Carnavalet/Carnival

By Eleanor!

Eleanor has become interested in photography, and Mac has started talking to her about lighting and composition and so a few of these will be her gems. My sweet brother and his fantastic little family came and went and we miss them and so off we went back to the Marais (where we'd all spent a couple of amazing days together in an apartment - airbnb, you are awesome) and continued our History of Paris curriculum (begun at the Cluny museum on a day I somehow didn't write about - we'll return I'm sure). I'm taking advantage of gorgeous days to go to museums and walk around neighborhoods - there will be plenty of rain in October, November, and December to keep me in libraries. For now, site visits and thinking about the museum course and tiny tiny to-go espresso cups and small beautiful parks.

These guys

Walking down the streets of Paris, France with three incredibly chatty kids aged 8-12 is pretty much a spectacle every time. The sidewalks are most often quite narrow, so there's a lot of single file walking - none of which deters them from carrying on lively conversations. I'll often turn around and see exactly this picture as I stop at an intersection to feel them bump up into me, oblivious to all but the finer points of the conversation, which, these days, is mostly likely to be concerning their favorite TV show, Lapins Cretins or how cool Guardians of the Galaxy were.

Shop signs

And so, to the Musée Carnavalet, a museum devoted entirely to the history of Paris and which is undergoing MAJOR RENOVATIONS! This is one of my all-time favorite museums: locks of Marie Antoinette's hair, 10-hour clocks from the French Revolution (why not go metric with time?), models of medieval Paris, front pages of newspapers from important moments in history. It's a completely eclectic museum, a museum of stuff - objects and things of what was then the every day which have survived to become emblematic. So: two whole rooms of shop signs, most of them from the early 18th-century, but many many based on medieval shop signs. Don't forget, it was Napoleon who came up with the idea of numbering street addresses. Until him (ah, Napoleon), it was "meet me at the giant scissors."

Creepy shop sign

I'd asked each kid to pick a favorite one: all three chose the eyeglasses. Because, creepy. And they are, aren't they? Just looking out at you across the room. It's early advertising (who could forget those eyes?), it's early wit (the restaurant "Au Bon Coin" is represented by a coing, a quince), it's early Orientalism (ask me about "The Persian," an enormous (7' tall) figure for an exotic goods store), it's early riddling ("Le Chat Qui Dort" - the sleeping cat - is revealed as such by the tiny mouse directly under his nose), it's all here. And the way that it's set up, you feel as though you're walking down a busy street. I hope hope hope that they do not change this room - it has a crowdedness that contemporary museums hate, but which I truly hope it doesn't lose. Watching the kids run back and forth and decode the signs was great joy. And then, on to the Revolution! The 10-hour clock! The hair!

Noooooooo!

The sign pointing up, and the black divider blocking entry, say it all. Well, and the kids' faces. Come on, Oliver, tell us how you really feel. Gaaaa! I'll have to look back through old photographs and hope to goodness that I got shots of the Revolutionary rooms (I'm sure I did) - they are truly old and crowded and surely will be changed. From what I can tell (and show you in a second) thus far, there's definitely a "period room" emphasis in the new rooms. I worry about those only because they tend to throw out things that "don't fit" and you lose your eclecticism that way. Fingers crossed. And hope (though dim) that the renovations will be done before we leave - it's a two-year project the guard told me, and everything was still as it ever was in January of 2013 when I was here with students last... Sorry kids, but look!

Fouquet

This is unbelievable! The unspeakably beautiful Art Nouveau façade and much of the interior of the jeweler Fouquet's shop! It's absolutely breath-taking!!! I've been coming to this museum for 25 years and have never seen anything like it - was it somehow in storage all along? a new donation? There are several rooms now (a ball room, a reception room) from multiple different Parisian sites - this is way beyond a period room, this is a re-creation and an environment. All soft, warm wood contrasted with smooth bronze: the flourishing young woman here holds bejeweled necklaces, and the interior (hard to photograph) has a stained glass window of a peacock atop of which is a 3-dimensional bronze peacock! It took our breath away. We've been pointing out the Art Nouveau Metro signs whenever they appear and Oliver put the stylistic pieces together - nice!

Proust

After that, there's a return to the period room, or rather a series of period bedrooms of famous people who lived in Paris. How all of Proust's bedroom came to the Carnavalet is surely a tale in and of itself. That's quite a twist, having a portrait of his father, the professor of hygiene and medicine, Adrien Proust, the very man who kept telling Proust to get out of bed already. Mac introduced me to him because he apparently did some work with neurasthenia, this new illness of modernity, this lassitude and fatigue. It's been claimed for Proust (and here I am out of my depth) whether by his father, himself, or posterity I don't know.

By Eleanor!

