| Paris is the city of the long line.
Though our hotel is in its shadow, I’ve yet to make it up the Notre Dame towers.
Every time I pass, the line extends all the way across the plaza. We waited an hour and a
half to enter the Musee d’Orsay, which I would never have done on my own, but I was
with Robin and our niece Felicity (we’re a party of four—Robin’s mom Elly
is with us in Paris too). It was worth the wait. In the
room of Cezanne’s it was a treat to compare two still lifes, one when he still
believed in traditional perspective, and one after he had outgrown it. All the heavyweight
hitters were here: Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Renoir. I found a Degas I didn’t know
existed, in a panoramic format like I shoot, with a powerful diagonal thrust of movement
from mass of complexity to mass of complexity, with a single, lit figure, dead center.
Vast stretches of space in the opposite corners were blank. Degas I admire for his
photographic sensibility. You always know the source of light in his paintings.
|
Inevitably, museum exhaustion set in.
There were long benches on the middle level, where Robin and I lay down. I fell instantly
into REM sleep. Felicity photographed the two of us spooned together on the bench. When I
got up, I saw a huge clock covering the wall of this former railway station. It reached
upward several floors, and behind it figures on the walkways were visible behind frosted
glass. I set up a camera on a tabletop tripod upon the stone slab, but I couldn’t
quite reach the viewfinder, so I stepped up onto the bench. "Assez!" a guard
shouted. "Enough!" I’d just had the quintessential French experience of
being put in my place. Sleeping on the bench, well, tolerable, they’re foreigners,
but stepping on it was to cross onto the proverbial grass in the park. It is not allowed. |
