So yesterday we went to see Les Mis at the theater in ENGLISH at Chatelet. It's OK to like musicals - they are so huge and wonderful! What better story to tell, what better song to sing than the song of angry men? And if you don't think that freedom chaffing up against the law and tradition is part of a daily message in Paris you don't have your eyes open. In the USA, we are told we have so many freedoms, and in a way, to assume that you have them makes you a little lazy. Here you are told every day that you have to fight to keep from being trod underfoot. It may be part of Paris' museum-like atmosphere but really you hear some version of it from everyone here.
Today at the Louvre we saw among other thing Gericault's Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix's Liberty Leads the People. If my children are not little revolutionaries by the time we leave, it's not my fault.
Finally I took them to France's attic - not a museum, but the collection of taxidermied specimens and natural world collectibles at Deyrolle. Although a fire nearly destroyed the place a few years ago, we can attest to its back from death's door, living large existence today. Cabinets of butterflies, beetles, shells, and cases of birds, surrounded by giant polar bears and baby giraffes and a...phoenix...but I couldn't really bring myself to purchase anything except a couple of notebooks, but then again couldn't really look away having been brought up in house stuffed with preserved snakes, bats in formaldehyde, and real koala skin made into a teddy bear. Just another Parisian indulgence. Like the ice cream and cookies we had after. (They had to have something while I fed my caffeine habit.) (The one I had given up for 4 years.)
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