For The Love of Travel

Our first stop for the day…Musee Montmartre, founded in 1960. It is housed in some of the oldest buildings on the hill, preserving the bohemian, artistic, and historical legacy of the district. Famous residents included Pierre-Auguste Renoir (who lived there between 1875 and 1877), Émile Bernard, Raoul Dufy, and later the trio of Suzanne Valadon, Maurice Utrillo, and André Utter. The heart of the museum sits in the Maison du Bel Air, a magnificent building constructed in the 17th century. My photo below, followed by Suzanne Valadon’s bold painting of same.

The museum is surrounded by the three ‘Jardins Renoir’. These gardens directly overlook the ‘Clos Montmartre’, Paris’s last surviving, working vineyard.

Many wonderous plants in the garden, including a delightful HUGE yellow tree peony; and a bit of an art surprise in one of the garden’s lower sections – a 1875 caricature by André Gill, of a wabbit jumping out of a pot. It adorned the ‘Cabaret du Lapin Agile’, the last operating artistic cabaret and a fave spot of poets and artists such as Apollinaire, Renoir, Utrillo, Braque, Modigliani and Picasso. 

The museum features a rich collection of paintings, posters, drawings, and photographs. Working through 3 floors, we viewed iconic works that defined Montmartre’s nightlife and cabaret culture. I was fascinated by the Chat Noir’s pioneering shadow theatre, featuring historical zinc shadow puppets and intricately painted sets designed by the artist Henri Rivière. The museum has curated this history really well.

We were fascinated to walk into the preserved, recreated atelier-apartment of the celebrated self-taught painter Suzanne Valadon and her son, Maurice Utrillo – incredible!

And, there was a temporary exhibition displaying an overview of the life of ‘Adya & Otto van Rees – at the Heart of the Avant-Garde’. Originally from the Netherlands where they met, Otto van Rees (1884-1957) and Adya van Rees-Dutilh (1876-1959) settled in Montmartre, at the Bateau-Lavoir, from 1904. They were in contact with Georges Braque, Kees van Dongen, Piet Mondrian and Pablo Picasso. They made a joint contribution to the birth of the Dada movement in Zurich, and the founding of the Cercle et Carré group in Paris.

Loved Adya’s painting and tapestry work in particular:

We walked up a hill to the heart of Montmartre – great view down the hill ….but the plaza where artists have traditionally displayed their best art on easels….well, it’s not a pleasant experience anymore to view works (as I did a couple of decades ago) – now you have to cope with the crowd surge!! Yuckk! We escaped off the street to have some lunch.

Caught the number 40 bus down the hill – well, we didn’t get far very fast…people and disability vehicle blocking the road…those bus drivers have the patience of Job!

Finally got to our next destination, Ladybird Montmartre , Rue des Abbesses – a wildly creative and fun speciality shop for jewellery, scarves, socks – all manner of accessories. Got tempted by this unusually striking ring and succumbed…

The next specialty shop we headed for was De Hillerin. It has over 200 years of history specializing in the supply and sale of kitchen equipment, the company’s motto being “to modestly help promote French cuisine”. (Eugène de Hillerin was a visionary in the 1800’s with a strong character, and laid the first foundations of the current kitchen supply the business in the Les Halles district. His clientele included restaurateurs who came to the Les Halles market to buy fresh produce). On that Saturday, the shop was CHAOS, but a lot of fun. I found some great non-stick Exopan tartlet moulds to bring back with me, as a reminder of the amazing food culture and food cooking techniques in French gastronomy.

We decided we’d done a lot and it was time to return to the hotel. I couldn’t work out why people were queuing just off the the street we were trying to flag down a taxi…I had to investigate of course. Men and women approaching a ‘hole in the wall’, talking with a person behind a curtain that was gesturing (black gloves emerging from behind a black curtain)…I asked a young woman nearby, and discovered it was a sextoy promotion. Have a google people, ‘Womanizer’…amazing what current ‘pleasure air technology’ is offering! 🙂

Les Baux de Paris, just down from our hotel was offering tapas with a Greek influence, so we had to try. Enjoyed a lovely meal, and felt very satisfied. But a drama was developing ‘up’ the street…firemen, police and fire engines arriving….black smoke billlowing…suspiciously close – well, opposite our hotel. We had finished our meal and wandered up the street, hoping that there was NO IMPACT for us. We discovered from others that the ‘blast’, was in a building close by, but hadn’t affected our hotel, thank goodness. But there was a safety cordon that prevented us from proceeding…arrh! One of the hotel staff saw us on the other side of the cordon, and after interceding with the police, we were given the go-ahead to go to our hotel. Yay! Talk about drama on our last night.

A great night’s sleep, a joyous early farewell to Sue and Keith, who are on their way to have more fun in Austria (especially attending a Lang Lang concert)….I hung around finishing this blog and then made my way to Garde du Nord to catch the Eurostar to London. My Chichester adventure with Helen and Lorraine starts tomorrow.

