Paris

Immediately after the door to my room closed behind me, I realized my mistake.

My room in the hostel was directly across the hall from the bathroom, so instead of getting dressed to go to the shower, I just stayed in my boxers, grabbed a towel and my toiletries, and dashed across the hall.  Except the thing is, the doors to the room lock behind you, and my key was on the wrong side of the door.  And, due to my late night the night before, it was 10:30, and my roommates had already left for the day.

"Well, shit," I muttered.

As long as I was standing mostly naked in the hall, I figured, I might as well take a shower and figure out the rest after I was clean.

I stayed in the shower a long time.  My mind was racing.  I was never one of the kids who had nightmares about showing up at school with no pants, but here I was, living the dream.  I thought about some book of boyhood adventures I read when I was in fifth grade where the main character has his clothes get stolen while he's skinnydipping.  I tried to remember how he got home, exactly--a lot of leaping behind bushes, I think.  There were no bushes in the hall.

I rinsed.

Could I just walk the five flights of stairs down to the office?  I wondered.  I mean, it wasn't like I was wearing a thong.  It was a pretty good-size pair of boxers.  It covered more than a lot of running shorts I've seen, and people wear those in public all the time.  I could take the elevator--wait, no--I wasn't taking the elevator.

I dried off and put my boxers on.  The fly seemed ok.  I wasn't, ahem, hanging out at all.  I went out into the hallway and looked around.  It was deserted.

Ok.  I definitely wasn't going down to the office.  There had been renovations going on in the lobby the past couple days, so it wasn't like I was just going to be dealing with the one person at the front desk; it was construction workers, too.  And while this was not the first time the thought of being naked with construction workers had occurred to me, in my imagination it had always worked out a bit differently.

I waited.  After a few minutes, I heard the bell of the elevator.  The door opened and a middle-aged man got out.  "Monsieur!" I called.  He looked at me.  I made a motion that I hoped looked like I was turning a key.  He shook his head and got back in the elevator.  I guess he thought he was on the wrong floor.

After a few minute I heard the sound of a door opening at the end of the hall.  A guy came out, and I couldn't see who it was at first, but it turned out it was Mike the Bostonian, hefting his backpack and heading home.  I was saved.

"Good morning," he said.  "Hey, can you spare 10 francs?  I need it for the Metro."

He was asking me for help?

"No problem," I said.  "Except I need you to do me a favor."

"Yeah, sure."

"Go down to the office and get a key to my room for me.  I'm locked out.  I'll give you all the change I've got"

He laughed.  "I'll be right back."

When he came back and unlocked my door, I was so relieved I completely forgot about my end of the deal.  I thanked, him shook his hand, wished him a good trip home.

"Uh..." he said, "that 10 francs."

"Oh yeah," I said.  I emptied the pocket of my jeans and gave him every coin I had.

"Thanks," he said.  "See you."

"Have a good trip."

I got dressed.  I'd lost an hour in the whole naked in the hallway ordeal, so it was now 11:30.  I went to the Metro station and headed for the Musee d'Orsay.  I was going to try to see it and the Louvre today.

The Metro station I got off at on my way to the d'Orsay wasn't as close as it looked on the map, but it was a straight shot.  A little after noon now, people were ducking into bakeries for lunch.  Lunch sounded appealing, since I'd missed breakfast.  Before I could settle on a place to eat, though, I came upon the d'Orsay.  It was undergoing substantial renovations on the
exterior, so I couldn't tell you what it looked like.  I went down a staircase into what I thought was the entrance, but it was a train station.  There was, however, a sandwich shop.  I ordered a three-cheese panini--brie, mozarella, and bleu, I believe, and an Orangina, and ate quickly.

After finding the real entrance to the museum, I checked my bag and wandered in.  The museum is a former train station, a fact not obvious from the scaffolding-covered exterior, but inside, the building was suffused with light, reminding me of old black and white photos of the beams of light streaming into Grand Central.  The central floor is a massive sculpture garden, with side galleries of pre-impressionist paintings.  Up the stairs to the mezzanine, there were more sculptures, including a monumental Rodin. Architecturally speaking, the mezzanine was my favorite part of the museum: the unusual texture of the floor and the clean lines of the railings were enough to make a Wallpaper editor weep.

