degustation menus (each about 170F for two), and got quite a selection, of which the best was a soup aux poissons redolent with lemongrass, good red and green beef curries (well-spiced but not incendiary, perhaps the Laotian influence) and fish steamed in curry with coconut mousse. We were all full, and even the kids ate well (mostly the deep-fried appetizers, which they typically don't care for). We walked back in the drizzle and called it an evening.