Thanks to EDUCO, I got another shot in a French kitchen, this time, making macaroons.
Unlike the last cooking class, which was held in a private apartment, this one was professionally-run, in a patisserie, which probably explains why it was so absolutely mediocre. Not only was almost everything measured and mixed for us in advance, but the instructor was constantly switching to English to explain even the most basic concepts (rather than just words like tamiser, "to sift"). There were supposed to be 10 of us, but 11 showed up, so I ended up being paired with two very stupid, very hedonistic girls, which was rather a disappointment.
That aside, I learned a little bit about French pastry-culture, including some cooking words involved in the making of macarons. For instance, one should blend the initial mixture of egg whites and white sugar until it forms a bec d'oiseau (bird's beak) on the end of the beater. Ordinary macarons are cookies, just like American macaroons, but Parisian macarons also contain a garniture (filling) inside of a sandwich of the two biscuits (cookies) which together form the coque (shell); the flaky edges are called the coloret (no translation, as far as I know, and I'm uncertain of the spelling). After the initial mixing, one begins the macaronage, ("macarooning"): I'm not kidding; to "macaroon" is a real word in the French language. Macaronage consists of quickly and repetitively beating and scraping the batter against the side of the bowl, with the help of a sort of flat flexible plastic scraper, in order to create a certain texture; when the batter descends in rubans (ribbons), you know that the batter is finished. After this, you pour the batter into a large bag with a douille (nozzle), and turn the bag over onto itself, forming a jupe (skirt). Using this, you dollop the batter into little macaroon-sized drops onto a layer of waxed paper affixed tightly to a baking sheet. One of the stranger processes follows this: the thorough beating of the baking sheet against the kitchen sheet, in order to égaliser (to level) the batter.
If you are a fancy pastry chef, then you have a special not-quite-oven, which will allow you to warm the macarons, and allow them to form a croûte (crust). Following this is a period in the real oven, at 100-120 degrees Centigrade (depending on the individual character of your oven. The macarons cooked, after a 10-minute cooling phase which I know well from home, they are ready to be removed from the waxed paper (otherwise, they will be torn apart). The macarons are paired, and then filled -- traditionally, macarons parisiens have a dollop of confiture de framboise (raspberry jam), surrounded by a periphery of cream; raspberries are nice and acidic, and therefore cut the sweetness of the very sugary cookies. Parisians have discovered all sorts of things to put into their macaroons, however, and ours included chocolate, and creams flavored with vanilla, pistachio, and speculoos, respectively. Just to get very decadent, you can also apply a metallic red powder to the exterior of the raspberry macaroons, just to give them that appetizing gleam that indicates freshness.
We ate a few of the macarons, but brought half-a-dozen to a dozen back to our residences (in my case, via the library). The pâtissiere told us to keep them in the refrigerator for 24-48 hours, in order to allow them to acquire a soft texture, and to lose their brittleness. My 11 macarons have been chilling (in every sense of the word) in my fridge for about 40 hours now, so I'm thinking of bringing them out to share with Jamie (and whoever else is in her room) this evening.
The pâtissiere told us that she'd send us all the recipe; when she has, I'll addend it to this post. If you're planning on living in the CJL this spring, you can probably count on my attempting to make these (kosher, of course), at least once. Maybe during finals week, when we'll need all the cookies we can get our paws on.
~JD
"Je commandai aux quatre secretaires d'Etat de ne plus rien signer du tout sans m'en parler... et qu'il ne se fit rien aux finances sans etre enrigistre dans un livre, qui me devait demeurer, avec un extrait fort abrege ou je pusse voir, a tous moments d'un coup d'oeil, l'etat des fonds et des depense faites ou a faire" [I ordered the four secretaries of state to no longer sign anything at all without speaking to of the matter... and that nothing be done in regard to the finances without it being registered in a book, which would stay with me, with a highly-abridged summary where I could see, at any moment with just a glance, the state of the funds, and of the expenditures made and yet to make] ~ Louis XIV, Memoires.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Exposé #1
On Wednesday, I delivered my first exposé; an exposé is an analysis of a reading, a complete unfolding of its meaning and its importance. This was for my Louis XV class, and the reading of the week was an extract of Montesquieu's Persian Letters, an epistolary novel which I absolutely adored when I read it in English with Prof. Kaplan (if you ever have the opportunity, I recommend the Penguin Edition's translation). There were fragments of two letters, both of which discussed the French monarchy, its absolutism, and its similarities and differences to the "oriental despotism" that reigned in Persia.
I worked exhaustively on preparation, consulting multiple works, in French and English, in order to fully illuminate all of the references and allusions. I read about venality of posts, about royal finances, about the king's scrofula-healing touch, about Persian Letters in general, and about ennoblement. In order to better illustrate my points, I accompanied my lecture with a graph and a series of statistics, and with a painting by Watteau, stapled to my bibliography (when you deliver an exposé in France, you need to type up your bibliography and the outline of your lecture, and pass it around the class). I had already verified with the professor that I could have a longer time limit than my classmates, in order to compensate for the fact that I would be speaking more slowly and more clearly, due to my heavy American accent. I rehearsed twice all the way through, and also practiced snippets, correcting the many grammatical errors that I had failed to detect when I typed them, and making certain I knew how to pronounce every word that I had typed (for instance, I eliminated the sentence with the word guigogne, which means Russian doll, because I didn't want to mispronounce it).
I have never delivered a lecture to such a sterile audience; sterile is the only way to describe the reception. I didn't notice anyone looking at the graphs or the painting; nobody took notes; nobody asked any questions; and when I checked, twice, to verify that everyone could hear and understand me, nobody budged: all I received were blank stares. In other words, for all I know, nobody could understand a single word that I spoke. After I had finished, the professor commented (note: French professors often give students constructive criticism after their exposés) that I should not have analyzed the letters separately, and that there was more than just Montesquieu (I'm still not certain what this latter comment meant). Then, she told the other students to prepare a three-part breakdown (all analyses come in 3s, and only in 3s, in France) of the reading, i.e., replicate what I should have done. So we sat in silence, literally for 20-25 minutes.
I'm not upset, only puzzled. My exposé was well-organized (I thought), but I guess it just wasn't organized the way it should have been? Why was the class so dead? It wasn't even morning; the class took place from 1:00-3:00 in the afternoon, so nobody should have had any reason to still be half-asleep.
I know that I had problems. I think my biggest problem, if I correctly interpret the professor's words, was that I analyzed the text as a primary source, rather than using it as a template to discuss absolute monarchy. I also might have over-contextualized, even though I cut a fair share of what I had typed. However, I did not limit myself to Montesquieu; I compared his viewpoint to that of some of his contemporaries of the same social class, and also analyzed his view of French history and government in light of modern historiography.
Pauline and I are going to keep on plugging away at our finance ministry exposé this weekend, due in one week from now. Maybe this one will go over better? I remain hopeful.
~JD
"The thrust of Arab opinion in [the 1908 Ottoman] Parliament remained in the direction of unity and uniformity within the imperial framework, not towards particularism" (Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks, 1908).
I worked exhaustively on preparation, consulting multiple works, in French and English, in order to fully illuminate all of the references and allusions. I read about venality of posts, about royal finances, about the king's scrofula-healing touch, about Persian Letters in general, and about ennoblement. In order to better illustrate my points, I accompanied my lecture with a graph and a series of statistics, and with a painting by Watteau, stapled to my bibliography (when you deliver an exposé in France, you need to type up your bibliography and the outline of your lecture, and pass it around the class). I had already verified with the professor that I could have a longer time limit than my classmates, in order to compensate for the fact that I would be speaking more slowly and more clearly, due to my heavy American accent. I rehearsed twice all the way through, and also practiced snippets, correcting the many grammatical errors that I had failed to detect when I typed them, and making certain I knew how to pronounce every word that I had typed (for instance, I eliminated the sentence with the word guigogne, which means Russian doll, because I didn't want to mispronounce it).
I have never delivered a lecture to such a sterile audience; sterile is the only way to describe the reception. I didn't notice anyone looking at the graphs or the painting; nobody took notes; nobody asked any questions; and when I checked, twice, to verify that everyone could hear and understand me, nobody budged: all I received were blank stares. In other words, for all I know, nobody could understand a single word that I spoke. After I had finished, the professor commented (note: French professors often give students constructive criticism after their exposés) that I should not have analyzed the letters separately, and that there was more than just Montesquieu (I'm still not certain what this latter comment meant). Then, she told the other students to prepare a three-part breakdown (all analyses come in 3s, and only in 3s, in France) of the reading, i.e., replicate what I should have done. So we sat in silence, literally for 20-25 minutes.
I'm not upset, only puzzled. My exposé was well-organized (I thought), but I guess it just wasn't organized the way it should have been? Why was the class so dead? It wasn't even morning; the class took place from 1:00-3:00 in the afternoon, so nobody should have had any reason to still be half-asleep.
I know that I had problems. I think my biggest problem, if I correctly interpret the professor's words, was that I analyzed the text as a primary source, rather than using it as a template to discuss absolute monarchy. I also might have over-contextualized, even though I cut a fair share of what I had typed. However, I did not limit myself to Montesquieu; I compared his viewpoint to that of some of his contemporaries of the same social class, and also analyzed his view of French history and government in light of modern historiography.
Pauline and I are going to keep on plugging away at our finance ministry exposé this weekend, due in one week from now. Maybe this one will go over better? I remain hopeful.
~JD
"The thrust of Arab opinion in [the 1908 Ottoman] Parliament remained in the direction of unity and uniformity within the imperial framework, not towards particularism" (Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks, 1908).
Monday, October 24, 2011
A Night at the Museum, a Day at the Basilica
It's been hectic around here! I literally just finished the rough draft of the transcrip of my 25-minute oral expose on critiques of absolute monarchy on Montesquieu's Persian Letters (to be delivered on Wednesday), and still in the middle of my expose on the Ministry of Finance under Louis XIV.
But let's talk tourism: in the past week, I returned to the Louvre, and paid a visit to some French royalty.
Twice a week, the Louvre holds "nocturnes," where the galleries are open at night, until 10:00 p.m. As a "young friend of the Louvre," I'm allowed to bring a guest during these nights, and I invited my friend Sherif, who lives in my dorm. Sherif is a 22-year-old law student from Egypt; he is fluent in French, having been taught in French-language school, and wants to continue his studies in the U.S. He needs to practice his English, and I need to practice my French, so we alternated fairly freely between the two languages, changing whenever it felt right, during our several hours together. We took the RER (the train in Ile-de-France) and Metro north from the dorm, and, after getting a little bit turned around in the 1st arrondissement, found the Louvre.
In retrospect, the two exhibits we visited were well-chosen; the history of the Louvre itself (built by Philipe II, called Philipe-Auguste, contemporary of Richard the Lionheart), and Ancient Egypt. I know a little bit of French history, so I was in the position, for instance, to explain a little bit about Philipe-Auguste, Louis XIV, Napoleon I and III, Louis-Philippe, and the other actors we encountered. Sherif, meanwhile, is Egyptian, and could give me a wonderful description of life in ancient Egypt, of its pharaohs, its scribes, its musicians, and its builders.
In the middle of our stroll through historic models of Paris and the Louvre, Sherif posed me a question that could never be asked in the United States. We had been discussing how Napoleon I seized power, and how, just as in contemporary Egypt, whoever controls the army controls the state (elections officially scheduled for November, right?). Sherif asked me whether it was in the United States, France, or Great Britain that human freedom had been born. I was, well, taken aback. We're so self-critical of ourselves in the U.S. that any claim that America invented human liberty cannot be openly supported by any but the most ultra-patriotic, who are not to be found where I grew up. So I found myself, first of all, explaining how untenable this opinion was, how, because, for instance, the author of the Declaration of Independence was a large plantation owner who sexually abused his slaves and kept his unrecognized illegitimate children as slaves strikes many as hypocritical. Then, with promptings by Sherif, I found myself describing the histories of contemporary France (1789, jacobine republic, Napoleon I, restoration, July Monarchy, Napoleon III, Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune, 3rd Republic, Vichy, 4th and 5th Republics) and Great Britain (Magna Charta, the Civil War and Cromwell, the Glorious Revolution, the neutralization of the House of Lords just around 1900, the slow decline in power of the monarchs), with a nod towards the U.S. Constitution. I didn't say all of this to show off, nor am I now listing everything for the purpose of flaunting my knowledge; what I'm trying to get at is how enormous a question Sherif asked, and how impossible it was for me to begin to explain why I couldn't answer it, because history simply is so complicated. He told me how much he enjoyed our conversation, so I thought that I did the right thing, but what would you have said if you had been in my place? Oh, and this was all in French...
By this time, we were several rooms into the Ancient Egyptian collections, and I told Sherif that it was his turn to speak, and mine to listen (he switched to English). It was my turn to relax, and listen to an enthusiast. He explained to me how obelisks were erected, for instance, with the help of the flood of the Nile, about the introduction of the chariot in Egypt, about scarabs, and about the origin of the "curse of the Pharaohs." Concerning this last matter, because Egypt's kings' tombs were provided with all the necessities of life, they had large stores of food, which, after several millennia, had long rotted. When early archaeologists opened the tombs, they immediately got hit in the face with 3000-year-old toxic effluvia. And despite all of the excavations, Egyptologists believe that they have only uncovered around 20% of ancient Egypt's treasures.
