* * *

In Normandy, where dozens of museums tell about the D-Day Landing, the 75 days of the Battle of Normandy, the victory for the Allied forces against the German occupant and the Liberation, visitors to the region have, until recently, been offered scant information about the effects of war on civilian populations.

Yet, in addition to the deprivations, deportations and executions caused by the German occupant and in some cases by their French collaborators, Allied air strikes from 1942 to 1944 claimed 50-70,000 civilian victims in France. Of the 20,000 Normans who died as a direct result of the war, the majority were killed by Allied bombardments intended to weaken the Atlantic Wall, destroy enemy forces and prevent the possibility of German reinforcement during the Invasion of Normandy. Furthermore, about 150,000 Normans lost or had to leave their homes during the spring and summer of 1944.

Those numbers, significant as they are, seem small when one thinks—or tries to grasps—that the Second World War caused the death of over 55 million people, of which about 35 million were civilians, including through planned genocide. The First World War brought the military front to the doorsteps of civil life, leading to the death of large numbers of civilians as a direct result of combat. The Second World War then confirmed that civilians were from then on fully a part of war and ideological combat. In the 21st century we are well aware (or should be) that civilians are not only collateral damage but also the targets of military and ideological attacks.

The Civilians in Wartime Memorial (Mémorial des Civils de la Guerre), a museum opened in 2016 in the small town of Falaise, examines of the effect of war on civilian populations. The museum naturally takes wartime Normandy as its prime example while also speaking of civilian victims of other conflicts around the world.

Falaise is a fitting location for this museum since it was in this area that the Battle of Normandy, which began with D-Day, June 6, 1944, ended with the defeat of the German tank division on August 22 in what is known as the Falaise (or Falais-Chambois) Pocket. The town itself, its center heavily damaged, was liberated by Canadian troops on August 17, 1944. It was in Falaise, I’ve been told, that a woman lost her 2-year-old son to bombardments on the day that she gave birth to a daughter.

As Americans, with our own civilians largely out of harm’s way during WWII, we generally focus on the war’s military aspects and on the lives and actions of soldiers and the military hierarchy. As the war recedes in time we further focus the war’s military aspects on the Normandy D-Day Landing and the ensuing several days, sometimes forgetting that a full 11 months of war in Europe was to follow, that harsh battle continued in the Pacific and perhaps even our military presence overseas for much of the past 70 years. Americans now often speak of the Beaches of Normandy as the shining example of our role in securing freedom around the world and hold it up as the best image we have of ourselves in our expeditions overseas.

It takes nothing away from America’s role in the Liberation of Europe to recognize that the effect that WWII and other wars had—and continue to have—on civilian populations, including through our own military actions. As travelers to Normandy remember, commemorate and visit the sites and scenes of D-Day and the early phases of the Invasion of Normandy, those with time to do so (for Falaise is off the beaten path for most itineraries) might also pay a visit to Falaise’s museum for an understanding of how civilian population lived and died during the war.

The Falaise museum is managed by the Memorial de Caen, the region’s major war museum—or museum of peace, as they would have it. In presenting the new museum, Stéphane Grimaldi, director of the Memorial de Caen, has written “The singularity of the Second World War is that it annihilated more civilians than soldiers. It’s estimated that 35 million civilians died – including 15 million Chinese, 8 million Russians, more than 5 million Poles, 3 million Germans. To these terrifying numbers one must add about 100 million wounded and maimed, ‘collateral’ victims of bombardments, exodus, combat and deprivations.”

While devoting major to civilian life and death in Normandy during the war, the vocation of Falaise’s museum is not to tell only a local story but to remind visitors of the difficulties and concerns of civilians during wartime everywhere.

With explanatory panels in French and in English, the visit is designed to begin at the third floor with displays about military occupation by foreign forces. The second floor then speaks of the Liberation. The museum occupies a former court building from the reconstruction period that followed the war. A remnant of the house (of a doctor and former mayor) destroyed during the war on the site is partially uncovered in the basement. While peering into that remnant one hears the sound of bombs dropping. Those bombs room comes at the end of the visit so as to leave the visitor with a reminder of the risk to all civilians in times of military conflict, though it can in fact be visited first, a foreshadow of things to come.

