Adventures in France and Beyond: Week in Review

November 9, 2013

Just because the weather in Paris is crappy this time of year (and this year has really been exceptionally crappy) does not mean that I have time to just sit at home and do nothing. After all, I’m unemployed! I have stuff to do! I have a list of museums and expositions and damn it I’m going to go visit them all! I may not be working the full French work week (35 hours) or the full work week of a teaching assistant (a whopping 12 hours), but I am spending quite a lot of time in museums and in the streets of Paris getting a truly French education. After my amazing visit to the Maison La Roche by Le Corbusier, I knew exactly what the event would be the following Saturday: it was going to be Le Corbusier’s apartment and studio, also owned by the Fondation Le Corbusier, but only opened to the public on Saturday. With that date also written in stone, I had a few days to fill… so what was I to do?!

On Wednesday I decided it was high time to get the mop on the top of my head addressed. It had was early September when I last had a haircut and although there were some who urged me to keep my wavy locks, j’en ai ras le bol (I’d had enough of them). So I decided to get up at a decent hour, have my breakfast and then find a place where I could get a haircut. I also had to go over to the rue Sainte-Honoré to retrieve my carry-on suitcase which had been repaired after a slight boo-boo in the train station some time before, but haircuts first!

As luck would have it, the first coiffeur that I came to, the one that I went to in 2011, appeared to have nobody inside, so I went in to ask if I could schedule and rendez-vous. In the back of the salon were 3 or 4 men and one woman, all sitting and looking at their cellphones (which I think may be the national pastime in France). Upon asking about getting an appointment the woman stood up and asked what I was up to right then and whether I could stay. Well why not!? I had nothing pressing, so into the chair I got.

Unlike going to Razor Ray’s in Bar Harbor which, don’t get me wrong, is a cultural experience, getting a haircut in France is quite a different sort of experience. The woman walked me over to the seat, opened the closet, took out a clothes hanger, and started helping me take off my jacket and scarf. I have two arms and I am quite capable of undressing myself, but there’s something about having a fairly attractive blonde doing it for me that is perfectly okay is my book.

Once everything was put away, she wrapped me in those hairdresser’s cloak things and made sure I was comfortable, and then asked me how I wanted my hair cut. Now, for about 18 years I’ve had the same haircut. (The first five years I had curly blonde hair, which turned into wavy, borderline curly, dark brown hair, which I have today.) I had decided that this time I’d let the hairdresser decide to do whatever he or she wanted. After all, the French are supposed to be the best with fashion and hair, so why not let them take control?! When the hairdresser asked what I wanted I told her that I didn’t want anything too crazy, but basically it was carte blanche. She explained to me what she wanted to do, and I just said okay, mostly because the vocabulary of getting a haircut was nothing I ever learned, and if I did, I’ve long since forgotten. Of course, I do remember most of the words from the ever important: terrorist vocabulary lessons from my French classes, which I’ve only ever used once, the day the Eiffel Tower was closed due to a bomb threat.

Anyway, I was all situated, she had explained what she was going to: trim here, cut there, leave it here, do this there, and so forth, and then she looked at me and said: would you like a coffee? Well actually yes, yes I would! What a brilliant idea. I’ve heard of barbershops offering beer to their clients, and that sounds like a great idea, but before noon on a Wednesday, as lovely as a glass of Chablis or Bordeaux would seem, a coffee seemed heavenly. No sooner had I accepted the offer than one of the other hairdressers came over with my little expresso, piping hot from the Nespresso machine (basically the must-have of every French home, office, and life).

I guess my American mindset said that I would drink my coffee as she got her hair cutting supplies in order and by the time I was finished she would be ready as well, but no. She told me to take my time, enjoy my coffee, and she’d be back when I was do. So I did. I looked in the mirror, I looked at the people on the street, I ate the mousse at the top of the coffee before drinking it. It was sort of like sitting on the terrace of a café, but actually warm! At this point I was really wishing they had the piles of magazines stock piled, both appropriate and inappropriate, that Razor Ray always has on the counter.

About 10 or 15 minutes later I was done and she came back to start the haircut. It was nothing out of the ordinary as far as an urban hair salon goes. Shampoo, cutting, trimming, talking, lots of playing with the hair, finishing it off with hair wax (in 2011 hair gel was in style, but I guess that’s over now), and then paying. Everything was fine until the paying part. 31 Euros is a lot of money for a haircut. In Connecticut I think I always paid 25, which included the tip. In Maine, it was never more than 20. But this was more than 41 dollars! Oof!

The hair cut is fine, and it’s a bit different from normal, but I’m happy with it. From the salon I walked to get my suitcase, came back to the house to drop it off, and then decided to make myself a sandwich and then go do more walking in the centre of Paris. I probably walked a good 10 miles that day (no exaggeration), but it was so nice. It wasn’t a great day, and sure, it sprinkled a bit, but there were so many people out and about that I just really enjoyed myself.