The Louvre guards began to close the doors on us, so we hurried out, and, with a little bit of searching, made it back to the Metro station. That night, it suddenly got cold in Paris, and I was still in my shorts (although I had grabbed my gloves before leaving). The next day, it was in the forties (low of 6 degrees Celsius, for you non-Americans), and I had my hood up and my gloves on in the Bibliotheque Saint-Genevieve.
Luckily, it was sunny for my Sunday excursion to the Basilique Saint-Denis, located north of Paris, as far as you can get from the city while still riding the Metro. It was a beautiful day, and I wanted to take advantage of the weather while it lasted, seeing as the basilica and its crypt get notoriously cold in the wintertime. I foolishly forgot my camera, so no FB photos; you'll have to imagine the basilica with me (or just search Google images for visual aids).
The basilica houses the necropolis of the kings of France; that is, it houses the bones of royal and noble families whom the modern state of France recognizes as French. Valerie, from EDUCO, had told me that Charlemagne was buried there; in fact, he isn't (he's in what's now Germany, in his old capital), but I did see several of my old friends, such as Francois I, who shares a prominent crypt with his queen, Claude de France; the crypt is decorated with Ionic columns, and was built under Henri II, in 1545. I saw Charles Martel and Pepin the Short, Carolingians, before descending into the Bourbon vault. Charles Martel was wearing a crown, holding a scepter, and wearing a royal cloak, just like all of the kings, even though he was never king in his lifetime -- he was Mayor of the Palace, meaning that he controlled everything, while the long-haired Merovingian king was nominal king of the Francs. Down among the Bourbons, one can find the preserved heart of Louis XIV alongside a fragment of Henri IV's body (which fragment is unspecified). As of 2004, Louis XVII's heart has also been on display (they wanted to verify that it was actually his). I could only think that the hearts were far more shriveled and unhealthy-looking than the sheep hearts that I handled in AP bio with Miss Gray, and even grayer and uglier than the crocodile hearts I had to understand in my Verts class at Cornell.
There is also an ossuary; behind two walls are a pair of caskets, with bones of various men and women with royal pretensions scrambled up inside. This, naturally, is not what is show to the public; instead, they are presented with a chronological list of all of the ossuary's residents, categorized by rank. There were enormous gaps in the chronology; for instance, the earliest bones were those of Dagobert (d. 638), Merovingian founder of the basilica; the next bones were those of Charles the Bald, Charlemagne's grandson, and thus a Carolingian, who died in 877. All of this disorder is the cause of the Revolution; during its more radical phase, the Revolutionary government disinterred all of the kings, in order to rid itself of all physical remnants of France's monarchical past. Although I believe in historical preservation ("that belongs in a museum!"), at the same time, I sympathize with the anti-royal cause. Can such a necropolis exist without engendering the illusion of the legitimacy of monarchy? Would I have visited the basilica if it had been filled with commoners rather than kings? Is this kind of history-by-political-leaders dangerous? Are palace intrigues, assassinations, and royal squabbles important to the study of history? But can we understand the past without some kind of a grasp of political leadership?
Ascending again, I found more royal propaganda, a pair of statues of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, commissioned during the Restoration of the monarchy, by Louis XVIII. Although the body in Louis XVI's coffin is a guillotined man, there is good reason to believe that the body is not that of Louis XVI; again, this is not written anywhere, and I know of it only by listening to one of the museum employees. There are a few more royal couples whom you may remember from my adventures in the Loire: Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne (married at the Chateau de Langeais, remember?), and Henri II and Catherine de Medicis. I also saw the tomb of Clovis, the Francish king who converted to Catholicism at the behest of his wife, around the year 500. Dagobert, called the founder of the basilica, received a rather special monument of his own, a fantastically-sculpted marble monolith depicting his soul, in the form of a naked baby wearing a crown and standing on a napkin, being presented before Christ. I really had to hunt to find the remains of Louis IX, a.k.a. Saint-Louis. Because he was canonized as a saint, his body was broken into tiny pieces, and sent to reliquaries around Europe; the basilica has retained the tip of one of his finger-bones, which has been placed in a chapel, rather than among the other royal tombs. Thanks to Professor Long's class on religious violence, I have read a section of the Compte de Joinville's account of Saint-Louis's failure of a seventh crusade in the late 13th century. Saint-Louis contributed greatly to the basilica, ordering a great deal of new tombs. He also initiated the burning of Talmud manuscripts (after a rigged trial between a rabbi and a formerly-Jewish monk, much resembling the Ramban's experience in Barcelona not too long afterwards), but, to his credit, he did found the Sorbonne, where I am studying.
Whew, I need to get to bed! I'm exhausted!
~JD
"Des 840, il est pratiquement impossible de retirer leurs honores aux fonctionnaires et le synode de Coullaines, en 843, officialise la pratique" [Since 840, it was practically impossible for the Carolingians to collect their royal land-revenues from their bureaucrats, and the 843 Synod of Coullaines made the practice the legal norm] (Jean-Philippe Genet, Le monde au Moyen Age, p. 57).
But let's talk tourism: in the past week, I returned to the Louvre, and paid a visit to some French royalty.
Twice a week, the Louvre holds "nocturnes," where the galleries are open at night, until 10:00 p.m. As a "young friend of the Louvre," I'm allowed to bring a guest during these nights, and I invited my friend Sherif, who lives in my dorm. Sherif is a 22-year-old law student from Egypt; he is fluent in French, having been taught in French-language school, and wants to continue his studies in the U.S. He needs to practice his English, and I need to practice my French, so we alternated fairly freely between the two languages, changing whenever it felt right, during our several hours together. We took the RER (the train in Ile-de-France) and Metro north from the dorm, and, after getting a little bit turned around in the 1st arrondissement, found the Louvre.
In retrospect, the two exhibits we visited were well-chosen; the history of the Louvre itself (built by Philipe II, called Philipe-Auguste, contemporary of Richard the Lionheart), and Ancient Egypt. I know a little bit of French history, so I was in the position, for instance, to explain a little bit about Philipe-Auguste, Louis XIV, Napoleon I and III, Louis-Philippe, and the other actors we encountered. Sherif, meanwhile, is Egyptian, and could give me a wonderful description of life in ancient Egypt, of its pharaohs, its scribes, its musicians, and its builders.
In the middle of our stroll through historic models of Paris and the Louvre, Sherif posed me a question that could never be asked in the United States. We had been discussing how Napoleon I seized power, and how, just as in contemporary Egypt, whoever controls the army controls the state (elections officially scheduled for November, right?). Sherif asked me whether it was in the United States, France, or Great Britain that human freedom had been born. I was, well, taken aback. We're so self-critical of ourselves in the U.S. that any claim that America invented human liberty cannot be openly supported by any but the most ultra-patriotic, who are not to be found where I grew up. So I found myself, first of all, explaining how untenable this opinion was, how, because, for instance, the author of the Declaration of Independence was a large plantation owner who sexually abused his slaves and kept his unrecognized illegitimate children as slaves strikes many as hypocritical. Then, with promptings by Sherif, I found myself describing the histories of contemporary France (1789, jacobine republic, Napoleon I, restoration, July Monarchy, Napoleon III, Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune, 3rd Republic, Vichy, 4th and 5th Republics) and Great Britain (Magna Charta, the Civil War and Cromwell, the Glorious Revolution, the neutralization of the House of Lords just around 1900, the slow decline in power of the monarchs), with a nod towards the U.S. Constitution. I didn't say all of this to show off, nor am I now listing everything for the purpose of flaunting my knowledge; what I'm trying to get at is how enormous a question Sherif asked, and how impossible it was for me to begin to explain why I couldn't answer it, because history simply is so complicated. He told me how much he enjoyed our conversation, so I thought that I did the right thing, but what would you have said if you had been in my place? Oh, and this was all in French...
By this time, we were several rooms into the Ancient Egyptian collections, and I told Sherif that it was his turn to speak, and mine to listen (he switched to English). It was my turn to relax, and listen to an enthusiast. He explained to me how obelisks were erected, for instance, with the help of the flood of the Nile, about the introduction of the chariot in Egypt, about scarabs, and about the origin of the "curse of the Pharaohs." Concerning this last matter, because Egypt's kings' tombs were provided with all the necessities of life, they had large stores of food, which, after several millennia, had long rotted. When early archaeologists opened the tombs, they immediately got hit in the face with 3000-year-old toxic effluvia. And despite all of the excavations, Egyptologists believe that they have only uncovered around 20% of ancient Egypt's treasures.
The Louvre guards began to close the doors on us, so we hurried out, and, with a little bit of searching, made it back to the Metro station. That night, it suddenly got cold in Paris, and I was still in my shorts (although I had grabbed my gloves before leaving). The next day, it was in the forties (low of 6 degrees Celsius, for you non-Americans), and I had my hood up and my gloves on in the Bibliotheque Saint-Genevieve.
Luckily, it was sunny for my Sunday excursion to the Basilique Saint-Denis, located north of Paris, as far as you can get from the city while still riding the Metro. It was a beautiful day, and I wanted to take advantage of the weather while it lasted, seeing as the basilica and its crypt get notoriously cold in the wintertime. I foolishly forgot my camera, so no FB photos; you'll have to imagine the basilica with me (or just search Google images for visual aids).
The basilica houses the necropolis of the kings of France; that is, it houses the bones of royal and noble families whom the modern state of France recognizes as French. Valerie, from EDUCO, had told me that Charlemagne was buried there; in fact, he isn't (he's in what's now Germany, in his old capital), but I did see several of my old friends, such as Francois I, who shares a prominent crypt with his queen, Claude de France; the crypt is decorated with Ionic columns, and was built under Henri II, in 1545. I saw Charles Martel and Pepin the Short, Carolingians, before descending into the Bourbon vault. Charles Martel was wearing a crown, holding a scepter, and wearing a royal cloak, just like all of the kings, even though he was never king in his lifetime -- he was Mayor of the Palace, meaning that he controlled everything, while the long-haired Merovingian king was nominal king of the Francs. Down among the Bourbons, one can find the preserved heart of Louis XIV alongside a fragment of Henri IV's body (which fragment is unspecified). As of 2004, Louis XVII's heart has also been on display (they wanted to verify that it was actually his). I could only think that the hearts were far more shriveled and unhealthy-looking than the sheep hearts that I handled in AP bio with Miss Gray, and even grayer and uglier than the crocodile hearts I had to understand in my Verts class at Cornell.
There is also an ossuary; behind two walls are a pair of caskets, with bones of various men and women with royal pretensions scrambled up inside. This, naturally, is not what is show to the public; instead, they are presented with a chronological list of all of the ossuary's residents, categorized by rank. There were enormous gaps in the chronology; for instance, the earliest bones were those of Dagobert (d. 638), Merovingian founder of the basilica; the next bones were those of Charles the Bald, Charlemagne's grandson, and thus a Carolingian, who died in 877. All of this disorder is the cause of the Revolution; during its more radical phase, the Revolutionary government disinterred all of the kings, in order to rid itself of all physical remnants of France's monarchical past. Although I believe in historical preservation ("that belongs in a museum!"), at the same time, I sympathize with the anti-royal cause. Can such a necropolis exist without engendering the illusion of the legitimacy of monarchy? Would I have visited the basilica if it had been filled with commoners rather than kings? Is this kind of history-by-political-leaders dangerous? Are palace intrigues, assassinations, and royal squabbles important to the study of history? But can we understand the past without some kind of a grasp of political leadership?
Ascending again, I found more royal propaganda, a pair of statues of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, commissioned during the Restoration of the monarchy, by Louis XVIII. Although the body in Louis XVI's coffin is a guillotined man, there is good reason to believe that the body is not that of Louis XVI; again, this is not written anywhere, and I know of it only by listening to one of the museum employees. There are a few more royal couples whom you may remember from my adventures in the Loire: Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne (married at the Chateau de Langeais, remember?), and Henri II and Catherine de Medicis. I also saw the tomb of Clovis, the Francish king who converted to Catholicism at the behest of his wife, around the year 500. Dagobert, called the founder of the basilica, received a rather special monument of his own, a fantastically-sculpted marble monolith depicting his soul, in the form of a naked baby wearing a crown and standing on a napkin, being presented before Christ. I really had to hunt to find the remains of Louis IX, a.k.a. Saint-Louis. Because he was canonized as a saint, his body was broken into tiny pieces, and sent to reliquaries around Europe; the basilica has retained the tip of one of his finger-bones, which has been placed in a chapel, rather than among the other royal tombs. Thanks to Professor Long's class on religious violence, I have read a section of the Compte de Joinville's account of Saint-Louis's failure of a seventh crusade in the late 13th century. Saint-Louis contributed greatly to the basilica, ordering a great deal of new tombs. He also initiated the burning of Talmud manuscripts (after a rigged trial between a rabbi and a formerly-Jewish monk, much resembling the Ramban's experience in Barcelona not too long afterwards), but, to his credit, he did found the Sorbonne, where I am studying.
