Once you start a vacation, you tend to forget about time. So getting up at a specific time, even if it is late, is sometimes disconcerting. In any case, we made it up, and Keith came by so that we could Metro on down to the Rodin museum.

The Rodin museum is in ANOTHER great old house. This one built in the 1728 by a rich financier. It changed hands several times until the Duke de Biron had it. His head was lopped off during the revolution, and then it was turned into a dance hall. It passed through several hands after that, and became an artist colony in about 1904. Isadora Duncan, Cocteau, Mattisse, Rilke, and Rodin lived there. In 1911 the government bought the place, and in 1916 it was decided to make a Rodin Museum. Rodin donated all his collection to the state in 1916 (he died in 1917).

The museum has both Rodin stuff and pieces that he owned (There are some Van Goghs, for example) as well as some of the plaster casts and some models from which he worked. Rodin is the guy who did "The Thinker" and "The Kiss". My favorite of his is his Balzac series, some small, some large, some in a bathrobe, some just naked. (Fat Balzac nude. You have to see it to believe it.)

The gardens around the house are gorgeous. They are large formal gardens with bronze sculptures scattered throughout. You could sit and just and rest for hours at a time, if the weather was nice.

There is a museum of the Sewers of Paris in the general neighborhood of Rodin’s museum. We had tried to get there earlier, but decided that it was too far a walk. Today,. we walked over to where we thought the museum was, through the very nice, very hoity toity western neighborhood of Paris. We walked up Avenue Rapp, which was well known as a street with Art Deco buildings. The whole feel of the city in this are is different than in the area we are staying. There are more residents and fewer tourists, not as many art shops and more food stores. There was one amazing building on Rapp street, and we stopped and gawked or a while. Doreen noticed that three of the five residents of the place had the same surname, so we surmised that they were the descendants of the original owner.

We finally made it to where we thought the Sewer Museum was located, and searched and searched for the entry. Aha! It must be close to the river! So Doreen spotted the entrance, we walked over with great anticipation, and it was closed on Thursdays and Fridays. It was very sad to be us.

We decided that we should walk across the Seine and take in the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, both buildings that were built for the Paris Exposition of 1900. On the way, we had lunch at a small café right off the Champs Elysee. I had something call a Croque Madam, which is sort of like a grilled ham and cheese sandwich with a fried egg on top. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Oddly enough, the waiter thought that I, not Doreen, was the one who could speak French, so he kept on addressing all of his questions to me. Of course, situational French is easy. You know that he is asking what you want to drink, what you want to eat, and if you want fries with that. So I was able to pretend that I spoke French, and he was able to pretend that he understood me.

We did try to get into the Grand Palais, but they were having a special exhibition of Art Deco geegaws, and we didn’t feel like paying the additional 50FF to get inside. So we wandered over to the Petit Palais, which is a completely over the top building with all sorts of detail work in every corner and in every nook and cranny. We wandered around that building for a while, and it turned out that they were filming "La Traviata" while we were there.

The Petit Palais is very close to the D’Orsey, so we decided to go back there once more. This time, we went up to the Lautrec pieces, and then wandered down among the Object d’art from the art deco era. It was amazing to see all the stuff that they have! Beds, sconces, wall panels, foot stools, end tables, on and on and on. We spent a good long time here.

After leaving the D’Orsey, we started walking in search of a cup of coffee and some geegaw shops. (I told Doreen that she should open a store called GeeGaws, Knickknacks, Gimcracks, and Tschokies. It would be swamped in Paris) As we wandered down the street, a construction site dropped a ladder from the third floor into the street! Luckily, it landed right BETWEEN two cars, and no one was hurt. The car in front thought that the car behind had hit them, and got very angry. They young woman in the car behind finally got OUT of her car and threw the ladder over to the side of the street, and with much more shouting and gesticulating, rode off. I can say it was disconcerting for US to be walking so near when this happened, and for this poor girl it must have been very frightening.

Keith took us to some of the print shops that he frequents, and from one of them, we got a very nice reception. Most of the other places the people employed are more than indifferent, they are hostile. If you get indifference you are doing well. Doreen saw a piece by someone named Thomas Shotter Boys, who was the subject of her dissertation, and felt she must own it. (She had told me several years ago that she really had no hope at all of owning any Shotter Boys art. I will let her expand on the Shotter Boys if she wishes) There were also some nice Lautrec song covers and some other things that we liked.

We had been looking for some Picasso linoprints also, but this gallery did not have any at all. We were directed to a gallery down the street. We also wanted to check the price of a nice Picasso ceramic platter that we had seen earlier – a nice large platter with a goat’s head embossed on it. We looked at several things, and Doreen asked about some pieces that we have seen "DO you have any of the Valluris Linoprints?" even before she got to the end of the sentence "no". There was a nice print of a line drawing of an owl I like in the back room of this gallery, and I said, "Is this sold?" "yes" No more information, and she was making sure that we knew that she was not happy to be having to be answering our questions.

Well, we finally made it to the gallery that Keith’s friend had mentioned. We walked in and were greeted by two friendly yellow labradors and a VERY unfriendly woman. Again, when asked, she either shrugged her shoulders, or just grunted. I usually want to get out of places like that, but I was sort of angry at this woman for implying that a) we didn’t know what we were talking about and b) that we couldn’t afford what we were looking at anyway. So when Doreen asked me if I was ready to go, I said no, and then wandered around all the $20,000 prints and just fingered and flipped them until the woman told us that they were closing, and that we would have to leave. I had to laugh!

We wandered back deep into the Latin Quarter for a good cheap meal at a place that Keith and I ate at about six years ago, and he had eaten at before that. I had Beef Burgundy, Doreen had the same, and Keith had Basque style chicken (I thought that might be chicken with a bomb inside, but I was wrong). It was all delightful, and we retired for the evening.

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