Ten Little Chances to be Free

The read-through thread for "À chasse noire, meute muette" finally gave me the necessary kick in the pants to post my last round of Paris photos--Valjean's flight through the Left Bank of Paris and Javert's pursuit. My guide for all of this was the invaluable book companion to Carnavalet's "Paris au temps des Misérables" exhibit, which also furnished me details on the inspirations and probable location of the convent.

BANDWIDTH WARNING: There are almost 50 images at 800x600 under the cut. If that makes your internet connection go "D:", I suggest you instead visit the Abaissé thread, which is identical except that the images are in link form.

( Off we goooo...  )

I did get things done today. Finalized my grade paperwork--managed to oversleep and miss an appointment with a professor, and the associate prof said this guy waited quite a while because he wanted to write on the paperwork that I was one of the top three students in the class. Which just stomped on all my depression triggers (because even the depression cannot fool me into thinking God didn't give me brains, but it can jump up and down on my chest shouting that I'm doing nothing with what I was given, that I'm wasting my life and any talent I have, that I'm unreliable and irresponsible and a disappointment and a lazy shit, etc.) and I felt pretty horrible for a while, but for once I did the smart thing and fought it off by getting more stuff done. So the paperwork is now in the hands of the associate professor, who will give it to the prof and get it mailed off, and I've arranged for my cell phone subscription to be cancelled and my bank account closed, and I've bought various gifts and mailed off various things. Everything replaceable has been entrusted to the French postal service and their cheap surface-mail option for shipping books--I hemmed and hawed over whether to send the "Paris au temps de Balzac" book, but so far all three packages I've sent have not only arrived, they've arrived twice as fast as they were supposed to. So everything is in the post except my Pléiade edition of Les Mis, the Carnavalet "Paris au temps des Misérables" booklet, coloneldespard's drawings, and my playbills and souvenir brochures. It's an odd feeling to be going home with more shoes than books.

Other than obligatory stuff, I've been doing more photo runs of Les Mis locations and visiting all the small offbeat museums that I haven't been to yet. Musée Dupuytren yesterday, which was mildly disturbing and Stephen Maturin would've loved it, and Salon Frédéric Chopin/Musée Adam Mickiewicz today. It was lovely and I still kind of want to learn Polish.

And then I said goodbye to Paris by getting a triple Berthillon sorbet and having dinner at l'As du Falafel. I was considering rounding things off with Les Mis student rush, but there were no interesting understudies on and anyway it seems kind of fitting for London cast change to be my last Les Mis for a while. (Speaking of which, I think I'm nearing 100 times seeing LM, which is terrifying.)

...I don't wanna leeeeaaaave.

I fly back to the US on Wednesday. (No idea how I'm going to manage all my baggage.) On the one hand, the rest will be nice. I'm kind of worn out and it will be nice to be able to sit around and track audios and sort through my photos without feeling guilty or like I'm missing out on Paris, and I'll be in the same time zone as most of my friends for the first time in ages. On the other... I don't want to leave Paris! I want to keep being able to visit Les Mis sites and go get Berthillon sorbet whenever I want.

I had a very strange day today.

It started out uneventfully enough. I slept in far too late, lingered over my computer far too long, set out with a list of museums I needed to go to, and only had time to do the towers of Notre-Dame. Which I did, and I'm proud to say the fear-of-heights dizziness didn't descend until I was on the wooden platform in the belltower. Afterwards I wandered around near Châtelet/Les Halles/Beaubourg for a while, stopped by the Théâtre du Châtelet only to realize there was no Les Mis tonight due to a Mahler concert, and so set out on another Les Mis location-hunting expedition. Current target: the convent.

According to the very smart and very well-researched people at Carnavalet who put together the Paris in the time of Les Misérables exhibit and book, the convent not only didn't exist, it was an amalgamation of two or three separate things. The everyday-life detail was taken from a Benedictine convent near the Rue Mouffetard where one of his mistresses was educated, and Hugo was originally going to set that part of Les Mis there, but his editor warned him off it due to legal issues. So he transplanted it to a completely fictional location near the Gare de Lyon and called it Petit-Picpus even though it was quite a ways away from the real Picpus. And the real nuns of the Perpetual Adoration were, in fact, in a convent that adjoined the Picpus cemetery.

