Dizzy in Paris

Was it the champagne, a gift from my son and his girlfriend to celebrate my birthday? Was it the lights and sounds of this city, everything from the flickering light show of the Eiffel Tower at night to the sound of the accordian being played by a roving musician on le Metro? Or was it the art of Matisse, Renoir, Monet, Manet, Van Gogh and Rodin that had me so dizzy?



This city is like a meal, too good to pass up one single course but there's a cost to gobbling it all up at once. Sensory overload, I think. Ernest Hemingway called it a moveable feast and wrote a book by the same name. Groaning, I am beginning to see what he meant... and it's not just from too many chocolate croissants and fabulous cheese plates. There's too much! Too many amazing statues to ogle, too much art to absorb, too much history to comprehend.



So instead of the Louvre today we tackled only the Musee de l'Orangerie, the small (ish) museum tucked away at the far end of the Jardin des Tuileries. Here you can see two oval rooms filled with murals, the famous waterlilies by Claude Monet, as well as a very select collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art by the likes of Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani and Dernier. I love this museum... it's on a scale I can handle. Yesterday we relished the Musee d'Orsay, a former train station that was converted to a museum in the 1980s, a collection which boasts some famous pieces that you'd recognize--among them the dancers of Degas, the can-can girls of Toulouse Lautrec. No photos allowed in the museum, though.



I can see I'll have to pace myself if I want to make it through the month. Between the elaborate architecture, the priceless art, the crepes sucrees (those are just the ones for dessert) and the wine, I'm in danger of dying of excess. But what a way to go.