Courbet Flashes Us, Café de Flore and Custo Barcelona Take All Our Money, but Maman Makes Everything Better with a Little Gigot

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How to *Do* Modern Art
Today I get to be the guide. That promises a lot of circular walking. I’m good at maps, I just don’t always know in real life which way I’m facing. I suppose if I put the map on the floor like Joey from “Friends,” I’d do better. I kiss Leroy goodbye and wish him a wonderful free day in Paris, and off I go to meet the rest of the crew at Metro Villiers. I hit up the ticket machine for a carnet (10-trip pack) since my 5-day Paris Visite pass has expired. We ascend from the metro at Solférino, and according to my two-dimensional map, I should be just one block away from the Orsay. Hmmm. The signs that directed us out of the metro have disappeared and there is but one museum arrow pointing to the Legion of Honor (oh if I only knew it was next to the Orsay). I stall by encouraging Mom and Bett to get some breakfast at the nearby boulangerie/patisserie as I stare at my map and try to figure out which way we’re facing. Long story short, I get them there in about 10 blocks instead of one, and along the way, Bett loses her pistache pastry because she holds the guidebook in front of her face and runs straight into a pole in the middle of the street. A French guard nearby tries as hard as he can not to laugh, but he is unsuccessful. Even Bob guffaws out loud when she recounts the story. No sympathy for inattentive tourists here! Mom gets the raw end of the deal though - it is more walking than necessary.

Once at the Orsay, there is a *ridiculous* line, and all we can do is join it. Mom goes on a hunt for a toilette, which I would say is one of her themes for the trip. She tells me that when I get to her age, bathroom hunts will become not only funny but incredibly important. For now, I thank God for my young(er) bladder. Once inside, we reuse our Louvre strategy and split up. Bettina and I, the art history buffs, are also speedy art connoisseurs. We do it in a way that would not agree with most, but when you are viewing a piece of art with 20 other people, there really is no right way. We start at the top floor where the big hitters are - Monet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Pissaro, Manet, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the list goes on. Mom is a big Monet fan, so we are not surprised to spot her purple crocs (and lavender fleece) in that room. I am an überfan of Matisse, but they must have hidden all his stuff away in Nice. Luckily, I still have Van Gogh, Toulouse, Degas, and Gauguin. Bett shares these favorites with me, although I think her #1 is Chagall (also in Nice!). We literally do quick walk-bys on all the pieces, with short pauses at the major ones (and there are many). I quickly learn how best to take non-flash pictures of each piece, and should we decide to post all of them, you will have to wade through dozens of paintings that absolutely make our hearts flutter. The middle floor is less inspiring, though still wonderful with the sculpture of Rodin and Camille Claudel and some objets d’art (which means furniture and home décor). I gotta say, I wouldn’t mind real art incorporated into my house, but it must cost a pretty penny. The bottom floor has more Monets and the famous Manets we’ve been waiting for - Dejeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia. Both are paintings we studied in 9th grade art history (and subsequent courses, because once you fall in love with the study of art, it never leaves you). Surprisingly, the Dejeuner de Manet hits Bett like a brick and she immediately exclaims that it’s her favorite in the Orsay. How surprising. Manet isn’t exactly similar to Chagall or Degas. He is *nothing* like Monet, so for those of you who think the only difference is the “a” for the “o,” bite your tongue! Nonetheless, the painting is so much better in real life than in pictures. I will never understand why he painted a picnic with two men fully dressed and a totally naked woman (and another naked lady in the background). I’ll have to look it up my Hartt and my Janson textbooks to get the context again, but the bottom line is… it is beautiful.

There is also a new installation on the ground floor which is a video that somehow recreates a Manet painting. We watch for a few minutes, but I will be honest and say that contemporary (as in actual time, the present) art is often lost on me. I love “modern” art more than classical art, but post-1950, I just don’t get. Another hit for us is the model of the Opera house and a 3-D map of a Paris neighborhood that is below the floor and covered in glass you could walk on. There is also a Courbet painting that shows a woman in repose with her private area exposed, and I’m sure that was quite a shock for the time since it’s a shock for our time. Courbet is flashing us!

With all three floors done, it is only one hour since we left Mom and Bob, and we have another hour to go before meeting them in the gift shop. Hmm, what to do? We go back to the top floor to search for Seurat, since we think we missed him (but we didn’t). It turns out that Sunday on the Island of the Grand Jatte is not housed here (probably at the New York Met). We meander about a bit and make sure we have all the photos we want. After all, we will want to savor these Moments, in honor of Mr. Barnhouse and all our other art history teachers - the public school people who took a risk and dared to teach inner city kids about art and beauty, to take them to the Getty and the LA County Museum of Art and the MOMA. Imagine if they had worked in cities like New York or Chicago, or dare I say, Paris and London and Madrid!