I had previously made trips to photograph the various streets through which Valjean flees during the nocturnal chase from the Gorbeau tenement, and since there are no coincidences in Hugo-land, of course Valjean's route takes him right past the real Benedictine convent. So I already had photos of that. I went and got photos of the Rue Traversière near the Gare de Lyon without incident. And then on a whim, I decamped and headed off to the Picpus cemetery.

Well, I spent ten or fifteen minutes wandering around the block, seeing no sign of a cemetery entrance and wondering why the fuck I had gone all the way out there for such a tangential connection when there was possibly nothing there. This is why the Les Mis tour guide exists, so that people don't have to have moments like that. Then I found the door. It was closed, there were no opening hours posted, I pushed and it opened. Inside was a courtyard, a church, and a gate--again, closed but not locked. I felt a little bad going through the gate, since it was 9pm and the place was probably supposed to be closed, but there was no one around to scold me and I was being otherwise well-behaved. Beyond the gate was a garden, and...

...no, wait, let me backtrack for a minute. The Picpus cemetery is a two-minute walk from the Place de la Nation, and at some point en route I found out that Picpus is where they dumped the bodies of those guillotined there during the Revolution.

So I go into the garden and it is the creepiest thing I have seen since I went down into the catacombs alone. The garden itself embodies the phrase "silence of the tomb" ten times better than any of the major Parisian cemeteries. It is 9pm around midsummer, therefore dusk, there is not another human soul around, and the garden consists of nothing but walls covered in climbing roses, gravel paths around the perimeter, and a series of big open lawns. Naturally my first thought is "is this the mass grave?"

Turns out it is not, but the garden is still creepy. There are probably beautiful passages in the Brick about the creepy, gloomy silence of a convent garden, and this garden embodies every one of them. It just keeps going on and on, and finally I find the door to the cemetery. It is not an elaborate Parisian cemetery. It is mostly stone slabs covering tombs, a lot of them are broken, there's a rotting wooden cross as a grave marker somewhere. In the back are a few larger graves for nuns put to death in 1794, and yet another closed-but-not-locked gate, this one going to the mass graves. There are two of them; one has over a thousand people in it.

By this point it is going on 10pm and I am seriously worried about whether I'm going to go back to the entrance, find the gate locked, and have to spend the night with a bunch of dead nuns for company. I head back through the creepy dead-silent garden, make my way back towards the entrance, and hear something. At first I think I'm imagining it. Then I get closer and no, I am not imagining it, that is a choir singing. It sounds like it's coming from the church. The church that is dark and locked.

I have now moved beyond worrying about whether the gate will be locked, and on to worrying about whether I am unwittingly re-enacting a scene from the novel and will have to smuggle myself out in a coffin. Fortunately, though, everything is still unlocked, and as I struggle with the front door latch someone flicks on a light for me. I can't see the someone, and the windows in the doorkeeper's house are dark, but I assume for the sake of my own sanity that it was not a ghost turning on that light.

On my way back I see a very interesting-looking bird in the street, brown with blue wings, completely different from the usual Parisian fauna. It's hopping around on the pavement and obligingly holds still while I take a picture of it. A little too obligingly--and it follows me down the sidewalk and barely seems scared of me at all. Intrigued, I bend down to get a closer look at it, and it tries to fly away and I see that its wings are clipped.

Shit. There is a pet bird hopping around on the street. I cannot just leave it there, especially since the Picpus cemetery made kind of an impression on me and it would feel doubly shitty to walk indifferently away. The building bordering this stretch of sidewalk doesn't have a doorkeeper or any windows at head level, so I can't ask if anyone's lost a pet bird. And it looks very bedraggled and possibly hurt. I lean down and hold out my arm, and it only takes about ten seconds' hesitation for the little guy to step up on it. Definitely a pet, almost certainly hand-fed, looks like a baby. Tamer than a lot of pet birds I have handled. Either someone is distraught because their bird escaped, or someone is enough of an awful bastard to clip a baby bird's wings and render it mostly helpless before abandoning it on the street. What the hell am I going to do with him?

