PARIS: May 13-19, 2009-Part II

Part II: Day 3

Sat., May 16, 2009: Breakfast this morning was crowded because I got up later. A lot of Germans, and one German guy with long, blond hair who was making sure he got his 7 euros worth of food. He kept going back to buffet table again and again. . .

Riding the Metro in the morning, sitting opposite me and also across the aisle were two Italian women with two little girls, looking to be about ages 4 and 7 or 8 maybe. I guess I have been to Italy enough that some Italian words I can recognize. The smaller girl was complaining that she had a headache and, as soon as she said that, the other one said, “Me too.” They were both slouching down in their chairs, looking none too happy. Since the day was just beginning, I thought these mothers have a long day ahead of them if their little girls are already whining with headaches and don’t want to be here. Good luck.

I had some disappointments on this day. First up was the Musee Carnavalet Histoire. This is a museum all about the history of Paris. I love history and was looking forward to learning all about the city. Well, everything was in French. There were no audioguides in various languages or even a map in English. The guy at the front desk spoke very little English, and when he shook his head that there was no English map, he did offer me a Spanish one instead, apparently thinking the languages are similar and Spanish would do just as well? This museum had free admission so must be subsidized by the government, I assume. But since all the written exhibit materials were in French only and there were no translations, it was not conducive at all to visits from tourists. Therefore, it was empty of people, except for the staff. There were three people at the front desk to handle the hordes of visitors, and one or two people per room. But no visitors. So the staff basically only has themselves to keep each other company. I was starting to chuckle to myself about the French way of making employment for its citizens. At the D’Orsay, there had been two people to take your tickets – one who takes the ticket and one who apparently just keeps that guy company all day. Here at the history museum, there were many more employees than visitors and they were unable to interact with any visitor who didn’t speak French. It was unfortunate, because I took a walk through the museum and the exhibits looked like they would have been very interesting to me, and I think I would have learned a lot of history. I am always interested in the French Revolution and Napoleon and the monarchy but, alas, I could not learn anything here.

So I left the history museum a bit disappointed. Going back up the street, next to St. Paul’s Cathedral were a row of Paris rental bikes, all lined up. These were all what my brother used to call “dry machines” – that is, like his old bike, they have back fenders to keep road dirt and water from splashing up onto your back and clothes. They also have headlights and wire baskets. You can rent the bike at one station and return it to any other station in the city. I saw a family riding some of these bikes later at the Tuileries.


Dry machines

As I walked by the bikes at St. Paul’s on my way back to the Metro, I heard a little kid crying and, after looking around, saw a little boy about 4 years old standing in the corner up against St. Paul’s. His father was a few feet away, waiting him out. But the kid hadn’t yet given in and was continuing to cry into the corner. I guess people the world over put their kids in the corner.

Since the history museum was a bust and it was only 10:30 in the morning, I decided to go to the Musee des Arts Decoratifs. I wanted to see furniture and textiles and also wanted to see the Museum of Advertising that was supposed to be here. It was over near the Louvre so I headed off to the Tuileries gardens. I enjoyed the museum. It had a lot of furniture from the 1700s to very modern pieces which look like art more than furniture, because I questioned whether you would really be able to use some of it as furniture. In my opinion, you haven’t made furniture if you make a chair that is too uncomfortable to sit on. Maybe you’ve made art, but not furniture. But then again, I love looking at Frank Lloyd Wright’s furniture, but I have read that it is incredibly uncomfortable to sit on. There were lots of beautiful armoires, some very gorgeous and artistic, with inlays and other decoration. Now there is a piece of furniture that is no longer really popular in America, with all the closets we build into our houses instead. I think that illustrates the American ideal of function and economy over beauty. Peggy has a large armoire in her bedroom, and I noticed in the houses of her friends in Italy that storage is in cabinets, drawers and armoires. Peggy basically has one closet in her house.

There was one gallery that was very good, all red – clothing, furniture, linens, etc. My favorite here was the Red = Communism room. There was one wall with French political posters for Socialiste, and the other wall had posters of happy Chinese communists – a man with a gun, a woman with a bayonet, smiling, equal, in their Mao suits. Of course, there was also Lenin, and Che Guevara.

But along came the day’s second disappointment – the exhibition on Advertising had closed the week before. Denied again. Just seemed like it was going to be that kind of day. I hoped in the back of my mind my plan to visit the Catacombs would not go awry.

