Adieu

Our time in Paris is rapidly coming to a close. Tomorrow morning we take the Eurostar to London for a dizzying three-day tour of that sceptered isle, that will include Buckingham Palace, the Tower, the British Museum, Stratford-on-Avon, Stonehenge, and the HMS Victory. Then on Monday, we fly home. It's hard to believe it's over. We have been looking forward to it for so long. But it has come and we have lived it and now we're moving on.

On Tuesday we went to the Orsay. The cavalry of the Republican Guard followed us most of the way there, and we would never have known if a Frenchwoman had not told us to turn around and look. I still don't know what they were doing, but they made an impressive parade.

We were among the first in line at the Orsay, which meant that we got to be alone, for a short span of time, with the Van Goghs. This was one of the highlights of the trip for Thomas. We also got to see the Impressionists upstairs with much smaller crowds than we had in October. November may be cold, but it has some distinct advantages for the Paris sightseer. In the afternoon we climbed the Montmartre once again to show Thomas the view.

On Wednesday we found ourselves in Versailles again. We toured the chateau in the morning, again with substantially reduced crowds.













Even though it has been cold and overcast for the past few weeks, the sun came out and shined bravely for us while we were in the Marie Antoinette Gardens, just to make us miss this place all the more.

This morning Thomas and I visited Napoleon's tomb and toured the Army Museum, sating our lust for armor, arms, and armies. Evelyn stayed home and packed and cleaned. We paid for the maid to clean our house after we're gone, but Evelyn doesn't want to leave a dirty house for the maid.

I'm ready to come home, and yet I don't want to leave. I certainly don't want to fly home on an airplane. I told Dick and Jeanne Rundell while they were here that my idea of heaven would be to work all week at BYU-Idaho, meet my Las Cruces friends at Chope's on Friday night, spend Saturday in the Louvre and the Luxembourg Gardens, and have dinner with my family on Sunday. I'm afraid mortality doesn't work like that. In this fallen world we don't have a fulness of joy.

But sometimes we can come pretty close.

Thomas arrive à Paris

Thomas is here! He came in Sunday morning, looking tired but happy to be alive after flying from Salt Lake to Cincinnati and Cincinnati to here. I met him at Charles de Gaulle (his trip through customs was blissfully quick) and we took the RER back to the St. Michel/Notre Dame RER stop. He was suitably awestruck as he emerged from the Metro with the Seine on his left, the Latin Quarter on his right, Notre Dame directly behind him, and our apartment dead ahead.

 After feeding him a sure-to-please French breakfast of croissants and pain au chocolat, we took him to see Notre Dame. They were right in the middle of high mass when we got there, the organ was playing, and the air was thick with incense. You couldn't ask for a better introduction to French Catholicism. He promptly ran down most of the rest of his iPod battery taking pictures of every detail of the cathedral, then had to pace himself for the rest of the day.

After the cathedral we took the Metro to Trocadero and saw the Eiffel Tower. I have never known anyone to be disappointed in the Eiffel Tower. No one has ever said to me, "You know, I imagined it to be bigger." Or if they did, they were talking about the one in Vegas.

We also bought Thomas his first crèpe with Nutella. He ate it, then said, "Mom, you could make these at home, no problem."

The Arc de Triomphe was next. It was a treat, because Evelyn and I still hadn't climbed to the top.

It may be the best view in Paris, partly because it includes the Eiffel Tower.

By this time Thomas was beginning to feel that he was living through the longest day of his life. But we still had miles to go before he could sleep. We walked him all the way down the Champs Elysées (allowing him to make a professionally-motivated tour of McDonald's), through the Christmas Village (which was packed shoulder-to-shoulder), across the Tuileries, and through the Louvre before he collapsed on our couch about 6:30. He downed a bacon and egg bagel from the Smith's Bakery and was snoring deeply within minutes.

We started the day Monday with a trip up the Eiffel Tower. It may be the best view of Paris, partly because it doesn't include the Eiffel Tower. It was cloudy and cold, but that didn't take away any of the joy of being atop the world's most famous landmark looking out across the world's most beautiful city.








After Eiffel, we took our boy to the Louvre. Of course we only scratched the surface, but Thomas loves everything and was happy to see what we saw. We told ourselves we would come back on Wednesday after we get back from Versailles, but we'll see what our feet say. Here are a few of our favorite sights from today:

Tonight we had dinner in the Cafe de Nesle, the little restaurant by our house. Thomas had onion soup, steak and green beans, and crème brulée, a suitably Gallic way to end a great day in Paris.

Noël!

And so here we are in Paris. All our friends have come and gone, we have take all our side trips, we've done most of things we wanted to do, and we're still here. Most of the day I work on my Humanities course while Ev reads, shops, and takes care of me. Everyday we go for a walk, and most days we visit at least one more major site. It's a good life. Too bad it can't go on forever!