Whew, I need to get to bed! I'm exhausted!
~JD
"Des 840, il est pratiquement impossible de retirer leurs honores aux fonctionnaires et le synode de Coullaines, en 843, officialise la pratique" [Since 840, it was practically impossible for the Carolingians to collect their royal land-revenues from their bureaucrats, and the 843 Synod of Coullaines made the practice the legal norm] (Jean-Philippe Genet, Le monde au Moyen Age, p. 57).
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Chateau de Versailles (Interior)
Versailles is a baroque monster crouching in a garden.
But let me explain; two weeks ago, I, with three other Americans, took a train out of Paris, for the artificial town of Versailles. Why do I call it artificial? Because the town was plopped down on the countryside when Louis XIV decided that he wanted a new palace, in order to better contain his nobles. Perhaps I exaggerate, but Louis was, in my opinion, both a megalomaniac and an egomaniac, and one of his greatest talents was his creativity in finding ways to remind the rest of the world that he, the Sun King, was at the center of the solar system.
After we passed security, and assured our free admission thanks to our student IDs, the girls and I split up (it was around 11:00 by this point). Ilana and Emily wanted to eat crepes in the gardens, and enter the chateau when the crowds had thinned; I wanted to enter the chateau immediately, so that I could guarantee that I had absorbed the whole interior before I relaxed in the gardens. Alice opted to go with the others, and so we went our separate ways.
And here, unfortunately, is where the detail ends. I became so quickly overwhelmed with the rest of my work that I never took the trouble to "write up" my travel experience while the matters were still fresh in my mind! Although I did take notes (as I usually do), most of the information can be found in the captions of my FB photos. So why repeat everything? Just enjoy the photos as they are; that should be visual tour enough of the triumph Louis XIV.
However, there's one thematic point that I'd like to get across. I left the chateau shortly after 6:00, and arrived back in my dorm at around 9:00 -- in other words, I had spent 12 hours of my day on this visit. I visited every room open to the public in the castle proper, and also hiked, circumventing the garden, to the Trianon and the Petit Trianon, where I likewise visited every room (I never made it to the Jeu de Paume, unfortunately). I never had time to visit the gardens.
And the astonishing thing is, that the girls ended up spending the whole day in the gardens, and didn't stop to enter the chateau proper until after it had closed! This, then, is the point: Versailles is simply so massive, that it cannot be visited in a single day, no matter how determined the tourist (and I assure you that I am very determined).
As for today, it's Toussaint, and the rain ruined my plans to visit the Cluny Museum. Maybe on the weekend...
~JD
"A la mort de Jean II, en 1479, il faut parler d'Espagne: son fils Ferdinand qui a epouse en 1471 Isabelle de Castille lui succede en Aragon; le couple se fait accepter en Castille" [After the death of Juan II, in 1479, one must begin to speak of 'Spain': Juan's son Ferdinand, who in 1471 had married Isabelle of Castille, succeeded him in Aragon; the royal couple made itself recognized in Castille] (Jean-Philippe Genet, Le Monde au Moyen Age, p. 231).
But let me explain; two weeks ago, I, with three other Americans, took a train out of Paris, for the artificial town of Versailles. Why do I call it artificial? Because the town was plopped down on the countryside when Louis XIV decided that he wanted a new palace, in order to better contain his nobles. Perhaps I exaggerate, but Louis was, in my opinion, both a megalomaniac and an egomaniac, and one of his greatest talents was his creativity in finding ways to remind the rest of the world that he, the Sun King, was at the center of the solar system.
After we passed security, and assured our free admission thanks to our student IDs, the girls and I split up (it was around 11:00 by this point). Ilana and Emily wanted to eat crepes in the gardens, and enter the chateau when the crowds had thinned; I wanted to enter the chateau immediately, so that I could guarantee that I had absorbed the whole interior before I relaxed in the gardens. Alice opted to go with the others, and so we went our separate ways.
And here, unfortunately, is where the detail ends. I became so quickly overwhelmed with the rest of my work that I never took the trouble to "write up" my travel experience while the matters were still fresh in my mind! Although I did take notes (as I usually do), most of the information can be found in the captions of my FB photos. So why repeat everything? Just enjoy the photos as they are; that should be visual tour enough of the triumph Louis XIV.
However, there's one thematic point that I'd like to get across. I left the chateau shortly after 6:00, and arrived back in my dorm at around 9:00 -- in other words, I had spent 12 hours of my day on this visit. I visited every room open to the public in the castle proper, and also hiked, circumventing the garden, to the Trianon and the Petit Trianon, where I likewise visited every room (I never made it to the Jeu de Paume, unfortunately). I never had time to visit the gardens.
And the astonishing thing is, that the girls ended up spending the whole day in the gardens, and didn't stop to enter the chateau proper until after it had closed! This, then, is the point: Versailles is simply so massive, that it cannot be visited in a single day, no matter how determined the tourist (and I assure you that I am very determined).
As for today, it's Toussaint, and the rain ruined my plans to visit the Cluny Museum. Maybe on the weekend...
~JD
"A la mort de Jean II, en 1479, il faut parler d'Espagne: son fils Ferdinand qui a epouse en 1471 Isabelle de Castille lui succede en Aragon; le couple se fait accepter en Castille" [After the death of Juan II, in 1479, one must begin to speak of 'Spain': Juan's son Ferdinand, who in 1471 had married Isabelle of Castille, succeeded him in Aragon; the royal couple made itself recognized in Castille] (Jean-Philippe Genet, Le Monde au Moyen Age, p. 231).
Monday, October 17, 2011
Un bon vin blanc
Fun fact: one of the easiest way to indicate that you are not a native-speaker of French is to compliment your host's white wine. The phrase un bon vin blanc, literally "a good white wine," contains all three of French's nasal sounds, which are unique to the language (the Danish equivalent of the phrase impossible for foreigners is rødgrød med fløde, a dessert as marvelous as its name). Monday night, I had some bon vin blanc, even though I couldn't pronounce it, at a wine tasting, not far from the National Archives. Organized by EDUCO, I left with a bit more oenological and viticultural knowledge than I had had when I entered, though I'm still going to refer all of my wine choices to a certain older brother of mine.
Before we even saw the first bottle, the instructor, who is a professional wine taster, explained to us a bit of how French geography and climate affect wine quality. In the EU, wine is designated according to its origin, not according to the variety of grape (although this is sometimes secondary). The instructor was very enthusiastic about the different characters, insisting that grapes are just like people; some are thin, some are wide, some are narrow, some are bitter, etc. As it turns out, France is just warm enough to grow grapevines, and there is a noticeable difference between the wines of the south (in Provence, Languedoc, etc), and the more central and northerly varieties (from the Loire valley, certain regions of the Atlantic coast, etc). The northern wines receive less sunlight, and thus tend to be thinner, more acidic, lighter, and longer; southern varieties fulfill all of the (silly) stereotypes of southern climes of 18th-century philosophy a la Montesquieu.
There are also right and wrong ways to taste and experience wine; that is, professional tasters use a different method than people like me. First there is the swirling of the wine glass, in order to test viscosity; depending on how quickly the residue adhering to the sides of the glass drips back towards the stem, the thicker the wine, and the closer together the drops (formally called "legs"), the sweeter. Next, there is the initial sniff, followed by the real one, which is accompanied by another swirl. Next, our featured presentation -- sipping the wine. After swishing the wine around one's mouth, in order to stimulate all of one's taste buds, one should inhale a bit (being careful not to drip), and either spit or swallow. This burst of oxygen makes a surprisingly large difference, for chemical reasons I would probably understand if I took a class with Prof. Regenstein.
The first wine (a white) was served in bottle with it's label covered, so that we would have to guess geographic origin. The wine was nearly transparent in the glass, and scored very low on the viscosity scale. The smell was sharp, and the taste was dry, without a hint of sweetness. In spite of all of this wonderful data, in a guided multiple choice question with two possible responses, I chose the wrong one (sorry, Sam). The wine was from Bordeaux (like my friend Guillaume), and was a sauvignon blanc.
Out came the cheese, and quite a lot of varieties, too! Too many to list and describe them all, but I took away one lesson from all the cheese, and that was the identity of two very tasty cheeses. The first was Saint-Marcellin, which I had never heard of. The second, the best cheese I have tasted since my arrival in France, was a humble compte -- but not just any compte. This compte had been aged for a very short amount of time, under 12 months, and I can still taste its mild sweetness. By the end of the night, with a bit more wine in my system, I began to refer to it as "Conde" by accident, this being the name of a 17th-century French general and prince, who gave Louis XIV both a lot of grief, and a lot of victories (see FB for a photo of a painting of him).
The next wine, also a white, was just a little bit thicker, and was also from the north. It was called Marsanne, and it really didn't do much for me. It was at this point, also, that small flasks of various scents were handed around the table; we tried to guess each fragrance, and, again, I failed miserably. Somewhat amusingly, I guessed that the lemon flavor was chamomile; this is because I instantly recognized its scent from herbal tea, of which there are mostly three kinds served in my house: mint, chamomile, and lemon. The power of association!
The next wine, a red, smelled heavily of raspberries, to me, at any rate. The instructor validated this, and added a few other flavors that I should have been smelling, but I could never really get past the crushed raspberries. It was a nice rich wine, from the southeast, known as the Coteaux du Languedoc (Longuedoc is right by Provence, on the Mediterranean coast). I refilled my glass once or twice with this one; I really liked it!
Last up was another bordellais wine, a white. Saint-Croix-du-Mont was it's name, and when I first sniffed it, I was immediately repulsed: it smelled of rotten fruit! I brought this up, and it looks as if my sense of smell wasn't misaligned; to manufacture this particular wine, the vineyard workers deliberately wait until the fruit has achieved an overripe flavor before they harvest it. I was at first hesitant to taste such a foul-smelling liquid (nobody else seemed bothered by it), but the taste was nothing like the smell: the taste was wonderfully sweet, that of a dessert wine.
Fun fact #2: There is no French word for "wine snob."
~JD
"Agenouillees, elles attendent qu'il passe, suivi de ses aumoniers; le premier medecin tient la tete du malade que le roi touche en repetant la formule" [Kneeling, they waited for the king to pass, followed by his chaplains; the chief physician held the head of the scrofulous supplicant, whom the king touched while repeating the phrase "the king touches and God heals you"] (Christophe Blanquie, Les institutions de la France des Bourbons, p. 27).
Before we even saw the first bottle, the instructor, who is a professional wine taster, explained to us a bit of how French geography and climate affect wine quality. In the EU, wine is designated according to its origin, not according to the variety of grape (although this is sometimes secondary). The instructor was very enthusiastic about the different characters, insisting that grapes are just like people; some are thin, some are wide, some are narrow, some are bitter, etc. As it turns out, France is just warm enough to grow grapevines, and there is a noticeable difference between the wines of the south (in Provence, Languedoc, etc), and the more central and northerly varieties (from the Loire valley, certain regions of the Atlantic coast, etc). The northern wines receive less sunlight, and thus tend to be thinner, more acidic, lighter, and longer; southern varieties fulfill all of the (silly) stereotypes of southern climes of 18th-century philosophy a la Montesquieu.
There are also right and wrong ways to taste and experience wine; that is, professional tasters use a different method than people like me. First there is the swirling of the wine glass, in order to test viscosity; depending on how quickly the residue adhering to the sides of the glass drips back towards the stem, the thicker the wine, and the closer together the drops (formally called "legs"), the sweeter. Next, there is the initial sniff, followed by the real one, which is accompanied by another swirl. Next, our featured presentation -- sipping the wine. After swishing the wine around one's mouth, in order to stimulate all of one's taste buds, one should inhale a bit (being careful not to drip), and either spit or swallow. This burst of oxygen makes a surprisingly large difference, for chemical reasons I would probably understand if I took a class with Prof. Regenstein.
The first wine (a white) was served in bottle with it's label covered, so that we would have to guess geographic origin. The wine was nearly transparent in the glass, and scored very low on the viscosity scale. The smell was sharp, and the taste was dry, without a hint of sweetness. In spite of all of this wonderful data, in a guided multiple choice question with two possible responses, I chose the wrong one (sorry, Sam). The wine was from Bordeaux (like my friend Guillaume), and was a sauvignon blanc.
Out came the cheese, and quite a lot of varieties, too! Too many to list and describe them all, but I took away one lesson from all the cheese, and that was the identity of two very tasty cheeses. The first was Saint-Marcellin, which I had never heard of. The second, the best cheese I have tasted since my arrival in France, was a humble compte -- but not just any compte. This compte had been aged for a very short amount of time, under 12 months, and I can still taste its mild sweetness. By the end of the night, with a bit more wine in my system, I began to refer to it as "Conde" by accident, this being the name of a 17th-century French general and prince, who gave Louis XIV both a lot of grief, and a lot of victories (see FB for a photo of a painting of him).
The next wine, also a white, was just a little bit thicker, and was also from the north. It was called Marsanne, and it really didn't do much for me. It was at this point, also, that small flasks of various scents were handed around the table; we tried to guess each fragrance, and, again, I failed miserably. Somewhat amusingly, I guessed that the lemon flavor was chamomile; this is because I instantly recognized its scent from herbal tea, of which there are mostly three kinds served in my house: mint, chamomile, and lemon. The power of association!
The next wine, a red, smelled heavily of raspberries, to me, at any rate. The instructor validated this, and added a few other flavors that I should have been smelling, but I could never really get past the crushed raspberries. It was a nice rich wine, from the southeast, known as the Coteaux du Languedoc (Longuedoc is right by Provence, on the Mediterranean coast). I refilled my glass once or twice with this one; I really liked it!
Last up was another bordellais wine, a white. Saint-Croix-du-Mont was it's name, and when I first sniffed it, I was immediately repulsed: it smelled of rotten fruit! I brought this up, and it looks as if my sense of smell wasn't misaligned; to manufacture this particular wine, the vineyard workers deliberately wait until the fruit has achieved an overripe flavor before they harvest it. I was at first hesitant to taste such a foul-smelling liquid (nobody else seemed bothered by it), but the taste was nothing like the smell: the taste was wonderfully sweet, that of a dessert wine.
Fun fact #2: There is no French word for "wine snob."
~JD
"Agenouillees, elles attendent qu'il passe, suivi de ses aumoniers; le premier medecin tient la tete du malade que le roi touche en repetant la formule" [Kneeling, they waited for the king to pass, followed by his chaplains; the chief physician held the head of the scrofulous supplicant, whom the king touched while repeating the phrase "the king touches and God heals you"] (Christophe Blanquie, Les institutions de la France des Bourbons, p. 27).
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Atelier de Cuisine
On today's menu: 1 French cooking class. Is your seatbelt fastened?
The cooking class was in a young French couple's apartment, in a nearly-silent corner of the 19th arrondissement, not far from the Parc des Buttes Chaumants, where Bruno and I had taken a walk together only a couple of weeks earlier. Our hosts were charming, intelligent, welcoming, and gifted with a very cute baby; the six of us felt at home immediately. The husband, Antoine, is an absolute gourmet, and loves cooking, using all sorts of exotic ingredients and nifty cooking tools, and inventing some very unique dishes; he cooks every day. Every time he revealed another amazing delicacy (such as purple carrots, Japanese radishes, Parisian honey, pepper from Madagascar, orange beets, etc.), he would cite the specialty store where he found it, and mention the address, for later reference. On the coffee table was a titanic Larousse Gastronomic dictionary (Larousse is the French equivalent of Merriam-Webster), and even the baby books in the playpen were about food.
The menu was vegetarian (although I'm the unique vegetarian in EDUCO), and I will relate the dishes in order of consumption. Using a little device called a toc-oeuf we cut the tops off of eggshells, and then drained the white, dropped the shells containing the yokes into boiling water for just a moment, filled the hot shells with a savory mixture of cream, pepper, and nutmeg, added a drop of local honey, and then immediately consumed, hot. I don't know whether the raw yokes were pasteurized or not, but they certainly were good! When we had finished cooking, we mounted to the 4th-story dining room, filled with light, and with a breathtaking view of Paris, especially Montmartre. The most beautiful dish we made that day was a raw, finely-sliced beetroot, sprinkled with sesame oil, hot peppers, and just a bit of Parmesan. The main dish was cooked lentils, filled also with the daikons and the carrots I earlier mentioned: amazingly full of flavor, and done just the right amount! For dessert, we enjoyed homemade savory icecream, which we had flavored with herbs picked from the couple's garden, alongside fried apple slices, which made me think just a little bit of a certain mother's apple crisp. At the end, there was, naturally, coffee. We made everything we ate, but we did not eat everything we made. By the time we left, it was mid-afternoon; Sarah, Adeh and I walked back to the Metro, and I spent the rest of the day trying to get some studying done.
This entry was short, but ASAP, I'm going to try to write up my all-day trip to Versailles. Expect to hear from me again soon!
~JD
"Pour marier ces soldats, Colbert envoya en Nouvelle France de jeunes orphelines pourvues d'une dot, un millier de 1665 a 1673" [To marry off these soldiers in New France, Colbert sent young female orphans, provided with dowries, to New France, a thousand from 1665 to 1674] (Michel Nassiet, La France au XVIIe siecle, p. 46).
The cooking class was in a young French couple's apartment, in a nearly-silent corner of the 19th arrondissement, not far from the Parc des Buttes Chaumants, where Bruno and I had taken a walk together only a couple of weeks earlier. Our hosts were charming, intelligent, welcoming, and gifted with a very cute baby; the six of us felt at home immediately. The husband, Antoine, is an absolute gourmet, and loves cooking, using all sorts of exotic ingredients and nifty cooking tools, and inventing some very unique dishes; he cooks every day. Every time he revealed another amazing delicacy (such as purple carrots, Japanese radishes, Parisian honey, pepper from Madagascar, orange beets, etc.), he would cite the specialty store where he found it, and mention the address, for later reference. On the coffee table was a titanic Larousse Gastronomic dictionary (Larousse is the French equivalent of Merriam-Webster), and even the baby books in the playpen were about food.
The menu was vegetarian (although I'm the unique vegetarian in EDUCO), and I will relate the dishes in order of consumption. Using a little device called a toc-oeuf we cut the tops off of eggshells, and then drained the white, dropped the shells containing the yokes into boiling water for just a moment, filled the hot shells with a savory mixture of cream, pepper, and nutmeg, added a drop of local honey, and then immediately consumed, hot. I don't know whether the raw yokes were pasteurized or not, but they certainly were good! When we had finished cooking, we mounted to the 4th-story dining room, filled with light, and with a breathtaking view of Paris, especially Montmartre. The most beautiful dish we made that day was a raw, finely-sliced beetroot, sprinkled with sesame oil, hot peppers, and just a bit of Parmesan. The main dish was cooked lentils, filled also with the daikons and the carrots I earlier mentioned: amazingly full of flavor, and done just the right amount! For dessert, we enjoyed homemade savory icecream, which we had flavored with herbs picked from the couple's garden, alongside fried apple slices, which made me think just a little bit of a certain mother's apple crisp. At the end, there was, naturally, coffee. We made everything we ate, but we did not eat everything we made. By the time we left, it was mid-afternoon; Sarah, Adeh and I walked back to the Metro, and I spent the rest of the day trying to get some studying done.
This entry was short, but ASAP, I'm going to try to write up my all-day trip to Versailles. Expect to hear from me again soon!
~JD
"Pour marier ces soldats, Colbert envoya en Nouvelle France de jeunes orphelines pourvues d'une dot, un millier de 1665 a 1673" [To marry off these soldiers in New France, Colbert sent young female orphans, provided with dowries, to New France, a thousand from 1665 to 1674] (Michel Nassiet, La France au XVIIe siecle, p. 46).
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Dancing the Horla
It's busy here in Paris.
I'm feeling just a little overwhelmed, but in a guilty way, rather than in a panicked way. Because of the lack of set goals, and the open-ended nature of readings, I don't know how much time I'm supposed to be spending on classwork, and as a result, am spending a lot more time on what I'll call "obligatory enjoyment," or maybe "lessons outside the classroom," such as time spent with Francophone friends and acquaintances, time spent in museums, time spent at the theater, and time spent in miscellaneous cultural activities, such as the French "atelier de cuisine" I'll be participating in this weekend. Then there's also the mandatory French tutoring sessions that I'm taking, ironically because I did well enough on the placement test that I didn't need to take a French class.
I don't even quite know how to budget my time for practicing French: do I look up and practice unfamiliar words that I encounter readings? Do I practice pronouncing nasals? Do I read the packet on liaisons? Do I read Baudelaire aloud, and hope I understand what the French tutor called the melancholy of his nasals? Do I track down one of my francophone friends, and ask him or her to spend the evening with me? Do I schedule an additional tutoring session at EDUCO? And what about my schoolwork? When do I take a run? My refrigerator is empty, and I only have two pairs of underwear left (and there's only one washing machine, for around 180 students)? When do I meet my partner at the library, to work on our project on Louis XIV's ministers? I have my first expose in just under two weeks, which is supposed to be about a very short passage in Montesquieu's Persian letter; how much time do I spend working on that? Has anyone ever read "Memorandum," by E.B. White? Here's the link to the first page (the essay is in One Man's Meat).
I sound like I'm whining, don't I? Don't worry, all is well: I had a very good birthday, thanks to all of my well-wishers, electronic and otherwise. Madame Pla, the house manager, "m'a fait les bises," that is, she gave me the French quadruple-kiss (not to be confused with French kissing, which is entirely different). Last night was the hall meeting, followed by a long party, where I finally succeeded in meeting some people, and might have made a lasting friend (fingers crossed). The fact that there was a party on the night of my birthday was an absolute coincidence, but I am not going to pass up free wine, dates, plums, and grapes, and a whole room full of friendly francophones, if I can. Because I brought up the problem of the lack of recycling facilities, it turns out that I volunteered to improve the situation, which won't I think, be as bad as it sounds. One of the highlights of the day was receiving the card my parents sent me! Thank you so much, Mom and Dad!
I spent the night before at the theater, going to a play called Le Horla (pronounced lor-la), by Guy de Maupassant. I walked through the Jewish quarter on the way, which made me feel a mixture of loneliness and homesickness, when I saw children selling etrogim for Sukkot, and elderly Jewish men hobbling along. In the southeast of the 9th arondissement, there is a whole crowd of kosher butcher shops, kosher restaurants, Hebrew and Judaic bookstores, and, of course, synagogues. The theater where the play was held was tiny, and I sat in the front row (did I mention that the tickets were, as always, free, but that nobody was free to go with me?). The play is a one-man meditation on the frailty of the human body and spirit, on the nature of madness, and on the truth. It left me with a bit of a shiver, although no nightmares. Maupassant, after finishing the novella in 1887 (the "play's" original format), wrote in a letter "Today I sent the manuscript of The Horla to Paris; before eight days have passed, you will see that all the newspapers will have published that I am made... It is a great work of imagination, which will strike the reader, and will cause more than one tremble to climb up his back, for it is strange" (my translation). Well, he was right. I think, however, I'm going to need to cut back on the theater, unless I can rationalize my attendance on cultural grounds. So, I'll finish up this blog with a description of the last two plays I've visited, since l'Avare. Arno, are you reading this?
Cyrano m'etait Conte: An adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, itself a play. For those of you who don't know, the gist of the play is that the main character, who is intelligent, clever, cultured, skilled in arms, a brilliant writer, but cursed with a long nose, finds himself first cultivating the love between the woman whom he madly loves, and a less-deserving rival, and then engineering their marriage. The rival dies on the battlefield, before his wife can realize that he had ceased to lover her, and that it was Cyrano who had been sending her elegant, flowing love letters. At the end, Cyrano grows old (thirty-five, to be precise), without ever revealing the secret. This production, however, was full of cameo appearances of various characters from the early 17th century, including the Three Musketeers, Corneille, Moliere, the Grand Conde, and Pascal. A five-comedian show, in which every one of the four male actors played the lead character at a different stage of his life. One of the best plays I have seen since I arrived, like Le Horla, but for entirely different reasons.
Petites et Moyennes Entourloupes: A two-comedian play, in a very hot theater on a very hot night! A satire of employer-employee relations, and of family matters, an obnoxious boss of a small cookie, Beurrafour, business is held captive in his office by a seemingly desperate woman looking for work, who later agrees to take care of the horde of children resulting from his four marriages and multiple affairs, during Christmas Break. The title, which I believe is meant to resemble the phrase petites et moyennes entreprises, or "small and medium businesses," literally means "small and medium dirty tricks. The actors spoke very, very quickly, and though there were many, many jokes I did not understand, I got enough to laugh a great deal. As I've mentioned before, the French appreciate a good penis joke just as much as anybody else. Not bad, but not fabulous.
In case you haven't notice, six of the eight plays I've attended have had five or fewer actors. Of the two exceptions, one was the enormously-prestigious Comedie Francaise, and the other was filled with rich people. I think that most Parisian theaters can't afford to put on costly productions, so deliberately choose write or choose plays with minimal casts. Still, people attend these little productions; Le Horla was packed with 20-30 audience members, I'd say.
Chag Sameach!
~JD
"Ah, Rome! Ah, Bérénice! Ah, prince malheureux! / Pourquoi suis-je empereur? Pourquoi suis-je amoureux?" [Oh Rome, oh Berenice, oh unhappy prince! Why am I an emperor, why am I a lover?] (Racine, Berenice, Act IV scene vi).
I'm feeling just a little overwhelmed, but in a guilty way, rather than in a panicked way. Because of the lack of set goals, and the open-ended nature of readings, I don't know how much time I'm supposed to be spending on classwork, and as a result, am spending a lot more time on what I'll call "obligatory enjoyment," or maybe "lessons outside the classroom," such as time spent with Francophone friends and acquaintances, time spent in museums, time spent at the theater, and time spent in miscellaneous cultural activities, such as the French "atelier de cuisine" I'll be participating in this weekend. Then there's also the mandatory French tutoring sessions that I'm taking, ironically because I did well enough on the placement test that I didn't need to take a French class.
