There are two museums very lose to our place in The Marais. One is the Musée Carnavalet, and the other is the Musée Picasso. The later is self-explanatory, the former is the City Museum of Paris. Since Doreen has had this obsession with the French Revolution lately, she really wanted to go into the Carnavalet to explore what they would say about the timing, causes, and consequences thereof.

The Carnavalet is in one of the grand old houses of Paris. If you have read any Balzac, James, (Henry, not Joyce), Flaubert, or Hugo, you would recognize this place. It had huge reception rooms, great ballrooms, 20 foot ceiling, and an immense formal garden. The stairways were twenty feet wide, and winding. You could get lost in this place if they did not give you a map and number the rooms. One of the coolest things about this place is that they recreated a street from the 16^th century. They had the stone streets (which exist still in most of Paris) the wooden signs, and doorways and windows you could look in. It was very interesting. (Later on in the museum, they had moved a whole jewelry store done by Mucha at the turn of the century. He was the guy who did all the art deco posters and fixtures. You would recognize the stuff if you saw it)

They had a special gallery that was dedicated to the Revolution. I forgot to mention in one of my earlier reports that while we have not yet seen a guillotine, we HAVE seen an actual guillotine blade, which was used in several executions. The thing that surprised me about it is how SMALL (narrow) it is. It was no more than a foot wide, and probably two feet long. Here in the Carnavalet, there were drawings of the executions of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, as well as recreations of the rooms where they were imprisoned. Yipes! Think about this – the storming of the Bastille was on 14 July, 1789. King Louis was not executed until January of 1793, and Marie Antoinette was not executed until October 1793! I thought that they just hauled them up and whacked off their heads. But it was a long process. He wasn’t even arrested until he tried to escape the country in August 1792!

So we have a lot to learn about the revolution.

And more about the REST of the history of France.

For example – from October 1870 to January 1871 Paris was under siege by the Prussians. There was much starvation, and people were reduced to eating rats! Now – think about this – Monet painted _Impression of the Rising Sun_ the piece of art that gave the impressionist movement its name – in 1872! Man! There was stuff going on here. The Pont Alexander was built in 1900 to celebrate the Franco-Russian alliance. The cornerstone was laid by Czar Alexander III! I tell you what.

But I digress. We enjoyed the Carnavalet. They had some really odd stuff, though. They had one room that was dedicated to caricatures of people’s heads. Not drawings, little sculptures! They had Proust’s bedroom! (If you have read about Proust, you know that he seldom left his house, indeed, his room) Not a recreation – but the actual room itself! They had Large Scale Academic Art that Doreen loves so much. They had about twenty recreations of the Bastille. (One man put it that "The Bastille is the most important monument that doesn’t exist!" It was torn down in the revolution) They had keys from the Bastille, they had a trunk that held the keys to the Bastille. They had about a million drawings of the storming of, and then the destruction of, the Bastille. They had pikes, and uniforms, and swords, and pistols, and hats, and drawings, and, well, you get the idea.

After being totally overwhelmed by the Carnavalet, we walked over to the Picasso Museum. I really love this place. The house is another of the grand old houses, and I think that he lived there in his later years. The museum is filled with his artwork that was given to the state by his family, to avoid death taxes. I think it was probably a good deal for both sides. You get to see some old, quite nice representational art that is shown in order of painting. You can see how his style developed, and some of the early cubist pieces are really fabulous. They had many of his ceramic pieces as well – he was especially fond of goats and owls – and they are all in a very accessible space. You never seem to get lost, and you are always seeing new things, into a new view. It, too, has a lovely garden where you can sit and contemplate the day’s events.

After leaving the Picasso museum, we decided that we should go to the Louvre for our second trip. This time, we went up to the French wing, and saw WAY too much French Academic art. These are mostly VERY large canvases, super real (or super faux) that followed the specific rules of the French Academy. You would recognize some of them, you would certainly recognize the style. Doreen said that for her taste, all French art could have stopped between the renaissance and the impressionists. But she was being a little bit harsh. I know that she liked SOME of the art we saw on that wing. Then we got to see the HUGE Rubens gallery. There were about 20 big paintings commissioned by Louis XIII’s mother, his regent. She was a Medici, and had these in their salon. When Charles I of England saw the pieces, he had similar works commissioned for HIS salon.