Notes on The Marais
(Le Marais) This district embraces much of Le Marais (the swamp), one of the best-loved
Marais Attractions
- Pere Lachaise
cemetery-An amazing experience to walk around is the Pere
Lachaise cemetery . In among
the majestic and gothic mausoleums you can find the graves of Marcel Proust, Edith Piaf, Balzac,
Chopin, Oscar Wilde and, most famously, Jim Morrison. Père-Lachaise cemetery is like a miniature city
devastated by a neutron bomb : a great number of dead,
seemingly empty houses and temples of every size and style, and exhausted
survivors, some congregating aimlessly, some searching persistently. The cemetery was opened in 1804 after an
urgent stop had been put on further burials in the overflowing city cemeteries
and churchyards, and to be interred in Père-Lachaise
quickly became the ultimate symbol of riches and success. A free map of the cemetery is available at
the entrance on rue des Rondeaux by Avenue du Père lachaise, or you can buy a more detailed souvenir one
at newsagents near here and the Boulevard de Ménilmontant
entrance. The Bastille-The Bastille
has a big part of to the French history. By crossing the Seine and following
the Boulevard de la Bastille, you will discover the site of the Bastille Saint-Antoine,
which was a major part of the defences managed by
Charles V, built from 1370 onwards.Louis XIV had his
dikes demolished but kept the Bastille as a prestigious prison for people of
quality. The Bastille was stormed by the Parisians on the 14th of July 1789,
and later razed. To remember not just the surrender of the prison with its last
seven occupants by the end of 1789, but the famous July Revolution of 1830,
which replaced the autocratic Charles X with the new "Citizen King"
Louis-Philippe, a column surmounted by the "Spirit of Liberty" on
place de la Bastille was erected.Few months after the
birth of the Second Republic later on, the workers took to the streets. All of
eastern
The Jewish Quarter
The
city’s most famous Jewish neighborhood is in the Marais
and is known as the Pletzl – Yiddish for little
Place. This 4th arrondissment district (Metro:
Pletzel: The
heart of Jewish Paris is the Pletzel, a Yiddish name
for the old 13th century Jewish quarter found in the Marais
district. Despite all the expulsions, Jews managed to find loopholes in the
ban, so there was never any time where Jews did not live in
The
best-known of Rodin's works, The Thinker (1880-1882),
sits outside the Rodin museum in the entry courtyard. At one
point, visitors entered through The Gates of Hell, a massive 5.5m-high bronze
doorway originally created for the
The
museum's several rooms house many more of the artist's works, including the The Kiss (1886), Eternal Springtime (1884), and The
Burghers of Calais, a monument commissioned by the City of
The
museum is housed in the former Hôtel de Biron, a mansion cum garden, vast and designed in the rocaille style in 1730 as a masterpiece of columns and
pediments. In succession, it housed the immensely wealthy, saw public balls in
its halls, became a convent school and had its gold-and-white paneling ripped
out by a mother superior who smelled materialism, and eventually became the
subdivided artists’ studios of such luminaries as Isadora Duncan, Jean Cocteau,
Henri Matisse, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Rodin.
When the
French government bought the mansion in 1911, it emerged, despite severe
opposition by some politicians and academicians, as a “Rodin
museum” – after Rodin agreed to donate his entire
oeuvre. In 1919, two years after Rodin’s death, the
museum opened its doors -- and what doors they are -- to the public. While there is more
than one backstory in Rodin’s life, it is important to note that he failed
three times to be admitted to the prestigious École
des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and in being denied, Rodin
was essentially liberated from their rules. Putting sensation and emotion
before the classical tenets and stringent academic convention in sculpture, Rodin used exaggeration and gesture to accurately render
feeling and meaning and to give his sculpture the very throb of life.
Wildly
celebrated yet wildly controversial in his lifetime, Rodin
paid the price of innovation right up to his demise. Even as the French
Impressionists, as a movement, freed up painting for the breakthroughs of the
20th century, Rodin single-handedly freed sculpture
from dogma and restored the tactile values of movement, rhythm, plasticity, and
life force.
On the Rue
de Varenne, after paying the entrance fee at the
corner, wander in the large and rather formal garden and note that it becomes
intimate whenever you encounter a Rodin sculpture.
His most well-known works in the garden include the eternally absorbed Thinker,
the harrowing Ugolino and his Children, the equally
harrowing Gates of Hell, and The Burghers of Calais.
