LOUVRE

By StanleySobari

#The central courtyard of the Louvre was only cleared of townhouses in the mid 19^th century the glass pyramids came later, in 1989

THE LARGEST PAINTING on display at the Louvre is The Wedding Feast at Cana, painted by Paolo Veronese in 1563. It covers a whole wall of the Salle des Etats, and in any other room it would be the focus of attention. On the wall immediately facing it however is a modest sized portrait in smoky colours of a woman smiling enigmatically. Thanks to the Mona Lisa, known in France as La Joconde, the figures in Veronese’s masterpiece spend most of their time looking out onto a throng of people with their backs turned.

The world’s most visited museum has plenty of similar treasures hiding in plain sight, beginning wit hthe earliest work on display – a 9,000-year old human figure in ghostly white plaster from Ain Ghazal in Jordan. Tutankhamun of Egypt lived closer in time to us than to the people who made this statue-a whisper from a nameless past. Now on loan to the Louvre, its present home (Room D, Near Eastern Anitquities) is generally a place of serenity.

‘We almost don’t want to say which rooms are less visited than they should be – we would like to keep them quiet!’ says Daniel Soulie, who has written several books on the Louvre. ‘The whole Richelieu wing and the second floor, the galleries of French sculpture and objects d’art, the paintings of the Northern European schools – these are fabulous collections which don’t get so many visitors.’

The Louvre gets its particular character because it evolved into a museum rather than being designed as one. It began around 1200 as fortress built to protect the western walls of Paris, its chilly foundations still visible in the basement of the museum. Soon enveloped by an expanding city, the fortress lost its defensive function, and in its place came a royal palace. Several changes later, this is the building that’s stands on the eastern side of the great glass pyramid.

IM Pei’s bold, geometric addition to the Louvre attracted some criticism when it was built in 1989 to give the museum the single, grand entrance it had never had. But it is only the latest stage in eight centuries of reinvention, in which the opening of a public museum in 1793 was just one milestone. To the west of where the pyramid is today was another royal palace, the Tuileries, and it was a long-term ambition of the later French kings to link up both residences with two parallel wings, creating a great central courtyard. In the end, it was an emperor, Napoleon III, nephew of the more famous Napoleon, who completed the project in the 1850s. in 1871, he was overthrown and the Tuileries burnt down. The grand central courtyard remains open its western side.

‘What Napoleon III had in mind when he built most of the buildings that you see around the pyramid was to gather together at the Louvre and the Tuileries all the major organs of the state-imperial residence, government ministries, a library and a museum,’ says Daniel. Before it was home to the Mona Lisa, the Salle des Etats was the venue for state openings of parliament.

Older royal reminders are also threaded through the museum. In room 26 of the Egyptian galleries, a headless statue of the Egyptian galleries, a headless statue of the boy-king tutankhamun is watched over by portraits of Louis XIII and his queen, Anne of Austria-their great-great-great-grandson Louis XVI and his own queen would come to a similar end in real life. And in the Grande Galerie, built between 1595 and 1610 to link the old Louvre to the Tuileries, French kings carried on the practice of ‘healing’ suffers of the skin condition scrofula with a royal touch of the hand, as proof of their divinely ordained powers. Yet despite the parade of kings and emperors who have passed through its corridors, the Louvre has never looked as splendid as it does now.

The museum offers a variety of themed, self-guided trails, including palace history, horse-riding. The Da Vinci Code and artworks depicting love through the

Notre-Dame

By StanleySobari

# Notre-Dame is a rare reminder of medieval Paris. A devil joins the crowd of statues on the high walkway between the cathedral’s two towers

EVERY CATHEDRAL HAS A face it presents to the world, but somehow Notre-Dame’s feels particularly expressive. At the top, two square towers with dark, shuttered arches stare out over the rooftops of Paris. In the middle, a rose window and a filigree of stonework confirm the uncanny skill of medieval masons. And at the bottom, three sets of doors are surrounded by sculptures of saints and sinners forming a bible without words.

Like any human face, the cathedral façade has its slight flaws (you can still see the small square holes where the wooden scaffolding went in eight centuries ago), and looks more real for being slightly asymmetrical – just enough to avoid monotony, and perhaps also to make a god-fearing sign of respect before the only creator of perfection.

The queue to get in passes by a bronze marker in the cobblestones, denoting ‘point zero’ – the spot from which all French road distances are measured. As an official centre point, this makes a certain amount of sense. Notre-Dame is on an island, washed by the strong current of the Seine, that was one of earliest parts of Paris to be settled in Roman times-conveniently neutral ground in the city’s Left Bank-Right Bank divide.

In 1160, Bishop Maurice de Sully judged Paris’s existing Saint-Etienne cathedral inadequate, and the construction of a replacement began three years later. The bishop never saw the finished building, which took shape over more than a century. During construction, the builders were worried enough about the growing structure to add the then-novel safety measure of flying buttresses. As an architectural statement, they must have betrayed a certain lack of confidence at first, but time has been the test, and now they seem at one with the medieval tracery. Inside, the soaring ceilings are further proof that stone can convey delicacy as well as bulk.