We came back to Paris to find out it was Christmas. They don't have Thanksgiving to slow them down here (as if it slows us down in the USA). On Sunday afternoon we took a stroll, and saw that they have a big ferris wheel up at the end of the Tuileries, and the street between the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Elysées is lined with Christmas booths.

The place is full of Gallic Christmas decadence, including hot wine, sausages, candy, cakes, crèpes, lights, decorations, and animatronic figures. I'd like to say we are too sophisticated to enjoy that kind of thing, but the truth is we loved it so much we went back and saw it again on Tuesday. We also picked up some Christmas presents for the good little boys and girls in our life.

The weather has been wintry, but yesterday morning we got up to such radiant sunshine that I grabbed my camera and went to Notre Dame. The stained glass was exquisite, and Evelyn and I were able to shoot some great video footage for my class.

This evening we made our umpteenth trip to the Louvre. I can't say we have seen everything, and we certainly haven't seen it in as much detail as we would like, but we have seen more than most anyone else ever would. Tonight we did Rome, one of the last parts of the museum we hadn't yet visited. I love the Louvre in November. I actually got a few photos of the great personification of the Tiber, Rome's hometown river. Many cultures have a mother country. Rome of course had a fatherland.

Here is a detail, with Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, suckling the she-wolf who raised them.

If Rome had a mother, it would have been Livia, the wife of Caesar Ausustus. In I, Claudius she poisoned Augustus's figs in order to advance the career of her son, Tiberias. But historians now say no. I like to think she did  it.















I also loved the portrait busts, the one medium of Roman art that they didn't get from the Greeks. It takes my breath away to see these likenesses of the great and not-so-great men of Rome, sitting there almost as if they are still alive. Here are a few:

The wily Octavian, soon to be known as Augustus:

Titus, with his big old head:

Trajan, my favorite emperor since I was child and heard Danny Kaye tell a story about Apollo giving him donkey ears. I know Greek mythology says it was Midas, but Danny Kaye said Trajan, so it's Trajan.

Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor:

























And suitably displayed across the aisle from each other, archaic Greece's great poets, Homer and Hesiod:

C'est la Guerre

This morning we left Germany after too short a stay and drove through the Alsace to Verdun. Of all the battlefields we have visited this week, this was the most ghostly. It was here that the Germans and the French flung themselves at each other, from the 21st of February to the 18th of December, 1916, the longest battle in history. Two-thirds of a million men fell here in the teeth of machine guns, poison gas, and massed artillery.

Even as we drove in through the second-growth forest we could see how shells had churned the ground, pitting the landscape in precisely the same way nature wouldn't. At Fort Douaumont the landscape remains mostly as the First World War left it, with concrete walls, foxholes, trenches, and barbed wire. Here was war at its most terrible, and its most senseless. The Germans attacked mostly to get the French to attack them, to bleed them in preparation for yet another offensive. The only thing that stopped the fighting was the need to transfer troops to yet another battle. The war would stretch on for two more years before Europe would fall into an exhausted and dissatisfied peace.

Thousands of French troops are buried in the cemetery here. Thousands of Germans are buried in cemeteries around the periphery. It's easy to see why there is a monument to the dead of the Great War in every town in western Europe. Everyone lost someone, usually someone very close.

In such a battle not everyone who dies is identified. Sometimes the only thing left of a fallen soldier is a bone or two. At the cemetery at Douaumont there is an ossuary, in the shape of a huge sword hilt plunged into the ground, that holds the remains of 60,000 unidentified French and German soldiers. It's easy for us to forget a war that took place so long ago. I won't.

Fortunately for our moods we were in Reims in less than an hour. Notre Dame of Reims is one of the great high Gothic churches of Europe, with its imposing west facade and matching towers. It's built on the site of the church where Clovis, the first Christian king of France, is buried, and is the place where all but two French kings have been crowned. Joan of Arc is a big deal here too, since she captured the place from the English in order to have the Dauphin Charles crowned king.

Reims Cathedral also features a wonderful stained glass by Marc Chagall right at the head of the chancel. I wish we could have taken a better picture, but the technology eludes us. I am posting it here all the same for Jeanne Rundell, who likes Chagall at least as much as I do. So far, in my opinion at least, Chagall is the only Modernist artist whose work doesn't intrude upon the ancient beauty of an older building. He can do my windows (or paint my ceiling) anytime.

After the Cathedral we made our way through the streets of downtown Reims to the Salle de Reddition, a room attached to a local high school where the Germans surrendered to the Allies early in the morning of May 7, 1940. Yes, you World War II enthusiasts, I know when VE day is. That's the day the surrender was announced, not the day it happened. The Russians celebrate it a day later, on May 9, when Stalin made a point of having the Germans sign a special surrender in Berlin.

