The only ticketed item we had in store for us this Saturday (9:30 AM) was the Cluny Medieval Museum on the Left Bank. (The Left Bank named for the side of the Seine you’re on in the direction the river is flowing.) And, mirabile dictu, we were on time! It was too early for the crowds to start showing up, so we experienced that quiet cloistered feeling that, for me, recalls the Middle Ages.
The museum is inside a 15th century mansion built by the Abbey of Cluny on the site of ancient Roman baths. It has an exceptional collection of Medieval art. The most well-known are the Unicorn Tapestries.
And the examples of stained glass artwork are remarkable.
It’s a small museum (to Ella’s liking) so it wasn’t long before we were back on the streets of the Latin Quarter, home of the Sorbonne, where I half expected to run into Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. At this time of day they would most likely be holding court in the Deux Margots or some other nearby café. Jean-Paul might catch me out of the corner of his lazy eye (Simone would have her face buried in a newspaper) and gesture aggressively in my direction with his pipe. Now that I was in Paris, was I being authentic? Was I making the right choices? Or was I just another tourist suffering from bad faith?
Jean-Paul had a point. Did I have a true desire to visit the Louvre and Versailles, or was I culture bound on some virtual Viking Cruise where all my choices were being made for me? Give me a break, Jean-Paul! I freely chose to see the Van Eycks the Viking Cruise didn’t have time for (the boat was only allowed to dock for so long), but I couldn’t help it if the Louvre turned my existential sense of Being into Nothingness. Simone lowers her paper to tell me it was true that my sense of Being was put on pause, but I still had a choice to define my authenticity by what I was not, and I had a chance to do that by refusing to be swept up in the crowd swarming towards the Mona Lisa. But I had never seen the Mona Lisa, Simone! Mais oui, Monsieur Grubb, but what did that get you? Compared to the wonderful sensation of being free?
Here I was walking past bookshops in the Latin Quarter being harangued by ghostly philosophers, when Ella rescued me by steering us towards a garden featuring extinct animals.
Look at that, Jean-Paul! Poor suckers never had a chance. Did that make them any less authentic? Now they decorate flower beds to the joy of children. We should be so lucky.
After the park, Ella hoped I had enough energy to search out some obscure eccentric urban architecture she’d read about. Okay, time to define myself by what I am not; I am not limited to tourist traps. I am free to follow Ella to what appeared on this Saturday to be an abandoned part of the city.
Yep, that’s what we found. A plexiglass stegosaurus sewer pipe snaking its way out of an otherwise unremarkable building. Perhaps it wasn’t a sewer line. Perhaps it was a monster sci fi air duct beginning to take over the block. We were definitely far from the Place de la Concorde.
We made a pit stop at a small pink pastry shop tucked in among the tall dark buildings near the Gare Austerlitz and had a truly decadent but delicious pastry.
Fortified with sugar and caffeine, we took a path by the Seine and went back towards the Latin Quarter where Ella had us looking for Salvador Dali’s sundial.
With everyone rushing by it on the street, we almost missed the unassuming creation.
Then we stopped by the Shakespeare and Company bookstore made famous in the 1920s when its owner and author patron Sylvia Beach sold stacks of James Joyce’s Ulysses when it was being banned all over the place. Normally you wouldn’t think it would be much of a tourist attraction, but it’s a short block from the bridge that spans the Seine in front of Notre Dame, so, yes, it was easy to find due the crowd.
There was a line to get in, but the man monitoring the flow of bodies saw that I was ancient enough to have been a student of Jean-Paul’s and plucked us out of the line to let us in a side door.
Since we were in the neighborhood I couldn’t resist crossing the bridge to gander at the Notre Dame cathedral. Me and a few thousand other people. I could hear Simone yelling at me, “Tu es un esclave!” The rebuilding of the cathedral hasn’t yet been finished, but no worries, they’ve erected stands where the multitude can watch the construction.