After the museum of decorative arts, I decided to get some lunch and took a walk through the Tuileries. A woman was walking towards me asking, “Do you speak English?” I recognized from her clothing she was a gypsy (long grubby dress, kerchief around her head, quilty winter coat on) and knew enough to stay away, hold onto my purse, just keep walking like I did not understand her cause I don’t speak English and I’m not a tourist. A couple of days later, I saw more of this scam at the Eiffel Tower. They have a card, like a religious card, that is in English that they want you to translate for them and when you stop to do that, while you’re helping her your pocket gets picked by her partner.

Adventures on Line 4 of the Metro: After lunch, I took a long ride on the Metro to get to the Catacombs. It was far along line 4, at the Denfert-Rochereau stop. I could tell riding this line I was probably getting to where Parisians actually live in the city, maybe less affluent Parisians. The train began to fill with Africans and Muslims. At one stop, two kids got on, probably one 10 year old boy and the other younger. Once the doors to the car closed, the little one began to yell in French, giving a speech, I think sort of telling a story. I guessed maybe it went something like, “I haven’t eaten in three days. . .” When he was done, he walked over to the lady next to me and held his hand out. She shook her head, so he put his hand out to me and I shook my head (I never, ever, ever give money to beggars, no matter what). He didn’t beg from the men in the car. At the next stop, they got off, as this car was not paying off. I assume they are gypsies and their parents have sent them out on the street to work on Saturday. They obviously don’t view their children the way we do. We take care of our children, provide for them. We don’t send 9 or 10 year olds out to beg. Later, on the way back, another guy got on the train. He reeked of booze and urine. He held his hand out to the woman next to me, she shook her head, held his hand out to me, shook my head too. He didn’t bother with any story like the kid did. Just need to smell him and you know his story. He did try to beg from a bunch of teenage boys on the train but nobody was willing to give him any money. After he got off, then a crazy guy got on the train. He had on a suitcoat and had a computer laptop bag and he looked at people and spoke in French which, of course, I didn’t understand. I don’t know, is he about to tell a story for money? He put down the seat next to me and spent an inordinate amount of time brushing it off before he finally sat down. That’s when I started thinking ok, maybe he is a little crazy. He put each hand into his suitcoat pockets, then took his hands out and in each hand he had little matchboxes. He started talking and started to wave his arms and hands all around, shaking the matchboxes like maracas and talking. Since I didn’t know what he was saying, I wondered – is he a performer, like a magician or something? Like he’s going to make the boxes disappear? Then I remembered a magazine article I just recently read by Teller (of Penn & Teller) and other magicians, one of whom began his career basically as a pickpocket. They said that when magicians do sleight of hand, this is based upon the way the human brain works. The eye watches the hand and the magician moves the hands in an arc because the way the brain works, when the person is watching the hand moving in an arc, they can’t register the other hand picking the pocket. Apparently, if the distracting hand moves in a straight line, the brain can see the other hand and what it’s doing. So as long as you move the distracting hand in an arc, the eyes and brain will be fooled. When that thought popped into my head, I decided to hold my bag and stop watching his hands waiving around. Well, he kept up with this waving and shaking the matchboxes and talking and now I could tell from the way the other people on the train were looking at him (because I figured they understand what he’s saying) that really he’s just a nut-job. He finally got off. My ride on line 4 was full of all kinds of interesting people.

Walking through the Metro tunnels on this day, I could hear Pachelbel’s Canon in D being played on the violin. Now I could tell, it wasn’t Met orchestra quality but it sounded good. She wasn’t playing any bad notes. How can you have so much talent, yet be playing in the subway with your violin case open, hoping for 50 cent euro pieces? I remember when I went to London the first time and we stayed with Peggy’s friend, Suzan, and one of her daughters played some violin music for us one night after dinner. She was just a young girl, I think around 15 at the time, and she hit a few bad notes, some not so smooth patches, and she had been studying violin for seven years. So I think it must be an incredibly difficult instrument to play and master, so how many years of study did this woman have to be able to play like this? (Yes, you know Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Everybody does. Enjoy this “Pachelbel Rant” on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM)

Well, I did reach the Catacombs in time to get a ticket. It cost 8 euro. There is a sign before you go in, translated into other languages including English, which warns, “The catacombs make a big impression on children and people with nervous disposition.” And if that doesn’t work, there is a sign warning there is no coat check and no toilet and it takes 45 minutes. Do you still want to go? Ok, go ahead then. First, a lady at the window sells you your ticket. Then you take a step to the right where there are two guys, one who checks your ticket and another guy who is just keeping him company. Then you go down a spiral cement staircase that seems to go on forever, is very small, and I was trying hard not to get dizzy going round and round.

