Hamburg, 9pm

Here in Hamburg it’s 9pm and cold and wet. Colder than Paris but not as wet as it was when we left Rue Saint Dominique at 6am and tried to find a taxi. Both of us are totally knackered after eleven hours in transit. I’m a bit over windfarms, do you know how many there are in Germany? And they’re all beside the railway line.

Thanks to the stupid booking priorities of Rail Europe’s Australian operation, we had to make three separate train trips – Paris to Köln, Köln to Hannover, and Hannover to Hamburg. Four trains, including the one we had to change to in Brussels because the first one broke down. (Instead of having a relaxing forty-five minute break, we made our Cologne connection with literally one minute to spare.) The Cologne-Hannover leg was made enjoyable by the presence of a cheeky little German girl going home to Berlin with her dad. She was not old enough to walk yet, for which a trainload of people should probably be thankful. At Hannover we said ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ and her dad held her up to the window as the train pulled out.

From Hamburg station a very nice taxi driver took us to Deichstraße in the old town. Another man offered help when we had trouble finding the block, and yet another told us the right way to find the flat.

This perplexes me. I have been told by a usually reliable source (who shall remain nameless) that northern Germans are cold and unfriendly, yet today I have met four who were the opposite. I will admit that being in the company of a striking blond has its advantages, but surely that alone can’t explain their niceness. My informant is usually an oracle, but she may be wrong (or maybe she’s from Munich).

Ring Cycle starts tomorrow night. No, I’m not excited, couldn’t possibly be. (I won't be if it's set on a windfarm.)

Pompidou Centre

When you emerge from the Chatelet-Les Halles metro station you are in the Forum des Halles. In centuries past a main market area, it is now a gigantic shopping complex of Escherian complexity and Westfieldian banality. It is a relief to escape, but the horror soon returns. The surrounding streets remind me of the Church Street mall – boring, bland, and bountiful with bogans – Parramatta on the Right Bank.

But a block or so east is the Centre Pompidou, the home of the Musée National du Art Moderne. I remember the furor when it was opened in the late 1970s, with the press screaming that the building was inside out, that it looked like it still needed cladding, and so on. (This was the press that a few years before had declared that ‘Blue Poles’ was a waste of money.) I remember being impressed that it had the escalator on the outside.

Now, I love the work of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers – Aurora Place in Macquarie Street is a beautiful building, and ‘South Pacific’ is my favourite musical – sorry, that’s Rodgers with a ‘d’. But the plaza beside it is a failure – butt-ugly and with dodgy paving (not unlike outside Fisher Library), and with a slope that makes it very difficult for anyone with legs to walk on.

I dreaded that the building itself, designed to have the air conditioning, lifts etc on the outside so as to maximise the exhibition space within, might look as rundown and tacky as the knockoffs you see in office buildings and shopping centres everywhere (the exposed conduits and wiring are intentional features of one part of Macquarie Centre, not known for its architectural audacity). But it has aged far better than the plaza. The windows need a wash, but that’s simple maintenance.

The permanent collection inside is comprehensive and well-laid out. Here’s where you want to come if you want to see lots of Picasso, Braque and Leger, and Fauvists and Surrealists and Futurists and any other art movement from the twentieth century. A Chagall made Megan happy, and half a dozen Kandinskys and a case containing his brushes and paints and gouaches and crayons made me happy. I was also pleased to see one of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fontaines’, enclosed in a case lest anyone feel tempted to utilise it. (If you don’t understand that, Google it.)



The view from the top floor is terrific, with most of the Paris skyline around you (rather than below you, which you get at the Tours Eiffel and Montparnasse). A lovely view of Montmartre, which is as close as we’ll get to it on this trip.

A word of warning. The boutique is full of overpriced crap and snobby staff, the toilets haven’t been cleaned since the building opened, and the so-called café is really the Woolies cafeteria. We couldn’t face lunch with such vile conditions, so we went outside. Next to the Pompidou is the Stravinsky Fountain, a pool of kinetic sculptures which could provide hours of amusement if you have a supply of good coffee. And one of the cafés next to the fountain is Dame Tartine, which has a great atmosphere (they played Ella) and young staff with a good attitude and an idiomatic grasp of English. We had wonderful croque-monsieurs, made with ham off the bone, comte and green peppercorns – haute cuisine meets comfort food, and reasonably cheap.

The Catacombs

Lots of steps. Tunnel, more tunnel, another bit. Bones, millions of ’em, nearly a kilometre’s worth, mostly limbs, lots of skulls, all stacked neatly. Must have taken ages to get the patterns right. More tunnel. More steps, corkscrewing. Exit into a back street of Montparnasse.

Notre Dame de Chartres

Apart from a general idea of ‘large gothic cathedral, stained glass, Chartres blue, blah blah’ my understanding of Chartres to date has been garnered from the tales of Dornford Yates. Jonah Mansel and Richard Chandos would stop there for breakfast after unloading the Rolls early from the boat at Calais and bypassing Rouen because it is too ‘hot’. While Carson filled the tank and checked under the bonnet, Mansel and Chandos would admire the cathedral windows in the morning light. Actually I think it was Boy and Adele in one of the Berry books – Mansel would probably have only gone into the cathedral to meet an informer or pursue a villain. Anyway, my point is that I knew very little about it.