Mac met us outside the Musée Carnavalet, himself emerging from his library into the crowd. There's a wonderful phrase, "prendre un bain de foule" - literally to take a bath in the crowd, but metaphorically, hmm: to enjoy the crowd? feel yourself surrounded, enter the flow; phenomenologically, to feel yourself energized by the life around you, to let yourself be curious and taken up in something bigger. I don't know which came first, Paris or the phrase, but they meet nicely at the Place des Vosges. Beautiful park square framed by perfectly matching architecture of the haute haute bourgeoisie (Hugo lived here). But times have surely changed: where before, the grass was meticulously weeded by gardeners and vigilantly protected by whistle-wielding park guards, we (the people!) can now sit on the grass. This is no big deal to Eleanor who loved the fountains instead (rightly so), but it does blow my mind that you can now sit on the grass in Paris, France. Still not at Jardin Luxembourg, mind you, but here, and right in the heart of the elite corner of the Marais. Vive la Revolution indeed!

Night!

If I could have simultaneously held a camera and the mountainous falafels we were eating, I would have. The Marais's Rue des Rosiers is rich in these and there are multiple ones to try - these were the feasts of my student days and they haven't stopped. 6euros will still get you all the festivities and then off you go down the street to find yet another park that you can sit in (so many!). And then Paris does that thing, where you start walking and you're seeing things, but you're also just so happy to be in the company you're keeping, and so you keep walking and you don't want the evening to end and it doesn't have to, because the streets keep coming, and Oliver has one more thing he wants to tell us about The Hunchback of Notre-Dame which he'd just finished that morning, and all of a sudden, you totally understand the flâneur, but then there's the metro stop in front of the Hotel de Ville (which is lit up like a birthday cake) and you know this one will take you straight home and so, ok, let's go.

And we even scored four seats together, with Mac just on the other side, and I took this picture in stealth because I don't want to forget them ever reading on the metro, books almost automatically rising out of their satchels, still (to me) tiny bodies settling in to the lull of the train, Eleanor's head on my shoulder, all of us heading homeward.

Tiki Pop

Two days later, I am as puzzled by the exhibit Tiki Pop at the Quai Branly as I was when I first stepped out. Poking around a bit has only made the whole enterprise (and I do believe that's the word) stranger, so there is little to do at this point but plunge ahead and make a few notes, hoping that, when I teach this in the Politics of the Museum class, my students and I might make more sense of it. So. What puzzles. The Display. There's an oscillation between glass cases and experiential environments. You'd think a museum goer would welcome this as "variety," but it comes across as confusing. (Let me say right here that I understand that this oscillation/confusion may be "part of the point," but that point, the ultimate goal of the exhibition, never becomes clear/is torn between a love and a critique of Tiki Pop. Examples of this oscillation are most pronounced in the difference between the glass cases, which present hundreds of Tiki Pop artifacts as these "explain" the phenomenon and constructed spaces, such as the room above, that mingle artifacts with museum props. In yet other cases, Tiki Pop objects are themselves mingled with original Polynesia objects (everything from lanterns to sacred works of art). What does this mean? How is this juxtaposition to be understood? I bought the Beaux-Arts magazine of the exhibition for reasons I'll explain in a bit and found this answer (loosely translated): "In the exhibition, we present several pieces of our permanent collection coming from New Zealand, Hawaii or the Marquesas Islands. In no way are they there to speak for the Polynesia people. Rather, they are points of departure for an exhibition that I would qualify as modern art." There is much to unpack here starting with the ease of separating Polynesian art from the people who made it, and the insistence on a rift between Polynesian art and modern art, that leads to the idea of the artifacts both displaying and explaining Tiki Pop. There's a bit of the "Ils sont fous, les Américains" feel to the exhibition, which after all is subtitled "L'Amérique Rêve son Paradis Polynesien" (America Imagines (says the publication, but dreams is ok) its own Polynesian Paradise) and indeed the same Beaux-Arts article presents America in the 1960s as a time when the country could (again, translated) "achieve its craziest (les plus fous) dreams."

The show ostensibly entertains the years 1945-1968, but also presents a series of literary precedents (Melville, Stevenson, Gauguin slips in there quietly, and there is this intense image of Dix with an ancestral statue of his collection - and I'm going to need Mac to explain the image of Hitler in this book opening). It then presents a series of (frankly) pop psychology explanations: the economic prosperity that followed WWII made for a "stressed" (quoting from the wall text) population seeking escape and leisure. Enter (without discussion of American military presence or the annexation of Hawaii or anything geo-political) the Tiki. The case preceding that of dozens of Tiki glassware for cocktails is entirely dedicated to Prohibition, which explains (?) the American enthusiasm for cocktails. Ok. So am I sounding like an American calling foul at another culture's representation of American culture? Sure - high time that happened to Americans and American culture. But I also want to keep the focus on what is happening to Polynesian culture here, on how it is being portrayed as the soothing elixir to another culture without any analysis of the power structures that needed to be in place for that phenomenon to occur. There's an ease and an inevitability, an inexorability and a relentlessness, to the American appropriation of Polynesia culture. There is neither protest nor critique. A tiny bit comes at the end of the show when the "end" of Tiki Pop is explained by the Baby Boomers' generation being better educated and therefore cynical of their parents' enthusiasm for Tiki Pop culture, marijuana replacing the cocktail (!!!), and (and this has to be my favorite quote from the wall text) America losing its naïveté never to regain it. My defensiveness at my perceived misrepresentation of American culture is short-lived compared to my need for some kind of analysis of the conditions of possibility (beyond literary precedent and pop psychology) of what is an extensive period of political and economic exploitation.