Nighttime strolls in Paris often lead me to places that are otherwise mobbed with tourists during the day.

The next day I decided I would do something a little different. Rather than doing a museum, I would instead visit the Salon International du Patriomoine Culturel (The International Cultural Heritage Salon) which was being held for only a few days in the Carousel du Louvre (the mall-like space under parts of the Louvre). The Salon was really interesting because it was meant to draw attention to the cultural heritage of various countries and regions, mostly French, and to the arts, particularly the “lost arts” of an earlier time.

There were artisans there would did furniture restoration, people who did slate roofs (and made their own slate shingles- a process I had never seen before), people making furniture just as it was done in the 18th century, and so on. There were also lots of regional bureaus of cultural heritage, architects, and so forth. While the vast majority of the exhibitors were European with a few Asian exhibitors thrown in, there was only 1 American exhibitor: the French Heritage Society. As I was looking through their exhibit and their publications I came across one image that I recognized immediately.

As I read more about Petite Plaisance, the Northeast Harbor house of Marguerite Yourcenar I actually found pieces of my own work thrown in. For years the people at Petite Plaisance told visitors that the house was built around 1865, which was the date that Madame Yourcenar had been led to believe at one point. From my first visit to the house and later when I had a chance to explore its nooks and crannies with its director, I was sure the house was much older than 1865. There were too many details that just didn’t add up. Some time later I was researching the Kimball family, who built the original house and actually came upon records of Squire Daniel Kimball purchasing shingles and lumber for its construction in the early 1830s. And here, four or five years after I originally presented this information to the Yourcenar Trust I find it printed in a brochure in an exhibition hall under the Louvre of all places!!

Marquetry work by a Spanish woman

In order to do the cutouts she was actually using a foot-powered saw.

In the same exhibition space was this man carving a table of his own design.

I believe this was a Belgian furniture designer

A metalworker

This company did slate roofs, but this was their advertisement to show their skills in both metalworking and in slate.

This is Aurélie Filippetti, the Minister of Culture, who was swarmed by cameramen, photographers, and people like me who had no idea who she was.

One thing that I found absolutely hysterical at the Salon was that around noon it got very noisy all of a sudden and I started hearing all sorts of pops in the various rooms. I figured that something was going on with the public address system or that maybe things just got noisy around lunchtime. It wasn’t until I started paying attention to the various booths that I figured out what was going on. Yes, it was lunch time, there was no doubt about it. But unlike exhibitors in America, who might have a quick sandwich and a can of coke and keep right on working, the French exhibitors were all popping open bottles of champagne and taking out elaborate trays of cured meats and cheeses for lunch. I was half waiting for them to pull out little cafe style chairs and tables, but instead they just set the bottles of champagne, wine, and meat and cheese platters on top of the Louis XV commodes (a giant piece of furniture) in the corner of the booth, or on any other piece of restored furniture they had nearby. In typical French style the exhibitors were all socializing, drinking, and being merry and it was just really funny to think that they were going to drink for an hour or so and then go back to officially promoting their cultural heritage. For the most part I saw bottles of Champagne, which makes perfectly good sense when one is trying to promote French culture, but I have to wonder, however, about the one Frenchman who restored interior boiseries (carved wood panels, often with very intricate designs) who was gulping down his Jack Daniels and coke.

On Friday it was back to the museum world, and being a rainy, cold, grey, miserable day, it was a perfect day to get some culture. Since it was not an especially nice day outside I decided that I would stay somewhat close to home and go to the Marmottan-Monet Museum, in the 16th arrondissement. Originally constructed as a hunting lodge outside of the city, the museum today is known for its impressive collection of Impressionist artwork (which I will admit is not my favorite genre of art), which includes Impression, Soleil Levant, the painted by Monet that gave Impressionism its name.

Impression: Soleil Levant by Monet, 1872, courtesy of Wikipedia

What was more interesting to me, however, was the current exhibit called “Les Soeurs de Napoléon - 3 Destins it Italiens” which looked at the sisters of Napoleon I and their lives in Italy. The exhibit was a lot more than just that, however. It looked at the Emperor’s entire family and their lives, and it was really incredible. I learned a great deal about the Bonaparte family and the exhibit was beautifully composed. The ground floor of the museum was completely dedicated to the exhibit about Napoléon and his family while the basement was completely dedicated to the Monet collection, was was given to the museum by the artist’s son and is the largest single Monet collection in the world. It is impressive to say the least. Get it, Impressionist, impressive? Even as somebody who doesn’t really like Impressionism and really finds paintings of water lillies and bridges a bit boring, I have to say that there were some great paintings here and I thought it was very interesting to see the changes in Monet’s style as he changed, and particularly as he developed cataracts. On the second floor of the museum was the Marmottan collection of Napoleonic era furniture and art, which was amazing, and was often, interestingly, paired with more Impressionist paintings (mostly portraits) on the wall. Unfortunately it was terribly hard to get decent photos because of the number of people in the museum, so I have very little to show of this great museum.