Finally, once I got to the bottom, there is a small room with some pictures and historical information to read. It seems that some years ago, in the late 18th century, the cemeteries were teeming with too many dead and were blamed for causing rampant disease in the city. Paris decided to empty the cemeteries and mass graves that were within the city limits and relocate all the bodies to the underground quarries, which became the Catacombs. They would dig them up and move them at night. I cannot imagine doing that job. Just think about it.

After the history room is a staircase with a sign in front of it that says the Catacombs are over 500 meters and if you have a problem while going through, call for help on the nearest call box. I went up the stairs and looked down a long, dark, narrow tunnel, low ceiling, dirt and stone floors, with just a few lamps up along the walls to give a little light. Too scary to go alone, so I decided to wait for a few other people to go in too. It turns out that there is no guide to walk you through or give you facts and information about the Catacombs. You just go through them by yourself. Along the way, wherever there were openings to other passageways, they were blocked by iron bars, so you cannot go off the trail that has been set out for you and you can’t get lost. After walking for a long time, we began to see some interesting things – someone had built a sort of little castle, and then there were some altar-type places along the way. Then we arrived at a place where there were three guys sitting around on chairs, chatting with each other. They did not acknowledge us at all, so I don’t know why they were there. More French employees doing nothing. But next to them I saw that we were at the entrance to the “Ossuary”, which is a final resting place for human remains. A sign asks that you please not take flash photos.

From here, there are more tunnels but, once I went in, I realized the walls of these tunnels are made of skulls and bones, piled on top of each other from the floor up to the level of my head. They are packed in very tight, and arranged quite neatly, with rows of skulls separated by rows and rows of big bones, probably femurs, until the top is just loose bones. Some skulls have holes in their heads, and I wondered if the people were killed by these injuries or if this is damage from moving the bones. This atheist had the urge to bless myself as soon as I walked in – an automatic remnant of my Catholic school experience, a way to ward off evil as I hoped the dead were really gone and their spirits not hovering here getting angry at our intrusion, treating their final resting place like it’s some tourist trap, which is exactly what we were doing. These narrow, dark tunnels reminded me of the movie “Alien”, that it would be so scary to make a story about an unhappy spirit down here going into a visitor and living again and coming back out into the world all angry and evil. It was totally freaky to think how the walls surrounding me were made out of people, literally. I have never been surrounded by human skeletons. I wanted to be careful walking, and this got trickier the farther in we went. The ceilings began to drip water and make the floors slippery. I did not want to slip and grab the walls to keep from falling.


Catacombs of Paris

Some of the walls had signs identifying where these particular remains had come from and when. I could not read them since they were in French, except for one that said these people had died in fighting at the Tuileries in 1792. I think that was when Louis XVI was being held prisoner at the Tuileries Palace after the revolution. Wow. Lots of people died that day. I thought, we all end up like this, just skulls and bones are all that’s left. But these people, thousands of them, all nameless now, each one had a life, and I wonder about them, when I look at a skull in the wall, who were you? Makes me feel insignificant too. Someday, when the last person who has a memory of me is gone, then I will be gone too. Catacombs – very worth the 8 euro price of admission.

But then there are the spiral stairs to climb at the end, a long way up and exhausting. I had to rest on a bench before exiting. The guy there at the end didn’t search my bag, and I thought anybody could just take bones if they wanted to. There is no one to watch you in there. You exit in an entirely different place, about 45 minutes after entering. A truly unique experience. The sign was right – I think it would be difficult for children and people with “nervous disposition”, and is a weird and strange enough experience for the rest of us. I started to wonder how long it takes for bones to become dust. They used to tell us in church on Ash Wednesday “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Some of these bones have been here for centuries, so how long does it take for our bones to turn to dust?

With all of the beggars and thieves and subway musicians and human remains I saw today, I actually feel pretty fortunate. I’m grateful for the life I have today.