The Curator. Ok, so maybe that need comes from being a humorless academic, which I'm not entirely so there's that. But I also don't think that poking gentle fun at wayward Americans is the only response to the American exploitation of Polynesian culture. And I understand that "Tiki Pop" as an exhibition title will draw more people than "American Exploitation of Polynesian Culture." Nonetheless, I felt the lack of analysis pretty insistently throughout the exhibition. This is the part that I would want to work out with students. What would be the mode, the tone, the emphasis, the material of an exhibit that acknowledges the politics of this cultural phenomenon? In some ways the answer is straightforward: go to history, go to geo-politics, go to economics (trace the movement's trajectory from California to Florida and then its spreading in the Midwest (when and how was the Tiki Bar at the University of Chicago, still in full swing when I was a grad student there opened?) and Everywhere Else in the States), involve Polynesian responses, bring in modern-day scars and inheritances. Bring in Sarah Vowell for goodness sake and have her read from Unfamiliar Fishes. In other ways, things get importantly complicated on questions of who speaks for whom, how dialogues can be created, who speaks with whom, how to live with legacies that prized pleasure and hid pain. Ok, so that's how I might start the conversation. It's not the conversation the curator, Sven Kirsten, is having. A self-titled "urban archaeologist," a cinematographer of music videos and Hollywood movies, and avid collector of Tiki Pop artifacts (whose introduction to Polynesia culture came by way of reading Thor Heyerdahl's book Kon-Tiki, found on his parents' bookshelf in Germany), Kirsten adds this exhibit (and its hefty catalogue) to two previous publications exploring/celebrating the American appropriation of Polynesian culture for everything from hotels to ketchup dispensers that he has dubbed Tiki Pop (The Book of Tiki and Tiki Modern). Once I learned this, I will tell you that I became more skeptical about the provenance of nearly everything from the show being "collection particulière" (private collection). Whose? And whom does the display of these artifacts benefit (knowing that any object that is part of a museum exhibit increases in value)? So that's the ethics component. But back to the insistent need for analysis (which I wanted) vs. presentation (which is done very, very thoroughly - make no mistake, this is definitely the best collection of Tiki Pop artifacts in the world).

I'm in a bind here because (let's just be quick about it) American culture sees professionalism as elitism. So for me, an academic, to decry the lack of academic credentials of the curator of a museum exhibit will be interpreted by many as snobbery on my part. But there is, in fact, a special training that goes into being a curator, one that of course can be stifling and predictable, but also one that, at its best, would have more vocabulary and wherewithal in confronting the complexity of American appropriation of Polynesian culture. In the absence of analysis, this exhibit becomes a loving look with a bit of head-shaking at those wacky Americans and their Tiki Pop. It would be one thing if this benevolent head-shaking occurred in a book or on-line, but in the halls of the Musée du Quai Branly, whose tagline is "where cultures come to dialogue" it is another thing entirely. I'm not seeing the dialogue, as much as I'm seeing a reminiscence, an exposé, an enthusiasm. What I see is immaterial, however, to the thousands of people who have seen the show, and to the hundreds that waited in line to see it as Eleanor and I left it. Tiki Pop sells, as it always has, with an unnerving glee that defies complications.

 The Publications. Very different things get said in different places. The Tiki Pop catalogue is by Sven Kirsten, and published by Taschen (run by Benedikt Taschen, who also emigrated from Germany to California - and lives in the awesomely cool Chemosphere by John Launter no less!). The Beaux-Arts magazine devoted to the exhibition is the only place where I've found French academics and museum professionals doing the writing. Now, the Musée du Quai Branly has a long and complicated history (chronicled in Sally Price's incredible book), but it's within these pages that you'll find analysis of the annexation of Hawaii in 1959, here that you'll see a photograph of Obama growing up in Hawaii (!), here that you'll see more intertwining of the European articulation of "primitivism" with American Polynesian consumerism. There's analysis and a score of images not in the exhibition (and of course fewer images than are in the exhibition - have to go to the catalogue for that). Finally, there's the strangest little publication. At the entrance, or the exit (when I noticed it) is a little blue fold-out paper. I picked it up, my head full of images of Tiki statues, full of questions of how this all (the phenomenon, the exhibition) came to be, full of curiosity about how the show ends, with the definitive end of Tiki Pop - with its revilement by the next generation as kitsch, racist, colonialist (the words of the wall text), with this "loss of naïveté" of American culture. And I look at this little blue fold-out and I see instructions for How to Host Your Very Own Tiki Party...! In English, with links to cocktail recipes and a Deezer playlist (put together by the Musée du Quai Branly) and suggestions for the right décor. And my puzzlement was thus sealed. Until further consideration (in class), as they say.