A lot of what appears medieval however is really neo-medieval. The French Revolution took an anti-clerical turn, and the cathedral suffered for it. Most of its bells were melted down and in 1793 the 28 royal statues on the main façade were vandalized, their heads hacked off-the crowd had allegedly mistaken these Biblical rulers for kings of France. By 1831, when Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the cathedral had become a dilapidated embarrassment. The architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc was brought in to bring Notre-Dame back to glory in the 1840s. as with many of his restoration projects however, he took some creative liberties along the way.

These include Notre-Dame’s famous grotesques, or chimeras – not properly gargoyles, as they serve as decoration rather than waterspouts. A dimpled, well-trodden spiral staircase leads to the Galerie des Chimeres. A herd of grotesques perch on this balcony walkway between the west towers-sinewy, bearded  devils, but also a pelican and even an elephant. They weren’t on the original blueprints, but then again Notre-Dame never got the spires that were meant to top its twin square towers. Perhaps a great cathedral is always a work in progress.

On the façade’s left-hand portal, look out the statue of St Denis. The patron saint of France is said to have walked a few miles after being decapitated, carrying his head in his arms.

CATACOMBS

By StanleySobari

#Black and White paints of obelisks and crosses break the pattern of the bones in the Paris catacombs

THE CITY OF LIGHT HAS A darker twin. While the Paris that knows sun and rain is home to some two million people at its centre, another six million Parisians can be called on during visiting hours in their paralled city, 20 metres below street level. Or at least, what’s left of them.

The Paris Catacombs were quick solution to a mounting problem. By the late 18^th  century, the medieval cemeteries could not keep up with the growth of the city. Old graves were dug up and bones tossed into attic-like charnel house to make room for more burials, but neigbour complained that milk and soup would spoil within hours because of the miasmas wafting their way, and in one notorious case the walls of a bone repository broke under the strain, spilling a morbid cascade into nearby houses. This was the Age of Enlightenment, and something had to be done.

Luckily, under the hill of Montparnasse to the south of the city, Paris already possessed a network of tunnels, built from Roman times onwards to quarry high-quality limestone for buildings such as Notre-Dame. From 1786, the old city-centre cemeteries were gradually emptied, and their contents brought to the mineshafts in a nightly stream of hearses accompanied by the chanting of priests. The last of the transfers to the catacombs was made in 1860, by which time vast suburban cemeteries such as Pere Lachaise had relieved the burden on the city.

The level of the catacombs is reached by means of a spiral staircase, but there is a long preamble of tunnels before the bones themselves. Many still bear a black line painted along the roof to help 19^th-century quarry workers navigate in low light, and water drips from the ceiling in places. The catacombs proper begin with a doorway over which written: ‘Arrete! C’est ici l’empire de la mort’ (Stop! Here is the empire of death). This is the first of many cheery inscriptions that were designed, in the words of the quarries’ overseer Louis Etienne Hericart de Thury, to ‘break the sinister and dark monotony’ of the catacombs, and to put the living into a philosophical frame of mind.

‘Think that in the morning you may not last until evening, and that in the evening you may not last until morning,’ reads one. ‘God is not the author of death,’ reminds another. The embankments of bones on either side of the passageways have signs stating the original cemeteries and dates of reburial. Passing these carefully stacked communities of the dead feels at times strangely like wandering through a sepulchral wine cellar, but even here the human urge to be decorative expresses itself in patterns of skulls and femurs.

The first bones had been thrown in haphazardly, in a rationalist 18^th century that just wanted these unsavoury remains put somewhere safely out of sight. But when burial resumed after a hiatus caused by the turmoil of the French Revolution, Romanticism had become the zeitgeist, and the catacombs were refashioned into a place where visitors could enjoy a kind of dignified melancholy. Their modern successors are returned to the surface by way of an unmarked door, onto an unremarkable Parisian backstreet, perhaps now taking a little more care crossing the road on the way back to the Metro station.

Queues to get in can be long (sometimes over an hour), so try to arrive before the catacombs open at 10am. Dress for a temperature of around 14ᵒC, with a few drips of water from the ceiling.

VERSAILLES

By StanleySobari

#The Southern Parterre is part of three square miles of gardens at Versailles. Kings of France and Navarre (1643-1715).

A HALF-HOUR RIDE WEST from the centre of Paris on the commuter train, the town and suburb of Versailles has grown up around a palace that stand as perhaps the most splendid example of control-freakery the world has ever seen. In 1661, the young Louis XIV embarked on a massive expansion of his father’s old hunting lodge, to glorify his rule and secure his crown against two troublesome quarters-Parisians, and ambitious nobles who might build private power bases in the provinces.

French kings had long been in the habit of roaming between various country chateaux and residences in the capital that were uncomfortably exposed to unruly Parisian crowds. In 1651, one mob had even barged into the 12-year-old King’s bedchamber. From 1682, Louis moved permanently to Versailles, and required most of his court to live where he could keep an eye on them, in his ever-growing palace.