I don't even quite know how to budget my time for practicing French: do I look up and practice unfamiliar words that I encounter readings? Do I practice pronouncing nasals? Do I read the packet on liaisons? Do I read Baudelaire aloud, and hope I understand what the French tutor called the melancholy of his nasals? Do I track down one of my francophone friends, and ask him or her to spend the evening with me? Do I schedule an additional tutoring session at EDUCO? And what about my schoolwork? When do I take a run? My refrigerator is empty, and I only have two pairs of underwear left (and there's only one washing machine, for around 180 students)? When do I meet my partner at the library, to work on our project on Louis XIV's ministers? I have my first expose in just under two weeks, which is supposed to be about a very short passage in Montesquieu's Persian letter; how much time do I spend working on that? Has anyone ever read "Memorandum," by E.B. White? Here's the link to the first page (the essay is in One Man's Meat).
I sound like I'm whining, don't I? Don't worry, all is well: I had a very good birthday, thanks to all of my well-wishers, electronic and otherwise. Madame Pla, the house manager, "m'a fait les bises," that is, she gave me the French quadruple-kiss (not to be confused with French kissing, which is entirely different). Last night was the hall meeting, followed by a long party, where I finally succeeded in meeting some people, and might have made a lasting friend (fingers crossed). The fact that there was a party on the night of my birthday was an absolute coincidence, but I am not going to pass up free wine, dates, plums, and grapes, and a whole room full of friendly francophones, if I can. Because I brought up the problem of the lack of recycling facilities, it turns out that I volunteered to improve the situation, which won't I think, be as bad as it sounds. One of the highlights of the day was receiving the card my parents sent me! Thank you so much, Mom and Dad!
I spent the night before at the theater, going to a play called Le Horla (pronounced lor-la), by Guy de Maupassant. I walked through the Jewish quarter on the way, which made me feel a mixture of loneliness and homesickness, when I saw children selling etrogim for Sukkot, and elderly Jewish men hobbling along. In the southeast of the 9th arondissement, there is a whole crowd of kosher butcher shops, kosher restaurants, Hebrew and Judaic bookstores, and, of course, synagogues. The theater where the play was held was tiny, and I sat in the front row (did I mention that the tickets were, as always, free, but that nobody was free to go with me?). The play is a one-man meditation on the frailty of the human body and spirit, on the nature of madness, and on the truth. It left me with a bit of a shiver, although no nightmares. Maupassant, after finishing the novella in 1887 (the "play's" original format), wrote in a letter "Today I sent the manuscript of The Horla to Paris; before eight days have passed, you will see that all the newspapers will have published that I am made... It is a great work of imagination, which will strike the reader, and will cause more than one tremble to climb up his back, for it is strange" (my translation). Well, he was right. I think, however, I'm going to need to cut back on the theater, unless I can rationalize my attendance on cultural grounds. So, I'll finish up this blog with a description of the last two plays I've visited, since l'Avare. Arno, are you reading this?
Cyrano m'etait Conte: An adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, itself a play. For those of you who don't know, the gist of the play is that the main character, who is intelligent, clever, cultured, skilled in arms, a brilliant writer, but cursed with a long nose, finds himself first cultivating the love between the woman whom he madly loves, and a less-deserving rival, and then engineering their marriage. The rival dies on the battlefield, before his wife can realize that he had ceased to lover her, and that it was Cyrano who had been sending her elegant, flowing love letters. At the end, Cyrano grows old (thirty-five, to be precise), without ever revealing the secret. This production, however, was full of cameo appearances of various characters from the early 17th century, including the Three Musketeers, Corneille, Moliere, the Grand Conde, and Pascal. A five-comedian show, in which every one of the four male actors played the lead character at a different stage of his life. One of the best plays I have seen since I arrived, like Le Horla, but for entirely different reasons.
Petites et Moyennes Entourloupes: A two-comedian play, in a very hot theater on a very hot night! A satire of employer-employee relations, and of family matters, an obnoxious boss of a small cookie, Beurrafour, business is held captive in his office by a seemingly desperate woman looking for work, who later agrees to take care of the horde of children resulting from his four marriages and multiple affairs, during Christmas Break. The title, which I believe is meant to resemble the phrase petites et moyennes entreprises, or "small and medium businesses," literally means "small and medium dirty tricks. The actors spoke very, very quickly, and though there were many, many jokes I did not understand, I got enough to laugh a great deal. As I've mentioned before, the French appreciate a good penis joke just as much as anybody else. Not bad, but not fabulous.
In case you haven't notice, six of the eight plays I've attended have had five or fewer actors. Of the two exceptions, one was the enormously-prestigious Comedie Francaise, and the other was filled with rich people. I think that most Parisian theaters can't afford to put on costly productions, so deliberately choose write or choose plays with minimal casts. Still, people attend these little productions; Le Horla was packed with 20-30 audience members, I'd say.
Chag Sameach!
~JD
"Ah, Rome! Ah, Bérénice! Ah, prince malheureux! / Pourquoi suis-je empereur? Pourquoi suis-je amoureux?" [Oh Rome, oh Berenice, oh unhappy prince! Why am I an emperor, why am I a lover?] (Racine, Berenice, Act IV scene vi).
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Linguistic Mishaps
It's all too easy to say stupid things when you're speaking a foreign language. Here are a few of the choicest mistakes that I've made since I arrived.
"My Father is at a reading in Australia." In French, the word conference means lecture, the word lecture means reading, and the word congres denotes a conference. I'm so used to second-guessing myself in this tangle, that, when I tried to explain the reason my Dad was in Australia, I used the word lecture. M. Avertin found this very amusing, that my Father had gone all the way to Australia, just to read.
"I came on top of an airplane." The French are much pickier about prepositions than we tend to be. For instance, when speaking of travel and transportation, on an airplane, for instance, a person travels "en avion," but a package or postcard is sent "par avion," whereas in English, both people and objects can come and go "in a plane," "on a plane," or "by plane." I have made both possible mistakes when describing my own itinerary, saying I came "sur un avion," which implies that I was hanging onto the exterior, and that I came "par avion," because I remembered that that's how French postcards are stamped. People, however, never, ever travel "par avion."
"The movie was a real ship." If a movie is a real failure, in English we say that it was a flop. In French, one calls such a movie, idiomatically, a navet, or turnip. I once tried to describe a French movie I thought was really, really stupid (so stupid I stopped watching after the first 10 minutes), using this idiomatic phrase, but accidentally called the movie a navire, instead, which means ship, and is cognate with the English word navy.
"No, I won't be braided." This is just a slip of the tongue; I was trying to tell someone that I would have plenty of time for a future activity, and wouldn't be in a hurry (presse). However, instead of saying "Je ne serai pas presse," I said "Je ne serai pas tresse," which means "I won't be braided!"
"Baldwin IV was a leprosy." I was describing a book I read about the crusades, Les Croisades Vues Par les Arabes (The Crusades as seen by the Arabs) by Amin Maalouf, and I remembered that the crusader-king Baldwin IV was a leper, and vaguely remembered the term "lepre;" so I wrote that he was "lepre." As it turns out, lepre means "leprosy;" I should have written that he was lepreux, meaning both "leprous" and "leper."
"I want to buy some postage stamp." This one was quite understandable, I think. Here, when one wishes to buy additional time for one's cellphone, one goes to the post office; I didn't know the procedure, so I went to the counter, and asked to buy temps, or time; unfortunately, I over-pronounced the word, and the clerk thought that I was trying to buy timbres, or postage-stamps!
"In need the book for a plan." False cognate! I wanted to say "project," and the false cognate projet came out instead, which just means "plan." This did not prevent me from purchasing a copy of Voyager au Moyen Age (Travel in the Middle Ages), however! Given the book, however, perhaps the bookseller would have thought I was planning a medieval-style voyage, had I not clarified myself.
Signs for tampons -- There are many stores here that advertise that they sell tampons. Nick was recently rather confused about this, and brought it up. Tampon, however, is the word for "rubber stamp," although the word can also have the same meaning as its English homograph.
It's surprising to find one's one language in italics. There are some words which the French have been borrowing for quite some time from the English language. One finds businessman in Le Petit Prince (1943), and pickpocket in Le Secret de la Licorne (1943). Other terms are self-made man, gentry, turnpike, stop, OK, leader, black [people only], coming-out, fliers, and even motherfucker. Almost every single one of the plays I've attended (not the 17th- or 19th-century ones, however) has a moment or two of imported anglicisms. More than once, characters have implied that the only English words they know are the threats made in Hollywood cop-films. French people also make almost no effort, I've found, to pronounce English proper nouns correctly (we aren't too different -- try talking about Victor Hugo, and you'll know what I mean). A beggar who sat down next to me tried to tell me that he like the American actor Will Smith, which he pronounced Wi'smiss; another time a store clerk, who was showing off how well she knew English by speaking to me in Franglais told me she was going to Monoton in a couple of weeks. It took me some time to realize that she was trying to say "Manhattan." My professor of the contemporary Arab world, when speaking of the the historian Jane Hathaway once tripped up, and said "Hasaway." I can forgive 100% the vowels, which are just due to an accent, and I can also well understand the occasional difficulty with th- sound, but the elision of the h is just due to laziness. Meanwhile, it's really my r, my u, my grave e, and my ou that give me away as a foreigner. Grenouille (frog), justicatif (legal proof), disponible (available), indispensable (necessary), agrume (citrus fruit), and carotte (carrot) have all given me trouble in pronunciation.
My Dad once explained to me that in linguistics, one speaks of different "registers" of words -- that is, words united by their theme, such as a "legal register" or "medical register." As someone taking a lot of history classes, I've been obligated to learn a fair amount of what I'll call the "agricultural register" -- I've been obligated to learn, for instance, the names of every single cereal crop, as well as words for such terms as "fallow," "flock," "yoke," "shear," "sharecropping," "bridle," "sow," "land [commercial sense]," etc. Virtually all of these words are different (except millet) from their English equivalents, probably because when the Normans took over England, they commandeered the justice system, changing all of the legal terminology (which is why you're charged for "larceny" in court, rather than "theft"), but allowed the peasants continue to sow wheat (semer froment) and to shear their herds (tondre les troupeaux).
There is one register (OK, it's not really a register) that is almost identical in French and English, and I can't figure out why. If anyone can offer some helpful hints, however humorous, I'd be interested. Many names for cats are the same in both languages. Here's a list:
chat - cat
tigre - tiger
lion - lion
panthere - panther
lynx - lynx
puma/cougar - puma/cougar
ocelot - ocelot
~JD
"Mais a la fin du XIe siecle et au cours de la permiere moitie du XIIe, les peages sur les rivieres, comme les peages terrestre, se multiplient, ce qui indique un essor de la circulation" [But at the end of the 11th century and in the course of the first half of the 12th, the river tolls, as well as the terrestrial tolls, multiplied, indicating a great increase in traffic (Jean Verdon, Voyager au Moyen Age, 42).
"My Father is at a reading in Australia." In French, the word conference means lecture, the word lecture means reading, and the word congres denotes a conference. I'm so used to second-guessing myself in this tangle, that, when I tried to explain the reason my Dad was in Australia, I used the word lecture. M. Avertin found this very amusing, that my Father had gone all the way to Australia, just to read.
"I came on top of an airplane." The French are much pickier about prepositions than we tend to be. For instance, when speaking of travel and transportation, on an airplane, for instance, a person travels "en avion," but a package or postcard is sent "par avion," whereas in English, both people and objects can come and go "in a plane," "on a plane," or "by plane." I have made both possible mistakes when describing my own itinerary, saying I came "sur un avion," which implies that I was hanging onto the exterior, and that I came "par avion," because I remembered that that's how French postcards are stamped. People, however, never, ever travel "par avion."
"The movie was a real ship." If a movie is a real failure, in English we say that it was a flop. In French, one calls such a movie, idiomatically, a navet, or turnip. I once tried to describe a French movie I thought was really, really stupid (so stupid I stopped watching after the first 10 minutes), using this idiomatic phrase, but accidentally called the movie a navire, instead, which means ship, and is cognate with the English word navy.
"No, I won't be braided." This is just a slip of the tongue; I was trying to tell someone that I would have plenty of time for a future activity, and wouldn't be in a hurry (presse). However, instead of saying "Je ne serai pas presse," I said "Je ne serai pas tresse," which means "I won't be braided!"
"Baldwin IV was a leprosy." I was describing a book I read about the crusades, Les Croisades Vues Par les Arabes (The Crusades as seen by the Arabs) by Amin Maalouf, and I remembered that the crusader-king Baldwin IV was a leper, and vaguely remembered the term "lepre;" so I wrote that he was "lepre." As it turns out, lepre means "leprosy;" I should have written that he was lepreux, meaning both "leprous" and "leper."
"I want to buy some postage stamp." This one was quite understandable, I think. Here, when one wishes to buy additional time for one's cellphone, one goes to the post office; I didn't know the procedure, so I went to the counter, and asked to buy temps, or time; unfortunately, I over-pronounced the word, and the clerk thought that I was trying to buy timbres, or postage-stamps!