So I am standing there looking like an idiot with this bird clutching my arm for dear life and nuzzling up to me, and this girl passes by with her bike and her dog. And let it never, ever be said again that Parisians are rude and unfriendly. This girl stops and says "Oh wow, he looks tame, did you pick him up off the street? Poor guy, we can't just leave him here." And locks up her bike and shows me the veterinary hospital down the street, which turns out to be closed. So she calls her mom and her brother to see if one of them can take the bird for the night, since he wouldn't be safe at her place with the dog there. The dog, it turns out, was adopted after someone him abandoned him on the beach, and this girl has a Thing about people who abandon their pets. So we take turns holding the bird until her brother shows up and takes it back home, and we exchange phone numbers so she can text me about what happens to him.

Just... wow. I am dumbfounded by how nice she was. People going out of their way to make sure an animal gets rescued when there's a convenient stranger already trying and failing to take care of it? In a big city? It's enough to temporarily restore your faith in humanity.

And it is 2am and I have to be up in three hours to catch my train to London, so thus ends this over-long post.

I went to the museum that has the historic collections of the prefecture of police! It's a little hard to find (it's on the third floor of a police station in the 5th arrondissement, and the station isn't marked as having a museum in it), but the collection is well worth it. There are a lot of geeky things in there--a replica of Fieschi's infernal machine, repro gendarme uniforms from various points in the 19th century (the ones in Les Mis are actually quite accurate to the 1829 ones), and lots of prison registers. They have the register entry from when Saint-Just's mother had him locked away. They have the Conciergerie registers with entries for Danton, Desmoulins, Charlotte Corday, and the Girondins. They have a bunch of stuff signed "Marat, l'ami du peuple," a lot of stuff signed by the Committee of General Security, and I think a few things signed by the Committee of Public Safety. They have a guillotine blade that was in use on the Place de Grève in 1792.

But this entry is not really about the shiny, which is a matter of public record. This entry is about their one lone placard about Lacenaire. Because Lacenaire's first victim? Was a young man on the wrong side of the law, named Chardon, alias "Madeleine," nicknamed "la tante."

LOLWUT, LUCIEN AND THEODORE ARE BASED ON THE SAME GUY? I MISSED THIS MEMO

(Also, right after the part of his trial where Lacenaire recounts the murder of Chardon, he says he tried and failed to rob a collecting clerk by renting an apartment near his... in the rue de la Chanverrerie. Heeeeee.)

Today was utterly MAD and I renounce at any attempt to make a coherent narrative out of it, so I leave you with bullet points:

- Trying to get Les Mis fans to show up at a particular place at a particular time = herding cats. I suspected it for a while what with RSVP chaos and such, but it is now official, and I was duuumb not to leave half an hour's waiting-around time in all the tour meetup points.

- Musain burger restaurant totally has a ball pit upstairs. A revolutionary ball pit where you can hide out and plot the overthrow of the government.

- Doing a lightning tour of Carnavalet and dragging people through the exhibits at double-speed hurt my soul, but the staff were incredibly amused by us. Like, incredibly amused. They kept grinning and saying hello just on seeing the tricolor sashes, and then we got to the Restoration/July Monarchy exhibits and they were seriously LOLing at us and our disparaging comments about Charles X.

- Really Carnavalet will never be as fun as it was this afternoon, with fourteen really nerdy people pointing things out and providing flippant, often sarcastic summaries of everything and everyone from Voltaire to the revolution of 1848.

- Lulz there is a flat for sale at 16 rue de la Verrerie. We should pool together and make it a giant collective fandom library/archive or something. It would be awesome. And completely implausible on so many levels, but the idea makes me grin.

- There are group photos of us being silly and revolutionary at the site of the barricade!

- And afterwards we got last-minute tickets to Les Mis and there were Marius and Enjolras understudies, and they were both fairly awesome. (More on that later, I think.)

- I had to make a battery run for my recorder fifteen minutes before the show, and my frantic running-around took me past the stage door. Twice. The first time all the stagehands were out back smoking. The second time all the stagehands were out back taking cell-phone videos of the crazy girl in the sash.

- This guy about our age came up to us at intermission and asked for a photo with us. This was funny but not inherently Twilight Zone-esque until he just so happened to mention that he played Gavroche in the Broadway 10th anniversary show, and was not there for any special date or event, he just happened to be seeing the tour.

- Second Twilight Zone moment came at the stage door, when Katie Hall and Rosalind James were chatting (very indulgently, mind, given that we were all there and hyperactive and dressed up) about the Paris engagement. And it got onto the difficulty of finding Les Mis places in Paris, and I did not even realize I was giving Cosette directions to the Rue Plumet until after it had been pointed out to me through fits of laughter by... pretty much everyone else there.