P.S. And then we went to Café Branly, which is of course very expensive, but the Café Gourmand is reasonably priced and comes with these fantastic little delectables. Fantastic little companion comes separately.

Vitaville!

My awesome little partner

First of all, it's fun to say: "Vitaville!" Second of all, it has something like ten different ways of being understood: "Vite! à ville!" "Vita! Ville!" (ok, two but still - very witty). Third, it was wonderful. A day-long municipal fair, in which all of the "associations" (what I think we would call clubs) are present with booths and sig-up information and demonstrations. The "Association Familiale Catholique" is right next to the "Association des Musulmans de Courbevoie;" sign up for "Kavadenn" to learn Breton dancing or go to the next booth over for Krav Maga. It's all here! Including, bien sûr, a crêpe stand and Orangina and cider for this afternoon duo. The only thing that comes close to resembling this (minus the cider) is the college activities fair where I teach. When all interests come together and you're invited to bring your curiosity and your good will, and there is something utopic in the air, hoping things could always be full of this much possibility.

Mac would know these dances

There's the Fun Bollywood Show club which learns dance routines from Bollywood films (and yes, there's a kids' dance club, and yes Eleanor is interested). They did a full-on demonstration. In her introduction, the club president said something interesting: "If you're an "amateur des films Bollywood" you will surely recognize the dances." As I watched the third one, I wondered if maybe I hadn't seen it in one of the films that Mac shows for the Bollywood section of his Indian Art class. I bet he'd know them all. But also, this means that there's Bollywood film screenings going on, and people who love them enough to learn the dances.

Le grand classique

On the same stage, within the hour: Breton dancing. In some ways, this afternoon, if not Courbevoie itself, is the dream (with all the simultaneous vividness and distance of a dream) : a complex society with a well-scripted social contract in which one can nurture interests and desires. Courbevoie is, in so many ways, the France I don't see in the museums and other cultural self-presentations of the state. It has less pomp but more circumstance: in habits and structures I don't fully understand yet, it houses dozens of different cultures and languages. There are combinations like I've never seen: not just the Halal-certified sushi, and the free Arabic lessons (from the (equivalent of) Parks and Recreation), but also the president of the chess club (with whom I had a nice long chat) who dreams of retiring to Cincinnati. I love it here, the rhythms of this neighborhood, the individuality of possibility. By the end of the tour of 100+ booths, Eleanor and I had picked up information about the rowing club for Mac, and I'd had a nice talk with the fencing club about Oliver joining ("question de langue" - it moves fast, but what better motivation to learn French quickly!), we'd looked at an art club for kids, and I'd thought about yoga. Our curiosity has only multiplied and somehow our sense of home grew. This happens at some point: this fantasy that wow, wouldn't it be wonderful to live here, really live here? Not always have departure in mind, not keep the critical stance to French culture, but just go in, just enter it and buy into the social contract and the ideals and the contradictions and the problems. Because, Vitaville, because municipal and federal services, because even the contradictions and hypocrisy are provocative of a better society. There isn't the time and the money, and there is the reality of our lives (!), but every once in a while, there is this invitation to think of living here. (It's both not as crazy and just as crazy as it sounds: I was born here and could activate citizenship proceedings, but God, try being a female university professor in France, try starting anything once you're over the age of 40 - no, this is definitely a ridiculous day dream, but it's interesting to me how pressing it gets sometimes). I've had several students accept this invitation and make their lives here. I admire them and wonder about the pleasures and challenges of full engagement in French life, not just scholarship and teaching materials, but life.

In the meantime, here are a few seconds of Breton dance and au revoir from Vitaville!

Off the Beaten Path of the 19th Century

!

Yes, that's exactly what you think it is: a cast of a hand that's been bronzed, gilded, and turned into an ink well. It's in the first room of the Musée de la Vie Romantique, the one filled with George Sand's prized possessions, and I was immediately drawn to it because at first glance it looks so very much like a medieval reliquary. When I asked Eleanor, completely rhetorically, "Isn't that interesting?" I got the resigned reply, "When interesting comes with gross, yes." Poor Eleanor - she favors her father in loving modern art, sans serif font, and sleek architecture, and is ever-dismayed (lately more resigned, though) at my love of all things "gross" in visual and material culture. But come on! An inkwell? How cool is that?

