Montmarte & Sacre Coeur

Last Saturday we decided to climb up to the top of Montmarte, the highest point in Paris, and to visit Sacre Coeur, a colossal late-nineteenth-to-early-twentieth-century Romanesque basilica dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The walk from our apartment took us through the tenth arrondissement, so we popped quickly into St. Vincent de Paul, a church we've wanted to visit:

From there we went on to the southern base of Montmarte, which is home to what seemed like Paris's version of Fordham Rd.: a busy and grimy street, swamped with cars and people, and filled mostly with run-down discount shops. Fortunately for us, we've had years of experience to steel ourselves for such a trek. Actually the street easily out-charms Fordham Rd., owing mostly to this view:

In our eagerness to make our way up the hill we accidentally turned down the wrong street, but quickly noticed our mistake because of how comfortable and easy it was to walk: the drove of tourists was pouring into the next street over. So with a slight course correction we joined the crowds and up we went. On the way we stopped at a cute shop for a small bag of cookies (two of which were out of this world), and gazed romantically at a carousel playing stereotypical Parisian accordion music - you know the sort.

As you can see, the approach to the basilica is very, well, French: 

The top of Montmarte offers the best views of Paris. Everyone comes mostly to see this:

That's very nice (or would be on a clear summer day). But we came more to see this:

That's St. Louis on the left of the portico (you can't see it, but he has the relic of the crown of thorns in his left hand) and St. Joan of Arc on the right. 

To help maintain the sense of sacred space, pictures are forbidden in the basilica's interior, so we don't have any of those. But in a terrible twist of biblical irony, the ambulatory had not one, but two shops selling religious goods. Even so, the nave is always roped off for prayer and the Blessed Sacrament is exposed on the high altar for adoration, so after a turn around the church we made our way into the still center, found an empty pew, and directed our zeal for God's house in that direction.

After ducking into a small and much older church right next to Sacre Coeur, where we witnessed some kind of ruckus being made for a wedding, we walked through the picturesque but tourist-crowded square before climbing down Montmarte and making our way home. We did, however, stop to recruit our strength at a little place around the corner from us that specializes in fries and beer. The service isn't great, but the mustard is.

The Louvre at Night

Hall containing ancient statues from the Borghese collection:

Statue of Louis XIV, based on a design by Bernini:

Walks in Paris

Today, I promise, less talking, more pictures!

We live pretty near the Opera Garnier. Most of the Opera de Paris productions now go on at the Bastille, but the Palais Garnier is still home to the ballet, and is by far the more imposing building (comparison: Bastille, Garnier).

Also, on a more low-brow level, the Phantom of the Opera was set here.

The Place de l'Opera is bustling at this time of year as the sales are hitting Paris. Apparently French law only permits sales once a year! We wandered a little farther on this particular walk, and found a tempting option:

 

Nearby streets at night, with a view of the Sacré Coeur basilica in the first one:

 

South of our apartment, we often walk through the Jardin du Palais-Royale, which is attached to the Comedie Francais.

 

I think the stumps are art of some kind:

 

And on the back of the Comedie Francais, there's a shop devoted entirely to figurines and lead soldiers. We've thought of buying an army.

If we take another route toward the river, we pass a fabric district, which is decorated for Christmas (?) with a variety of oversized lampshades (??), and some nice art nouveau buildings.

And for the past week, we've been experiencing Paris in the snow:

Le Louvre et l'Amour

We spent the last two Saturday afternoons visiting the Louvre. Since we're here for so long, and there is so much to see, we decided we had better become members. So after marching down to the river from our apartment, and taking the escalators down beneath the iconic glass pyramid (they did it first, Apple...), we headed straight for the membership office, where after a short wait, a brief interview, and a quick photo-op (the French are really into taking your picture for cards), we got these:

I'm the Victorian-looking guy at the top, just left from center. Actually my picture's on the back. Our year-long memberships cost less than our memberships at the Met (thank you, France!), and they come with great perks. Of course we can visit the museum as much and as often as we like, but we also never have to pay or wait in line for special exhibits, and we never have to wait in line to get into the museum. Our elite point of access is tucked away in here:

After receiving our membership cards we were told emphatically, "Visitez le Raphael," so that's what we did! The Raphael exhibit, which closed the day after we saw it, featured the largest collection of moveable works by the artist ever presented. And it was awesome. The exhibit followed the growing trend of interest in the members of the great masters' workshops and in their creative process, from sources of inspiration through studies, sketches, and drawings to the final piece. We recently saw a similar exhibit of Bernini clay models at the Met. Such exhibits are proof that the greatest works of art don't just spring fully formed from the masters' heads like Athena from the head of Zeus, but are the result of an arduous process of trial and error, as the artists try to work out the best solution to the problem posed by the work. The reason they're masters is that their solution really is the best. 

