Actually, I just noticed, I got so caught up in describing the opera theatre and its patrons of the time; I forgot to mention it's most famous patron, namely, the Phantom of the Opera. When they were building the Palais, they had to drain a body of water underground, during which the neighbours heard voices, which is how the myth began, and any mysterious occurrences at the theatre were attributed to a ghost. In particular, the falling of one of the counter weights to the auditorium chandelier on a woman in the renters area. An incident which was embellished in the novel by Gaston Leroux, on which the musical was based, in which the ghost received his own box but luckily for the theatre, the musical has never been performed in Paris, nor the movie, so audiences sit in Box 5 which no thoughts regarding the phantom.
Oh, and the ballet I saw was a contemporary one, choreographed by John Neumeier to Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony. I didn’t a playbill until afterwards, so I didn’t know about the season theme or the love story, but I quite enjoyed it. I would have really enjoyed it if I had a seat though. It was a two hour performance with no interval, and after the first act, I was finding it hard to concentrate on the stage, and by the last act, I was fidgeting all over the place. Which was a pity, since the choreography was really interesting and the dancers very good. Note to self for the future, it is worth paying more for a seat at a theatre, though in this case I didn’t really have a choice as they were all sold out. It was an experience though, they had two doors that went to standing room seats where they had padded rail for people to lean or perch on. The more seasoned of the audience went in early and stood near the rope separating the standing audience from the seated audience in the hope that they would be allowed into any empty spots, though there weren’t any at this performance. We didn’t have that bad a position actually, an unobstructed view of the whole stage. I’ve paid much more at home for worse.
Anyway, I should stop talking about the theatre and mention what else I’ve been doing. Which has been a whole lot of walking. Yesterday I way, very slowly, from Opera Garnier to Opera Bastille, doing some window shopping and sight seeing along the way. I breezed though Galleries Lafayette, which was very luxurious (I had a peak at the Tiffany section) and did have a very big lingerie department, though I don’t know about the largest in the world. It also had a very nice view over Paris from the terrace and a very pretty dome.
I also looked inside Le Printemps, the department store next door, but it wasn’t as pretty, so didn’t bother looking around. I also went though Passage des Panaoramas, a covered shopping arcade, which was a bit of a let down from my guide book description, not as nice as the arcades back one and away from the entrance lots of empty stores.
I also stumbled across the Eglise St-Eustache, which has a very beautiful façade with lots of arches, though the inside doesn’t really match it with lots of the paintings needing restoration work done.
And with that, I think I’ve finished describing yesterday. Today’s plan was kind of similar, I had a couple of places I wanted to go, and whatever was interesting in between or around I would decide to visit when I got there.
The first attraction was the Hôtel des Invalides, which houses the Musée de l'Armée and Napolean’s Tomb. Before I went there however, I made a slight detour to the École Militaire, from which, there is a great view of:
Le Tour Eiffel. I didn’t bother going any closer as I have plans to go up it in summer with my boyfriend, but I thought that I would at least take a photo of it since I was so close.
From there it was a short walk to the Hôtel des Invalides, which for those who have been to Paris, is the gold domed roof near the Eiffel Tower.
This is the roof of the aptly named Dome Church, in which is Napolean’s Tomb, where he lies within five successive coffins encased in a sarcophagus on a floor on which is written eight of famous victories and on the surrounding walls are ten marble sculptures of his civil achievements, one of which lists all the buildings he commissioned in Paris. Quite ostentatious really. Granted, it wasn’t planned by the emperor to be interred in such a state, all he supposedly specified was to ‘lie by the Seine, among the people he loved’ but I’m pretty sure he would approve of his final resting place:
Who wouldn’t be? 12kg of gold was used to gild the dome when it was restored in 1989!
The rest of the complex wasn’t as ornate, since that church was originally built for King Louis IV to come and hear the same mass as all the veterans of his wars for whom the complex was built, which encompassed the functions of a hospice, barracks, convent, hospital and factory. It you’re wondering, the royal church was never used for the military, they had their own plainer church, behind the royal one, currently decorated with flags and standards taken from enemies.
The Musée de l'Armée is split into three sections, one of which was closed for renovations. I only went through one of the remaining two, The Antique Arms and Armour Deparment, knights to permanent army. The other was devoted to the First and Second World Wars, but I ran out of time and wasn't really interested in the topics, as in the past I've found it difficult to stomach exhibits on those wars. I'm fine looking at swords and muskets and chain mail and suits of armour but find it hard to look at guns and tanks. I think it's because history has romanticised knights and sword play and it is hard to identify with the individual people on the battlefield who couldn’t write and tell us about what it was really like, but there is nothing romantic about mechanised warfare, which is more recent of which there are plenty of memoirs describing the horrendousness of it all.
I also got distracted by the Musée des Plans-Reliefs. As some of you know, I have a thing for maps, I like seeing how things are organised on a larger scale and maps made in times past are even more interesting as you can compare them to today and see the development. Oh, as anybody who has travelled with me probably knows, I also have a thing for miniature models; I always look at them and take photos of them if there are any around. So the relief maps were the combination of these, scale models of fortified towns and surrounding countryside all along the French border made from 1668 to 1870. They were pretty cool, but I didn’t find them that interesting since I hadn’t been to any of the places except one and all the descriptions were in French. Though, the thing that interested me about most of the models was the star-like shape of the town defences:
which I had never seen before, supposedly built in this shape as round towers have blind spots. You can see how the town could go in hold out in a siege until they ran out of supplies. They had a cool set of models showing the stages of a battle from as the advancing army comes in from the distance to breaking the walls and entering the town.
From the Hôtel des Invalides, I headed, again very slowly, east toward my second attraction, the Panthéon, going past the Eglise St-Sulpice whose name you may recognise from Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, which he places a meridian line he calls ‘The Rose Line’ and is the setting of a murder. For those who have seen the movie, there really is a meridian line marked on the floor of the church
but as a sign in the church states, this was placed there for a scientific study conducted by the Paris Observatory, directly south of the church, and the P and S symbols in the windows don’t stand for the Priory of Sion, but Peter and Sulpice.
Anyway, I finally made it to the Panthéon, which I was looking forward to for numerous reasons. The geekiest of which is:
it is where Foucault set up his first pendulum back in 1851, demonstrating the rotation of the Earth. Now the last time I saw one was at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles last August, after which I said I was going to find out how it worked. I remember looking at the Wikipedia page, and I can’t remember how it differs from an ordinary pendulum. I’m it has something to do with the length of the strong and the weight of the ball and I know the angle through which it rotates changes with latitude, and at the poles (or was it the equator?), it would act as an ordinary pendulum (or rotate though the full 360 degrees), but I can’t remember why.
The building is magnificent and has a very interesting history, which I won’t bother to go into here, because I will probably wrong and I want to mention the other reasons I wanted to go there, namely that Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas and Pierre and Maris Curie are all interred in the crypt along with lots of other French people, most of whom I don’t know, though I did recognise some of the names, like Voltaire and Rousseau, though these don’t interest me as much as Nobel Prize winning scientists and novelists whose books I know and love.
From these, I headed to the Jarin du Luxembourg, where I am currently writing this very long entry and in which there is a multitude of flowerbeds in bloom
and grass you can’t walk on with guards posted to blow whistles at people who try. Oh, they are also there to tell everybody to leave the park when it closes…
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