Dendrite painting

Very cool, it turns out, as were most of the objects in the museum. It's one of fourteen City of Paris Museums, with free admission for all. (Free admission!) There's perceptible difference between these and the national Monuments Historiques museums - less sleek, smaller scale, more run-down (the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Musé Galeria being the exceptions), visited by serious fans of the personages in question. This museum is in a home studio that was owned by the painter Ary Scheffer and frequented by a Veritable Who's Who (love that phrase) of Romantic heroes: George Sand, Frederick Chopin, Franz Liszt, others and others. Yet, for all the 19th-century feel of the place, the presence of the Middle Ages remains palpable throughout your visit. Those medieval connections start to take you down some very strange paths. The painting technique known as "dendrite" is a brief diversion from said path I can't not mention. Very popular in the 19th century, and (yes!) named for the same effect found in stone (which of course is where I associate the term), an effect achieved by spreading gouache on the paper and then mashing it down to reveal shapes that are then modeled and built up with drawing and painting. George Sand was quite good at the technique, and this is one of her landscapes. Dendrite. Who knew I would find a geologic term in a museum devoted to the 19th-century life of the Romantics?

Le Giaour, by Scheffer

No surprise that I would find the intersection of neo-medievalism with Orientalism - there's pretty much an entire room devoted to paintings by Scheffer of themes by Sir Walter Scott and Gottfield-August Bürger and, here featured, Lord Byron. I knew about Byron's Sardanapalus play from 1821 because I teach it every year to introduce the concept of Orientalism. But no, wow no, I did not know about "The Giaour" -  a fragmentary poem by Byron published in 1813 whose Orientalism (specifically along the lines of fascination and detailed descriptions of an ascribed violence and despotism) seems even more extreme, if that's possible. I haven't read the 700+ line poem yet, but I will, as this painting and this tale intersect so many of the themes that I want to explore in this politics of the museum course, and so many of the themes of the Middle Ages, medievalism, ethnicity and identity that I'm being pushed to think through by the brilliant writing going on at In the Middle. For now, suffice it to say that there is a young woman, there is a man named Hassan, and there is the Giaour (a derogatory Turkish word for Christians), and that there is love, combat, and death - and this painting by Scheffer which presents the Giaour as a Crusader (to my eye) and (I hope you can see this in the image) Hassan emerging from the shadows to the left. Romancing this violence for as long and as fervently as the 19th century did has laid down some very dangerous ground being trod pretty freely today by Game of Thrones, other fictions, and a great deal of geo-political reality. The thought I keep coming back to, the obvious and insistent but still highly debated one, is that France is not as "French" as the Front National argues, that the very concept of France deeply intertwines ethnicities and histories and fantasies, maybe never comfortably but always and always intensely.

Café romantique

Which gave us much to talk about during our café romantique in the Jardin de Thé (and café, thank goodness) adjoining the museum. The air was cool, the ivy was growing, and the low murmur of French people having intimate café conversations surrounded us. Two people next to us were quizzing each other on Spanish and Arabic vocabulary words (yes, wow!), the doting grandfather two tables over helped his grand-daughter out of her school smock and gave her an Orangina, Eleanor played with her Playmobils, my mom and I talked, the espresso hit the spot. It was here that I received a phone call from the bank heralding yet another delay in the opening of our bank account (now they want a marriage certificate (original, of course) because we have two different last names - Love. Of. God.).

Splendor

So with the momentum of annoyance and the need to shake things off, we plunged back into the city - well, took a nearby bus down to nearby Opera - and decided to engage in some serious flânerie. After all, it's free to look, and until these money troubles are over (we lose so much money not having this French account - rant to come another day), that is a lovely thing indeed. Like a beacon, the Lindt shop called to our Swiss hearts and in we went, to be greeted by a lovely person offering us truffles. Why yes, thank you, Paris - you take and you give.

Frieze of La Maison Dorée

The wild forest hunting scenes of the frieze of La Maison Dorée on le Boulevard des Italiens, for example - since 1974 the corporate headquarters of BNP Paribas, precisely the bank that is making us nuts (of course, America made them nuts, too, so I guess it's all love and war and banking or whatever). You walk down the Boulevard des Italiens and you see this incredible building and its golden gilded balconies and its hunting scenes, and then you come to an intersection and there's Sacré Coeur shimmering in the distance. So yes, flânerie, meandering is a gift here.

Regarde! Un hôtel!

Nowhere more wonderfully than when you happen upon a "passage" in Paris. Passage Jouffroy was one I'd heard about but never chanced upon and it is especially magical. The Musée Grévin (which, granted, looks pretty awful but which we're going to go to anyway at some point I just know it) is off of it, and then the rest are antique book dealers and toy shops (lots and lots of those) and this one enormous place called the "Palais Oriental" - a bazaar indeed. There was one little shop entirely devoted to doll house furniture (patisserie displays in miniature! the smallest tables and chairs!) that Eleanor particularly liked. And then, this little hotel at the end of the Passage. If ever I'm in Paris in the winter, I'd definitely stay here, because what would be cozier than coming home down the Passage? I've had fun reading the reviews on various websites - its two stars are definitely eccentric...