(not our pictures)

Raphael's painting of St. Cecilia (patron saint of music) and its accompanying sketch by a member of his workshop give a nice example of what I'm talking about. Whereas the figures accompanying St. Cecilia (St. Paul, St. John, St. Augustine, and St. Mary Magdalene) are isolated and disconnected in the sketch, in the painting they belong together, as if they had just been having a conversation. And you're drawn into that conversation much more dynamically by the outward gaze of St. Mary in the painting's foreground than by the similar gaze of St. John in the sketch's background. The light coming in from the right side of the painting leads your eyes immediately from St. Mary's gaze down her side, and both her bent leg and bent arm join with the organ to sweep your eyes up toward St. Cecilia's face at center. Of course St. Cecilia's upturned eyes lead you to consider the heavenly choir, which she contemplates ecstatically, but you're also helped along upward by St. Augustine's crozier, which is completely absent from the sketch. The most striking iconographical change from the sketch to the painting, I think, is the depiction of the heavenly choir without any instruments. The broken instruments gathered at the saints' feet then make a far more dramatic statement: not only is the heavenly song better than the earthly one, it's of a radically different kind. I could go on and on about this painting, which has been a favorite of mine for a long time. How great to finally see it in person!

On our second visit to the Louvre we started exploring the permanent collection, which is dauntingly vast. We began with Greek and Roman sculpture (Venus de Milo! Wow! Nike of Samothrace! Wow!), and had just scratched the surface of Italian painting before we left. I was completely blown away by this coronation by Fra Angelico, another of my favorite painters:

(not our picture)

This picture doesn't do the painting justice. The whole thing radiates light. The steps up to the throne glow ethereally in rainbow-colored marble. Perhaps only second to the Bernini sculptures in the Villa Borghese in Rome, this was certainly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. I stood there looking at it for about twenty minutes straight. We also got to see a well known triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, a handful of paintings and frescoes by Boticelli, another favorite, and of course the Mona Lisa, behind bullet-proof glass, a wooden rail, a nylon rope, four guards, and a horde of tourists wielding cameras of all sorts. On the whole I have been shocked by how visitors to the Louvre behave. Shocked.

After our visits to the Louvre we usually walk across the Seine into the left bank, crossing the Pont des Arts. This bridge is tres romantique, since it's covered on all sides with locks left by lovers who carve their initials on a lock, lock it to the bridge, and then throw the key into the river.

Luckily we don't have crazy initials, so it was easy enough to find a lock with ours on it. Ah, l'amour!

Latin Quarter

Apologies for our silence! We have been working hard and playing hard, but neglecting to write about it. Mostly, so far, we have played by going for walks: it's free, it's beautiful, and we can retrace the steps of so many people whose works we've read.

One project of ours has been exploring the Latin Quarter. Last semester I read the memoirs of Raissa Maritain, wife of the twentieth-century Neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, which talk about their spiritual and intellectual lives in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I recommend it for many reasons, including the window it gave into life in that world: they were close friends with so many brilliant thinkers, and they were of course always going to churches and gardens in Paris. So we've been following them a bit. Our first expedition on the left bank was in search of the (somewhat redundantly named, as Raissa points out) Jardin des Plantes, where, as young students at the Sorbonne, full of despair over the atheistic naturalism of their professors, they pledged to kill themselves if they couldn't find life's deeper meaning within a year.

But they did. First they encountered the philosophy of Henri Bergson (although they later came to disagree with him, it was the first not-merely-naturalist worldview they had heard seriously defended by a professor), and then after befriending Leon Bloy they were baptized Catholics. That conversion, of course, also opened up the way for Jacques Maritain to rediscover the works of Thomas Aquinas,  which informed the rest of his intellectual life.

