Writing with the Impressionists at the Musée d'Orsay

Today I took my writerly self for a creative outing to the Musée d'Orsay.

It was another gray morning when I headed out on the twenty-minute walk there from my conveniently situated hotel. How lucky I am to actually prefer Paris under wistful, melancholy skies!

I arrived well before the museum's 9:30 opening, so I took a stroll across the Seine to the near-deserted gardens of the Tuileries.

When the museum did open at the appointed hour, the crowds were less daunting than they had been at the Louvre yesterday, and I was relieved to find that I could leave my backpack with an actual human attendant at the cloakroom instead of struggling to master the keypad for a locker. Spoiler alert: this turned out not to be as great a boon as I had thought!

First, I wandered through the museum; the choicest Impressionist paintings seem to be in a different location from when I was here six years ago; now they are up on levels five and six, which led me to the famous clock.

Benches were fewer and farther between than at the Louvre, unless I wanted a spot on the long stone benches by the procession of sculptures. With seating options so few I felt guilty about monopolizing an entire glass bench (yes, the benches by the paintings are made of glass!) for a full hour or more, but I did find one that was longer than the others so more easily shared. Why glass benches? Why glass slippers for Cinderella? Maybe glass is the preferred medium for objects of enchantment. 

My bench faced two strangely shaped canvases of Monet. When I read the label, I learned that he painted his own Déjeuner sur l'herbe with the hope of imitating not only the theme but the fame of Manet's famous painting, here displayed on the wall opposite. Manet's is the one notable for the fact that a completely naked woman reclines on the grass, unabashed by the absence of any shred of clothing, in the company of two fully clothed gentlemen. My photo of it turned out terrible, so here is a image of it from the museum website:

Alas, Monet's painting did not make the splash he had hoped for and became damaged from prolonged storage, so he had to chop it up to salvage what he could. Hence the oddity of the two adjoining paintings in their mismatched sizes.

Lessons to be learned here: 1) competitiveness is (sadly) ubiquitous among artists; 2) and often doomed to disappointment; and 3) we salvage what we can.

So I sat on my bench and wrote. I took the first picture of the glass bench with writing pad laid upon it. A kindly stranger took the other two, one of me posing myself as if I've just looked up from writing a creative masterpiece and one just of my head sans mask so you can see me looking like the happy writer-in-Paris that I am!

Today I used my writing time to make notes for a book that I have been thinking about writing for literally - get this - FIFTY-FIVE YEARS!!!! I have several dozen typed pages that I wrote either in high school or in college (I think I wrote them in high school, but they were saved in a Wellesley College folder). They are highly autobiographical and self-indulgent, but they are my entrance point into writing a ruthlessly honest, tender and heartbreaking coming-of-age story set in the turbulent years of the late 1960s. (I like writing the flap copy first, so I know what to aim for!). I came away from the session with six handwritten pages of questions I need to ask myself as I begin the task of - at long last - actually writing the book. I celebrated this progress over lunch at the museum's lovely cafe.

The museum was getting crowded at this point. If it's this crowded mid-day in January, one shudders to think how crowded it must be at the peak of the tourist season in July. So it was time to leave. I rummaged in the little side pocket of my purse for my claim ticket for the cloakroom. It wasn't there. I rummaged throughout my entire purse, though I was sure I had NOT put it in my wallet, or secret zipped compartment, or anywhere else. WHERE COULD IT BE? I checked each location again. It was nowhere. It must have fallen onto the floor at some point when I retrieved my phone to take these photos.

Oh, well. I must not be the first museum visitor to lose her cloakroom ticket. So I waited in line for the attendant and threw myself on her mercy, even practicing saying in French: "Je suis désolée, j'ai perdu mon billet!" Désolée sounds so much more genuinely heartbroken than merely saying "I'm sorry." I explained that it was a green backpack, not too large, and she set off to look for it in the row of cubbies. She held up an assortment of green backpacks. Was it this one? Or this one? Perhaps this one? As each proffered green backpack was rejected, she allowed me to come back to look for it myself, but I had no luck finding it, either. All it had in it was my coat, raincoat, and umbrella, but those are things someone would miss rather keenly on a rainy day in January, 

I searched again for the missing ticket, but it was just as gone as it had been ten minutes ago. The kindly lady admitted me again for another search, even though it was plain as plain can be that there wasn't a single green backpack there that was mine. Then suddenly - oh, joy! - I found it! But it was NOT green, it was navy blue!! I filled out the form required for the staff to surrender an item to someone who had no ticket for it, and then headed out in the afternoon drizzle, grateful for my outerwear and umbrella. 

There really are some people too dumb to be allowed to travel through the world alone, and I am one of them!! 

The topic of my next post is going to be why, although I am making it SOUND extremely wonderful to be a writer all by herself starting the new year in Paris, there are a number of reasons why this trip is . . . hard. And then I'll share what I'm planning to do to make it wonderful, anyway.