Paris, Part One: Les Jongleurs

Les Jongleurs de Paris

What are a Venezuelan, a Cordovan, and a Westphalian, doing at the house of a Gaditan and a Saxon in Paryż? No, it is not ‑yet- a joke.

In a small world, a rel­at­ive of a friend of a rel­at­ive of a friend of my moth­er ‑was it like that?- whom I haven’t seen in ages, a Gaditan guy who back in time showed me Madrid and infes­ted me with the hun­ger for the city’s his­tory, a guy who we almost meet last year in Berlin just to find out he actu­ally moved to Paris, hos­ted us this year in Paris. And to what extent we have just enjoyed the stay, I’m speech­less. Remarkable hosts!

Paris, the city of the toy tower. The city where we stayed for five nights. And it was just not enough. As Jorge already knew the place, he sought for more spe­cif­ic places he could­n’t be before, like the Catacombs and the Moreau museum ‑what a paint­ings he has, it deserves com­ing back to the city just for that alone! On the mean­while, Leon and me went to places whose beauty has been for­got­ten behind a banal­isa­tion of pic­tures. Just to men­tion the first one for today, the Louvre.
It must be admit­ted, not without a small bit­ter taste, that there were big pieces of the Louvre not vis­ited. To excuse us, the museum is too large, too much for just a vis­it, and the city is too large, too much for just any­thing less than sev­er­al, if not many, weeks. Or months.

We star­ted at the greco-roman sculp­tures just because it cas­u­ally was the first one we found after enter­ing, but which cas­u­ally was one of the pieces I’m usu­ally inter­ested the most, interest that was sat­is­fied by the most per­fect human pro­por­tions and delighted by their move­ment impres­sions. Oh that gla­di­at­or whose pos­ture was just the same I would have taken in his place. I must say, I’m a sculp­tures lov­er: I must be please reminded of two things:

  • To look for some cheap, per­haps small wooden, way of learn­ing a per­son­al bit of that topic.
  • To send to an autode­fé those who dare to dis­respect a Roman or any ancient sculp­ture by caress­ing his hair.

We skipped almost on pur­pose the ori­ent­al halls of the museum ‑Egyptians, Assyrians, Islamics, etc‑, just to have time for a part of the paint­ing halls. Say that it was just for an excuse to come back to the city, for example.

Mona Lisa, as stated by Leon, did a mar­vel­lous job at dis­tract­ing the phone storm from the rest of paint­ings, and even though still remark­able, we have just an ori­gin­al copy of Leonardo him­self at Prado, Madrid. But the three David’s: Leonidas, Napoleon, and the Sabines, where noth­ing but a delight; two stor­ies I used to know quite well, plus a Napoleonic one Leon just intro­duced me to detail, remark­ing how big of a states­man this Napoleon was, who were all the people around him, and what­for they were there. And just when we were leav­ing, a small room ded­ic­ated to the sea­side sun­sets of Claudio de Lorena, whose water I could hear roar­ing just by the tone of his col­ours, mar­velled me like that of the Prado.

2 Replies to “Paris, Part One: Les Jongleurs”

  1. […] fourth vis­it to Paris since this blog star­ted with the first – and finally one from which I got a reas­on­able amount of […]

  2. […] Continue from Paris, Part One: Les Jongleurs […]

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