A day in the life

By popular demand (i.e. one person asked me once), here is what we do on a typical work day.

After getting up, we make coffee in our retro* non-automatic-drip coffee pot and have our breakfast of yogurt and granola. When we first arrived, our breakfasts were all croissant/pain au chocolat/baguette with cheese and sausage all the time, but since that was also what we ate for lunches... well. I think the 'French people don't get fat' myth was not associated with eating pain au chocolat for breakfast every day.

* I have not mastered making good coffee with a pour-over pot. But I refuse to buy a 'swan-necked kettle' or whatever else is necessary for true coffee-nerd happiness while in Paris, so maybe I'm just stuck. The link goes to someone who cares far, far more about coffee than me. If you didn't think that was possible, now you know.

Then we pray, and we're ready to go!

Or rather, I get ready to go to the library. T usually stays at the apartment, since he hasn't found anywhere close and quiet enough to be worth moving to. So he just settles down to work:

If I don't get to the library early enough one of the security guards who has come to recognize me gives me a hard time. It kind of makes me feel at home, though. I sign in and get assigned a seat in one of two reading rooms. If I'm working with manuscripts, it's upstairs in a smaller room. You aren't allowed to take anything in to the manuscript reading room besides papers and pencils or computer equipment, so as to avoid putting the manuscripts at risk. So I'm assigned a small cubby where I lock up my coat, purse, and lunch. Alas, I'm not allowed to photograph this room, which has a spectacularly gaudy ceiling fresco and glorious chandeliers, so here's a picture from the internet:

Galerie Mazarine, photo from here

If I'm working with microfilms, I go to the main reading room, the Salle Ovalle. It is huge and very imposing. The Times recently ran a piece about its architect, actually. Again, photography isn't allowed, so here's someone else's picture:

Salle Ovale, photo from here

Readers at home may be glad to know that 'Washington D.C.' has been inscribed on the ceiling among a list of great cities of the world: Paris, Babylon, Byzantium...! Also in the dust on the big skylight, someone has traced "Je t'<3" ("I <3 you")...

What is T doing all this while? Well...

... thinking metaphysical thoughts.

After a while I eat a lunch packed at home. There are some sad little benches around the first floor of the library where other graduate students eat their sandwiches. I think the older professors mostly go out to lunch! Some of them seem to have inhuman endurance that doesn't require food breaks, though. This is probably why they're such good scholars.

While I eat, I sometimes look at the busts of venerable former librarians which decorate the lobby. This one is of Léopold Delisle, who overhauled the cataloging system in the late nineteenth century. He was from Normandy and thus took quite an interest in Norman medieval records, so I've used a lot of his work.

Somehow I didn't picture him so grumpy-looking when his catalogues of manuscripts are so helpful!

The lobby also contains a magical vending machine, which I would like to import to all libraries at home. It dispenses very decent espressos and macchiatos for a mere 40 Eurocents, and the food side is well-supplied with madeleines and chocolate bars. Basically it's the best.

I work til around 6, when the manuscript and microfilm departments close. I'm doing two sorts of work, for the most part. I've located a bunch of manuscripts from the monastery where the monk-historian I'm writing my dissertation on lived; they're now scattered around France and a few other places. When things written at this monastery during my guy's lifetime exist only in later copies, I just have to read them and copy out anything that looks interesting. The texts I copy can be documents about the monastery's property, rights, and legal disputes, or other historical works and poems from the time. The library has made microfilm copies of many of these manuscripts, and I can use those for transcription work. Of course, sometimes I have to turn to the originals, because the handwriting in these later manuscripts sometimes looks like this:

Can you read this? Seriously, if you can, can you let me know what it says?

My work is more fun when copies from my monk-historian's lifetime survive. In that case I have to examine the binding, page layout, and organization of each book. For each book which was produced at the time and place I'm interested in, I measure its pages, figure out whether the book is missing any bits or has had any added, and what the original book was like. I try to tell which texts were copied in the same handwriting and which weren't, whether each gathering of parchment pages has a particular theme or common source, etc. It can be tedious, since it doesn't always lead immediately to any useful information. But sometimes it turns up something really good. All these observations on all of the books from this one monastery at this one time should add up to a picture of what the monks' common literary project was. That will help me to situate my particular monk-historian.

Medieval handwriting is much clearer.

And of course it's cool just to work with medieval books, too.

When I come home, maybe picking up a baguette along the way, this is what greets me:

We relax for about an hour, or maybe I start dinner, and then we often take off for daily mass... which is at 7pm, because everything is later in France. A couple nights ago we were surprised to find that our evening mass had been sponsored that day by the 'Ajaccians of Paris,' who apparently meet annually to celebrate their city being spared in a plague. The mass used Corsican chant, which was like nothing I'd ever heard before. Here's an example of something similar. Sometimes we go to the Louvre on its late nights instead, though.

I cook us some dinner at home, and then we pray again afterward. Usually we try to do something productive in the evenings if we're home--for example T's doing French language tapes, and we occasionally manage to eke out a blog post. But sometimes we just end up watching Star Trek instead. And that's a working day for us!