For our final full day in Paris, Jenny and I had separate plans for the daylight hours before reuniting for a fancy dinner after dark: she enjoyed a last bit of carefree quartier, resting at 'home' before going vintage shopping (Maje) and practicing French on a return to the terrific noodle house from a few days before (Délices Lepic); and I had farther-flung destinations in mind, one in space and both, in their different ways, in time.
I'd go from one of the city's highest points, la butte via la Musée de Montmartre, a repository for the neighborhood's lively history including the Belle Époque, to the lowest place accessible on foot, les Catacombes de Paris, a subterranean reliquary for some 6 to 7 million bodies from older, defunct cemeteries. Both settings spoke as well to the city's history of intensive quarrying for clay, lime, and more, stretching all the way back to Roman occupation (Lutetia, 'Mudville'). No surprise that I was excited at the prospect of such an underworld journey, katabasis, and encounter with the dead, nekyia!
First, though, the height and the history there. The Museum of Montmartre is an absolute gem, combining the museum itself in several old houses with Renoir's gardens, an enclosed but playfully sprawling space overlooking the quartier's vineyard. The only vineyard in Paris, it slopes gently down towards a famous old business featured in the Museum, the club le Lapin Agile, whose salmon tone (bottom left) was delightful in sight of the moss and lichen on longstanding stones (bottom right and middle).
Much of the Museum's standing exhibits had to do with the era in which that club was central, alongside the even-more-famous Chat Noir (with iconic 1896 poster by Théophile Steinlen advertising the entertainers' tour). The paintings and, even more, the documentary evidence give a vivid impression of the neighborhood's nightlife as well as daily life. I especially liked early photographs showing the grain and texture of the place.
The Museum itself was delightful, well-organized and yet also rambling among the old buildings. Renoir's gardens had that same spirit, with additions and changes by subsequent inhabitants and with views around, and of, every corner. I spent a lovely half-hour sitting outside in the cool, enjoying an apple cider and imagining seeing the setting again across the seasons: easy to feel territorial, as Renoir famously did, overlooking such literal terroir!
After a quick lunch back 'home,' I took a taxi--the driver and I had a great conversation about exploding old stereotypes of French / Parisian snobbery about foreigners speaking the language--to one of my most-wanted stops the whole trip: as far to the south as Montmartre is north, near to Denfert-Rochereau station, and as la Butte is high overlooking the city, so deep underground, the Catacombs.
This 19th-century repository for the remains formerly housed in several much older, and by-then-derelict, cemeteries is a marvel: a labyrinth stretching through old mines and quarries, a major step forward in sanitation--the need became clear when, for example, human remains would burst through basement walls into houses adjoining cemeteries--and, given the educational tradition, a mélange of moving poetic testimony to, and by, the dead ...
... beginning with variations on my beloved Virgil!
And again, including lines quoted elsewhere by a favorite author, the Nebraskan / New Yorker Willa Cather, whose sojourn in Paris had a major effect on her (amazing) work; optima quaeque dies is an epigram for one of her novels, while the rationalism in the top-right image, quoting Virgil's Georgics, seems a fitting testament to the Catacombs' enterprise, a thoughtful approach to arranging remains:
This was nearly a spiritual experience for me, certainly a deeply thoughtful one. Often teaching Underworlds, always following traces of ancient stories into new media, I loved it:
Afterwards, I refueled from the relative cold--and long hours: the line to get in was long indeed, as the Catacombs allow only 200 people at a given time--at a nearby cafe and then tried to double down on Parisian disposition of the dead by visiting the cemetery of Montparnasse, only to get there just as a guard, ringing an old bell, was shutting the metal doors ...
... so instead of getting locked in, I retraced my steps a bit, took the RER B and the métro to Bastille, and waited patiently (while walking muchly), even angelically (including exploring another bookstore or two, and reading some of my souvenirs from the Catacombs), for Jenny ...
... so we could have a final, fancy dinner in Paris, at a restaurant called Dersou:
C'était magnifique! A splendid final full day in the city!
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