Our next move is lunch as we are famished. Bett and I would like to walk, but I don’t think Mom will make it on an empty stomach and with the wild goose chase I led her on this morning. She also still has some shopping to do at the gift shop, so we decide to split up and meet at the metro near St. Germain. This will give Bett and I enough time to walk there, and Mom and Bob will cab it. Our walk is lovely (even though I started by taking us in the completely wrong direction), and we are excited about our afternoon alone shopping. We are distracted by a Custo shop where we love the Barcelona designs. If I didn’t promise Bett we’d be back, we’d have left Mom and Bob wandering around wondering where we were. But no worries, we run into them on the street, and first decide to look at the menu at Brasserie Lipp, a well-known German establishment in the area. It’s pricy, but somehow, we end up at an even more expensive joint - Café de Flore, a place that is quite touristy due to its fame as having served the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone du Beauvoir. Voltaire and Hemingway hung out at the other café (Les Deux Magots) less than 100 meters away. I can’t believe the prices on the menu, but Mom seems willing to pay for the ambience (although she also decides that these cramped cafes are not her style). But, she can’t complain, since she has the “best salad” (with artichokes and lemon olive oil) she’s ever had, and Bettina has the “best club sandwich” ever. We end the lunch with café crèmes, and then Mom and Bob head home.

Pinays à Paris: il faut faire du shopping
On your mark, get set, go! Can you believe it starts raining just as we begin our spree? First, we stop by Zara in the hopes that we’ll find tops that we like enough to skip spending at Custo. Not quite. We find sweaters that will keep us warm in Amsterdam, but we just must go back to Custo. There, Bett wants to see every top, and the shopman teases her for wanting to see “everything.” She is mad at him, but since he seems to like me, she just has me try on all the designs she wants to see. He is being nice to me, considering he doesn’t need to tell me that I’m “trés belle” for us to buy something. First, Bettina tries to stave off the shopping monster by saying, “I won’t buy anything if you don’t.” Unfortunately, the way she says it translates to, “You’d better buy something too.” So I decide I’ll get one top, and I’ll try to keep it on the low end (prices for the shirts are ranging from 65 euros to the hundreds). The next thing Bett says is, “Don’t let me buy two!” No worries, we keep it together, and we leave the store with a shirt each, and we both love them. It’s too bad our best friend Angela is not here with us. We share our Custo experiences together. The first was a (slutty) dress that Bettina bought in New Orleans that is just gorgeous on her. Then, all three of us got shirts from the Leaf & Petal boutique in Palo Alto. I think we still all have ours (but 2/3 of us don’t fit into the shirts anymore). Success, we are happy and don’t mind being soggy on the way to Debauve & Gallais, a chocolaterie with maison fondée in 1800. Now that’s old! Leroy brought me some chocolates from here when he last visited Paris (and we were just friends, what a sweetie). Bettina goes crazy buying gifts for her family, and I buy a bar for Leroy. We look at the lovely boutiques all over St. Germain-des-Prés, but we dare not walk in, because we clearly can’t afford anything. We can just dream.

We decide to go for something easier on the wallet and go to Les Halles near the museum we went to the other day. Once out of the metro, we drop her Sony memory card off so that we can have some photos on CD, then scope out the stores. We try a bunch of stuff on, but somehow the shopping monster has gone to sleep, so we pick up our photo CD and go home.

Chef Maman shows us what it means to eat French: Gigot d’Agneau, Flageolets, Haricot Verts… my mouth waters just thinking about it
My mother wrote an email to our family describing our French dinner Chez Maman, so let me take some excerpts (gosh, does this make the second successful guest blogger?) to show you what a fantastic night it was. I did have to make edits for accuracy, because Mom got some of the details a little wrong, i.e. what people’s jobs are.


Their place is a short walk from our apartment. It was raining, but we had our umbrellas. Yes, mine is a cute purple one. Their place was big, and Béatrice (Leroy's Maman) has boarders. Not all of them are students since the two who joined us for dinner were working people. Felipe is Brazilian and is an architecture major from Belo Horizonte and is working for an architecture firm doing visual and media production for them. Karine is part Japanese and part French and has lived in places like Mexico and New York. Hubert is Béatrice's son and his girlfriend is Élodie. We first hung out in the grand parlor, and were served a red wine in cute wine glasses with Matchbox cars at the bottom. I had a Viper. Bettina had the Ferrari. Hubert had a VW bug. I don't remember the others . Then they served tortilla chips with guacamole. Then, Béatrice said, “May I welcome you to a French dinner?” Oui oui!

At dinner, Hubert assigned us our seating places. He tried to make it balanced in terms of boy and girl. I found that interesting. Then we had baguette de tradition (and, later, longer baguettes) with chicken liver pate and rillettes de canard (a duck spread). And the conversation kept going. Leroy did make a comment later that it was so nice to have dinner at the table since this was one of the things that has gone by the wayside in the American culture. Béatrice then got up and served us a lamb dish (gigot) with two roasted heads of garlic on the side, flageolets (green baby lima beans) and haricot verts (French beans, which means, they were beans -- mwa hah hah. It is interesting that we do name a lot of stuff as "French" this and “French” that), and more wine. Dessert was different flavored macaroons (black currant - which offered a lot of minutes of discussion such that a dictionary had to be brought out - pistachio, lemon, coffee, vanilla, strawberries, etc.) and the layered cake that we brought.

