Thursday April 14th Out and About in Paris

We have been to several interesting Paris locations over the past few days.  They were not necessarily the types of places you might visit if you are only here for a few day, which is one of the things that is nicer about a longer trip, the ability to take things slowly and go off the beaten track a bit. 

One place we visited was the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages. It is a rather small museum that can be gone through in about an hour or so.  The building itself has an interesting history. The original structure is that of the main house of the abbots of Cluny and was built in 1334, and rebuilt in 1510. However, the original structure itself was built on top of something even older – the site of Roman baths, dating to the third century.  The building has been a museum since 1843.   Normally the Roman baths can be visited, but they were closed while we were there.  I was extremely disappointed in this as I thought that would be really interesting to see.  There are a lot of medieval artifacts in the museum and I particularly enjoyed seeing some actual illuminated manuscripts.  Each delicate hand-lettered and illustrated page was carefully encased and protected, but you could look through an entire book page by page.   The pages were onion skin thin and a true beauty to look at.  I also enjoyed seeing some very small ivory carvings that took the shape of stamps but with images from the New Testament.

 Katie enjoyed seeing the headstone of Nicholas Flamel, the famous alchemist.  We both enjoyed the Museum’s most famous holding, a series of six tapestries of the girl and the unicorn.  Duplicates of these tapestries hang in the Gryffindor common room in the Harry Potter movies!  The colors in the tapestries were deep burgundies, golds and greens despite their ages.  Each tapestry shows a depiction of the girl and the unicorn exploring one of the five senses, and there is a bonus 6^th tapestry that no one quite knows the exact meaning of.  Each tapestry also shows many other animals and it was fun to pick out the rabbits, birds, monkeys, dogs, lions, goats and other animals in the background. Katie was really spell bound by the tapestry and did not want to leave the room for quite a while even after I’d grown tired of it. It could have been the Harry Potter connection, but it seemed to me that she was just entranced by the tapestries themselve.  The room displaying them is round with nothing but the tapestries there in low light, and she walked the room three times looking at them with rapt attention to detail.

Another excellent stop was the Paris catacombs.  The catacombs have gotten a lot of attention lately in National Geographic and some other magazines, and are on the must see list now for a lot of people.  This led to a huge line outside the entrance.  However, despite this increased attention, the operators of the catacombs have not given in to the lure of a quick euro and strictly limit the number of people in the catacombs at one time.  The area underground is quite large, and the number of people allowed underground at one time is 200.  As someone comes up, someone else may go down.  While this led to the huge line outside the door, everyone was patient and well behaved while waiting.  We waited just over an hour to be allowed to descend. 

Once in the catacombs, the limit on people was really nice as it lead to a very deserted and creepy feeling.  You went straight down on a spiral staircase 130 steps, about six stories straight down and it felt like you were drilling into the center of the earth.  The catacombs were built in the late 1700s.  Prior to this most people in Paris were buried in mass graves and by the late 1700s these mass graves were creating extremely unsanitary conditions and polluting the drinking water.  So the graves were exhumed and the bones relocated into the existing tunnels of some quarries.   The bones from each mass grave are grouped together with a large stone marked indicating the name of the region from which they came.  The arrangement of the bones is unusually artistic, with skulls and leg bones used to create extremely attractive and yet macabre displays.  Viewing the arrangement made me feel deeply sad and yet touched at the same time. Instead of feeling that the dead were being violated by the use of their bones in these decorative arrangements, I had the feeling that they were cared for deeply and dealt with respectfully. Each bone was placed so carefully and it seemed lovingly into place that it gave the feeling of gentleness in this otherwise morbid place.

The limits on visitors meant that as Katie and I wound our way through the passages, we were never in sight of more than a handful of people at a time, and were often completely on our own. Katie was fascinated, but yet a bit spooked, making me go first through most of the passages.  There were marble slabs with quotations about death every so often, many of which I could translate, and which I found comforting, but Katie found disturbing. Overall, I found the catacombs to be extremely touching and one of my favorite stops so far.

After the catacombs, we checked out the Pantheon. This is the site of the original Foucault pendulum and the burial place of France’s greatest men and women.  I thought it was pretty boring, but honestly after the catacombs, not much would hold up.  We saw the graves of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Victor Hugo, which meant nothing to Katie, and the grave of Marie Curie, which staggered her.  She loves Marie Curie and holds her up as a real role model, which is great.  She was really touched by seeing her grave site, and the flowers that people still bring to her.

Finally, we spent some time in the Jardin des Plantes, the site of the Paris zoo, some beautiful gardens and a handful of small museums.  The Paris zoo is the oldest zoo in the world. So since the Philly zoo is the oldest zoo in the US, we have now been to the oldest zoos on two continents.  The Paris Menagerie had an interesting start   - it was founded with the animals which had been part of the royal court at Versailles after the ousting of Marie Antoinette.

 It is a small zoo, with no big African animals.  The most notable animals were ostrichs, a snow leopard and some orangutans.  But it was a beautiful day, and it was fun to be with Katie at the zoo, even looking at common animals.  Katie is picking up a lot of French and the animals names were great vocabulary for her.  In fact she has learned enough French to notice a label “lapin” at the boucharie yesterday and get upset since it meant people were buying and eating rabbit.  There were a lot of field trips of preschools at the zoo and we enjoyed trying to understand the little kid French as they jumped up and down in excitement.  “Regardez!!! Un Orang- utan!!”

Across the park we went to a small museum , the Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy. Really we went in because I had to go to the bathroom really badly, but once inside it looked interesting so we bought a ticket and stayed.  Basically this was a museum of animal skeletons.  But really it was fascinating.  All the signs were in French so we had a lot of fun looking at the skeletons and deciphering what they were, from dolphins to lions to rhinos to giraffes to whales!  Similar types of skeletons were grouped together, hence the “comparative anatomy”. There was a small dinosaur section, but the US collections of dinosaurs are much better.  The regular skeletons were fascinating to decipher and look at in comparison to each other, and all displayed in one enormous room, two stories tall just crammed full of bones.  Although we picked the museum out of biological necessity, it was actually one of my favorite places so far.  That and the catacombs, so I think I’ve discovered I have an odd fascination with bones.