Anyway, the Jardin des Plantes was something of a disappointment, as seems to be the way of French gardens in the winter (lots of gravel, mud, and bare trees in straight lines). The neighborhood is also not what it was in 1901! On a second trip to the left bank, we had better luck. This plaque tells us that the street we stumbled on by chance was the home of the journals published by their friend Charles Peguy:

On this trip we were headed to a cafe called l'Ecritoire, recommended by a friend, which is now right outside the Ecole Nationale des Chartes. Seeing the school was exciting to me because of how much time I have spent thinking about manuscript studies in the past few months, if perhaps less exciting to normal people. It also, as we discovered, was across from a wonderful bookstore, the Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin:

The store was crammed with nothing but philosophy books, as you might guess, although J. Vrin is a press I've also come across for history. Unfortunately for T (but fortunately for our bank account), most of the books were in French! It followed a trend we've noticed with French bookstores, though. They seem on the whole much more serious than American ones. The volumes are mostly plain, without pictures on the covers. They're lined up on shelves going up to the ceiling, and there isn't a lot of room to maneuver between them--not (usually) displayed on stands in welcoming, wide rows. And there isn't any mickey mouse stuff, as T would say. All in all, it seems like the French bookstores expect you to be interested in the books, where American ones are more likely to try to woo you.

On yet another trip to the left bank, we stepped into Saint-Germain-des-Pres. This former monastery owned most of the neighborhood nearly until the revolution, and also incidentally owned the manuscript I'm looking at now at the BnF. It was the home of a lot of early work into French medieval history, and had a busy church, too. Here's one of the monks well known to me for his antiquarian work. He's buried inside, next to his confrere and fellow-historian Bernard de Montfaucon, and Rene Descartes (!):

It's pretty depressing inside now. The area around the church is extremely fashionable and expensive. The church, which has a romanesque-ish nave (11th-12th century), painted all over, and a more gothic-ish but still transitional apse (12th century), and which ought to be beautiful, is in disrepair. Some of the repairs that have been done, which seem aimed at 'modernizing' the church, are regrettable. It took us ages to find the new tabernacle, for example, shoved off to the side behind some chairs ("they've taken my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him"!) The repairs may have been done out of good intentions and I'm sure with very little financial support, but it's still sad. As Dante says, better not to speak of it: look, and pass by.

To end this post on a less depressing note, here's the Jardin du Palais-Royale in the beautiful snow, which we've had for the past few days:

A la bibliothèque

This week I visited the Bibliothèque nationale de France, got my reader's card, and got my first look at one of my manuscripts. Visits to the BnF are one of the biggest reasons for our entire trip, so it was both exciting and slightly nerve-wracking to make my first approach. I'm also trying to really use my French on this trip, so every interaction is a kind of test: do I get answered in pity-English?

I get to work at the oldest branch of the library, because the Latin manuscript collection is still housed there. (The new branch, on the other hand, looks like this.) And it's only about four blocks from our apartment! To access the collection, though, you have to prove your academic credentials. So my first encounter was with a nice print-shop employee, who printed out my letters of reference. The whole thing transpired in French, though my sentences involved a lot of waving papers and pointing at things.

The second stop was a security guard at the entrance. I asked him the way to the reader orientation office, and either something about me asking twice or my look of terror led him to start telling me I'd better take the TGV... fortunately I did not believe this and the office was just past the gate! (Happy ending to this story: this guard now tells me "bon courage!" when I enter and we had a conversation completely at cross purposes about how my dissertation is going.)

Next, according to the website, one must have an interview with a librarian. This also passed peacefully, though with her speaking very, very slowly and precisely (for which I was grateful). And in the end I got the card that lets me into the manuscripts reading room.

This branch is old and beautiful, in a grandiose way. There are chandeliers, velvet book-rests, and a very, very quiet atmosphere. The atmosphere is so quiet I didn't quite dare introduce myself to the eminent historian of the twelfth century who has been looking at manuscripts (and, I'm pretty sure, napping at least once) in the reading room this week.