Allons-y!

... and around the corner from Chartier. Inimitable Chartier, wonderful Chartier, loud boisterous Chartier, the perfect place to end our walking tour of 19th-century Paris. The place where a dear friend of mine was absolutely forbidden from ordering spaghetti by the waiter ("C'est pour les enfants!" he protested - she had the roasted chicken and he was mollified (and it was delicious)). Eleanor ate almost an entire pavé rumsteak (with its herb butter) and my mom and I highly recommend the perch in a leek sauce. The things that look like card catalogues against the walls are "casiers" in which workers would leave their napkins after they'd eaten the restorative (thus our word "restaurant") broth, le bouillon, that Chartier was famous for starting in 1896. It's famous in my heart for feeding me time and again as a student, still being amazingly affordable today, and plunging us into a noise and bustle that perseveres, and will persevere one feels, unabated, nourishing all human complexity.

Opera Garnier indeed

Tragedy Shoes

One could say, certainly Garnier would have said, that only in Paris, France could tragedy be so well shod. And so she is, with her companion Comedy, two caryatids of classical features with dark marble skin, at the Opera Garnier, which we toured today. Missing Mac, Iris and Oliver, we drew closer to them by walking in the footsteps of a Winter Term trip in which Mac and Iris went to the Garnier with students. Where else but here could tragedy be so nonchalant? could fantasy be so monumentalized? could the haute bourgeoisie be so very well ensconced? Here, tragedy sings. Here, red velvet assuages everything. Here, there was ice cream at intermission in the 1860s. I have never known a place be so over-the-top and yet fully in command of its seriousness.

A glimpse of glamor

See what I mean? I'm not sure I do yet (and of course now I have a million questions for Mac). Over-the-top (like make-believe) is another great English turn of phrase. Over-the-top of Versailles (on which the mirrors and chandeliers were based), over-the-top of the Sistine Chapel (on which the ceilings were based). Over-the-top of a new public sphere inhabited by this haute bourgeoisie as it ate iced cream, a luxury that a mere 50 years ago only the mightiest (like Napoléon and Josephine, who actually had some really nice glacière (porcelain ice holders) inexplicably (to me) featuring 17th-century Dutch paintings) could afford). But I digress. How could I not? This place takes you everywhere: to the Vatican and Versailles, over any top that had been known to exist...

Coffee!

... to an unspecified Africa, wrenched into Western fantasy by colonialism, who, windswept, liberally pours coffee while her companions of the world offer tea and pastries and meats in Gobelins Tapestries all around the room. The word consumption comes to mind in so many ways. One of the things I'd want to ask Mac is "Who was here?" Was it the 1% of their day? Was is some 5%? The only other place I've ever seen this much glowing (of gold and gild and glass) are the Soviet metros of the people - those opulent hallways of transit. And now it is open to, shall we say, a much greater percentage (truly, as a student, I heard Debussy's "La Mer" here for the equivalent of $5). Communal luxury is an interesting phenomenon. It is by necessity both momentary and unforgettable.

Salamanders!

There are moments here when opulence outstrips pretense and reaches for something (I do wish I had a more critical vocabulary here) totally cool. This antechamber to the smoking room (who smoked here? were they all horrid? does it matter? is the Garnier a monument to some Belle Epoque past or is it just now actually coming into its own as a spectacle - never mind the spectacle it was meant to host?), the antechamber to the smoking room has a ceiling of golden flames heralding its title of Sun Room that only the lyrical salamanders on the ceiling can survive. Pretensions to François Ier and his salamander emblem? Or cool counterparts to the bats (!) on the ceiling at the opposite end of the hall in the Moon Room? Tragedy's shoes, the sun's salamaders - this seems a new iconography of luxury.

Le Fun

And so where else to end our excursion but the Galeries Lafayette where, a quick modernist generation after the Opera Garnier, stained glass and glimmering things could be available to any visitor. You don't even have to buy anything. And so Eleanor and I tried on eight different perfumes (one on each side of our arms) and multiple clip-on earrings and pearl necklaces and played in the make-believe section of another palace of over-the-top. History and commerce vie with each other in the 9th arrondissment, along the Grands Boulevards and up the stairs of the Opera Garnier. Perhaps that is why Tragedy stands in such fashionable contrapposto, alongside Comedy, framed by fantasy.