"In need the book for a plan." False cognate! I wanted to say "project," and the false cognate projet came out instead, which just means "plan." This did not prevent me from purchasing a copy of Voyager au Moyen Age (Travel in the Middle Ages), however! Given the book, however, perhaps the bookseller would have thought I was planning a medieval-style voyage, had I not clarified myself.
Signs for tampons -- There are many stores here that advertise that they sell tampons. Nick was recently rather confused about this, and brought it up. Tampon, however, is the word for "rubber stamp," although the word can also have the same meaning as its English homograph.
It's surprising to find one's one language in italics. There are some words which the French have been borrowing for quite some time from the English language. One finds businessman in Le Petit Prince (1943), and pickpocket in Le Secret de la Licorne (1943). Other terms are self-made man, gentry, turnpike, stop, OK, leader, black [people only], coming-out, fliers, and even motherfucker. Almost every single one of the plays I've attended (not the 17th- or 19th-century ones, however) has a moment or two of imported anglicisms. More than once, characters have implied that the only English words they know are the threats made in Hollywood cop-films. French people also make almost no effort, I've found, to pronounce English proper nouns correctly (we aren't too different -- try talking about Victor Hugo, and you'll know what I mean). A beggar who sat down next to me tried to tell me that he like the American actor Will Smith, which he pronounced Wi'smiss; another time a store clerk, who was showing off how well she knew English by speaking to me in Franglais told me she was going to Monoton in a couple of weeks. It took me some time to realize that she was trying to say "Manhattan." My professor of the contemporary Arab world, when speaking of the the historian Jane Hathaway once tripped up, and said "Hasaway." I can forgive 100% the vowels, which are just due to an accent, and I can also well understand the occasional difficulty with th- sound, but the elision of the h is just due to laziness. Meanwhile, it's really my r, my u, my grave e, and my ou that give me away as a foreigner. Grenouille (frog), justicatif (legal proof), disponible (available), indispensable (necessary), agrume (citrus fruit), and carotte (carrot) have all given me trouble in pronunciation.
My Dad once explained to me that in linguistics, one speaks of different "registers" of words -- that is, words united by their theme, such as a "legal register" or "medical register." As someone taking a lot of history classes, I've been obligated to learn a fair amount of what I'll call the "agricultural register" -- I've been obligated to learn, for instance, the names of every single cereal crop, as well as words for such terms as "fallow," "flock," "yoke," "shear," "sharecropping," "bridle," "sow," "land [commercial sense]," etc. Virtually all of these words are different (except millet) from their English equivalents, probably because when the Normans took over England, they commandeered the justice system, changing all of the legal terminology (which is why you're charged for "larceny" in court, rather than "theft"), but allowed the peasants continue to sow wheat (semer froment) and to shear their herds (tondre les troupeaux).
There is one register (OK, it's not really a register) that is almost identical in French and English, and I can't figure out why. If anyone can offer some helpful hints, however humorous, I'd be interested. Many names for cats are the same in both languages. Here's a list:
chat - cat
tigre - tiger
lion - lion
panthere - panther
lynx - lynx
puma/cougar - puma/cougar
ocelot - ocelot
~JD
"Mais a la fin du XIe siecle et au cours de la permiere moitie du XIIe, les peages sur les rivieres, comme les peages terrestre, se multiplient, ce qui indique un essor de la circulation" [But at the end of the 11th century and in the course of the first half of the 12th, the river tolls, as well as the terrestrial tolls, multiplied, indicating a great increase in traffic (Jean Verdon, Voyager au Moyen Age, 42).
Thursday, October 6, 2011
CM, TD, Bibliotheque
Absence from Cornell, and introduction to a foreign system, make me realize just how much I miss so many basic aspects of the Big Red.
At Cornell, there are three main pillars of academics: the lecture, section (discussion, lab, or fieldwork), and library. Superficially, the same division exists in France: the weekly CM (cours magistral) is a lecture lasting 60-90 minutes delivered to all of the students taking the class; the weekly TD (travaux diriges) element of the class breaks the students into groups of around fifteen to twenty, and lasts 2-3 hours; and there is a university library, just around the corner from the Pantheon.
I'm taking four classes, all of them at Paris IV (I passed the very easy French language test required in order to opt out of an otherwise mandatory French class taught by EDUCO). On my academic menu, I have four courses: 1) International Relations of Medieval Europe, 2) The France of Louis XIV, 3) 18th-century French society, and 4) Emergence of the Arab World 1798-1914. I've been to 2 CMs for each, and attended the first TD, except for the Louis XIV TD, which is tomorrow morning at 8:00. I begin all of my days relatively early, usually at 8:00, but never finish later than 2:00 in the afternoon. It's a 40- to 50- minute walk from my dorm to Paris IV, so a fair amount of my time is taken up just in getting to class. On my way to class each day, I pass by the Parc Montsouris, the monument to the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Observatory, the Jardins Luxembourg, and the Pantheon.
CMs are enjoyable, and not unbearably long. All of the professors wear suits and ties, every day, and it is absolutely necessary to address them all as vous (formal "you"). The professors are as cordial as they come, and though very professional, are extremely welcoming, especially to foreigners. There are a surprisingly large amount of foreign students here, most of them through an intermediary program known as ERASMUS; among the first questions I'm always asked by instructors is if I'm with ERASMUS. Surprisingly, lecture halls fill up from the front to the back; I am accustomed to students sitting as far back as possible. Here, students line up in the hallway before the start of class, maybe 15 minutes in advance, in order to be first in the room, to grab front seats. It isn't always easy to hear just what the professors are saying if you're in the back, something I never noticed at Cornell, because I near the front, in the first occupied row, if possible. Not possible here. In any case, the three greatest differences between the American and French systems are 1) French professors have zero contact with their students, 2) office hours do not exist, and 3) though there is a bibliography, there are no reading assignments meant to be completed each day. Bibliographies can contain over 100 volumes; in other words, students are required to pick what and how much to read for the CM.
TDs are long, and sometimes boring. They are not discussion sections; they are lectures delivered to a smaller class size. I cannot tell whether the instructors are young professors, or grad students (or whatever the equivalent is here), but they also wear suits, and are not on a first-name basis with the students. Every single one of the 4 TDs I have attended so far has followed exactly the same model: the instructor hands out a fasicule, or course packet; for each week, there are two short readings, each about 3-5 pages long. The instructor reads down the list of readings, and every student volunteers to prepare an expose, written or oral, on a particular reading. There are very, very strict guidelines for exposes, which are not gone over in class, because all of the French students have been preparing exposes for three years now. (To receive the first post-high school degree, the LICENSE, requires 3 years; all of my classes are third-year courses, and include MASTER students.) For instance, for my 18th-century France class, I chose an excerpt from Montesquie's Lettres Persanes, which I read with Prof. Kaplan, and absolutely adored. Luckily, I'm going to receive a little bit of coaching about how to prepare an expose. But the form of the TD is that of a lecture, only on a smaller scale. In this same class, for instance, I received an incredibly boring lecture on French historiography, which was also very disheartening for someone with academic aspirations, for reasons I can't quite explain. Unfortunately, the sheer number of foreign students has impelled my Arab World Prof (same instructor in CM and TD) to treat them as a separate category, preparing a different kind of assignment than their French peers. Although I could easily understand more lenient grading for non-Francophones, I think it's rather stupid, as well as discouraging, to be denied equality with one's peers in this way. This marks me off, definitively, as different, something I don't like.
Finally, the library. Oh, boy, where to begin; the Cornell system of libraries is superior in absolutely every respect. Assuming most of you know the policies of Olin, Mann, and Uris, I'm just going to list what I can only see as faults of the Sorbonne library:
1) Hours are 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
2) Students may not access the stacks, but must place an order on the library catalog, and are obligated to wait two days to receive their books.
3) Students may only borrow 2 books at a time.
4) Loans are for 14 days.
5) No Borrow Direct, no Interlibrary Loan.
6) Students must apply for a library card.
7) Students must use their library card to gain admittance, as well as to exit the library; they must pass through metro-like turnstiles.
8) There are no printers in the library.
9) One must exit the library in order to use the bathrooms.
10) No Libe Cafe.
I am as shocked by the fact that the library closes as the EDUCO team is of the fact that American students don't respect their bodies (as they put it), and don't get 8 hours of sleep every night. I've spoken to my Australian friend Nick, who told me that in Australia, university is just a part of one's life; it doesn't consume one's life, as it does in the states, where one identifies with one's graduating class, with one's hallway, with one's dormitory, etc., very strongly. I think that it's the same here in France: students live with their parents, and, I guess, that means that they go to bed before midnight each night (at the moment of my typing this, it's 12:17 in the morning, and I have an 8:00 class tomorrow). I know that I could never have writte that Hume paper with such restrictive guidelines.
Two notes before I finish.
The French make up for their horrendous libraries with wonderful, wonderful bookstores. There are some massive used bookstores here, in the Latin quarter, on the Rue Saint Michel, just south of the street's eponymous statue.
French universities, including Paris I, IV, and VII, have departments of geography, and of demography. Maybe these fields are covered in the U.S. by history, econ, and political science (gov at CU)? I don't know. I've only heard of one demographics course ever being taught at Cornell, and that was before I was born, and taught by Prof. Kaplan.
I will update again, sometime after Yom Kippur. Is there anything that anyone is curious about, that I haven't written about? Let me know.
~JD
"Ces grandes chose paraitront petites un jour, quand elles seront confondues dans la multitude immense des revolutions qui bouleversent le monde, et il n'en resterait qu'un faible souvenir, si les arts perfectionnes ne repandaient sur ce siecle une gloire unique qui ne perira jamais" [These mighty happenings will appear insignificant one day, when they will be confounded in the immense multitudes of the revolutions which overturn the world, and nothing would remain of them but a feeble memory, if the perfected arts had not draped upon this century a unique glory which will never perish] (Voltaire, Le Siecle de Louis XIV, p. 561).
At Cornell, there are three main pillars of academics: the lecture, section (discussion, lab, or fieldwork), and library. Superficially, the same division exists in France: the weekly CM (cours magistral) is a lecture lasting 60-90 minutes delivered to all of the students taking the class; the weekly TD (travaux diriges) element of the class breaks the students into groups of around fifteen to twenty, and lasts 2-3 hours; and there is a university library, just around the corner from the Pantheon.
I'm taking four classes, all of them at Paris IV (I passed the very easy French language test required in order to opt out of an otherwise mandatory French class taught by EDUCO). On my academic menu, I have four courses: 1) International Relations of Medieval Europe, 2) The France of Louis XIV, 3) 18th-century French society, and 4) Emergence of the Arab World 1798-1914. I've been to 2 CMs for each, and attended the first TD, except for the Louis XIV TD, which is tomorrow morning at 8:00. I begin all of my days relatively early, usually at 8:00, but never finish later than 2:00 in the afternoon. It's a 40- to 50- minute walk from my dorm to Paris IV, so a fair amount of my time is taken up just in getting to class. On my way to class each day, I pass by the Parc Montsouris, the monument to the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Observatory, the Jardins Luxembourg, and the Pantheon.
CMs are enjoyable, and not unbearably long. All of the professors wear suits and ties, every day, and it is absolutely necessary to address them all as vous (formal "you"). The professors are as cordial as they come, and though very professional, are extremely welcoming, especially to foreigners. There are a surprisingly large amount of foreign students here, most of them through an intermediary program known as ERASMUS; among the first questions I'm always asked by instructors is if I'm with ERASMUS. Surprisingly, lecture halls fill up from the front to the back; I am accustomed to students sitting as far back as possible. Here, students line up in the hallway before the start of class, maybe 15 minutes in advance, in order to be first in the room, to grab front seats. It isn't always easy to hear just what the professors are saying if you're in the back, something I never noticed at Cornell, because I near the front, in the first occupied row, if possible. Not possible here. In any case, the three greatest differences between the American and French systems are 1) French professors have zero contact with their students, 2) office hours do not exist, and 3) though there is a bibliography, there are no reading assignments meant to be completed each day. Bibliographies can contain over 100 volumes; in other words, students are required to pick what and how much to read for the CM.
TDs are long, and sometimes boring. They are not discussion sections; they are lectures delivered to a smaller class size. I cannot tell whether the instructors are young professors, or grad students (or whatever the equivalent is here), but they also wear suits, and are not on a first-name basis with the students. Every single one of the 4 TDs I have attended so far has followed exactly the same model: the instructor hands out a fasicule, or course packet; for each week, there are two short readings, each about 3-5 pages long. The instructor reads down the list of readings, and every student volunteers to prepare an expose, written or oral, on a particular reading. There are very, very strict guidelines for exposes, which are not gone over in class, because all of the French students have been preparing exposes for three years now. (To receive the first post-high school degree, the LICENSE, requires 3 years; all of my classes are third-year courses, and include MASTER students.) For instance, for my 18th-century France class, I chose an excerpt from Montesquie's Lettres Persanes, which I read with Prof. Kaplan, and absolutely adored. Luckily, I'm going to receive a little bit of coaching about how to prepare an expose. But the form of the TD is that of a lecture, only on a smaller scale. In this same class, for instance, I received an incredibly boring lecture on French historiography, which was also very disheartening for someone with academic aspirations, for reasons I can't quite explain. Unfortunately, the sheer number of foreign students has impelled my Arab World Prof (same instructor in CM and TD) to treat them as a separate category, preparing a different kind of assignment than their French peers. Although I could easily understand more lenient grading for non-Francophones, I think it's rather stupid, as well as discouraging, to be denied equality with one's peers in this way. This marks me off, definitively, as different, something I don't like.
