Jed and I walk through the neighborhood so I can show him 77 rue de la Verrerie (location of apartment last fall) on our way over to Notre Dame to see the Crown of Thorns (see Good Friday entry). We expected the cathedral to be mobbed but fortunately, at the moment we go in, it is not. There are priests (or perhaps monks), dressed in white, all over the church selling commemorative postcards of the Crown of Thorns for 2 euros. Available in English as well as French.
We cross the river so I can show Jed the best view of Notre Dame from the corner of the Square Viviani. Unfortunately, the little park is closed for "bad weather" and, inexplicably, so is the church of Saint Julien le Pauvre. So we visit Saint Severin instead. We wander (nous flanons!) around the Latin Quarter down to the Boulevard Saint Germain, then down rue de l'Odeon to the Jardin du Luxembourg. It is amazing to see flowers in bloom in this cold weather.
Jed wants to walk over to see the apartment he stayed in several summers ago on rue des Arenes so we leave the park on the east side and make our way up the hill to the Pantheon. There are giant yellow balloons flying and it turns out that the Pierre and Marie Curie Institute is selling daffodils for cancer research. There are daffodils, primroses and other spring flowers all over the small lawn in front of the Pantheon.
We stop in the lovely church of Saint Etienne du Mont but there is a service going on so we don't stay. Down rue Clovis, past the Lycee Henri IV, to rue Descartes, and then Jed finds the little pedestrian street, rue Rollin, which has stairs leading directly down to rue des Arenes. We relax for a few minutes in the Arenes de Lutece, sitting in the sunshine and watching a rowdy game of petanque.
Now I'm following Jed because he is much more familiar with this neighborhood than I am. In fact, he's introducing me to a part of Paris where I have never been before! At the end of rue des Arenes, we turn right down rue Linne to the Jardin des Plantes. We climb the "labyrinth" to the top (wishing we were small again so we could scurry around underneath the hedges!). We continue through the rest of the garden which not only has early flowers in bloom but also two gorgeous trees, one white, one pink, both varieties of Prunus Serrulata (according to the little signs). Unfortunately, my camera batteries have died. At the far end of the garden, we exit onto the Place Valhubert, next to the river where the 5th arrondisement meets the 13th.
At this point, although we've literally been walking all day, we decide to keep going along the river to the Bibliotheque Nationale. One might think that walking along the river would be scenic, but in this part of town, it isn't. We are walking along the Quai Austerlitz (past the Gare d'Austerlitz) which is a very busy and wide road between us and the river. We finally stop to have the vanille (me) and biere blonde (Jed) at a very Parisian cafe (Cafe Marcel et Lili) at the intersection of Quai Austerlitz, Boulevard V. Auriol, and the Quai de la Gare. You will not find any tourists here!
Fortunately, the Bibliotheque Nationale is only a little further, and we start to see signs directing us to it. (Although I have seen the B.N. from the other side of the river, I have never actually been here before so I am discovering lots of new places today with Jed!) We go up a long flight of stairs and arrive at a vast esplanade with four towers (each in the L-shape of an open book, it is said) rising out of each corner. Needless to say, it is very windy on this empty expanse! (The B.N. complex has been controversial since its opening in 1998. I could write an entire blog entry on this alone.) We quickly follow the signs to the East Entrance and find ourselves on a moving sidewalk heading down. It turns out that we have been, in fact, walking on a rectangular plinth forming the top of the building below. There are very tall trees growing in a courtyard in the middle.
Inside the West Hall are two enormous globes (apparently quite famous, although not to me!) by Coronelli, one of the earth and one of the heavens. (Aside: Vincenzo Coronelli was a Franciscan monk, an Italian cosmographer, publisher and encyclopedist known in particular for his globes. He was commissioned in the 1680s, when he was only in his 30s, to build these two globes for King Louis XIV.) When I say they are enormous, I mean enormous. Each is 384 cm (more than 12 feet) in diameter and weighs about 2 tons.
There is an currently an exhibition (no pun intended) here about the L'Enfer of the Bibliotheque Nationale (France's official collection of erotica, kept under lock and key for 170 years!) Rather than try to describe it, I've excepted below a review of the exhibit from a British newspaper. (And let me make it clear that Jed and I did not walk through this exhibit together!)
We take the RER back to Place St Michel. Have dinner at the Creperie de Saint Andre. Walk back to Theatre de la Huchette to see one of the Ionesco plays but I've messed up the times and we've missed it. So instead we walk home and collapse! When you consider that we have glimpsed both heaven (at Notre Dame) and l'Enfer (at the Bibliotheque Nationale), it's been quite a day.
From THE INDEPENDENT (3 December 2007), review by John Lichfield
Psst! Wanna see some dirty books and pictures?
France's official hoard of erotica and pornography, lovingly assembled by the Bibliothque Nationale over a period of 170 years, will be thrown open to the startled eyes of the public for the first time this week.
More than 350 books and prints from the forbidden section of the state library officially known as "L'Enfer" (hell) will be presented in an academically meticulous, but often frankly filthy, exhibition in Paris for three months from tomorrow. . .
The material is often beautifully executed, sometimes surreal, sometimes very funny, sometimes brutal. It is steeped in French (and British) history. Much of it is not for the very young or for the faint of heart. The pictures shown here are some of the mildest. . . .
The "Enfer" section of the Bibliothque Nationale books and prints and photographs purchased, confiscated or donated over almost two centuries is believed to be one of the largest and richest collections of pornographic and erotic materials in the world. The Vatican's secret stash is said to be even larger but that, presumably, will never be opened to the public.
