Timing is everything (or, heaven rewards the virtuous)

For example:

1. Our postal votes arrived in the mail the day before we left.

2. Our tickets for the Houses of Parliament tour arrived ten minutes before we rang for the taxi to take us to the airport.

3. This morning the Pont de l’Alma metro station was closed for repairs, which we didn’t know until we got there. So we had to change our plans. Instead of a pleasant walk through the catacombs, we walked over to the Place de la Concorde to go to the Orangerie. When we arrived just after 10am we thought that it too might be shut – there was no queue! But it was open. We were just lucky. We were able to look at Monet’s Nymphéas with maybe a dozen people around. That’s all.

Painted from about 1918 to 1926, these eight pictures were commissioned by the French government and and installed in the Orangerie in the Jardin des Tuileries after Monet’s death. They are so big it is a completely different experience to observe them than, say, the water lilies on display at the Musée d’Orsay or the Marmottan. There you have individual canvases about 1.8m square. Here there are twenty-two panels each 2 metres high and with a total length of 91m. They are housed in two oval rooms on the ground floor of the building, illuminated by filtered natural light from the glass roof. In the middle of each room are benches of generous length and padding, on which you can relax and gaze, watching the play of light on the water, the lily pads, the depths of the pool, the waving willows – it feels like you are sitting in Monet’s garden at Giverny.


There are no ancillary elements in these paintings; everything is subject. The silence is as important as the sounds; like Debussy and Ellington, the space between the notes counts. I don’t know how these pictures rate in terms of his technique, but they have to be Monet’s most successful in conveying an experience of time and place. People in these rooms are quiet, not in awe but in joy. If I could only come back to one thing in Paris it would be this.

On the underground level you can see the Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume Collection, a selection of late 19th – early 20th century paintings some of which toured Australia while the Orangerie was closed for renovations a few years ago: Renoir, Pisarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, Laurencin, Modigliani, Rousseau, Derain, Matisse, Picasso, Utrillo and Soutine. We were pleased to renew our acquaintance with some old friends, and also noted the presence of Rousseau’s L’Enfant avec un poupée, a particularly ugly creature which we refer to as the Beastly Baby, after Edward Gorey.

Incidentally, another feature of the Orangerie which may dispose you towards a visit: the wash-basin taps are pedal operated, just the thing for us cleanliness fetishists.

We walked through the Jardin des Tuileries in a gentle rain, watching the Parisiens promenading even on a cold, wet day. It was the first time I have been able to use my new umbrella since I bought it a month ago. It is a black Shelta with automatic opening and closing, a thing of beauty. Megan was a little embarrassed about using her umbrella; Monet’s water lilies may look chic in Sydney, but in Paris...