Finally, the library. Oh, boy, where to begin; the Cornell system of libraries is superior in absolutely every respect. Assuming most of you know the policies of Olin, Mann, and Uris, I'm just going to list what I can only see as faults of the Sorbonne library:
1) Hours are 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
2) Students may not access the stacks, but must place an order on the library catalog, and are obligated to wait two days to receive their books.
3) Students may only borrow 2 books at a time.
4) Loans are for 14 days.
5) No Borrow Direct, no Interlibrary Loan.
6) Students must apply for a library card.
7) Students must use their library card to gain admittance, as well as to exit the library; they must pass through metro-like turnstiles.
8) There are no printers in the library.
9) One must exit the library in order to use the bathrooms.
10) No Libe Cafe.
I am as shocked by the fact that the library closes as the EDUCO team is of the fact that American students don't respect their bodies (as they put it), and don't get 8 hours of sleep every night. I've spoken to my Australian friend Nick, who told me that in Australia, university is just a part of one's life; it doesn't consume one's life, as it does in the states, where one identifies with one's graduating class, with one's hallway, with one's dormitory, etc., very strongly. I think that it's the same here in France: students live with their parents, and, I guess, that means that they go to bed before midnight each night (at the moment of my typing this, it's 12:17 in the morning, and I have an 8:00 class tomorrow). I know that I could never have writte that Hume paper with such restrictive guidelines.
Two notes before I finish.
The French make up for their horrendous libraries with wonderful, wonderful bookstores. There are some massive used bookstores here, in the Latin quarter, on the Rue Saint Michel, just south of the street's eponymous statue.
French universities, including Paris I, IV, and VII, have departments of geography, and of demography. Maybe these fields are covered in the U.S. by history, econ, and political science (gov at CU)? I don't know. I've only heard of one demographics course ever being taught at Cornell, and that was before I was born, and taught by Prof. Kaplan.
I will update again, sometime after Yom Kippur. Is there anything that anyone is curious about, that I haven't written about? Let me know.
~JD
"Ces grandes chose paraitront petites un jour, quand elles seront confondues dans la multitude immense des revolutions qui bouleversent le monde, et il n'en resterait qu'un faible souvenir, si les arts perfectionnes ne repandaient sur ce siecle une gloire unique qui ne perira jamais" [These mighty happenings will appear insignificant one day, when they will be confounded in the immense multitudes of the revolutions which overturn the world, and nothing would remain of them but a feeble memory, if the perfected arts had not draped upon this century a unique glory which will never perish] (Voltaire, Le Siecle de Louis XIV, p. 561).
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Dans le Frigo
I'm going to take a moment to talk about normal food here. Yes, normal food, as in the kind of thing that I'm used to eating, and not the decadent repast that I wrote about two posts ago.
Fruits and veggies are pretty much the same in France. However, there are a few differences: tomatoes here are so far tastier here than they are in the U.S., and according to Bruno, Coeur de Boeuf tomatoes, which I haven't yet tried, are even better. A very common dish here (I've had it multiple times here) is sliced tomato in vinaigrette. Green beans, likewise; both common and excellent when served fresh, with just a little bit of sauce. On the other hand, the apples I am used to, cultivated in the Cornell Orchards, are much, much better than the apples I've eaten here, which are fairly boring. I miss the massive quantities of onions that I am used to consuming at home. Peaches and nectarines, while they are in season, are very, very common, whereas blueberries are exotic. I had only once eaten fresh figs before, and they might have been the tastiest fruit I had ever eaten -- but French figs, grown, I think, in the south of French, are less interesting than the tomatoes. The close proximity to North Africa and the Middle East makes the transport of such produce, such as dates (1.99 a kilo, from Libya) and so-called Barbary figs, which I had never seen before, much easier. Mangoes are a euro apiece, but I've barely seen any watermelon. Although OJ is common here, I don't think it's quite as ubiquitous as is in the states; and as I mentioned earlier, French people don't know what to do with their ripe bananas.
Oh, how the bread is good here! See an earlier entry for details. Sadly, no bagels. Interestingly, one buys just about all one's bread here fresh, and from a real boulangerie -- except sandwich bread. Even stranger, one of the biggest sandwich bread brands (the Avertins ate it every morning) is called "Harry's" and advertises itself as an "American Sandwich Loaf." According to the packaging, however, it's a German company...
Everybody in France eats Nutella.
Milk is more or less the same, although I had to learn that here, "skim" milk is called "creamed" (ecreme). This makes sense, when considering that "pitted" dates lack pits, "peeled" onions lack peels, and "cored" pears lack cores; however, it's very confusing, during one's first trip to the grocery store. Another confusing item at the grocery store is so-called fromage blanc (white cheese) which looks like, tastes like, and is situated next to yogurt (although yogurt is a little bit firmer). I'm still not 100% certain of the difference in production. According to a dairy vendor, yogurt undergoes boiling, while fromage blanc doesn't. According to a quick internet search, however, yogurt is fermented, while fromage blanc is curdled, and moreover, yaourt is an EU-controlled name, (just like champagne). Cheese ranges from the cheap to the gourmet; however, what I'll call the "workingman's cheese" is not cheddar (which, when you think about it, has to be imported from the UK), but Camembert. I had an amazing cheese the other day, Reblochon, made in Savoie, which is in the East, near the Italian border.
There's a student cafeteria, at which I receive a limited number of free meals, guaranteeing me a hot dinner four times a week. Not a bad deal, considering that I'm not living with a host family, a choice I am every day regretting (I choose to live in the dorms because I thought I would have a French roommate). In the U.S., every corridor in the dorm becomes a small community; here the Residence Lucien Paye, there is almost no contact with the others, though they are perfectly friendly (if somewhat distant) when I meet them.
One last interesting point; there are street vendors here who sell fruit at extremely low prices, who create small stall out of fruit crates, which one can find near or inside of metro stations. These vendors all appear to be of the same non-Francophone nationality. According to Bruno (who thinks they might be Afghan), they used to sell posters.
Next post, I will vent about French academics.
~JD
"Si le roi avait ete temoin de ce spectacle, il aurait lui-meme eteint les flammes. Il signa, du fond de son palais de Versailles et au milieu des plaisirs, la destruction de tout un pays, parce qu'il ne voyait dans cet ordre que son pouvoir et le malheureux droit de la guerre; mais de plus pres, il n'en eut vu que l'horreur" [If the king had witnessed this spectacle, he would have himself extinguished the flames. He signed, from the background of his Palace of Versailles and amidst its pleasures, the destruction of a whole country, because in this order he saw only his power and the wretched law of war; but had he been closer, he would have seen only the horror] (Voltaire, Le Siecle de Louis XIV p. 371).
Fruits and veggies are pretty much the same in France. However, there are a few differences: tomatoes here are so far tastier here than they are in the U.S., and according to Bruno, Coeur de Boeuf tomatoes, which I haven't yet tried, are even better. A very common dish here (I've had it multiple times here) is sliced tomato in vinaigrette. Green beans, likewise; both common and excellent when served fresh, with just a little bit of sauce. On the other hand, the apples I am used to, cultivated in the Cornell Orchards, are much, much better than the apples I've eaten here, which are fairly boring. I miss the massive quantities of onions that I am used to consuming at home. Peaches and nectarines, while they are in season, are very, very common, whereas blueberries are exotic. I had only once eaten fresh figs before, and they might have been the tastiest fruit I had ever eaten -- but French figs, grown, I think, in the south of French, are less interesting than the tomatoes. The close proximity to North Africa and the Middle East makes the transport of such produce, such as dates (1.99 a kilo, from Libya) and so-called Barbary figs, which I had never seen before, much easier. Mangoes are a euro apiece, but I've barely seen any watermelon. Although OJ is common here, I don't think it's quite as ubiquitous as is in the states; and as I mentioned earlier, French people don't know what to do with their ripe bananas.
Oh, how the bread is good here! See an earlier entry for details. Sadly, no bagels. Interestingly, one buys just about all one's bread here fresh, and from a real boulangerie -- except sandwich bread. Even stranger, one of the biggest sandwich bread brands (the Avertins ate it every morning) is called "Harry's" and advertises itself as an "American Sandwich Loaf." According to the packaging, however, it's a German company...
Everybody in France eats Nutella.
Milk is more or less the same, although I had to learn that here, "skim" milk is called "creamed" (ecreme). This makes sense, when considering that "pitted" dates lack pits, "peeled" onions lack peels, and "cored" pears lack cores; however, it's very confusing, during one's first trip to the grocery store. Another confusing item at the grocery store is so-called fromage blanc (white cheese) which looks like, tastes like, and is situated next to yogurt (although yogurt is a little bit firmer). I'm still not 100% certain of the difference in production. According to a dairy vendor, yogurt undergoes boiling, while fromage blanc doesn't. According to a quick internet search, however, yogurt is fermented, while fromage blanc is curdled, and moreover, yaourt is an EU-controlled name, (just like champagne). Cheese ranges from the cheap to the gourmet; however, what I'll call the "workingman's cheese" is not cheddar (which, when you think about it, has to be imported from the UK), but Camembert. I had an amazing cheese the other day, Reblochon, made in Savoie, which is in the East, near the Italian border.
There's a student cafeteria, at which I receive a limited number of free meals, guaranteeing me a hot dinner four times a week. Not a bad deal, considering that I'm not living with a host family, a choice I am every day regretting (I choose to live in the dorms because I thought I would have a French roommate). In the U.S., every corridor in the dorm becomes a small community; here the Residence Lucien Paye, there is almost no contact with the others, though they are perfectly friendly (if somewhat distant) when I meet them.
One last interesting point; there are street vendors here who sell fruit at extremely low prices, who create small stall out of fruit crates, which one can find near or inside of metro stations. These vendors all appear to be of the same non-Francophone nationality. According to Bruno (who thinks they might be Afghan), they used to sell posters.
Next post, I will vent about French academics.
~JD
"Si le roi avait ete temoin de ce spectacle, il aurait lui-meme eteint les flammes. Il signa, du fond de son palais de Versailles et au milieu des plaisirs, la destruction de tout un pays, parce qu'il ne voyait dans cet ordre que son pouvoir et le malheureux droit de la guerre; mais de plus pres, il n'en eut vu que l'horreur" [If the king had witnessed this spectacle, he would have himself extinguished the flames. He signed, from the background of his Palace of Versailles and amidst its pleasures, the destruction of a whole country, because in this order he saw only his power and the wretched law of war; but had he been closer, he would have seen only the horror] (Voltaire, Le Siecle de Louis XIV p. 371).
Sunday, October 2, 2011
400 Years of Italians
Shanah Tovah, everyone! I hope that this year, we will not continue the stupid mistakes of last year, and that the unfortunate events of last year will not repeat themselves.
Speaking of repetition, I spent (another) day at the Louvre this weekend. This weekend was the Day of Italian Paintings: that's virtually all I saw, but my itinerary took me from the medieval painters of the Sienese school to the canvases of the age of Louis XIV.
The curators of the Louvre have worked hard to present their Italian paintings in a historically coherent fashion, that nonetheless is free from strict chronology. They have converted a colossal second-floor hallway in the Denon wing, perhaps the longest continuous wing in the entire palace, into a gallery to display their great Italian treasures. I would guess that at least 20% of the paintings depicted the Madonna and child, even though by the middle of the seventeenth century, this motif is no longer in vogue. The earliest Italian paintings, those dating from the late 13th century, were in a side room, as was the Mona Lisa, but for the most part, the chronological trajectory was straight. Oh, and I also passed two famous Greek statues, dating from antiquity, on the way, "The Gladiator" (who actually isn't a gladiator), and the "Victory of Samothrace."