But what was most fascinating was the conversation. It was pretty hard at times since when the discussion became heated, they would speak French, with Hubert translating. At first, it was about the food, how the lamb was made, how the garlic was roasted, we also found out that the flageolets were dwarf kidney beans or green baby lima beans. Etc. And then… the conversation turned to religion. At the end of the evening, Hubert and Béatrice had to agree to disagree. Élodie initially was taking Béatrice's side but slowly took her own stand (i.e., not Hubert's). And all this because Hubert had expressed that he had seen Pope John Paul four times. And Béatrice made a comment that the new Pope did not have as great a reception in Brazil as the other Pope.

Anyway, I had such a great time. Watching the interaction between Hubert and Béatrice, between Béatrice and Élodie, between Hubert and Élodie. Amongst Béatrice, Leroy and Hubert. It gave me a glimpse of the French, assuming that the interaction was typically French. I just love to see how people interact. I also would have loved to ask Felipe about his ohm necklace, but it was time to go home and to start a new subject was a dangerous thing, timewise. Mwa ha ha!


While all this was going on, I was trying my best to understand the French discussion. Somehow, my knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese gives me enough to understand maybe 50%!o(MISSING)f the conversation (unless the speech gets too fast or the subject too lofty). My favorite part was how convinced each party was as to their correctness - after all, that’s what makes good debate and good dinner conversation, eh? Yes, I would love for my own family-to-be to always have dinner at the table, TV off. Of course, that means I also get to cook lovely dinners, and that’s just gravy for everyone. I also love the “high-low” game where you ask each member of the family to say what their high and low points were for the day. I hope we can make it happen. But before the debate, we were all just sharing stories, and Bett and I were savoring every bite. Bett can be quite shy in these types of situations, so she would whisper to me for more pain or more rillettes de canard. And why not? Both the pâté and the rillettes were fantastic, and I finally got to eat pâté in Paris! The gigot was sublime, and we garlic fans could not get enough of the roasted garlic spread onto the lamb. C’est magnifique!

Bett is also a macaroon queen, and my favorite is a hazelnut macaroon from a French bakery in San Francisco. Hubert is aghast that he had not been able to find it during his 6-month stay there (oh, if we had only known each other then, Hubert! We would have shown you where all the yummy desserts were!). Élodie takes two different flavored macaroons, splits the two cookies apart, and then mixes and matches. I’ll have to try that next time! As we stand and say our goodbyes, Bettina nudges me to ask Maman where we could buy the rillettes de canard. We had already gotten directions from them as to which bakery in Paris has the best macaroons (secret recipe and everything) - LaDurée on Rue Royale or on Champs-Elysée. Funny thing, I got an airport magazine a week later that had a whole feature on LaDurée, and Leroy got to the part in his book “Paris to the Moon” where the author makes gigot with flageolets and buys macaroons at LaDurée. It’s all celestial, these coincidences. I have every intention to learn how to make some of these things - I’ll start with gigot. I’m sure Leroy won’t mind trying out my experiments. Anyway, Bett nudges me because, although we know where to get macaroons, she is not going to let me forget that we *need* the rillettes de canard. Maman says it could be hard to find, then disappears for a minute, and returns with two large tins and gives one to Bett and one to my mom. Rillettes for us?!??! This is fantastic!!! Bett is already planning on when to serve it in San Fran. The night ends with full bellies and lots of smiling.

What a perfect French dinner!!! Bravo, Maman! Nous t’embrassons très très fort!

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Photos

Musée d'Orsay
Van Gogh portrait... but Bett looks too happy.

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This is how you do it, Bett. Well, not quite. But closer.

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There goes that happy bobble-head again.

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Whaddya think? Prettier for real or better in Monet's paintings?

Musée d'Orsay
We love Degas.

Musée d'Orsay
The clock in the main galley.

Musée d'Orsay
Here you go, Mom, the full photo.

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Our good friend, the metro, in the objets d'art section.

Musée d'Orsay
Are we irrevent in museum shots? Do we think we will be closer to art by imitating it? Should we discuss this over some foie gras and bordeaux in a somber cafe?

Musée d'Orsay
Oh, Butters. I said we needed to aim higher in taking the photo, not that your eyebrows had to go higher!

Musée d'Orsay
Dejeuner sur l'herbe by Manet. Just fantastic. It's electrifying.

Musée d'Orsay
Courbet flashing us. And I'm not that mature.

Debauve & Gallais
Founded in 1800, it is the oldest chocolate house in Paris

Comments

[bett]

manet's my man!!
that was breathtaking in person - dejeuner sur l'herbe...it was my FAVORITE!!!! dinner with maman made my experience richer...thanks leroy and maman and family!!!!!!

[Alea]

how did you find willis in paris?? thx for the [soft?] porn, mel; your face is priceless. lol.