How strong can this stuff be? Given what appears daily on the internet, on cable TV, or in the pages of the Daily Sport, is it possible to be shocked by exquisite, but explicit, 17th-century porn?
The answer is, yes. The exhibition is an eye-opener: a quietly and intelligently displayed but garish cornucopia of sadism, masochism, bestialism, scatology, bums, tits and staring genitalia. It is also a fascinating, and sometimes beautiful, expedition through the dark, winding corridors of the human psyche.
The erotification, or pornification of the internet was inevitable, one learns. Every previous technological or literary advance in human communication from the printing press, to the novel, to the lithograph, to the photograph, to the cinema has been hijacked by the human (or is it mostly a male?) compulsion to meditate, or drool, over our sexuality. Even established writers or artists also secretly wrote dirty stories or drew dirty pictures out of the act of lovemaking. The exhibition includes examples from the poet Charles Baudelaire and the surrealist artist, Man Ray.
In the DVD/internet age, smut or eroticism is available to all. Most of the material in the exhibition at the Bibliothque Franois Mitterrand on the Left Bank of Paris was originally produced in secret, mostly for an educated, wealthy clientele which pretended to the world that it knew better.
There is one series of explicit but rather funny prints in the exhibition, which consists of innocent sketches of drawing rooms or corridors, with doors which open onto scenes of energetic debauchery. These once belonged to Leon Gambetta, a highly respected late 19th-century, French prime minister.
Typical French hypocrisy? Think again. Some of the most beautifully executed, stylised but brutally explicit prints in the show are from 19th-century Japan.
The exhibition also includes a series of beautiful, early 19th-century, pastoral scenes of haystacks, cornfields and covered rowing boats. If you hold them up to the light, you see eager couples inside the haystacks et al in what the curators of the exhibition coyly call "advantageous positions". This is entitled the "English collection": the prints were all created in Jane Austen's England. . .
Most of the material is of French origin. The Marquis de Sade has three display cases to himself, including the hand-written manuscript of "Les Infortunes de la Vertu", composed while he was a prisoner in the Bastille in 1787.
Only bona fide academic researchers have been allowed access to the "L'Enfer" collection until now. The omnipresence of erotic or pornographic images in the modern world has persuaded the French national library that it is permissible, finally, to open the doors of Hell.
"Twenty years ago, such an exhibition would have been unthinkable, certainly one sponsored by a state body such as the Bibliothque Nationale," said Marie-Franoise Quignard, one of the two curators.
"The contents of L'Enfer have been the subject of myth and fantasy for years. People, journalists for instance, were always pestering us to let them have a look. Attitudes to sexuality and eroticism have changed today. There is a great interest in the connections between literature, art and pornography. The library decided that an exhibition would be acceptable and commercially successful."
The exhibition also explores the history of the Enfer collection itself. Why would a state library gather such works and then hide them away? The same sort of thing exists at the British Library at St Pancras, which has never opened its collection the "Private Case" to general viewing.
The Bibliothque Nationale ... has a statutory duty to collect every book published in France. The torrent of contemporary erotic and pornographic texts do not go into the "Enfer" collection, however. They go to the open shelves of the library.
The Enfer collection consists mostly of works which were published secretly, from the mid 17th century to the 19th century. It also contains a few rare first editions of other erotic works such as Pauline Rage's sado-masochistic classic The History of O, published in 1954.
"The collection was begun in the mid 18th century by the royal librarians," said Raymond-Josu Seckel, the other main curator of the exhibition. "They believed that a national library has a duty to collect everything which could be of cultural or historical interest to scholars in the future."
The royal library became the national library after the Revolution. It created a separate, closed category for sexually explicit materials in 1830. The name "L'Enfer" seems to have been coined some time in the 1840s.
From the beginning, the only outsiders permitted to enter Hell were bona fide scholars who could prove, to the satisfaction of the library management, that they needed to see a particular print or book. Browsing was never allowed.
The collection of over 1,700 books and many more prints and pamphlets was obtained partly by raids and confiscations. A large part of L'Enfer came from the private library of a political opponent of the Emperor Napoleon III, who was raided by police looking for anti-Imperial tracts in 1866. They found hundreds of old works which were judged "contrary to good public morals". A court ordered the books to be burned but the then head of the Bibliothque Nationale insisted they should be saved for posterity.
The exhibition reveals some interesting, historical differences in erotic tastes. The earliest, 17th and 18th century, material dwells on the straightforward pleasures of the flesh. The celebration of the pleasures of pain imposed or submitted begins with the Marquis of Sade in the late 18th century. Pornography from the French Revolutionary period is mostly political, especially scurrilous allegations about the sexual appetite and imagination of Marie Antoinette. The 19th century concentrates on the blazing sexuality lying below the stern conservative or domestic exterior of life. . . .
What comes over when you go through the whole collection is just how repetitive our sexual imaginations and interests are. You find the same images and themes, the same fixation with male and female genitalia, the same interest in unusual ways of performing acts of sex. In the end you become dulled by it all or you just laugh.
"On the other hand, this is a library, and this is, finally, a literary exhibition. It is fascinating to see how different writers, including well-known conventional writers, like George Bataille, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Louys, adopted different approaches to erotic writing, some desperately serious, some very funny." . . .
The exhibition "L'Enfer de la Bibliotheque, Eros aus secret" is open at the Bibliothque Francois Mitterrand in the 13th arrondissement from 10am to 7pm on Tuesdays to Saturdays and from 1pm to 7pm on Sundays from tomorrow until 2 March. It cost 7 euros to get in. Under 16s are banned.
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