Arrived by AerLingus into Charles de Gaulle airport and decided to take the train to Paris – I succeeded finally but let’s say that I won’t try that again with 2 pieces of luggage. Ask me about the ‘incident’.

Caught up with friends Sue and Keith (who had travelled in from Perigueux) at the hotel in the 5th arrondisement in Rue Mouffetard, and we were surprised that we have a narrow flight of stairs inside the door to our room (nothing about that in the booking.com ad). We did have a laugh, especially as I booked the hotel as its one of the few with a lift in the area! The irony. They told me we were in Paris over the Ascension Day public holiday that stretches from Thursday to Sunday, with crowds evident everywhere, so to be prepared.

A lovely drink and dinner in the Place de la Contrescarpe. And an early night.

After breakfast, we walked from down Rue Mouffetard appreciating the amazing boulangerie, patisserie, fruit and veg displays, cheese shops…eventually strolling down Rue Monge towards the Seine. We had a coffee break at Le Petit Cardinal (an arresting doggie picture – a bit like the Mona Lisa; his eyes follow you to anywhere you are in the room)… opposite the queue lining up outside Boulangerie Guyot Ferreira (that’s won a few baguette prizes!). Not as good as La Maison D’Isabelle, one of our later taxi driver’s opined! 🙂

Got to the Pont de l’Archeveche and watched a couple of dudes playing jazz numbers – a perfect morning with sun, music, buzz of the crowds, boats floating beneath us on the Seine. It’s sooo good to be back in Paris., especially with good mates. I noticed the bridges all have plastic attached to their sides so you can’t append locks along the length – so some people have risked falling into the Seine by leaning over and attaching on external struts!

Wandered along Quai aux Fleurs and spotted a rather dilapidated building with a sign ‘old home of Heloise and Abelard’…on closer scrunity of the elaborate door frames found this lovely detail. The Héloise and Abélard story begins in the 12th century in the Ile de la Cité, Paris’s beating heart and the epicentre of intellectual life. Pierre Abélard (1079-1142), a rebellious intellectual from Nantes, was a reputed cleric and scholar in Paris, where he moved in 1110 to follow the teaching of the French philosopher and theologian Guillaume de Champeaux. Héloïse (1092-1164) was the illegitimate daughter of an early libertine lord. As a teenager, her mother entrusted Héloïse’s education to her own brother, Notre Dame’s Canon Fulbert, who lived in Ile de la Cité. The young girl’s lively intelligence was evident, and Uncle Fulbert decided to hire Abélard to perfect Héloïse’s education. Guess what? They fell in love. When Héloïse became pregnant, the couple fled to Brittany, to Abélard’s sister, where Héloïse gave birth to a son. Back in Paris, Abélard tried to obtain forgiveness from Uncle Fulbert, unsucessfully. Uncle Fulbert, dishonored, mulled his revenge. And one morning, accompanied by pig castrators, he broke into Abélard’s room and castrated him. According to the precepts of the time, Abélard had to give up teaching because his body was imperfect by mutilation. He retired to the abbey of Saint-Denis, where he devoted himself to theology, while Héloïse took the veil in Argenteuil.

Continuing the walk, an arty farty view of part of the Notre Dame Cathedral….as well as the more traditional …and there was a ‘Festival of Bread’ happening in the forecourt area of the Cathedral. Hundreds of people milling about, enjoying the sunshine, history and free promotional offering of BREAD.

A fun group of women partying with red berets (as you do) in a restaurant close to the Shakespeare bookshop we were heading for…which had an incredible queue to get in…so we didn’t join it. Had lunch instead, my first onion soup in a long time – was quite yum.

A lovely photo of Keith and Sue, who focussed on looking at me, rather than the raised phone camera trying to take the Seine view as well in the background 🙂

On y va! Caught a cab to the 16th arrondisement Palais Galliera (a Renaissance Revival palace built in 1895, and home to Paris’s fashion museum since 1977). Saw 2 exhibitions: ‘Fashion in the 18thC’ and ‘Weaving, Embroidering – Crafts and Trades of Fashion’.

It was amazing to actually see garments from the 1700s is such a well-preserved condition. And it was interesting to see how later century’s designers were influenced from that era. Here’s a tiny sample…

There were some shockers….

Some beautiful and very intricate embroidery examples too…..

We had booked to have dinner @ Le Vieux Bistrot the night before. It’s a very popular venue with queues waiting to score a table. Sue’s premonition was right, the guy that had taken our booking outside had forgotten to write it down (inside), so there was a clash with other customers, who unfortunately arrived 5 mins after us. We ‘claimed table possession’ by having determined ‘not our problem’ looks….and succeeded! The other customers waited outside with free ‘Kir Royales’, until a table became available.