These Days

And then there are extraordinary ordinary days. Like when your brother and his awesome wife and their two fantastic boys come to where you live, and you find yourself very soon at the park and the kids are running around and maybe you've actually been here a while now. And it's on this day that I realize that the kids completely know their way around our neighborhood on their scooters, that they're the ones getting the baguettes for lunch and dinner (oh yes), that Iris has memorized the bus stops from La Défense to our house, that we love our house very much, and that somehow this has become home base.

Little kids have a way of simultaneously slowing things down and speeding them up. It is one of their many powers. Little Henry and tiny, mighty Emmett guided us through a dreamy afternoon of play, play, play. I'd forgotten that: the play all day. I now have kids who (need to?) retreat into their own worlds for a bit - books, intimate conversation, drawings, videos, books. It's quite something, then, to see my kids enthralled by their cousins, to enter that play, and go with it. To walk with it. I know that Oliver is 12 (France reminds me every day), and I see that in this picture and I can't see it. It's Oliver at any age, it's Oliver fixed in time but always Oliver. He's always been the kid to take the little kid's hand. Just now everybody's bigger.

And so three different days. Everyone but me and Eleanor and my mom are off to Nice where my sister-in-law has a conference (nice!). I'll shift work to start on a book review that's due in three months (fresh!) and we'll see what Paris has to offer three generations all at once (thus far, Musée de la Vie Romantique calls - we'll see if we can get Eleanor to join my new George Sand obsession: I've been reading Indiana (because why wouldn't I? Sand's first novel as Sand, the heroine is the daughter of colonial settlers, highly recommended by esteemed colleagues, and the heroine's name is Indiana!), and we're eager to see a movie - good thing the new Pariscope comes out tomorrow!). We have our habits, it turns out - there for us to realize when something wonderful happens.

Musée Nissim de Camondo meets Malmaison

Abraham Solomon de Camondo

The Musée de Nissim de Camondo and Malmaison meet in the Middle East, are furnished by far-flung itineraries of modernity, and come to rest in Paris. A section of my "Politics/History of Display" course will feature house museums, specifically those that are shaped by their owners' identities and/or collections outside of Europe, and these sites offer treasure troves of possibilities. "Treasure" is an operative word, in all its problematics. The houses house treasures, the houses are treasures, all bespeaking histories of fascination, exchange, and exploitation (capitalism and culture) . There's no comparing them: they are stopping points along the long trajectory that has linked France and the Middle East since the Crusades in the 12th century. Nissim de Camondo's path to Paris begins in 1492, when Queen Isabella of Spain exiled all Jews from her kingdom. The family emigrated to Venice, and 300 years later when the Austrians came, to Istanbul. At the very same time that Napoleon was leading his wild campaigns in Egypt and Syria (1798-1801), Abraham Solomon Camondo and his family established what would become the Imperial Ottoman bank in 1863 with a thriving subsidiary in Paris as of 1869.

Beatrice and Nissim de Camondo

In 1870, King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy made Abraham a hereditary count, changing the family name to "de Camondo" in honor of the family's contributions to Italy during another set of Austria attacks. A new country bestowing an ancient title on an esteemed family. Abraham would join his son Moïse in Paris and die there three years later. He would be buried in the Jewish cemetery of Istanbul and that wish, and images of him, close out the long chapter we know of this family that began in Spain. The rather stunning shift in costume and demeanor from Abraham to Nissim in these two photos tell a tale of modernity, of France and the Ottoman Empire, of this family negotiating two worlds. Moïse, son of Abraham, built the house you can visit today in the posh 16th arrondissment near the Parc Monceau in 1911, and raised his two children, Nissim and Beatrice, there.

Books bound unbounded at the
Musée Nissim de Camondo

There is a strange intimacy in this house. Everything seems so whole, so complete: no restorations, no substitutions: these are the books of Moïse, these are the hallways that Nissim and Beatrice ran down, this is the dining room where they ate, here is the porcelain collection they used. The house was only lived in for 14 years: Nissim was killed in 1917, serving in the French air force. It was then that Moïse decided to will the house to the French government. When he died in 1935, the house was given to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which is still its steward today. It heralds the house not as the culmination of hundreds of years of displacements and achievements, not as a crossroads of France and the Ottoman Empire, but as one of the finest collections of 18th-century furnishings anywhere in Paris. Which it is. But.