The Route from Caen to Falaise

The route south from Caen to Falaise, 23 miles (37 km), passes two cemeteries related to the Battle of Falaise and the Falaise Pocket. The first, coming from Caen, is the Canadian Military Cemetery at Bretteville-sur-Laize. Falaise, as noted earlier, was liberated from the German occupation by Canadian troops on Aug. 17, 1944. Beyond the Canadian Cemetery is the Polish Military Cemetery at Urville. Most of its 615 tombs there belong to soldiers and officers of the First Polish Tank Division under General Maczek, which was attached to the First Canadian Army. The Mémorial de Montormel, a museum and monument dedicated to the final days of the Battle of Normandy, is a 40-minute drive east of Falaise.

William the Conqueror and Falaise Castle

Falaise itself, much destroyed during the Battle of Normandy, is a handsome example of post-war reconstruction that even on an empty morning has a peaceable air of well-being to it. The tourist office is across the street from the museum. Between the two is Town Hall, an 18th-century survivor of the war. All three of these structures face Place Guillaume le Conquérant, William the Conqueror Square. William was born in Falaise in 1028. He would become Duke of Normandy then also King of England following his conquest of the cross-channel kingdom in 1066. He died in 1087 and is buried in the Abbaye-aux-Hommes in Caen.

William’s Castle, modified by his descendants and then the kings of France, stands several hundred yards away. The Civilians in Wartime Memorial. The royal castle is visible from the museum’s top floor.

The castle ramparts have recently been reconstructed. A previous reconstruction/creation at the entrance to the castle looks so ridiculously out of place that it nearly dissuaded this visitor from wanting to enter. But once inside the remnants of the castle inform visitors about the itinerant court of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries through three parts: that of William’s son, with a residential dungeon (the beginning of the development of dungeon palaces), that of his grandson, then that of the king of France after 1204, when Normandy fell within the crown of France. Tablets enable visitors to see rooms as they might have appeared during those eras.

A brief walk about the center of town may include a visit to Saint Gervais Church.

The restaurant O Saveurs, 38 rue Georges Clemenceau, is a nice option for a well-prepared meal.

For opening times and other information see the following websites:

Mémorial des Civils de la Guerre (Civilians in Wartime Memorial), 12 Place Guillaume le Conquérant, 14700 Falaise.
Falaise Tourist Office, 5 Place Guillaume le Conquérant, 14700 Falaise.
Falaise Castle, Château Guillaume le Conquérant.
Mémorial de Montormel (Montormel Memorial), Les Hayettes, 61160 Montormel.
Calvados Tourist Board. Calvados is the name of the department (sub-region) in Normandy which includes Falaise, Caen, four of the five Landing Beaches, Caen, Deauville, Honfleur, etc. The fifth Landing Beach, Utah, is located in Manche.
Normandy Tourist Board. Information about the broader region.

© 2017, Gary Lee Kraut

See other articles about Normandy on France Revisited.

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Hospital visits are worrisome enough back home, so it’s understandable that you’d be wary of visiting a medical facility when abroad. But just as you needn’t be an artist or model to visit the Louvre, you needn’t be a doctor or ill to visit one of the city’s historic hospitals and medical museums.

Paris has a rich if sometimes horrific hospital and medical heritage. While exploring that heritage will be especially noteworthy for travelers in the medical field, it offers any off-beat traveler the opportunity to learn much about the history of health care and medical progress in France, of Paris’s treatment of the poor and destitute, and a good deal about rabies, tumors, anatomical pathologies, mental illness, military medicine, radiation therapy and much more.

Furthermore, several of the hospital courtyards described here are so peaceful that visiting them is in itself a form of therapy to the urban pathologies caused by car fumes, noise and crowds of fellow tourists, beginning with an oasis of calm right next to Notre-Dame Cathedral.

The Hôtel Dieu

Notre-Dame Cathedral receives over 14 million visitors per year but only the rare visitor will venture into the Hôtel Dieu, the hospital right beside it, even though their histories are intimately entwined.

Hôtel Dieu, meaning the house where one is welcomed in the name of God, was founded under the auspices of the Church in the 651 and developed as a place where the Church would receive the ill, the poor and pilgrims. Piety, prayer and medical care, as it were, were united. It was more hospice than hospital, nevertheless in Paris as elsewhere in France, the Hôtel Dieu was (in some cities still is) the heart of the hospital system in the growing city. Expanded and rebuilt over the centuries on the southern (Seine) side of Notre-Dame, Paris’s Hôtel Dieu was eventually moved to the northern side then rebuilt as it’s seen today from 1866 to 1876.

