Museums, Markets and Malmaison

Can't believe it's time to go to Nancy (without the laptop) so I'll recap the past week as best as I can. Saturday we finally got to Bastille market which was as good as everybody told us - lots of Salamanca style stalls as well as very good (French) food stalls. Got a great rye fruit loaf which was almost as good as the ones they used to bake at Peppermint Bay and a very aromatic Bouc Bourgogne (which we realised later was goat - quite tender but very strong).
Sunday was another stroll around the Marais - always vibrant always interesting - purchased a gateau fromage blanc from our favourite shop for afternoon tea - sort of like a really smooth cheesecake without any pastry.
Monday we finally got to visit the church St Germain du Pres (a very historic church which is often mentioned in books and song). There is a well know bookstore nearby called La Hune which I spent some time in looking for anything to do with the artists I am interested in (even though it was terribly overheated) - didn't find anything relevant.
Tuesday was the Musee d'Orsay which is mind blowing. After waiting in line for an hour (watching the black rain clouds gather - without an umbrella) we entered the huge cavernous space of this former railway station (which was the first in Paris and built for the Exhibition Universelle in 1900) and looked out over the marble floor covered with large sculptures - many of them by Rodin. The exhibition spaces rises up for six floors on either side. We headed straight for the Art Nouveau section which was fascinating then on to the impressionist (much more crowded) where there are many examples of Degas' sculptures of dancers and horses. When we left exhausted at 3pm the queue was still just as long waiting to get in (despite the fact that there had been a major downpour while we were inside).
Wednesday - to Malmaison at long last. Metro to La Defense which is a major commercial development with very modern high rise buildings outside the periphery road to the north west of Paris. The whole place is built on a massive scale and is overlooked by Le Grande Arch, a sort of oversized contemporary version of the Arch de Triomphe. Over 150,000 people work in this area and we did finally see fashionably dressed french women (and men) obviously dressed for the office. There is also a modern mall with over 300 shops, 40 restaurants and a number of cinemas. After many false starts we finally found the bus terminal and boarded the bus for our half hour trip to the village of Malmaison to visit the house that once belonged to the Empress Josephine. We did not have a map of how to get there from the bus stop (even Google maps were not too clear) but managed to find a visitors centre where we were given a map and directions as well as information about Josephine and her daughter's tomb in the local church. Having brought cheese and corned beef (from the Bastille market) with us we went in search of a baguette to eat it with before walking the kilometre or so the the "Castle". The boulangerie was in the town square across from the church and had the best looking gataeux that we had seen so we also purchased a chocolate concoction called Opera and sat in the square while we ate it - yuuuuum.
As the church was right in front of us we went in and inspected Josephine's tomb - again a rather feminine feel to the place. In the garden around the fountain oustside we discovered Callistemons and wondered whether they had been planted there because of Josephine's connection with Australian flora or just because the people liked them.
Walking via the back streets we passed a large park which used to be once part of Josephine's estate which was broken up and sold off after her death and we got some idea of just how large the estate was. The house itself was a joy - not large by french chateau standards - and very homey (that probably sounds strange when you consider all the furnishings etc but, apart from the formal areas, it was rather simple). There was evidence everywhere of Josephines love of flowers - from simple ceiling decorations to tapestries to formal porcelain plates to her dress and underwear - exactly what one would have expected.
The chateau closed at 1230 so we wandered around the garden and found a cleared space amongst the wildflowers at the rear of the building where we sat with our lunch and imagined what life must have been like here nearly 200 years ago - about Delahaye who planted the French Garden at Recherche Bay and later became the head gardener here and about discussions between him and Josephine who was a very keen amateur botanist about what should be grown where. Its all in the past of course and cannot be recovered but it is interesting to be in this space and think about what has gone before. Afterwards we scoured the grounds looking for signs of the Australian flora which had been grown here but all we found was a spindly Eucalyptus which was obviously not very old. Any Acacias, with their short life span, would of course have been long dead but I have been told by a French lady in Hobart who grew up in this area that Acacias still grow around here and she remembers them quite clearly from her childhood (were they wild offspring from those original plants carried back by the d'Entrecasteaux and Baudin expeditions and planted by Josephine and/or Delahaye?).
After so much reading about Malmaison and the plant collecting of the early explorers it was a wonderful experience to be able to have the time to actually sit here and think about these things (especially without examinations and deadlines hanging over my head).
Thursday was another museum. I had not really intended to visit the Pompidou but there is a collection of Kandinsky's work on exhibition which I really wanted to see. As usual with these things the actual work is so different to the images one has seen in books etc - some are larger, some are smaller and most are less well defined than I had expected. My favourite section is a collection of small watercolours that he worked on around 1914-15. He worked with watercolour and pen and ink and it appears that he was working through some of the ideas which came out in his later work - to me there is a lack of restraint and a freshness within these that really appealed. Also looked at the modern art while I was there and it was interesting to see so much of the stuff that we had talked about at art school.
Friday and Saturday we set out to explore some of the outskirts of Paris by riding the Periferique buses that circle the city (Paris has a large ring road called the Periferique at a radius of about 5 km with roads leading off at regualr intervals to all the major rural centres). Three buses and one tram complete the full circle and each section takes about 30-45 minutes plus another 40-60 minutes to get to and from them so we broke the trip down over two days. It is very interesting to get away from the tourist areas of Paris and see how the people really live - from the really poor sections to the east to the quite affluent areas of the north west. We also passed lots of stadiums, parks and playing fields and, down around the south east, a massive amount of redevelopment which appears to be commercial (I remember some of this from my visit to the Mitterand library last time). In the south west there is the huge Paris Expo site alongside air force and naval complexes. Just across the river there are masive high rise housing complexes and we wonder whether this was the site of the rioting a year or so back. The western edge is bordered by the Bois de Boulogne. A different but interesting view of Paris. On the way home by metro we came across a band of Russian performers in the Concorde transfer walkways. I remember them from 2005. They are still performing and still selling CDs and we wonder if they ever perform anywhere else. We made a movie and gave them some money in gratitude for their show.
Today we returned to Montparnasse to visit an artist's market. A hundred contemporary artists selling their work in stalls just like all the other markets around Paris - everything from sculpture to painting to photography and prints (interesting chat with a printmaker with good prints and very limited English). Quite stimulating and at least one can see what the current working French artist is doing (unlike the "tourist art" at Montmarte).
There has been researching and art making going on in the midst of all this but I won't bore you with all that. Now it's off to Nancy to see what we can unearth about Daum, Galle, Lalique, Baccarat and the Ecole de Nancy.