The Grand Salon

So this would be one of the conversations we would have in this class: what is spoken, written up, and celebrated in any museum setting; what is mentioned, elided over, glossed and in what proportion. Because the only thing that acknowledges the end of the Camondo family at Auschwitz, where Beatrice, her husband and her two young children died in 1944, is an inscription in the entrance drive stating the names and relationships of the house's inhabitants. The big bunch of fresh flowers in the red, white, and blue of the French flag tell a story of more care, more attention - what were the decisions made? Would the tragedy frame the house or the house the tragedy? It's not remotely that simple, but that is certainly the tension I felt going into the house - my mind thinking back to that entrance inscription, while the text everywhere drew my attention to this fine 18th century rug, this amazing Louis XVth chair. And it is an astounding collection of French 18th-century furniture and furnishings.(1) And here, in being astounding and complete it becomes very difficult. I need to think of a critical framework that can sustain the question: "How dare this furniture survive and its collectors not?" How dare this fussy, overblown, furniture of scandalous French privilege survive and its philanthropic, complex, Jewish collectors not? Maybe this should get shut down right away: maybe there is no critical framework for moral indignation, or historical shock. Maybe the framework should be to trace the trajectory: to track what would motivate Moïse, a child of Istanbul, a banker of an international world renewed by early 20th-century capitalism, to collect works of art heralded as the epitome of French style and French elegance, which was itself derived from the early flourishing of capitalism and the availability of Indian cotton and Chinese silk that it created. To trace the violent rupture in the trajectory so that in 1943, neither Beatrice's conversion to Catholicism, nor her philanthropic work continuing that of her father, nor her socio-economic standing, nor her friends could stop the Gestapo. I could use help on this. It's a powerful testing ground for the clash of materiality and ethics, for an unforgiving and unconscionable presence in the face of human absence.

Paintings at Malmaison

To say that Napoleon could fill a room is an understatement. And no, I'm not trying to be funny. His presence at Malmaison brings with it the ghosts and shadows of hundreds of thousands more. He peopled it that way, and these presences remain. Past the entrance hall, past the billiards room, is a small antechamber which houses the six portraits of the Sheiks of the Divan of Cairo that Napoleon had commissioned when he was First Consul (between 1799-1804). He had them painted by a Michele Rigo, and they hung in the billiard room until 1810. There's a conversation.

The Egyptian heads on chairs

In a geopolitic harkening back to the Crusades, and certainly Christopher Columbus's forays, Napoleon attempted to thwart Britain's access to its colonies in India by controlling Egypt. A complex series of moves that would ultimately fail militarily but gain tremendous traction culturally (the Rosetta stone, and Champollion's translation and an enormous chapter of Orientalism). How Napoleon brought his campaign in Egypt and Syria "home" will be what I would want to study. These portraits (minor academic painter, a series, billiard room?, friends and colleagues?), the chairs of almost all of the rooms, with their Egyptian heads at the arms...

Tent ceiling of the Council Room

... the tent ceiling of the Council Room. Deep in the research of my dissertation, I found Napoleon exclaiming to Alexandre Lenoir in the 12th-century room the latter had established at the Grands Augustins, "Cette lumière me rapelle ma belle Syrie!" or words to that effect. I went nuts with it because here was Napoleon being reminded of Syria by a room illuminated with 13th-century French stained glass. There's much to read on Napoleon and Egypt and Syria and I can't wait to do so for this class. In the meantime, his Council Room sits, bedraped by/as an enormous military tent, as these had been set up in Europe, as he had set them up in Egypt.

Shock

You could say that Napoleon and his ambitions filled just about any space he inhabited, but Malmaison, this house that belonged to Josephine, this retreat, this haven, 30 minutes from Paris, was where he worked. It, along with the Tuileries, was actually the seat of the French government in the early 20th century. Napoleon and his counselors, and eventually visitors like Thomas Jefferson would come here and would do things like sign the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 (I need to keep researching this, I've found "Paris" as the site, thus far, but the Treaty of Ildefonso of 1800, in which Spain returned the Louisiana territory to France was definitely signed here - you see Oliver and Iris processing the shock of Really Big Things having been decided, signed and sealed, in the very room where they stood. That's its own kind of Stendhal Syndrome).

And now to dine

It's all here: Egypt, France, Italy (the dining room is modeled on a Roman villa, breezy between the billiard room and the council room), Louisiana, Haiti (the rebellion that was part of the push for Napoleon to sell the Louisiana territory), more. The very tricky question of asking "Qui est Français?" (who is French?) and the very nasty term "français de souche" (basically, French without a history of immigration) are both fantasies undermined by the very museums used to herald them. France has never been as French as some strains of French politics and culture would have it be.

Josephine's Bedroom

The fantasy starts to unwind right here, in these museums presented as emblematic of core French culture. In Moïse de Camondo's pleasure in Louis XV furniture, in Josephine's bedroom presented as a sultan's tent, lines blur and objects and desires, identities and trajectories meet to confuse certitudes and ideologies. This makes France (and everything it purports to be) much more complicated, much more complex, and brings a whole host of questions to American museums and American identity as well.


(1) The Cognacq-Jay Museum has such a collection as well, but it's more of a museum than a house. In looking around, it seems that the Cognacq-Jay collection was also given to the French state, this time in 1929. And its collector was the founder of the La Samaritaine department store. There's something to examine in who is collecting 18th-century French furniture in the early 20th century. I envision the furnishings on the market, more than impoverished aristocracy selling it all off - or a combination of the two.