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: