|
Zooming in on Montmartre, from the Arc de Triomphe |
Luckily for us, the 280 steps to the top of the
Arc de Triomphe were free of charge on Sunday, December 4th. Having walked the length of the long, straight avenues (Charles de Gaulle / de la Grande Armée) from the Pont Neuilly at La Défense to the Arc, we climbed up to see the views of the city from that splendid vantage point. Montmartre looked so higgledy-piggledy, with the dome of Sacré Coeur above, that it could have been Istanbul. Then we stepped back down and set off down the Champs Élysées, that now terminates at the ferris wheel (
La Grande Roue, dramatically lit up after dark).
|
Champs Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe |
|
Ave. Foch and Ave. de la Grande Armée. La Défense in the distance.
We'd walked from there! |
Avoiding lunch on the Champs Élysées, too touristy for my liking (where shopaholics were queuing to be allowed into
Louis Vuitton or the new branch of
Marks & Spencer), we found a cosy Brasserie on the rue de la Boétie where we could sit at a window to enjoy our steak-frites and beer. Good service, good food!
Back on the main drag we walked past another
Marché de Noël, French-German style, thousands of people milling around:
... pas moins de 160 chalets authentiques (fabrication dans les Vosges) ...
|
Molière as César, 1657 |
We decided on impulse to take refuge the
Petit Palais (opposite the Grand Palais, between the Pont Alexandre III and the Champs Élysées metro station), an imposing edifice built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900 and recently renovated (in 2005). Its permanent exhibition contained a substantial collection of paintings, including a lovely one I'd never seen before by Monet,
Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt. At the moment the Palais features an exhibition about the
Comédie Française, which interested me a lot, having (once upon a time) studied the 17th century French playwrights. There was the original portrait of Molière as a young man, acting in a play by Corneille; there was Molière's leather armchair, rather the worse for wear all these years later. What interested me most was the painted depiction of productions through the centuries of the great plays by Racine and Molière, several of
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and
L'Avare, for example, none, to my surprise, of
Tartuffe. If this exhibition is anything to go by, the Comédie Française seems to have preferred to stick to French drama, with few deviations into Shakespeare, say, except for an occasional performance of
Hamlet in translation. A picture of the riot caused by the première of Victor Hugo's
Hernani was shown. Another thing that surprised me was that I didn't recognise a single face on the wall of faces that were the present day
troupe of the Comédie Française, France's top-ranking actors. Had contemporary film stars been among them I'm sure I'd have been able to identify some of those.
No comments:
Post a Comment