The first thing I'm consulting is a manuscript from the twelfth century, a commonplace book which turns out to be very small, only maybe 4"x6", probably compiled by the monk whose history I plan to write my dissertation about. It's so exciting to see something he planned and designed himself, and to learn some of his quirks--like highlighting all his clever rhyme schemes and meter in his own poems. Alas, I was not allowed to photograph the reading room or my manuscript, so this is all I have to show you:

Then I only had to: figure out where to go to pay for my card before it would start working; how to work the lockers where all one's belongings have to stay while in the reading room; in what order to fill out and hand in, and to which librarians, the white, yellow, and blue slips of paper that are used to order and retain manuscripts but whose workings are not explained anywhere (that I know of); how to know where to sit; and how to be allowed to look at manuscripts instead of their microfilm copies! Reading my scribe's handwriting and his abbreviations--both of which are very clear by medieval standards, but difficult nonetheless for beginners--is getting a little easier, and since I even managed to discover how to take a lunch break but still get back in to the library, I'm looking forward to this week's work.

Labor

Yesterday and the day before, we did nothing but sit in our apartment and write funding applications. This wasn't too exciting and didn't yield any nice photos, but it did produce a total of four grant applications between us, and a much-longed-for conclusion to the grant application season for me. Conveniently, celebratory sparkling wine is available for less than 2€.

We also hiked UP the hill to Montmartre, which is one arrondissment over from our apartment, and went to church, went to the store. But I didn't photograph any of that either. So here are a few photos from our earlier adventures.

Hobbit door and tiny, tiny elevator in our apartment:

More from Sainte Chapelle. First, heaven (i.e., the space from which God or angels appear) is often represented in medieval illuminations as a series of wiggly lines, optionally rainbow-colored. There is probably a real art-historical term for this. I was excited to see a three-dimensional representation of this at the Sainte Chapelle. So I also photographed a painting that shows the two-dimensional version, even if it does probably owe more to Viollet-le-Duc than to actual medieval artists:

 And finally, here's one of the many Joan of Arc statues we've seen. Particularly touching was the plaque in Notre Dame de Paris explaining that her rehabilitation trial had been announced on that spot...

Today I survived my first trip to the Bibliothèque nationale! But that is a story for another day.

Epiphany

Today we celebrated the feast of Epiphany at Notre Dame de Victoires, our local parish. The church and its Marian shrine are quite famous throughout France, and the local congregation is alive and thriving, as evidenced by the packed church for mass this morning, the beautifully sung liturgy, and the crowds who remained afterward to pray.

Epiphany is one of my favorite of the Church's feasts, because, among other things, it is a celebration of the conviction that motivates much of my work in philosophy. The well known story told in Matthew 2: 1-12 of the wise men who follow a star in search of the newborn king of the Jews, along with Romans 1: 19-21, Acts 14: 15-17, and Acts 17: 26-28, are sources for the Christian conviction that unaided natural reason can attain some knowledge of God, however limited, and that the sciences in general, and philosophy in particular, can open and lead one to accept the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Pope Benedict treats this topic very well in the chapter on the magi from the recently published third volume of Jesus of Narareth on the infancy narratives. The story of the wise men, he says, "implies that the cosmos speaks of Christ, even though its language is not yet fully intelligible to man in his present state. The language of creation provides a great many pointers. It gives man an intuition of the Creator. Moreover, it arouses the expectation, indeed the hope, that this God will one day reveal himself. And at the same time it elicits an awareness that man can and should approach him." That's why I'm writing a dissertation on an argument for God's existence.

After mass E and I continued the celebration with a delicious king cake (which is for Epiphany, by the way, not Mardi Gras). King cakes are a big deal here, and there are lots of different kinds. We got a traditionally southern one, made of brioche and candied fruits, which came with a golden crown. And I got the piece with the gold in it!

After lunch we visited the Sainte Chapelle (!), which St. Louis built in the thirteenth century to house the relics of the passion. We aren't sure why, but there was no line today and admission was free. Thank you France! The building is in the high Gothic style and is just amazing. The walls of the upper chapel are literally almost nothing but stained glass windows depicting more than 1,000 scenes from salvation history. Wow wow wow.

On our way home we took a detour through the Jardin de Tuileries, which is full of trees cut into neat squares that further witness to the French thing for tidy gardens. Tomorrow we're supposed to be getting down to work. We'll see how that goes.