St. Eustache and Marmottan-Monet

Every good Sunday in Paris starts out with great pipe organ music, and today was no exception.  Our hotel is a 15-minute walk from the St. Eustache church:

The church is at the heart of an area undergoing major restoration.  The area in the foreground is being rebuilt as the Nelson Mandela Garden.  When finished, it will be surrounded by the Bourse (Paris's major stock exchange), Les Halles, a recently renovated market center, and, and this magnificent church. The parish has a history going back over 800 years.  In the center of the nave the visitor finds a memorial to the parish priests throughout its history.  The list starts will single-name priests (Simon), evolves through names like "Guillaume de Corbeil", and finally arrives around 1490 with modern first-last names like "Jean Balue".  Maybe in my next career I'll be a historian, because these kinds of discoveries fascinate me.

The current edifice was constructed between 1532 (the first stone placed by François I) and 1637.  Like its neighbors, it's currently undergoing its own renovation.  It was nice to be able to contribute during the offertory today.


Its website told us the music for today's 11:00 service would feature the grand organ, the choir organ and the church's choir.  We were not disappointed.

The program told us that all the organ solo music was to be improvisations.  I never cease to be thrilled by the ability of a master organist to take a simple melody, such as the Alleluia that was sung by the congregation threaded throughout the service, and promote it into a display of sound worthy of this "king of instruments". 

Leaving the building after the service, we were struck by the warmth of the artwork decorating the 500-year-old walls.

I have to confess something--I was looking for someone. I have been on a reading project, working my way through the series of police detective novels by Jean-Françoise Parot.  "Our hero" is named Nicolas Le Floch, a young marquis who becomes a gifted detective during the reign of Louis XV.  He lives with his new mentor, M. Noblecourt, up the street (Rue Montmartre) from St. Eustache, where they are both faithful members of the parish.  Le Floch has discovered that he can use the sanctuary as a device for checking to see if he is being followed and by whom, and to lose his follower if necessary.  He begins his subterfuge by entering a side door; I'm pretty sure that's it in the lower left, at the dead end of Rue Montmartre.  Sad to say, I saw no sign of him.

 Outside the building, we found two very different signs of authentic Parisian life.  One one side of the building, accessible to Les Halles, Le Bourse, and the emerging Nelson Mandela Garden, was this 65-ton, sculpture by Henri de Miller, L'Ecoute (The Listening).  It's new, having been installed in 1986. (Note the man standing just to the right to get a sense of the size of this sculpture.)

On the other side of the church was a street market, today's session of a tradition going back hundreds of years.

From here, we turned our attention to the Impressionists, this year's excuse for coming to France.  We'll be leaving Paris tomorrow for Normandy, which will be holding its every-third-year celebration of the Impressionists.  In Paris, the two primary places to go to start one's study of impressionism is the Musée D'Orsay, which we visited on our first trip three years ago, and the Marmottan-Monet Museum, where we went today.

This was once a private home, and the owners donated it and its collection of impressionist art to the city for permanent display.  Today it houses the largest collection of original works by Claude Monet, the father of impressionism.  Sadly, no photographs are allowed.  But one cannot talk at any length about the impressionists without reference to this gem:

(courtesy of Par Claude Monet — wartburg.edu, Domaine public, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5504881)

The French title is Impression, soleil levant, with the traditional English translation Impression, sunrise.  Whatever you take away from seeing this kind of art, it's yours and no one can take it away from you.

As a multi-degreed engineer, I once considered myself as "above" all that artsy kind of stuff.  But I'm beginning to identify with this guy:

In case you have a hard time reading it, his caption says "Life without art is stupid."  We were standing in front of Hotel de Ville (city hall), and after tossing a euro into his collection cup and taking his picture, I asked him why his caption was in English and not French.  After all, he could be saying that the French understood art better than the English-speaking world, and I wasn't sure I was ready to just stand aside and let him make that claim unchallenged.  But he just shrugged his shoulders as if to say "I don't know the English word for marketing."

Now, since I've decided against joining the million crazies at Fanzone (see yesterday's blog), I'm going to settle back and root for "Les Bleues" against Portugal on TV.  Tomorrow we'll be relocating to Louviers.  That will be a "something completely different" experience for us.  Join us, won't you?