In one gallery on the mezzanine was a special exhibition that I didn't completely understand.  It had three rooms, and all three were somehow related, I think, but the one in the middle came with a warning in French above the door, basically boiling down to: not for the faint of heart.  While the two end rooms had fairly innoccuous and ultimately unmemorable art, the middle room was made up of sculptures of unusual and gruesome medical conditions.  They were clinical, not gratuitious; they looked like the sorts of things that might be used in med school classrooms, and for all I were, maybe they were, but the colors and the glazes seemed too careful.  One sculpture was of a head that from the angle I first looked at it, appeared perfectly normal.  When I went around the other side, I saw that a portion of the skull was completely collapsed.  The skin fell slack where there was no bone to catch it.  In a case was a life-size sculpture of an old woman, her joints completely mangled by rheumatism.  Smaller pieces depicted diseases of the eye and mouth.  I don't think I'm a wimp, but I had
to leave before long.  The catacombs didn't bother me; death is universal and I can deal with that, but this menagerie of affliction was more than I could stomach.

Much of the side of the building facing the Seine is devoted to furniture. I like design as much as the next guy, but you can only look at so many chairs.

The third floor is where you find the stuff everyone comes to the d'Orsay to see.  The museum is devoted to nineteenth century art, so everyone's there for the impressionists.  But before I got to the really famous stuff, my progress was stopped for some time by a large canvas, The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Caillebotte.  I gather from the little research I've done since the trip that this is a moderately well-known painting, but I found myself completely arrested.  The painting depicts three men, shirtless, scraping a wooden floor in preparation for putting a new finish on it.  Two of the men are aligned with the grain of the wood; the third is perpendicular to it.  It's a dark painting, the only source of light is late-afternoon sunlight coming in through the window, again, aligned with the grain of the wood, illuminating the ribs and musculature of the workmen.  Two of the men have glasses of red wine close at hand.  The whole thing shimmers.
 

The Pyramid.

After leaving the d'Orsay, I wandered over to the Louvre.  When I reached it, any though that I had of doing the Louvre and the d'Orsay in one day evaporated.  I never intended to try to see the entire museum in one day.  In fact, I had already decided that I wanted to focus on pre-Renaissance religious art, which the small but solid collection at the Indianapolis Museum of Art had turned me on to.  But the size of the building overwhelmed even my limited priorities.  So instead I wandered around the courtyard and took a few photos of the pyramid, designed by I.M. Pei.  It was smaller than
I'd imagined, but an attractive counter to the heavy grandeur of the the palace.

I wandered along the river, idly looking at stalls selling books and various random items.  Eventually I came to the Pont Neuf, and decided to pay a return visit to Notre Dame.  After crossing onto the island and getting reoriented, I headed toward the church.  Near the metro station was a market, including a vendor selling Christmas trees and flying a rainbow flag.

Somehow in my visit to Notre Dame the day before, I had failed to notice the giant tent in the plaza in front.  Loudspeakers blared from it, encouraging visitors in four languages to come in and witness the Mystery of Christmas.  I declined.  After about 15 minutes, I headed back to the Metro station, and took a train to the Marais.  I wandered through the narrow streets, eventually repeating my adventure of the previous day, walking and walking till it was nearly nightfall.  Three young women came out of a building, laughing, and asked me if I had a light.  I fumbled through my bag; I did have some matches.  They started talking to me as I lit their cigarettes; I informed them I didn't speak French.  They came back at me in broken but enthusiastic English, asking where I was from, what I was doing, until the last cigarette was lit and they walked off into the dimming streets.

Eventually I found that I had circled back to the d'Orsay, one way or another, so I headed for the Metro station where I'd started my day.  I walked past an intersection encircled by police cars with their lights flashing.  A small group of people, 20-30 at most, were protesting something, but I couldn't figure out what.

In the metro, a clarinetist got on the car, playing Christmas carols for a few stops before walking up and down the car with a cup.  I gave him 5 francs.  He got off at the next stop, waiting to board the next train.

I went to the grocery store across the street from the hostel and bought some tomatoes, chicken breasts (I almost bought rabbit, but figured I didn't really know how to cook it), a can of spinach, a few beers, and a bottle of white wine.  Back at the hostel I sauted the chicken breasts in olive oil and made a sauce for them with the spinach, tomatoes, and wine.  An American woman about my mother's age asked if she could buy a glass of wine from me--she'd just gotten in to Paris and was waiting for her daughter to arrive tomorrow.
 
 

Gerry and Dan.

"How about I just give you a glass?" I said.  After I'd finished cooking, she and I sat together for a while.  She was a former engineer for IBM, now teaching, and she and her daughter were heading to southern France to ski over Christmas.  After about 20 minutes, she headed on to bed.  By that time, Gerry had shown up, so I sat with him, talking.  About 7:30, Dan
wandered in.  He'd stayed up drinking till 5, and was only now getting out of bed.  It was another long night for Dan, Gerry, and me, but I had some sense tonight and went to bed around 12:30.  I had a morning train to Amsterdam.

Next - December 21: What's New, Buenos Aires?
 

Copyright 2002 Brendan O'Sullivan-Hale