Birthday dinner at La Jules Verne

I was getting my bloods done two weeks ago when the nurse noted, 'Your fiftieth birthday! Did you do anything special?'

'Oh, went out to dinner.' Pause. 'At the Eiffel Tower.'

I think I did the trip only so I could say lines like that.

No comments, just a couple of pictures and the menu.

From 125 meters up we could see from the Arc de Triomphe, across Concorde and the Louvre to Notre Dame, and to Les Invalides (see above).

The birthday cake - pistachios and wild strawberries.

What we ate:

Champagne:
Lamandier

Mineral water:
Badoit

Amuse-bouches (appetizers):

Gougères, gelée de concombre (parmesan puffs, cucumber jelly)

Entrées:
Homard de nos côtes en Bellevue, sucs de cuisson en sabayon et caviar gold (Bellevue-style local lobster, sabayon and Gold caviar)
Petits artichauts poivrade en barigoule (Roasted and marinated baby artichokes)

Poisson et viande (fish and meat):
Blanc de turbot cuit au four façon Dugléré (Dugléré baked turbot)
Grenadin de veau au sautoir, pommes de terre Anna, vrai jus (Sautéed thick medallion of veal, Anna potatoes, cooking jus)

Desserts:
Moelleux aux pistaches et fraises des bois (Pistachio and wild strawberry soft cake)
L’écrou au chocolat et praliné croustillant, glace noisette (Tower bolt, dark chocolate praliné, hazelnut ice cream)

Best birthday ever.
 

PT's adventures in Paris

PT at the Tour Eiffel

PT at Notre Dame

PT at the Louvre

PT at the Musee Rodin

PT at Napoleon's Tomb, Les Invalides

PT at the Moulin Rouge

PT at the Arc de Triomphe

Literary Paris

Lovers of literature are prone to bang on a bit about Paris, especially concerning the Lost Generation. I’m with Hemingway; when Gertrude Stein told him he and his colleagues were a ‘lost generation’ he thought she was talking crap. But it’s interesting to see where so many great writers hung out (or should that be ‘hanged out’?) and try to pick up a scent of what inspired them.

I’ve already mentioned the literary significance of our flat, and that near it is Baudelaire’s birthplace in the Place Saint-André des Arts. Just around the corner from us you can pick up a copy of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal at Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop started by George Whitman in 1951 as Le Mistral which attracted many writers of the Beat and earlier eras like Henry Miller.

In the 1960s George renamed the shop after Sylvia Beach’s legendary shop of the interwar years at 12 Rue de l’Odeon (6th arrondissement). It was there that she published James Joyce’s Ulysses, which makes it a must-see on my list. Alas, that building has been completely remodeled and none of the original fabric of the shop exists.

But some of the places where Joyce wrote that book still stand. He wrote the Ithaca and Penelope sections in the latter half of 1921 at 71 Rue de Cardinal Lemoine in the 5th. Around the same time Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris and spent two years just up the road on the third floor of number 74.

To work off the hunger Hemingway often spent long periods of time walking in the nearby Jardin du Luxembourg, where he would often meet Gertrude Stein walking her dog. Stein lived with Alice B. Toklas on the western side of the Jardin at 27 Rue de Fleurus (6th), where she had a legendary salon for writers and artists until the war.

One of those who attended Stein's salon, and any other party that was going, was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived with zany Zelda worlds away in the wealthy 8th arrondissement, at 14 Rue de Tilsitt near the Arc de Triomphe.

Mind you, none of this is a substitute for sitting down and reading their books. Except Gertrude’s - utter rubbish.

Music everywhere

Music is everywhere in Paris. We wake up to the bells of St-Julien-le-Pauvre behind us and of Nôtre Dame just across the Pont au Double. Buskers busk on every corner or every train in the tourist areas, and some of them are good. Wednesday night walking back from the Ile St Louis at 9.45pm a trad jazz group was playing outside the Square Jean XXIII. Last week another group, set up their upright piano and drum kit on the Pont St Louis and played Hot Club de France style. The next day we saw a guy with an upright on the Boul Mich at Cluny, and the following day another on Blv Saint Germain at Place Sartre-Beauvoir. For a while we thought it was the same guy.

Paris is one of the professional musical capitals of the world, so you expect to see a lot of the good stuff (which is one of the reasons we keep coming here). I’ve already commented on Renée Fleming in Arabella at the Bastille, but the week has also seen concerts by a couple of great mezzo-sopranos.

Susan Graham performed at the Théâtre du Chatelet on Saturday 23 June with accompanist Malcolm Martineau. Our seats were front row centre, which is a bot too close for my liking, but it gave the performance an intimacy which it may not have had, even in a place as small as the Chatelet. Graham sang scenes and songs by Purcell, Berlioz, Schubert, Wolf, Duparc and Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim’s ‘The Boy From…’, a hilarious parody on ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. In her encores she sang Reynaldo Hahn’s ‘À Chloris’, a song guaranteed to leave me a puddle on the floor, so that was an unexpected bit of magic.

On Tuesday 26 it was the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées to hear Joyce di Donato sing a programme of songs about or inspired by Venice and written by Vivaldi, Rossini, Fauré, Hahn and Head. Joyce sounded more comfortable singing the more florid pieces – coloratura is what she’s best at. In the second half she wore a figure-hugging floor length gown, and if she’d had her hair up in a beehive you’d have sworn it was Dusty Springfield. I wonder how ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ would have gone down with that crowd – they loved ‘Over the Rainbow’.