Notre Dame de Chartres makes Notre Dame de Paris look like a parish church. (Ok, it is, but that’s beside the point.) It is bigger, older, has more stained glass windows, and is more gob-smacking than any other church you are ever likely to be in. It’s also probably colder.


The windows live up to every encomium I’ve ever read. They are like enamelled jewel boxes, with intricate little pictures. Photos don’t capture the colours, the vivid reds and blues and golds and subtle greens. Like the Monets in the Orangerie you can sit and look for hours, and we would have if it hadn’t been so effing cold.

At Notre Dame in Paris I was impressed by the sacred surviving the onslaught of the profane. That is here too; while the cameras buzz and rude Japanese tourists barge and jostle, the devout carry out their private devotions in the chapels and consult the priest in a confessional in the ambulatory. The artisans who created this place found a way to combine the sacred and secular in their work. We don’t know their names because they donated the windows as guilds and did their work in teams. But the windows, the carving, the engineering all display craftsmanship as vocation and worship.


Another man who has found his vocation at Chartres is Malcolm Miller, a distinguished-looking gentleman who has guided tours in English here for fifty-three years. He first came here in 1956 as a student completing his French degree (he still wears his purple and white Durham scarf). The French government made him a Chevalier of the Order of Merit and of the Order of Arts and Letters for his work here and around the world writing and talking about the cathedral, so I think we can assume his delivery is informed. It is also amusing, full of witty comments and anecdotes about saints, tourists and art historians. Describing how the Allies almost bombed the building in 1944, he added, ‘I’m glad they didn’t, because I’d be teaching French to horrible school children in Birmingham.’ Rather than filling our radio headsets full of facts, Malcolm focused on the symbolism of the building, and how the windows, statues and other objects relate to each other, describing and commenting on Biblical narrative and theology – in other words, teaching us to read the building as the unlettered artisans and worshippers of the thirteenth century did.

When we walked out into the sunshine we took off our scarves, opened our coats to let the warmth in and had lunch at a little Italian restaurant called La Voûte Romane in Rue Fulbert on the southern (sunny) side of the cathedral. Brilliant food and atmosphere, and no tourist groups.

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...

Les Lézards de Paris

In our walks we have discovered a beautiful art nouveau building just around the corner. 29 Avenue Rapp was designed by the architect Jules Lavirotte in 1901.The front door is classic art nouveau, but we are curious about the identity of the lizard in the middle – he looks like a blue-tongue with big feet:





Perhaps he is a descendant of this bloke we saw on Rue Cler this afternoon:



Yes, that price is what you think it is. This is the seventh arrondissement, honey.

Touring without tourists

When I woke this morning I thought I was at home. I had set the alarm for 6.30 instead of 7.30, and when it went off I reached over to turn off Megan’s nose. ‘Other side’, she said, just before I made contact.

We’ve been to three of the monsters – Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre, and Versailles. All impressive, and packed to the rafters with two things: masterpieces and tourists. Is there anywhere where you can get the first but not the second?

Yes. We visited two such places today: the Musée Marmottan-Monet in the 16th arrondissement, and the Musée Jacquemart-André in the 8th.

Both started life as private collections. Paul Marmottan was a historian of the Napoleonic period, who lived in a former hunting lodge near the Bois de Boulogne. When he died in 1932 he left his house and collection of First Empire art to the Académie des Beaux Arts. In 1966 Michel Monet donated his father Claude’s collection of paintings held at Giverny. This included not only paintings by Monet himself but also paintings by his fellow impressionists. In 1996 Berthe Morisot’s grandson bequeathed his collection. So now the Marmottan has the world’s largest collection of Monets and Morisots. The Monets are mostly late: several Water Lilies and other paintings of Giverny, one of the Rouen Cathedral series, one of the Houses of Parliament, and the painting from which the movement took its name, Impression: Sunrise. These are housed in a large, specially-built gallery below the rear garden. The Morisots take up two rooms of the ground floor and are simply beautiful – they are what chocolate-box artists aspire to, pastel without being syrupy, in Megan’s words.

Up the Metro from La Muette to Miromesnil, and a short walk around to 158 Boulevarde Haussmann. The Musée Jacquemart-André was the mansion of Edouard André, a banker, and his wife Nélie Jacquemart, a painter. The house was built specifically to show off their collection of Italian art, as a work of art in itself. The décor is overblown Second Empire style, but the pictures are great. They include a Saint George and the Dragon by Uccello (one of my favourite paintings), a few Mantegnas and a couple of Botticellis.

Neither museum is crowded, and the customers are very upmarket – no bogan tourists in tracky-daks yelling at each other. The products in the shop at the Jacquemart-André are very high-end, a step up from the trinkets at the Louvre. Like many museums in Paris there are a lot of French, but many seem to go just for the restaurant (which has free entry). You may have to wait for a table but it’s worth it. For example, their lunch special (€16.50) is the quiche du jour plus a pastry. The quiche was exquisite, with a light shortcrust pastry and caramelised onions on the base. We both had a chocolate and caramel slice, the caramel tasting of honeycomb. Followed up by a traditional hot chocolate, it was the best meal we’ve had in Paris yet.

We sat on the patio overlooking the courtyard, where small children played hide and seek and older children played chasings around trees in planters that seem especially placed for just that purpose. People sat on benches and enjoyed the sun, and no one was in a hurry. For elegance and light, I prefer the Marmottan. But for food and relaxing…