- lucieandco and I talk about Balzac when we're drunk. Be afraid.

OMG it is happening. A dozen people in tricolor sashes running around the Jardin du Luxembourg and having lunch in the burger-joint-that-would've-been-the-Café-Musain. I can't believe this worked.

Have to run off to Carnavalet in a few minutes to continue the tour, I just wanted to go squeeeeee and wish you all a happy Barricade Day!

MEETING PLACES FOR THE TOURS

How to recognize the group: There will probably be people in tricolor sashes and period costume running around. Here's a picture of me. Yes, my hair is still that color, and yes, it tends to stand out in a crowd.

( FRIDAY, 4th JUNE )

( SATURDAY, 5th JUNE )

( SUNDAY, 6th JUNE )

My utter planning fail has not screwed me over! There are still vacation rentals available in Paris for the first three weeks of June. I sent out half a dozen inquiries and have two responses so far, one in the upper Marais (around Arts et Métiers/République) and one on the Rue Mouffetard. Waiting on a response for a few others, including one right across from Saint-Merry. Of all of them, the Arts-et-Métiers one is the likeliest candidate and definitely looks the least like it was decorated by a student on an IKEA binge, but I am willing to give up aesthetics for location if the Saint-Merry one is available.

Edit: Also I finished Splendeurs et Misères and by the end of it not only was the editor on board with the gay, most of the footnotes were about double entendres that I wouldn't have caught. And speculation about the size of the characters' genitalia. Whaaat.

Sketching out plans for how I'm going to do the Les Mis tour on Barricade Day. Tell me which sounds better to you? (Even if you're not coming, I could use some feedback.)

Immutable facts:
- The Procope reservation is for Sunday afternoon lunch
- All the good restaurants in the Marais are closed on Saturday

Planned segments of the tour:
- The Marais, between the barricade and the Place de la Bastille, including 2 museums (at LEAST 4 hours total)
- Latin quarter, close to the Procope, includes the burger joint where the Café Musain used to be (probably a couple hours if people have time to go exploring)
- Saint-Marcel/Place d'Italie/Gobelins (one hour tops, I should say)

Things the plan needs to accomplish, in order of importance:
- Not making people late for the show
- Not exhausting everyone
- At least leaving time for lunch and dinner
- Preferably either eating somewhere along the way, or letting people loose in a neighborhood with plenty of restaurants
- Not wasting people's Metro/bus tickets, grouping things that are within walking distance

Plan 1:
- Isolated trips (Rue Plumet, etc.) Saturday morning. Marais Saturday afternoon after lunchtime. Completely ignore the fact that, by going to the Marais on Saturday, we are missing the best falafel in Paris, and just do the whole thing starting from Bastille and dump everyone in Les Halles at dinnertime to partake of the, er, numerous and varied food options there. Les Halles = close to the theatre, so we are golden.
- Saint-Marcel on Sunday morning, lunch at Procope, Latin Quarter in the afternoon, dinner at the Quality Burger Restaurant of Revolutionary French Fries.

Plan 2:
- Latin Quarter on Saturday morning. Lunch at Quality Burger Restaurant. Split up Marais trip; do Carnavalet, Rue de l'Homme-Armé, Rue de la Verrerie, Saint-Merry, and the barricade on Saturday afternoon, and end in Les Halles.
- Saint-Marcel and/or isolated trips on Sunday morning, lunch at Procope, second half of Marais trip in afternoon: Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire (optional), Bastille, Victor Hugo museum, Eglise Saint-Paul, absinthe shop, La Force, then have delicious delicious falafel for dinner in the Rue des Rosiers.

Of course there are many other possible combinations, but most of them completely screw us over for time and/or leave us with nowhere to eat.

So far I am liking Plan 2 better; it will waste a hell of a lot more Metro/bus tickets, but splitting up the Marais section might be a good idea since there are two museums in there and it's a long damn way. And the Rue des Rosiers can accomodate almost any dietary restriction imaginable: kosher, vegetarian, food allergies, etc.

Fortunately there is no need to specifically schedule in the site of Javert's final jump, since the theatre is practically SITTING on the Pont au Change and you can go walk around there at intermission if you want.