I’ve previously mentioned a piano recital we attended at the church below our flat. On Sunday afternoon we went to another one, Jean-Christophe Millot playing Beethoven (including the Moonlight Sonata) and Chopin (including the Minute Waltz). To hear a Steinway in a small church is a tad scary; the sound fills out every nook and cranny of the building, making the startling bits unnerving even when you expect them.

On Thursday 21 was the Fête de la Musique, an annual event started thirty years ago, in which musicians play free concerts anywhere and everywhere. The official guide listed 240 events for the Paris area alone, and we saw several performances that weren’t listed. As we ate dinner in the flat that night we were serenaded by African drumming, a brass band from across the river, and a rock band from somewhere in the rues below us. Outside the Trois Mailletz around the corner from us in Rue Galande was a trad jazz band, Les Papyfous sont laches (The granddads are on the loose). In the Rue des Prêtres Saint Severin a crowd surrounded an Italian community choir that had distributed song sheets and was calling for requests. A drum band blocked the Rue de la Huchette and deafened everyone, and over in Place Saint Michel a band was playing Allman Brothers style rock. We eventually wound up in Notre Dame listening to an organ recital.

And then there is the everyday music of the tourist quarter, the honking of the traffic, the sirens of the emergency vehicles and the drunken chanting of pisshead soccer fans on the river boats. The other night we had a very good saxophonist busking for a couple of hours in a square nearby; quite an improvement on the usual ambient sound.

Eugène Atget/Paris, Musée Carnavalet

Walking through the Marais in the rain this morning I kept seeing things I want to photograph, buildings, details, lines. So it was appropriate that we were going to see an exhibition of Eugène Atget, one of my favourite photographers. He photographed Paris from the 1890s through to the 1920s, seeing himself as a documenter of a changing city rather than an artist making pretty images.

I love Atget because he thinks the same way I do – he sees the same images and takes the same photos, in some cases literally, because we came across a photo very much like a shot I took this morning at Saint Severin. Whether he has influenced me or it’s just coincidence I don’t know, but I enjoy his photos very much. Another level of enjoyment comes from knowing many of the places he photographed, although they have changed very much over the last century. Or maybe it’s because they have changed… The exhibition is coming to the Art Gallery of New South Wales later this year, so I can see it again.

The Musée Carnavalet is dedicated to the history of Paris, and it has a great collection. But it’s a nightmare to navigate your way – it’s difficult to orient yourself, the signage is inadequate, and the maps are actually puzzles developed for the Mensa entrance test. And by the time you get to the gallery where you want to go, you find it’s closed for the lunch break. Just because of the size I would recommend more than one visit if you want to see it properly; the layout and ad hoc closures make that a necessity.

Here’s a picture of a toy guillotine. Kids in revolutionary Paris had the coolest toys.

La Caféothèque

The state of coffee in France today is like that of the phone system a quarter of a century ago: one of the worst in Europe. So a place like La Caféothèque, near the Hôtel de Ville, is a relief as well as a pleasure. It’s an artisan café, much like the artisan boulangeries you see everywhere in Paris, but with a mission to educate people about real coffee. They talk about terroir; could I describe it better than by saying that?  It’s a connoisseur’s café, where you get a glass of water to cleanse the palate before the coffee and a chocolate to sweeten it afterwards, and the only food on the menu is croissants and some other viennoiserie. This morning the café de jour was Plantation Chitul-Tirol from Guatemala, full-bodied, sweet, a little acidy. The barista gave me a second espresso because the first wasn’t quite right – the second had the same flavours, only more intensely. Nom.

Monet’s Nymphéas, Musée de l’Orangerie.

When we visited the Orangerie last year it was a rainy Sunday. When we visited it this year it was a rainy Sunday. Not planned that way, it’s just what happened.

If you are at the Orangerie it’s most likely that your goal is Monet’s huge Nymphéas (Water Lilies) paintings. You’ve seen the little ones, they’re in lots of museums and sometimes come out to Australia in touring exhibitions. But these are the granddaddies, two metres high and up to seventeen metres long. Monet painted these as a gift to the French state, who specially built two galleries to display them.

The rooms are oval, with seats in the middle, and if you go first thing on a Sunday morning (which we always seem to do) there aren’t many people around to make noise and interrupt your view. You sit in the middle of the room, look at one of these pictures and let it do its magic. The pictures are large enough for you to mentally block all the incidentals of the physical environment. It’s just you, looking at a lake below. Don’t look at the details, just absorb the whole picture, feeling it, not thinking about it, not analysing. You experience these pictures, you don’t ‘appreciate’ them. I was tired enough to almost go into a trance looking at them, to feel like I was being drawn into them and I could and would have stayed there for literally hours.

You almost see the water and the reflections moving. This is your mind doing what it thinks works, but a sense of dynamism also comes from the composition. There are two main elements to the paintings, the water lilies and the reflections, and it is the relationships between these that give the paintings their energy and movement. Usually the two complement each other, but sometimes the lilies surprise you by appearing in the midst of the reflections. The trees put more air and space into the pictures, adding a depth that lets you place yourself in relation to the view.

Try to work out the time of day from the shadows on the water and the light on the clouds. Is a breeze rippling the surface? Is that rain chopping up the reflections? The willow fronds are waving, and the lily pads move gently back and forth at their moorings.

PS No pictures for this entry. The Orangerie has banned photos since our last visit. But better than any photo I can take is the museum’s website. It allows you to make a ‘virtual visit’ to the rooms and to enlarge and examine the paintings. The text is in French, but that doesn’t matter because the paintings aren’t.

http://www.musee-orangerie.fr/homes/home_id24799_u1l2.htm