Conservaitore des Arts et Metiers
"To enter the Conservaitore des Arts et Metiers in Paris, you first cross an eighteenth-century courtyard and step into an old abbey church, now part of a later complex, but originally part of a priory. You enter and are stunned by a conspiracy in which the sublime universe of heavenly ogives and the chthonian world of gas guzzlers are juxtaposed."
-- Umberto Eco, Foucalt's Pendulum, p.7
"The bored tourists who pay their nine francs at the desk or are admitted free on Sundays may believe that elderly nineteenth-century gentleman--beards yellowed by nicotine, collars rumpled and greasy, black cravats and frock coats smelling of snuff, fingers stained with acid, their minds acid with professional jealousy, farcical ghosts who call one another cher maitre--placed these exhibits here out of a virtuous desire to educate and amuse amuse the bourgeois and the radical taxpayers."
-- Umberto Eco, Foucalt's Pendulum, p.7
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