The first room contained some well-known names to those of you familiar with art history, or just with Dante's Divine Comedy. Cimabue and Giotto, two great painters of the 14th century, who, like all their contemporaries, painted only religious scenes. Whereas Cimabue's style places him squarely in the medieval school, on account of his highly impersonal representations of saints and angels outside of time and space, however well he executed them, Giotto began to innovate, and began to situate his paintings in time, at precise moments in history. Today, it seems obvious that a painting, even a still-life or a portrait, is in some sense a snapshot of a particular object at a particular time, but in the middle ages, Mary and Jesus, surrounded by angels, stare out at the spectator in a kind of calm eternity. They are objects of veneration. However, Giotto welcomes his viewers to imagine a specific moment in time. His paintings changed not only the history of art, but also the history of religion; according to Van Loon's Arts, Giotto's wonderful paintings of the life of Saint Francis of Assisi are what brought about such enormous popularity to this sect (indeed, the Franciscans are still around today, and I have a friend who is considering joining them, although he seems to be leaning closer to the Dominicans). I saw one of these paintings, and it was quite fantastic, capturing the moment in which Saint Francis received the stigmata (I also saw a very obvious imitation of it by a painter of the Sienese school, who lacked the creativity to compose his own tableau). In the same room, of a slightly later period, were two 15th-century monk-painters, Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, who were lucky enough to be painting after Brunelleschi invented linear perspective, and also lucky enough to be patronized by the Medici. While Fra Angelico had an enormous love of bright color, Lippi played with light and shadow, and made great strides (to my eyes) in increasing the level of realism in painting, even going so far as to situate a self-portrait rather prominently in one painting. For those of you who don't know, Lippi was a great womanizer, and Cosimo de Medici often had to be patient with the monks debaucheries.
Yes, and so the Renaissance was beginning. The Louvre has several paintings by such illustrious artists as Titian, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci. Yes, I saw the Mona Lisa, although I wasn't paying as strict attention to it as the mob of tourists waiting in line to come within several meters of the painting. It turns out that the woman in the painting is actually a historical figure, and that the French title of the painting, "La Joconde," is actually a pun on her surname; the painting might have been intended as a wedding present, even though Francois I brought it home in his luggage after his wars in Italy. Facing the Mona Lisa is Veronese's huge, huge painting, "The Wedding of Cana," the largest painting in the Louvre; I have absolutely no idea how they even managed to transport it to its current location: they must have unrolled it, and constructed the frame inside of the gallery, and then hung the painting on a nail the size of a parking meter. The massive painting was commissioned by a Dominican monastery, who hung it in their dining hall. However, the Dominican order forbids speaking during mealtimes, so the lively painting, full of action and music (the musicians may have been modeled after musicians whom Veronese knew personally) ended up accompanying many a dour, silent meal. In the same gallery is hidden a fairly good painting entitled "Concert champetre," or "meadow concert;" the painting depicts a singer and a lute-player just about to begin playing, accompanied by two nudes. The composition is actually a clever allegory of poetry, and the inner and the meanings hidden between the lines, as represented by the two naked women. Not far from these is a colorful painting of Paradise that once hung over the throne of the doge, in Venice. The last painter not to miss in this room is a less-known Bassan, who decided to include depictions of daily life in his work, which was at the time an unusual choice. In a painting of what is ostensibly Hephaestus's forge, the artist visited a local smithy, and has meticulously portrayed the artisans at work; in another painting, Bassan took the same approach towards viticulture and wine-production.
There are a number of other interesting 16th-century paintings in the gallery. There is a series of four portraits, called the Four Seasons, by Arcimboldo, and presented to Maximilien II of the Holy Roman Empire in 1573. The painting, four portraits cleverly composed of various vegetable and floral arrangements, are actually symbolic palimpsests, simultaneously presenting the four seasons, the four humors, and the unity of an Empire that was a variegated hodgepodge of various nationalities, language-groups, and religions. There are some excellent religious paintings dating from the early Counter-Reformation, and particularly good are those painted by a fellow named Carrache, who also took the trouble to paint countryside scenes of fishing and hunting, towards the late 16th and early 17th centuries. One of the most unusual paintings of this section, however, is a large painting situated in the middle of the corridor, depicting the same scene from two different angles, one on one canvas, and another on a canvas on the opposite side. The scene is that of David about to decapitate Goliath with the latter's sword; from one side, one sees the faces of the two, and from the other, the backs; the painter's name is Danielle de Volterra.
In the Louvre's exhibit on Italian painting, between the 16th and the 17th centuries are two markers. The first is a large white urn, placed in the center in the hallway; the second is the series of works by Caravaggio (such as this one), who recreated painting. Developing (though not inventing) the method of clair-obscur, this painter completely changed the way painters depicted light, just as da Vinci had a century or so earlier. If you love the light of Vermeer, and the darkness of Rembrandt (as I do), you will know what I mean. Although I still prefer the work of the two Dutchmen to that of the Italian, it is only because the former have a special place in my heart. However, Caravaggio did more than transform style, he also made a drastic change in subject; although "humanist" is an overused and imprecise term, I believe that it characterizes his general elision of angels from his paintings. There are certainly exceptions to this (such as the painting of the Akedah), but when angels appear, they seem human, obeying the same laws of light and shadow as human subjects; likewise, even when halos appear, they are faint circles.
After Caravaggio, there are few remarkable paintings. Painters who I had not heard of, whom I will probably forget, such as Le Guerchin, Revi, Le Dominiquin, and Salvatore Rosa, dominated. This last painter has an interesting story, however. When he was young, he spent time with a group of bandits, and many of his paintings include violent themes. His most famous, "Bataille heroique," painted 1652, is intriguing, because it is anything but heroic; it is violence, pure and simple. The painting followed a series of extremely violent civil wars in France (which I have been reading about), and this painter decided to paint a battle without heroes, fought in a smoking, deserted landscape. Needless to say, Louis XIV wasn't too excited about it, and nobody paid much attention to it for a few centuries. Now, according to the Louvre curators, it is without a doubt his most famous painting.
That night, I went out with some Cornellians, and didn't get back until 4 am. It was a long day!
~JD
"Aucun d'eux ne pensait qu'un roi eleve dans l'eloignement des affaires osat prendre sur lui le fardeau de gouvernement. Mazarin avait prolonge l'enfance de ce monarque autant qu'il l'avait pu" [Not one of them thought that a king raised at a distance from the affairs of state would dare to take upon himself the burden of governing; Mazarin had prolonged the childhood of this monarch as much as he could] (Voltaire, Le Siecle de Louis XIV, p. 229).
Speaking of repetition, I spent (another) day at the Louvre this weekend. This weekend was the Day of Italian Paintings: that's virtually all I saw, but my itinerary took me from the medieval painters of the Sienese school to the canvases of the age of Louis XIV.
The curators of the Louvre have worked hard to present their Italian paintings in a historically coherent fashion, that nonetheless is free from strict chronology. They have converted a colossal second-floor hallway in the Denon wing, perhaps the longest continuous wing in the entire palace, into a gallery to display their great Italian treasures. I would guess that at least 20% of the paintings depicted the Madonna and child, even though by the middle of the seventeenth century, this motif is no longer in vogue. The earliest Italian paintings, those dating from the late 13th century, were in a side room, as was the Mona Lisa, but for the most part, the chronological trajectory was straight. Oh, and I also passed two famous Greek statues, dating from antiquity, on the way, "The Gladiator" (who actually isn't a gladiator), and the "Victory of Samothrace."
The first room contained some well-known names to those of you familiar with art history, or just with Dante's Divine Comedy. Cimabue and Giotto, two great painters of the 14th century, who, like all their contemporaries, painted only religious scenes. Whereas Cimabue's style places him squarely in the medieval school, on account of his highly impersonal representations of saints and angels outside of time and space, however well he executed them, Giotto began to innovate, and began to situate his paintings in time, at precise moments in history. Today, it seems obvious that a painting, even a still-life or a portrait, is in some sense a snapshot of a particular object at a particular time, but in the middle ages, Mary and Jesus, surrounded by angels, stare out at the spectator in a kind of calm eternity. They are objects of veneration. However, Giotto welcomes his viewers to imagine a specific moment in time. His paintings changed not only the history of art, but also the history of religion; according to Van Loon's Arts, Giotto's wonderful paintings of the life of Saint Francis of Assisi are what brought about such enormous popularity to this sect (indeed, the Franciscans are still around today, and I have a friend who is considering joining them, although he seems to be leaning closer to the Dominicans). I saw one of these paintings, and it was quite fantastic, capturing the moment in which Saint Francis received the stigmata (I also saw a very obvious imitation of it by a painter of the Sienese school, who lacked the creativity to compose his own tableau). In the same room, of a slightly later period, were two 15th-century monk-painters, Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, who were lucky enough to be painting after Brunelleschi invented linear perspective, and also lucky enough to be patronized by the Medici. While Fra Angelico had an enormous love of bright color, Lippi played with light and shadow, and made great strides (to my eyes) in increasing the level of realism in painting, even going so far as to situate a self-portrait rather prominently in one painting. For those of you who don't know, Lippi was a great womanizer, and Cosimo de Medici often had to be patient with the monks debaucheries.
Yes, and so the Renaissance was beginning. The Louvre has several paintings by such illustrious artists as Titian, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci. Yes, I saw the Mona Lisa, although I wasn't paying as strict attention to it as the mob of tourists waiting in line to come within several meters of the painting. It turns out that the woman in the painting is actually a historical figure, and that the French title of the painting, "La Joconde," is actually a pun on her surname; the painting might have been intended as a wedding present, even though Francois I brought it home in his luggage after his wars in Italy. Facing the Mona Lisa is Veronese's huge, huge painting, "The Wedding of Cana," the largest painting in the Louvre; I have absolutely no idea how they even managed to transport it to its current location: they must have unrolled it, and constructed the frame inside of the gallery, and then hung the painting on a nail the size of a parking meter. The massive painting was commissioned by a Dominican monastery, who hung it in their dining hall. However, the Dominican order forbids speaking during mealtimes, so the lively painting, full of action and music (the musicians may have been modeled after musicians whom Veronese knew personally) ended up accompanying many a dour, silent meal. In the same gallery is hidden a fairly good painting entitled "Concert champetre," or "meadow concert;" the painting depicts a singer and a lute-player just about to begin playing, accompanied by two nudes. The composition is actually a clever allegory of poetry, and the inner and the meanings hidden between the lines, as represented by the two naked women. Not far from these is a colorful painting of Paradise that once hung over the throne of the doge, in Venice. The last painter not to miss in this room is a less-known Bassan, who decided to include depictions of daily life in his work, which was at the time an unusual choice. In a painting of what is ostensibly Hephaestus's forge, the artist visited a local smithy, and has meticulously portrayed the artisans at work; in another painting, Bassan took the same approach towards viticulture and wine-production.
There are a number of other interesting 16th-century paintings in the gallery. There is a series of four portraits, called the Four Seasons, by Arcimboldo, and presented to Maximilien II of the Holy Roman Empire in 1573. The painting, four portraits cleverly composed of various vegetable and floral arrangements, are actually symbolic palimpsests, simultaneously presenting the four seasons, the four humors, and the unity of an Empire that was a variegated hodgepodge of various nationalities, language-groups, and religions. There are some excellent religious paintings dating from the early Counter-Reformation, and particularly good are those painted by a fellow named Carrache, who also took the trouble to paint countryside scenes of fishing and hunting, towards the late 16th and early 17th centuries. One of the most unusual paintings of this section, however, is a large painting situated in the middle of the corridor, depicting the same scene from two different angles, one on one canvas, and another on a canvas on the opposite side. The scene is that of David about to decapitate Goliath with the latter's sword; from one side, one sees the faces of the two, and from the other, the backs; the painter's name is Danielle de Volterra.
In the Louvre's exhibit on Italian painting, between the 16th and the 17th centuries are two markers. The first is a large white urn, placed in the center in the hallway; the second is the series of works by Caravaggio (such as this one), who recreated painting. Developing (though not inventing) the method of clair-obscur, this painter completely changed the way painters depicted light, just as da Vinci had a century or so earlier. If you love the light of Vermeer, and the darkness of Rembrandt (as I do), you will know what I mean. Although I still prefer the work of the two Dutchmen to that of the Italian, it is only because the former have a special place in my heart. However, Caravaggio did more than transform style, he also made a drastic change in subject; although "humanist" is an overused and imprecise term, I believe that it characterizes his general elision of angels from his paintings. There are certainly exceptions to this (such as the painting of the Akedah), but when angels appear, they seem human, obeying the same laws of light and shadow as human subjects; likewise, even when halos appear, they are faint circles.
After Caravaggio, there are few remarkable paintings. Painters who I had not heard of, whom I will probably forget, such as Le Guerchin, Revi, Le Dominiquin, and Salvatore Rosa, dominated. This last painter has an interesting story, however. When he was young, he spent time with a group of bandits, and many of his paintings include violent themes. His most famous, "Bataille heroique," painted 1652, is intriguing, because it is anything but heroic; it is violence, pure and simple. The painting followed a series of extremely violent civil wars in France (which I have been reading about), and this painter decided to paint a battle without heroes, fought in a smoking, deserted landscape. Needless to say, Louis XIV wasn't too excited about it, and nobody paid much attention to it for a few centuries. Now, according to the Louvre curators, it is without a doubt his most famous painting.
That night, I went out with some Cornellians, and didn't get back until 4 am. It was a long day!
~JD
"Aucun d'eux ne pensait qu'un roi eleve dans l'eloignement des affaires osat prendre sur lui le fardeau de gouvernement. Mazarin avait prolonge l'enfance de ce monarque autant qu'il l'avait pu" [Not one of them thought that a king raised at a distance from the affairs of state would dare to take upon himself the burden of governing; Mazarin had prolonged the childhood of this monarch as much as he could] (Voltaire, Le Siecle de Louis XIV, p. 229).
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