Our Last Day in Paris

Tue. Apr. 12: How to make the most of our last day in Paris?!?! We still had much to do! Our arrondisement’s Farmers’ Market was set up just a block away so we went there and got bread, cheese, olives and oranges for lunch. We began by taking the Metro to Museé d’Orsay and assessing the crowd. As we had read, because the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays, the lines we long so we went on to the Museé de Rodin. There, our museum pass (SO glad Aram and Judy told us to get this!) got us right in with no wait. The museum is in the “hotel”(villa) that he rented at the end of his life for a Paris home. It has fabulous gardens with sculptures such as “The Thinker” and “The Gates of Hell” outside and drawings, paintings and sculptures such as “The Kiss” from throughout his life inside. One room is devoted to his protégé and mistress Camille Claudel. She was an artist in her own right who depicted Rodin’s struggle between his devotion to his long time companion, Rose, and herself in her works entitled “Maturity” here and in the Museé d’Orsay. (I was happy to find out the old man ultimately gave up the sweet young thing, Camille, to stay with the aged Rose. Sadly, Camille slipped into insanity and died in an asylum.) We learned that “The Thinker” was actually Dante overlooking his Gates of Hell in the Divine Comedy, a piece Rodin worked on for over 30 years and never really finished. We also found that he was friends with such other artists as Monet and Van Gogh. They used to trade pieces of their art so there are paintings and sculptures from them as pieces in Rodin’s museum. After seeing the museum and grounds we walked toward des Invalids and found a lovely park in which to ea our lunch. The day was partly sunny, but breezy and cool with temperatures in the fifties. We returned to the Orsay, where the lines were much more reasonable. In some ways we were disappointed by it though. For one thing they kept making announcements in many languages warning of the pickpockets working the crowd. Also they are working on the building, which is the old train station, and there were scaffolding, barriers, and banging noises that were distracting. One nice thing is that they had all the main Impressionist and Pointillist artists’ works lining two long hallways so it was very easy to walk up one side and down the other and see it all. But there were no benches or seats to allow one to linger and contemplate and we had seen so many masterpieces by then that we made short work of the place and got back on the Metro. Back at the Ile de Cité we bought VERY expensive coffees to drink at a street side table in the sun. We returned to Notre Dame for the fourth straight day, this time to take pictures of the Pieta and the three rose windows which we couldn’t get on our other visits. At the other end of the Place we finally found the Crypt Archeology Museum open. One of most vivid memories of my high school visit to Paris was of going down some narrow, steep stairs and bending down to get a glance at the oldest parts of Paris, ruins from the Romans’ time here. The area has now been developed into a museum, all underground, of the ancient main road that ran across the Ile and through the Left Bank, and foundations of the ramparts and homes that were here. They have extensive explanatory panels with English translations and we spent quite some time enthralled by antiquity. Back in the light of modern day Paris we had an expensive misunderstanding at shop, which resulted in, not a piece of apple cake (Gateau de Pomme) but potato cake (Gateau de Pomme de Terre), and not tap water but bottled water sans gas, but since it was the only problem we had we couldn’t complain and even the potato cake was delicious, just not sweet.