Hands

Saturday

We went up to Paris today. We had rather a late start, since yesterday evening I felt I was perhaps coming down with a cold, and I still felt a little groggy first thing, but once we'd had breakfast and coffee, I was feeling a bit brighter , so we decided to risk it. Fortunately I improved as the day went on. We went first to the Rodin museum, at Hôtel Biron, where my blip was taken. The Musée Rodin opened in 1919, dedicated to the works of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). It has two sites, at the Hôtel Biron, including it's beautiful gardens in central Paris, and just outside Paris at Rodin's old home, the Villa des Brillants at Meudon. While living in the Villa des Brillants, Rodin used the Hôtel Biron as his workshop from 1908, and subsequently donated his entire collection of sculptures (along with paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Pierre-Auguste Renoir that he had acquired) to the French State on the condition that they turn the buildings into a museum dedicated to his works. We started in the gardens, then moved into the house. The house is currently being renovated, so it is a temporary exhibition of some of his representative pieces, but there was still enough to see to make it interesting. The popularity of Rodin's most famous sculptures, such as the Thinker and the Burghers of Calais, tends to obscure his total creative output. A prolific artist, he created thousands of busts, figures, and sculptural fragments over more than five decades. He also painted in oils (especially in his thirties) and in watercolors.

After the Rodin museum, we walked to the Jardin du Luxembourg, and had a wander round there. We always assumed we had visited them during our previous residence over here, but they didn't seem familiar. The Jardin du Luxembourg, or the Luxembourg Garden was created beginning in 1612 by Marie de Medici, the widow of King Henry IV of France, for a new residence she constructed, the Luxembourg Palace. The garden today is owned by the French Senate, which meets in the Palace. The park is known for its lawns, tree-lined promenades, glorious flowerbeds, the model sailboats on its circular basin in front of the Palace and for the picturesque Medici Fountain, built in 1620.

We were planning to have dinner up in Paris, then go to the Night show in Notre Dame Cathedral, but this still left us a bit of time, so we went for a walk around Île Saint Louis first. The "night show" in Notre Dame we found a bit disappointing - it was basically just a film, projected onto a cloth screen suspended over the nave, on the history of Notre Dame. It was interesting, but we were expecting something different, a bit grander.