Photos: Hospital de Invalides--Napoleon's Tomb. How you move in Paris. One of the traffice gates into the Louvre complex---about 10 inches on each side of the bus
Photos: The Louvre, the Mona Lisa, Napoleon III's public sitting area--could have quite a party
Monday, July 12,2010
Once again we are on the go. After picking up a bit in the apartment and having breakfast, we headed out to Notre Dame to catch the hop on, hop off bus. We caught the bus to the Musee d’Orsay, intending to take a diagonal walk to the Hotel de Invalides. Well, the short cut turned out not to be such a good short cut—it was a really long cut. We did see a whole bunch of gendarmerie (police with guns) at the Palais de Assemblee Nationale…one of the governmental bodies. We eventually reached the Invalides, entering through the back side. It got us there.
We bought two day museum passes that allowed us entry to several museums throughout Paris. We walked right up and bought them….no line. Hold that thought. The museums are either closed on Monday or on Tuesday by the way..
The Hotel de Invalides contains a couple of museums within one. There is Napoleon’s Tomb and the French Army Museum. Napoleon’s Tomb is impressive—he certainly has a big casket for such a small dude. He is not alone in the tomb (he does have the biggest space) ; his brother, his son, and Marshall Foch share parts of the building—well, their bones do anyway. The story that you have to bow to reach Napoleon’s Tomb is not true. There is a huge open area above the casket which is itself huge that allows people to look down on his casket/tomb. If you go into the crypt itself, you must look up.
Within the Musee de la Armee, we shuffled through the World War I and World War II exhibits. They were very well done with information on Russian, Italian, British and American forces in both wars as well as the French and the German enemy. A slightly biased view compared to our own biased view, but very well done. Interesting work on Free French forces. We then walked at a faster pace through the exhibits on Louis XIV and his wars, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Wars of Louis Napoleon—not because they were not interesting, but because they were hot, and because much of the explanation is in French which neither Nancy nor Neil took in school. The most striking thing that fascinated Nancy was the petiteness of the soldiers during Napoleon’s time. Some of those uniforms wouldn’t have fit many of the seventh graders I used to teach. Another interesting thing was that there was nothing included about Vietnam. The museum was not air conditioned, yet the preservation---cases, filtered light, no flash photography was there. I guess trying to air condition a very old building is a bit of a challenge.
We stopped at the museum café for lunch for a sandwich and a great fruit tart. The fruit tart had a double bottom crust with a fruit gel between the two crusts. Then it had a cream cheese layer and then strawberries, raspberries, cherries, blueberries, and two other berries that we don’t know what they were. We sat at a table with a lady from San Francisco who was reading her magazine rather than accompany her husband through another military museum.
After lunch we found another bus and rode to the Louve. The plaza around the entrance was a huge crowd with lines snaking this way and that. Nancy found a guide who spoke English, and she guided us to the Richileiu entrance where with our museum passes we were allowed us to walk right in—with the security check point. We got to skip the lines that must have been 5 blocks long to buy tickets. Once inside we did the tourist thing and went to see the Mona Lisa, one of the original works of the collection dating back to Louis XIII. The room was packed, but we saw it. The crowds were unbelievable; so were the number of guards The painting itself is behind a glass protective case with a little fence to keep the crowds back. We also saw the winged victory statue. It is hard to describe the immensity of the crowds in the rooms in and around the Mona. It was also incrediably hot, which is really unusual for an art museum.
We then headed for a less congested part of the huge museum, which is U-shaped and each wing is about two normal blocks long. We saw lots of Flemish and Renaissance works and then took a walk through the apartments of Emperor Napoleon III. Wow, the family room was large and overly decorated--Victorian with lots of gilded woodwork. The Grand Salon was like a bus station. It was huge with many groups of furniture where 50 or 60 people would not have been overcrowded—that’s a big living room with huge chandeliers. The formal dining room with a table long enough for twenty chairs on each side and three chandeliers over it was pretty impressive as well. We saw some more of the lavish furniture from the Second Empire period and then went back outside—through the pyramid in the courtyard. We had had enough of the crowds.
We seem to be able to do about two museums a day.....drat!
We rode a bus back to Notre Dame and did some souvenir shopping on our way back to the apartment where we arrived about 7:00. Pete and Jess came back from their own adventures which included the Basilica du Sacre Coeur, the Eiffel Tower, and spots they wanted to see.—We got some groceries and had dinner. We were all quite tired.
24,512 steps today.
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