After going to Iceland last year, we knew we had to go somewhere completely different this winter. Nick wanted somewhere that would still have a winter, but we also didn't want to go somewhere that was focused on winter landscape. In steps Paris, the city of lights, filled with museums and cafes to fill the cold, rainy days of winter.
When I first saw the outside Notre Dame, I was far enough away that I felt it was less imposing than I had imagined. As a kid whose first introduction to Paris was the Hunchback of Notre Dame, I imagined the towers to be large and dominating, overwhelming in their moral authority. The closer you get, however, the larger it looms, and by the time you stand at the foot of the church it feels as if the statues up above really do possess the secrets of the universe.
The detail put into the outside of the building is stunning. There are carvings around every corner, even the ones you can't easily see. It's overwhelming in person, but in the way that it will bring you to your knees in wonder. I wondered out loud to Nick why we don't make buildings like this anymore, and he said, "Because we don't make buildings for God. Only God would see all that detail."
As if Notre Dame weren't enough, Sainte Chapelle is on the same island. While the outside of Notre Dame draws you to here, it is the inside of Sainte Chapelle that really sparkles. With nearly every inch covered in stained glass depicting various scenes of the Bible, and the rose window at the end showing John's vision of the apocalypse, color embraces you in a way you will encounter in few other places.
Versailles, the palace of the Sun King Louis XIV, was one of our next major stops. Although the queen's wing was notably closed off for maintenance, we got to see the famous hall of mirrors and the king's public bedchamber, as well as a number of other equally luxurious and opulent rooms. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Versailles, however, is what you miss if you simply look at the gold and artwork. Learning about how Louis XIV manipulated the noblemen in France to sitting back and doing nothing while he ran the show is truly incredible. This varied from having nobles fight over who got to carry his candle when he went to bed at night to always having games going in the palace which would keep the nobles actively idle and would also drive them into debt with each other. When they needed to repay these debts, they would borrow money from Louis XIV, and then, in turn, be indebted to him. If you ever get a chance to go, I highly recommend the Rick Steve's audio tour for Versailles. It's filled with rich historical detail as well as his peculiar, punny dad sense of humor.
The palace is incredibly ornate and massive. It should be. It cost somewhere around half of a year's worth of the Gross Domestic Product of France at the time. This is the palace that most fully embraces Baroque architecture, with gold leaf and marble on nearly every surface and paintings of Greek and Roman Gods, especially Apollo, on nearly every ceiling. But this castle wasn't just made to be opulent. Every detail tells a story, from the room which Louis XIV had built for his daughter's wedding, with a depiction of Hercules marrying the daughter of Zeus, to the war room, where each section of the ceiling is depicted as a different country that is jealous of France's power. There's a master plan at work in every corner, a glimmering, expensive reflection of the twists and manipulative turns of Louis XIV's mind.
The gardens are equally expansive and breathtaking, with fountains that would turn on only when Louis XIV himself passed by, lush grass, and canals. Underneath the gardens Louis kept about 1000 orange trees, potted, that he would have servants bring out and arrange around the garden when it was sunny. Perhaps my favorite part of the gardens, however, is the first fountain that you come across while exiting the palace. The story of this fountain occurs when the mother of Apollo, the sun god, was scorned by local townspeople. In her dismay, she called out to her lover Zeus to avenge her, and he turned them all into frogs. A brief study of history shows why Louis XIV may have been charmed by this story. His father died when he was very young, leaving noblemen to walk all over Louis and his mother until Louis was old enough to be king. It's a time in life he never forgot, and you can see its impression here in the fountain.
If you look closely enough you can see even the human forms are in the process of becoming frogs and turtles. Their fingers are lengthening, their faces change, and their backs begin to hung over.
If you wander further into the gardens, there is a second, almost miniature version of Versailles. It would feel rather like the summer cottage of a king who still needs to have both a public and a private bedchamber.
Finally we made it to Marie Antoinette's medieval village. The doomed queen was enamored with the idea of peasant life, and so had an entire village constructed which she would wander through and pretend she was a farmer or a peasant. It's weird to imagine her walking through these beautiful renderings of a hazy blissful life of poverty displayed with fine architecture even as the people of France were literally starving. She is most famous for saying, "Let them eat cake," when confronted with the situation outside the Versailles walls, to which I always wondered if she was simply callous or just incredibly clueless. Wandering around Marie Antoinette's pretty little peasant village, as charming as it was, left a sour taste in my mouth. It felt like a Disneyworld display to the joys of human suffering and glorification of a life whose beauty she was drawn to simply because she would never attempt to understand the rough edges of the world. As we all know, this approach didn't work out well for her. She was beheaded during the French Revolution.
On a happier note, rainy days in Paris, although not ideal for walking through the gardens of Versailles, are perfect for museums. The Orangerie was by far one of my favorites. It is small enough to be fully appreciated, and the presence of Monet's water lilies is the enveloping respite I so often need when exploring a large city. Monet, although going blind while painting many of these impressions, brings his garden to you, in many different lights and times of day. I'm not ashamed to admit that after hearing about them and imagining them since I was 5, I was completely overcome by the panoramas encircling me, and I began to cry.
The Louvre, however, is an entirely different experience. We went twice while we were there, mostly because after leaving the first time, we discovered there were some paintings we had very much wanted to see that we had missed (only to return and find out that the rooms they were stored in are, you guessed it, closed for maintenance). However, going to the Louvre in January when the crowds around the Mona Lisa are a fraction of what they would be any other time of year and wandering around this extensive palace as the rain pounds outside is well worth it. The artwork is beautiful, but I found the Louvre to be the least enjoyable of the art museums we went to, simply because of its size. When you are so utterly surrounded by some of the most spectacular pieces of art in the world, it can be hard to take it all in and appreciate it. The Orangerie was far and away my favorite, while the Orsay was a close second. The Louvre, however, would take me weeks to unravel. While visiting the second time, even when we retraced our steps to where we had been before, we found massive paintings we had missed or entire rooms we had failed to notice. It is nothing less than a labyrinth of art. To get lost in it on a rainy afternoon is a pleasure, but to get lost in it for the remainder of the day turns into a dizzying affair.
Near the end of our trip we decided to visit Montmartre. These streets were, by far, the most crowded with tourists, although once again the crowds were significantly smaller than they would have been any other time of year. In the main square, you can get your portrait drawn by any number of Parisian artists, and the results are truly beautiful. When you walk through the streets, you are surrounded by cafes and bakeries and tourist shops. This was also the only place we came across street vendors yelling "selfie stick" and shysters trying to catch visitors' hands in a yarn game, leaving their back pockets open and vulnerable. It's a charming section of the city, especially for its history with famous artists and writers, but it's hard to feel as if the veneer hasn't worn off a bit, and what is left is a hollow peddling of the memory of what once was. We found the neighborhood where we stayed, by Rue Cler, to be more authentic, with a large number of cafes, bakeries, wine shops, fruit markets, and bustling locals ebbing and flowing with the life of the city.
Finally, Nick and I decided to take a trip to one of the lesser known attractions in Paris, the Musee Fragonard. This museum is inside a veterinary school, and is about a 45 minute train ride from where we were staying near the center of the city. This fascinating little museum features a number of bones and specimens, both animals and human, healthy and diseased. It had a surprisingly informative English audio tour, and the collection is fascinating if you are at all open to learning about anatomy, or simply seeing weird, somewhat horrifying cases of the body gone wrong in the most unimaginable ways.
However, the bones are not what makes this museum (somewhat) famous. The most exciting and nightmare inducing element of this collection are the ecorche, or flayed figures, set up by Honore Fragonard. He was the first professor of anatomy at the school, but he was fired after only 5 years. Why? He loved to make figures out of flayed people, but not just for educational purposes. He set up these figures to show stories. For example, he made one of the figures Sampson and stuck the jawbone of a donkey in his hand. He took flayed babies and put them in dancing positions. Personally, I think the final straw was the figure below. He started to make the horsemen of the apocalypse. Legend has it that this figure was made out of the corpse of a woman he was in love with, but if you look closely enough you can see the figure has a penis. However, this figure, the way it is displayed now, isn't half as horrific as Fragonard intended. As he designed it, the horseman of the apocalypse is meant to be encircled by preserved fetuses riding on flayed lambs. It's no wonder he was run out as a madman.
We took the last day in Paris to cleanse our palettes from the shock of Musee Fragonard and hightailed it over to Disneyland Paris, where the snack food is Parisian, the American-themed rides ring with a little extra country twang, and the fiddle music sounds orchestral. It's fun to see how the idea of America is packaged and sold to other countries in a format they will buy.
Overall, the city of lights is absolutely charming in January. While the weather is far from ideal and this is when a lot of places will undergo routine maintenance, I felt like I got to see so much more of the city, both sites and personality, because there were fewer people around. It's a place I don't think I would even attempt in the peak of summer, but when it's quiet and the lights of the Eiffel Tower are twinkling, the magic of Paris has a way of warming your frozen cheeks as well as your heart.
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