Shown
first in 1889, public enthusiasm for The Burghers of Calais was undermined by
sneers from the academy. Yet when the blind Helen Keller visited in 1937 and
ran her fingers along each of the burghers, she noted that they were “sadder to
touch than a grave.” Rodin himself called the work “a
living rosary of suffering and sacrifice.” Look to the exaggeration in the feet
and particularly the hands. Rodin modeled the hands
separately, seeking intensity of expression in hands that pray and hands that
weep, hands that question and hands that give in, hands that bless and hands
that blaspheme.
Today,
the piece is exhibited as Rodin wished – not on a
high pedestal but on the lawn, where Everyman can rub shoulders, indeed feel
the passion and anguish of these burghers who willingly sacrificed their lives
so that the citizens of
Also in
the garden is the sculpture of Honoré de Balzac, his
cape, face, and stance so dynamic that when I last visited, he emerged from the
garden’s lime and linden trees almost to “speak.” The impetuous movement of the
drapery seems to merge with the head and hair, and the torque and tension
between torso, limbs, and head impel the immovable bronze to breathe the
fevered intoxication of Balzac’s creativity. Today, few would argue with the
power, energy, or substance of this sculpted Balzac, yet the first exhibition
by Rodin of a plaster cast of Balzac unleashed
outrage. Rodin persevered and started again, making
three, four, ten models, yet the Balzac affair, like the contemporaneous
Dreyfus affair, unleashed a storm. Though he had much support from abroad and
from such artists as Monet, Rodin met with scorn in
Nor was Rodin’s dropping of the 19th century convention of the
pedestal construction well met. Rodin was accused of
denying the base. Instead, like Michelangelo, whom he had studied in Florence, Rodin often let his figures merge with the seemingly
unfinished base of the stone itself, expressing his awe at the mystery of form
“awakening” from within the stone.
Inside
the museum, the rooms are so pleasingly arranged that the chronological
progression of Rodin’s work is easily followed in the
nearly 500 works (of a total of over 6,000 works owned by the museum) on
display. To be sure, everyone gazes, transfixed, on The Kiss, and many pose
beside it for the camera, as if the human ecstasy that seems to flow through
the marble could be captured and held. (In 1893, when The
Kiss was exhibited in Chicago, it was accessible only to visitors with a
special pass.)
In The
Cathedral, comprised of two hands in an attitude of prayer, it usually escapes
the viewer that he is observing two right hands. Rodin
found that two opposed thumbs lacked the prayerful feeling, the emotion he was
attempting to render. In fact, Rodin usually depicted
only right hands, with the exception of The Hand of the Devil, in which Satan’s
left hand is used to crush humanity.
In
contrast to the concentrated and tense force of Rodin’s
bronzes are the forty restored marble pieces. Pause at The Danaid,
whose curves undulate as the finely polished white marble surfaces let the
light glide like a caress over the radiant body of the young female figure, in
deliberate contrast to the secondary parts left in a rough state.
The
museum also exhibits Rodin’s drawings, conserves
8,000 photographs of his works, and shows Rodin’s
personal collection of paintings by masters as eminent as Van Gogh, Renoir, and
Monet. Van Gogh’s Les Moissoneurs holds the viewer in
acres of wheat, its farmer lost in a field of gold while in the distance, the
city encroaches.
And then
there is the room containing Rodin’s Sculptor with
his Muse. Another backstory.
Not to be forgotten for a moment. The 43-year-old Rodin
was the sculptor. The 19-year-old Camille Claudel
(1864-1943) was the muse. She became his pupil, his model, and his lover of
many years. Her relationship with Rodin unfortunately
eclipsed the power of her work, but the critic Mirabeau
called Claudel “a rebellion against nature: a woman
of genius!” The more time spent in the room that Rodin
dedicated to her sculptures, the more we are convinced of Claudel’s
immense talent. And yet, Claudel spent half of her
life locked in a hospital for the insane.
When Claudel finally understood that Rodin
would not leave Rose Beuret (who managed his
household, was also his lover, companion, and mother of his son, and finally
his wife in old age, two weeks before she died), she turned her love of Rodin into a singular hatred. Claudel’s
mother had rejected her daughter from infancy and was repulsed by her liaison,
sans marriage, to Rodin. Claudel’s
father had secretly supported her, but after his early death, her support was
left to her brother, the writer Paul Claudel. His
political aspirations would not tolerate his sister’s scandalous connection or
subsequent erratic behavior, so he used a lax French law to drag Camille from
her apartment and hide her away in a mental institution for thirty years.
Friends who visited her thought her quite sane, as did the hospital staff, who
tried to release her, but her mother and brother would not have her. That Rodin dedicated a room to her work indicates that their
commingling had deep resonances; it is one of the most fascinating rooms in the
museum, and the most sad.