The museum features the room where the surrender actually took place. It served as the map room for Eisenhower's headquarters, and the table and chairs are in exactly the same position they were in at the time of the signing.

The sun was low on the horizon as we left Reims and headed back to Paris. We got into Charles de Gaulle airport where we left our rental car about 6:30, but a rush-hour cab ride (a fascinating and thrilling adventure) took us an hour more. Vaughn stayed with us until Sunday morning. It was wonderful to have him here. He's such an accomplished guide, and he really can make up the time on the Autoroute. It also didn't hurt to have someone who actually speaks French! It's great to be able to work with your friends.

Les Allemands

After a delightful stay in Belgium, on Wednesday morning we hit the road early for Germany. Unfortunately the road hit us back. Just outside Liège we got ensnarled in a three-hour traffic jam caused by an unexplained closure of a small section of the autoroute. Thus we spent our morning and some of our afternoon. We had planned to see Aachen and Cologne today and Trier tomorrow, but Aachen was all the time we had today. But it was a lovely city and worth a day. It was all decked out for Christmas (the Europeans rush the season just like we do), and we sampled their Printen (gingerbread) and Bratwurst (not necessarily a Christmas food, but it put me in a festive mood).

Our main target in Aachen was Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel. Charlemagne was the inventor of Europe. He was a Frankish king who conquered most of Western Europe and was designated by the Pope to be the Holy Roman Emperor. Both France and Germany claim him as the father of their respective countries. Besides being a political giant, his influence sparked a renaissance of learning and culture that amounted to the birth of northwestern European civilization. The octagonal chapel is the only part of his cathedral that remains, but it has been integrated into the current Aachen cathedral. Designed by Odo of Metz, who oversaw its building between 792 and 805, it remains a stunning remnant of Charlemagne's glory. The Emperor's remains are still there.

After Aachen we drove to the charming village of Bad Münstereifel. I don't know why they call it that. I don't think it's a Bad Münstereifel; actually it's quite a Good Münstereifel. I told that joke to Evelyn and Vaughn at least thirteen times while we were there, but they never seemed to think it was as funny as I did. Maybe you will. It works best if you imagine me saying it with a German accent.

Anyway, we rented a house in Bad Münstereifel for two nights. The area is more mountainous than you would expect in this part of Germany, and our house is out in the country (our landlord raises sheep and chickens). By the time we got there on Wednesday it was dark, but the next morning, in spite of a hard frost, we got up and went for a walk up into and around the mountains and forest. It was about what you'd expect from a mountain village in Germany. Here are a few photos.

Our day trip into Cologne focused on the great cathedral, the largest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe, with the second tallest spires and the largest façade of any church in the world. Begun in 1248, it was left unfinished when building halted in 1473. In the 19th century the Germans recommenced work on it as part of their reborn nationalism, and it was finally finished according to the original plan in 1880, nine years after German reunification. In World War II the Allies almost wrecked it, and it has been under renovation ever since. If Germany can have a few more years of peace, they might even get to polish it up the way the French have theirs.

 Cologne Cathedral is the seat of the Archbishop of Cologne, who in olden days was one of the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire of Germany. We found out that in the Middle Ages the cathedral received a number of relics of the Magi, or Wise Men. Since the Magi were the very models of the medieval major monarchs, it gave the cathedral immense prestige, and was one reason why the Archbishop of Cologne was considered the equal of other rulers and potentates in Germany.

We visited the Cathedral Treasure and saw, among other things, two links from the chains of St. Peter. But the French Revolutionary Army pillaged or destroyed the relics of the Magi when they occupied Cologne in the 1790s. Those French. Tsk.














While there I made sure to track down and photograph the Dichterliebe sites. All you Schumann/Heine fans (both of you) should be delighted:

Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome

Da spiegelt sich in dem Well'n

Mit seinem grossen Dome

Das grosse heilige Köln.

(In the Rhine, in the holy river

Reflected in the waves,

With its great cathedral

The great holy Cologne)

Es schweben Blumen und Eng'lein
Um unsre liebe Frau
Die Augen, die Lippen, die Wänglein
Die gleichen der Liebsten genau.

(Flowers and cherubs
Float around Our Dear Lady
The eyes, the lips, the little cheeks
Are exactly like those of my love)

Und holt mir auch zwölf Riesen
Die müssen noch stärker sein
Als wie der starke Christoph
Im Dom zu Köln am Rhein.

(And get me also twelve giants
They must each be stronger
Than the strong St. Christopher
In the Cathedral at Cologne on the Rhine)

We managed to get back to Bad Münstereifel in time to visit the old walled city before dusk. It was a thoroughly girlie German city, with gingerbread, half-timbered houses, a bricked-in stream running through it, and great prices on women's clothing and accessories. It really isn't bad.