Windchimes

alas, hélas, or what have you

From Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad

Alas that journals so voluminously begun should come to so lame and impotent a conclusion as most of them did!

and further down the page:

At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty's sake, and invincible determination may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat.

Considering how much energy I felt motivated to expend on seeing and doing things while in France, and how little I ever feel motivated to spend time writing, I feel like I did good to make a few notations about our adventures while having them, in order to write more about them after arriving back home. Usually, I scribbled such notes during train rides before succumbing to the sleepiness brought on by the hum of the wheels on the tracks. The only problem with this plan: there are always things to do and catch up with on arriving back home. Still, I'm going to continue trying to document how we spent our vacation, just so it doesn't become a blur in my memory. My apologies if those efforts make for tedious reading.

We got up early on Thursday morning. I wanted to get some laundry done before the morning entirely got away from us, and had seen a "laverie-libre service" just down the street. Between my ability to read the directions, Cliff's ability to figure out things of a mechanical or technical nature, and (mostly) the helpfulness of a parisienne also there doing her laundry, it went pretty well. Now, my one pair of pants suitable for cooler temperatures was clean again, and we were ready to venture out.

So we headed for the Musée Rodin, and spent quite a bit of time there. I hope the pictures of "Les Bourgeouis de Calais" turn out well, and enjoyed seeing Rodin's studies of the human hand. I missed the Camille Claudel exhibit though. I saw some of her work there in 2003, but if it's still there, I didn't find it. Of course, there is also "Le Penseur" surrounded by rose bushes with huge blooms in the garden outside, and the gardens themselves are well worth spending some time in.

We found some sandwiches and headed back in the general direction of Les Invalides. Mostly, I wanted Cliff to see Napoleon's tomb. The rooms displaying collections concerning WWII and the Résistance, however, were fascinating to me, especially after having just read a book length poem by Claire Malroux for last semester's poetry class. The poem is her memoir of a childhood shadowed by the war and her father's (Augustin Malroux) role in the Résistance. One of the 80 to oppose the Vichy puppet regime, he died at Bergen-Belsen just before the camp was liberated. The English title for Marilyn Hacker's translation of the poem is A Long-Gone Sun. I'm looking forward to reading it again after seeing some of those exhibits.

We headed back for La Petite Huchette after leaving Les Invalides, hoping to meet Amanda and Jason. I spotted them coming down La Rue de la Huchette just a few minutes after five, and just a few minutes before the box office opened. We've both wanted to see "La Cantatrice Chauve" for a long time, and both Cliff and Jason were very sweet about sitting through it with us, and even enjoyed it to some degree. Cliff told me he would like to read a good English translation of it now. I wonder if I have one around here somewhere. Any recommendations? We ate dinner at the same place Cliff and I had eaten a couple of nights before, had plenty of time between buying the tickets and curtain time. After the play, we went to a restaurant/bar on St. Germain des prés, where Amanda (who knows how to say "I like to drink beer" in over 40 languages) had noticed a sign advertising over 200 different kinds of Belgian beer. She had a cherry-flavored beer, I had a raspberry. I love anything that has to do with framboises. The waiter there was a charmer, in my opinion, (he gave me a little kiss on top of the head when we were about to leave) but I resisted the urge to ask him what time he got off work, knowing Amanda would understand what I was asking, haha. Amanda and Jason were planning to spend Friday at Versailles, so we made a semi-early night of it. We had only vague ideas of how we'd spend our last full day in Paris, but sometime in the midst of all this activity, we'd gotten a phone call from that friend of my daughter's I'd called a few days before, and we'd made plans to meet right outside the metro station closest to our hotel on Friday evening.

I've got some reading I better get to at the moment, so I'll write about our Friday in Paris later, and then about gallivanting around in a rental car in Bretagne.

J.H. Larrew
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