Tuesday was a very full day. Morning blogging was followed by a few minor tasks around town, such as returning my books to the library; by the time I reached my first tourist destination, Victor Hugo's house on the Place des Vosges. I'll admit that all I have read of Hugo's works is "Demain, des l'aube," a short, but very famous, poem of his. However, I will be reading Notre-Dame de Paris this semester, so I expect to shortly become a fan, because from everything I've heard, he's an excellent writer.
Hugo lived in the 280-square-meter apartment for 16 years of his life: he moved constantly, so there is no single house where he passed most of or all of his days, as is the case for certain other historical figures. Although there is the attempt in some rooms, such as the "Chinese salon," to reconstruct Hugo's own interior decoration, for the most part, the rooms contain mementos and artifacts relating to his life, his family, and his works, arranged chronologically with reference to his time in exile following Napoleon III's coup d'etat. There are some excellent paintings, drawings, and engravings of scenes from his works, which I'm certain I would have appreciated even more if I had read them. Although I've already seen both of Rodin's excellent sculptures of Hugo as the great visionary writer (one naked, the other clothed), I saw several other good portraits and busts, a couple of them even made especially for the museum, which opened in 1904 (Hugo really looks quite different with and without a beard), as well as a few artifacts which had belonged to him and to his family members. I was surprised by just how many anti-Hugo caricatures were drawn during his lifetime: as a politician and an artist, he clearly had made a fair amount of enemies, which rather surprises me. Now, of course, everybody loves him, but it wasn't always that way, it seems.
I didn't have enough time to walk to my next stop, which was up in Montmartre, so I did the unexpected, and took the Metro northwest, to a Metro station named after Lamarck, one of the least-appreciated scientists; my Dad will be happy to learn that the man at least has a Metro station (and its eponymous street) named after him! I eventually got my bearings, and made my way to an out-of-the way museum: l'Espace Dali. Dedicated to the drawings and sculpture of the great Spanish surrealist (rather than his familiar paintings), l'Espace Dali had been recommended to me by Meaghan, one of my fellow Cornellians here in Paris. In any case, there were some pretty nifty things on display: sculptures of melting clocks and of long-legged elephants carrying crystal obelisks on their backs, naturally, but also drawings I had never seen or heard of before. Dali illustrated Don Quixote, Romeo and Juliet, The Search for the Holy Grail, the Old and New Testaments (his mother was a fervent Catholic), and Alice in Wonderland, among other works of literature. He designed a couch in the shape of an enormous pair of lips, and a set of silverware in the shape of little animals' heads. My favorite piece, however, was a series of 12 drawings, plus a frontispiece, done in 1973, in honor of the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the state of Israel. Dali considered the return of a Jewish state, after centuries of exile, a fitting subject for surrealist art, and at least one Israeli minister commended the artwork, stating that "whether for their ambiguity or ambivalence, these portraits hold a definite significance for us. Through his abundant and diverse imagination, Dali in this album helps to immortalize the Israeli civilization at the beginning, to realize the mystical character of its existence and of its developments."
I hopped back onto the Metro, and rode it to my third and final stop for the day: Honore de Balzac's house, in the 16e arrondissement, in the far west of the city. Balzac moved there in order to escape his creditors, and wrote up to 22 hours a day in his small office, producing the great super-series the "Human Comedy." I'll admit that, as with Victor Hugo, I haven't read anything by Balzac; apparently his vocabulary is difficult for even native French speakers to understand. Furthermore, my Mother once told me that I would need to wait until I was 30 before I could read and fully understand Cousine Bette, but now that I've visited the house, I might give old Honore a shot, perhaps this summer. His house is occupied almost entirely by the temporary exhibit on the rather dull topic of the Grisette, which means something like "young girl or young woman of middling social condition, worker or employer in a dress shop" in the 19th century (a definition that makes me think about the Mantalini couple in Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby). In one side room is a series of several hundred woodcuts of many of the characters from Balzac's fiction. In another are a few of his personal artifacts, including his walking stick. Thankfully, the study, too, has been preserved: you can still look at the desk where he wrote that pile of books!
It was dark again, so I rode the Metro to Denfert-Rochereau, from which I walked to the student cafeteria, and then, back to my dorm.
~JD
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