Day 4: Friday, April 25, Paris

The vaults of Chapelle. They are actually blue, but came out as slightly brown.

Today we went to Saint Chapelle. It is a church that is part of a complex that also houses the Palace of Justice and the prison (Conciergie). It had a long line, and while waiting we talked with the people ahead of us. It was a couple from Alberta, Canada, their son (about 20yo?), his cousin who was studying in England, and one of her friends. The two girls both go to Bucknell and were spending the semester studying in England. Saint Chapelle has two layers, similar to the church of St. Francis in Assisi. The bottom was where the palace workers would worship. While ornate, it wasn’t amazing. Built above it is the main attraction: a tall cathedral built in late Gothic style with stained glass windows housing 1100 Biblical scenes. It is a pretty small church, which makes its verticals seem even taller. It feels very airy – I would guess that 80% of the wall surface area is glass, which is very impressive for a stone building and particularly for a stone building built in 1248.It was built to house the crown of thorns that Jesus supposedly wore on the cross.

For perspective, each window is probably 50 feet tall.

To put things in perspective, the king of France (the only one to be made a saint after his death) paid 40,000 francs to build the cathedral that was an engineering and artistic feat. He paid three times that much for the relic and twice that much for a jeweled display case for the relic. The crown is now at Notre Dame and is only shown on a few days every year.

Our next stop was the Notre Dame courtyard. We briefly saw the spot marking the official city center (signs marking distances to Paris are measured from this point) and then went to the archeological crypt that is underneath the plaza. You can really see the layers – Modern over Renaissance over earlier medieval over Roman.

A burned-out tourist, perhaps?

We headed on to Musee d’Orsay. Paris has lots of art museums, but the Big 3 can be thought of this way: the Louvre is everything up to about 1850, the Orsay is everything from Louvre to Modern, and one other is Modern to present. I really enjoyed the Orsay. It takes up an old railway station, and they did a great job converting it to an art gallery while keeping the original character of the building. It reminded me of the modern art museum in London built in a converted power plant whose name escapes me.

With one of my favorite painters at the Orsay.

At the Orsay we saw Impressionists and Pre-Impressionists, stopping at Van Gogh when the museum closed.

Sacre Coeur as seen through the bottom quadrant of a clock. it hangs on the side of the Musee d'Orsay, and from the inside you can see out.

It was then on to the Louvre. First stop was the Mona Lisa because of the crowds. They have special barricades herding people in front of the picture. I guess after having seen in time and time again I hadn’t considered the fact that it is quite an ordinary-sized painting, or about 2x2.5 feet. The throngs, roped-off area, cameras, and continuous flashes made it seem like the paparazzi mobbing a celebrity, but this celebrity wasn’t running away. After that we just wandered through the seemingly endless halls of the Louvre until it, too, closed its doors on us.

About the Louvre itself: the building was a palace for a long time until Louis XIV moved everyone out to Versailles. I’m not sure when it became an art gallery, but apparently it was the first gallery to be open to the public. The place is monstrous – I don’t know for sure, but I would say it is 1.5 times the size of the main palace at Versailles – and its exterior is beautiful in itself. A working street runs through the building. It makes a U-shape, and I.M. Pei’s glass pyramids are in the bottom of the U. Honestly I don’t like them. They aren’t ugly per se so much as very out of place. They break up the style and period of the surroundings. They look like Apple’s NYC store, but which I think is pretty neat and fits much better in the landscape of NYC.

A cigarette break for a jovial restaurant owner.

Coming home on the subway we transferred at Concorde. The inside of the station is tiled with letters and numbers. It’s like a huge word-search puzzle, but it’s in English. The numbers are in a different section and go chronologically – a block of 1’s, then a block of 3’s, etc. on one side, and blocks of mixed 1’s/2’s and 3’s/4’s, etc. on the other side. The shape and the tiling give it interesting acoustics, and I could almost perfectly hear the conversation that several American girls were having on the other side even though they weren’t raising their voices. Nothing that I could see talked about the station’s design.

Cafe life in Paris is exactly as you might imagine.