On entering the state apartments, once the immediate impact of the coloured marble and gilt has worn off, a running theme emerges – a sunburst with a face at the centre, repeated in the design. In Louis XIV’s propaganda, he was the Sun King, and solar metaphors were given free rein. Versailles’ original building plan followed a kind of yin and yang, with the king’s apartments and the Salon of War in one wing, and the queen’s rooms and the Salon of Peace in the other. But ultimately Louis moved hid bedchamber to the very centre of the palace, facing the rising sun.

Every morning at eight, he would be woken in his canopied bed, watched over by a gilded figure representing France herself. Over the next two hours, up to a hundred courtiers would crowd into his room to join in the ritual of the ‘lever’ (‘rising’), where handing a shirt or  a glove to the king as he dressed was a social and political honour calculated, like all Versailles etiquette, down to the last degree.

Yet despite the formality of the court, security could be surprisingly relaxed. Almost anyone was allowed into the palace provided they met a few minimum standards of attire, and even the gentlemen could rent the required dress sword at the entrance if they had none of their own. ‘There are nations where majesty of kings consists, in large part, in never letting themselves be seen,’ Louis XIV once said. ‘But that is not the genius of our French nation.’ The curious throng from all over the world who process through the Hall of Mirrors six days a week are unwittingly re-enacting a drama scripted by the Sun King.

In its display and ritual, Versailles was a suit made to fit its creator. But Louis XIV and Louis XVI who followed him were more private characters, as was the wife of the last, Marie Antoinette of Austria. Even a Habsburg princess like her found the etiquette at Versailles oppressive, and she escaped when she could to her own miniature palace-the Petit Trianon, at the other end of the gardens. Although she never said ‘Let them eat cake’, the mock hamlet she had built in the grounds was a source of much ridicule at the time.

Versailles’ reign ended on 6 October 1789, when an angry crowd overwhelmed the palace guard, forcing the royal family to return Paris, and finally sending them to the guillotine in 1793. The first and last piece of pomp in Versailles is the equestrian statue of Louis XIV at the entrance. Here the king sits, with his back turned on the chateau he willed into being and which his successors could never fully make their own, and his arm pointed down the grand avenue that leads back to Paris.

Book on e-ticket online and come Wednesday to Friday to avoid the biggest crowds (chateauversailles.fr).

CLASSIC PARIS

By StanleySobari

#The sun sets over the Seine, viewed from the Pont Alexandre III

JUST A STROLL ALONG THE BANKS of the Seine is a reminder of the special hold the French capital has on all our imaginations, and even its most visited sights have kept their magic.

Direct flights from Singapore Airlines and Air France are available in Singapore; Malaysian Airlines flies direct to Paris from Kuala Lumpur.

Metro stations are dotted everywhere around Paris A carnet of 10 tickets cost US$18, but it’s often worth buying a Paris Visite card, which allows unlimited public transport use within a set time period, and also gives a range of discounts (ratp.fr).  For more information, see parisinfo.com

Many city-run museums in Paris are free (for a list, see paris.fr). One of the best is the Musee Carnavalet, which sings a poetic ode to Parisian history through exhibits including an Art Nouveau shop interior (carnavalet.paris.fr). The botanic gardens at Le jardin des Plantes have a history dating back to 1626. Stroll through sections ranging from Alpine rockeries and rose gardens to tropical hothouses (some areas free, jardindesplantes.net). Pick up where the Louvre leaves off at the Musee d’Orsay, which covers art from around 1848 to the early 20th century, including Manet’s epoch-making painting Dejeuner sur l’herbe, which turns 150 this year (muse-orsay.fr).  Briliant value and just footsteps fro mthe bars, cafes and clubs of Rue Jean-Piere Timbaud, Cosmos Hotel is a shiny star with retro style on the budget-hotel scene, recently given a makeover (cosmos-hotel-paris.com). Au Sourire de Montmartre is a charming b&b with five rooms individually decorated with either French antiques or Moroccan riad-style motifs (sourine-de-montmartre.com). Hotel Verneuil is a 17 century townhouse renovated in 2012, which mixes dark tones and opulent touches to create a discreet pied-a-terre in fashionable St-Germain-des-Pres (hotel-verneuil-saint-germain.com). Classic bistro dishes such as lentil salad, duck confit and tarte are on the menu at tiny, charming au Pied de Fouet – the St-Germain-des-Pres branch is one of three in town ( Rue St-Benoit; 00 33 1 42 96 59 10).  Flavours fro mthe Maghreb are matched by Thousand and One Night  décor at 404 in the Marais. Afterwards, repair to the multicoloured Casablanca-meets-Andy Warhol cocktail lounge ( 69 Rue des Gravilliers; 404-resto.com). Set in the Grand Palais, Minipalais serves creative French and world cuisine and has a splendid colonnade (Ave Winston Churchill; minipalais.com).