Paris Day 3: Bones!

Today is the day we became Parisiennes. We got our inside jokes down pat:

• Everytime a dog walked by, we'd say "un chien!" I guess we impressed ourselves knowing this much french, so we used it whenever possible. Amy noted that were absolutely no ugly dogs in Paris. I agree.
• When we'd get to a traffic light, the pedestrian single was either a red dude ("homme rouge") meaning don't walk or a green dude ("homme vert") meaning walk. We wanted to call him a little green dude, but we couldn't decide whether that was "homme vert petit" (little green man) or "homme petit vert" (green little man) (Do you like Green Little Man?  Do you like them, Sam I Am?)  Also, at one light, we found a man with one leg ("homme vert petite avec un jambe"). Amy joked that if it were a woman, it'd be named Eileen.

So speaking of legs ... which reminds me of femurs, let's have some fun at the Catacombs of Paris!

Tossing Old Bones

After breakfasting on croissants at the Moulin de la Vierge, Amy and I decided to hit the Catacombs. So here's the deal. The French needed a lot of stone to build buildings, and they pretty much picked out all the stuff on the ground. So they decided to dig underground quarries next. They were huge underground caverns, and they dug a big one near the Saint Germain de Pres section of town.

Around 1790, they had a bigger problem - they started running out of land to build buildings. So they had a great idea - dig up old cemeteries and move the bones and skulls where they had room ... like a quarry! You see where I'm going with this. The business of digging up bodies (which were often coffin-less) happened at night. The quarries were consecrated by a priest. And then they were thrown in there. But "throwing" is really too sloppy a word. In fact, their femurs and skulls were snacked neatly into piles that were resistant to falling over. Each dug-up cemetery had its own section in the quarry. A couple of alters marked where priests would say mass before their bones were piled up.


You pay 4 euros to walk through it. It's a couple hundred steps down to the quarry, where you then walk through the eerily lit caverns. When you reach the bone rooms, the sign above says "Here is the Empire of the Dead." As we made our way through, past the five-foot high neatly stacked piles of femurs and skulls, people made nervous jokes. (e.g. Amy says "I see dead people!" ala the Sixth Sense).

After what must've been a half mile of bone piles, the jokes became fewer. Signs with eerie comments in French and Latin mostly said, "Don't laugh at the dead, you will be next."

After must've been a hundred piles of bones and skulls we hit a couple of cave-in spots.  The ceiling above rose from 6 foot to a cavernous 20 foot or so.  The un-caved-in portion has been reinforced with concrete so more doesn't fall.  But it still kind of freaks you out that were were so close to getting pelted with rock.  Amy and I then climbed the stairs to the sunlight again, looked at each other, and felt a little glad to be alive.

Back In the Future

In a city of 850-year-old cathedrals, you start thinking everything modern is banal.  We cured ourselves of this by walking to the Musee d'Arte Moderne de la Ville Paris in the Tracadero section.  This part of town has an American flavor- the streets are named after Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and there was a big, hastily-erected, temporary monument to the World Trade Center (today being close to the 10th anniversary of 9/11.) 

The very first painting we hit was La Fee Electricite, and we spent almost a half-hour looking at it.  Eee gads, how could a painting command that much of our attention?  Well it helps that the damn thing is 10 meters by 60 meters - about 30 feet tall and 180 feet wide!  (The picture above is only the right half of it, and not even the FULL right half!).  It's not a mural.  When you walk up close to it, you can see all the little tiny details that little paintings have.  It's more of a symphony than a theme - it depicts life before and after the invention of electricity, and it's amazingly both complimentary and critical.  You think you might get overwhelmed by such a large painting, but it's a work you can look at both a macro and a micro level.  Amy and I debated lots of little details, and I suspect that's what Raoul Duffy wanted.

Amy's approach to modern art makes sense to me. If the invention of photography makes realist paintings superfluous, then modern art's job is to capture feelings.  So when you look at an abstract painting, it's not to figure out which blobs of ink are the horse and duck, but which are tenderness, anger, and bliss?   So we wandered around, finding works that inspired us.  The big surprise to me was how many paintings invoked a first response of "Ehhhh," only to find, on second look, something completely different and beautiful. 

In true Parisian fashion, there were no shock pieces that American intellectuals gravitate toward (no "poop in a can" here).  Just lots of cool modern art - Matisse, Victor Brauner, etc.  It was a nice, focused time ... as opposed to the Louvre which is just way too much to absorb.

Where the Locals Eat

That night we were so exhausted from walking (10 miles on concrete, plus the Catacombs, plus the art museum) we took a nap. It was 8:30 and we headed for St. Germain district without a recommendation. It was a tough journey. The menus were all posted outside, and we scanned what seemed like a thousand. There were lots of Italian restaurants, lots of Americanized restaurants, resturants that were tourist traps (e.g. Deux Magots.)


After an hour, we finally settled on Café Varenne mostly because I recognized Confit de Canard (duck comfit). Amy had this at the Great Range in the Adirondacks a couple of times. And fortunately … it was exactly the right choice.  Confit is a method of cooking where you marinade the duck for a day or two, then poach it in a low-temperature oven in its own fat.  The duck was crispy, carmelized, and very tender inside. The potatoes were heavenly too. And I've never been a fan of sopping up juice with bread, but I felt compelled to break this tradition here. I would've licked the plate if we weren't eating outside with people strolling past. So wonderful! And we decided to do like the Parisians do and end the meal with a fromage plate. The camembert and toast points were the perfect meal ender.

I thought the waiter was strange, but Amy had him figured out. He was acting reserved and a bit embarassed because Amy and I were making googly eyes at each other.  He was just trying not to step in a tender moment. Once Amy explained that to me, I thought it was pretty cool. Food is not all business to the French, as it is to Americans.  Dinner is like a microcosm of all that's good in life.

As we walked hand-in-hand, Amy noticed I had my shirt on inside-out (unintentionally).  I'm just mentioning this because it's sure to become the fashion trend in Paris in the next few weeks.  Now you know. 

Since it was 12:00 - Round Midnight, as it were - we had to go a jazz club, right? We landed in Chez Papa, dabbled in white wine and Evian, while the combo Take 3 played Bossa Nova and Gershwin. They were superb, and the piano player had the Monkian habit of growling "Yeah!" between phrases.  It was the perfect place for a couple of tired ex-patriate Americans to wind down the day.  

A day of bones: corpse bones, duck bones, and piano bones. And I was tired to the bone. I was all up for slowing down a little.