The current hospital complex appears from the outside to be an uninviting block. But enter the sliding doors, turn left with no need to ask permission at the front desk, and you will find yourself in a peaceful, flower-filled courtyard. As a sign that the courtyard may actually be too quiet, too ignored, a piano beneath the gallery at between the courtyard’s two levels begs, in English no less, “Play me I’m yours.”

This vast hospital complex is currently underused, and the AP-HP, the organization that operates the city’s public hospital system, is in a quandary as to how to reallocate the space. One day there may be busy shops, a crowded café, lodgings or some other financially attractive tourist-pleasing enterprises. Better to come then before the crowds.

The Hôtel Dieu is alongside the square in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral at 1 Parvis Notre-Dame / Place Jean-Paul II, 4^th arrondissement. Open daily.

As a public hospital there is no longer an affiliation between the Hôtel Dieu and the Catholic Church, yet the name remains as a reminder of its origin. Similarly, other Paris hospitals have their history written into their names. Les Quinze-Vingts (meaning the fifteen twenties), for example, was founded by (Saint) Louis IX in 1260 to house the poor blind, 300 of them (15×20 according to the base 20 counting system). From its original location on what is now rue Saint Honoré, Les Quinze-Vingts was moved at the end of the 18th century to its current site on rue de Charonne in the 12^th arrondissement, where it remains one of France’s foremost ophthalmological institutes.

Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital and the treatment of mental illness

La Salpêtrière has also kept its historic name even though gunpowder (using saltpeter) was only briefly produced on the site centuries ago.

La Salpêtrière was a “general hospital,” which, in the ancien regime, did not mean that it provided medical care but that it housed, often by force, the poor and the indigent. In the name of law and order, Louis XIV’s royal edict of 1656 established institutions “for shutting up poor beggars of the city and suburbs of Paris” who “live almost all in ignorance of Religion, contempt for the Sacraments & in the continual habit of all sorts of vices.”

La Salpêtrière’s most prominent feature is Saint Louis Church (1678), which can be freely visited along with the surrounding courtyard. In 1684 the complex expanded with the addition of a maison de force where, among others, prostitutes and women and girls who couldn’t be controlled by their husband or family were forcibly interned.

La Salpêtrière may have helped clean up the streets of the capital but it became a sick city unto itself where a mix of beggars, vagabonds, indigents, criminals, the deranged, the “incurably” insane (in many cases chained up for life), the socially disobedient, orphans, the destitute and the aged lived in close proximity, often in ghastly conditions.

In the history of the hospitals and asylums of Paris, La Salpêtrière is above all associated with the incarceration of women and particularly of madwomen (les aliénés). Through them, it is also associated with the evolution of the treatment of mental and neurological disorders (or those diagnosed as such), along with those who sought to improve their living conditions or treat them. A statue by the entrance shows Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), bienfaiteur des aliénés, unchaining a ward of the asylum. Jean-Martin Charcot (1815-1893), a neurologist who used hypnosis among other techniques to attempt understand and to cure “hysteria,” also worked here.

In the early 19th century the notorious “general hospital” was transformed into a civil hospital. La Pitié-Salpêtrière then merged with the adjacent hospital La Pitié in the 1960s, creating the sprawling complex of La Pitié-Salpêtrière, near Gare d’Austerlitz in the 13th arrondissement.

Temporary exhibitions are occasionally presented here, but even without them one can enter within the once-daunting walls of La Salpêtrière is to visit Saint Louis Church and the peaceable courtyard. Fear not, there has been no mental asylum here since 1921.

Hôpital de La Pitié-Salpêtrière. The main entrance to this vast hospital complex is at 83 boulevard de l’Hôpital, 75013, beside the Saint Marcel metro station. However, the historic Salpêtrière portion, including Saint Louis Church, can be entered directly 200 yards downhill at 47 rue de l’Hôpital.

The Museum of the History of Medicine

Even in hospitals more welcoming than the old Salpêtrière it’s difficult to imagine living in a time and place when might have been subjected to the variety of medical tools at the Museum of the History of Medicine, located in the old Faculty of Medicine, now Université Paris Descartes in the 6^th arrondissement.

This old-fashion museum, which appears little changed since the room was built in 1905, presents a sweeping view of medical, mostly surgical, progress over the centuries.

Here we can examine medical techniques and technology as practiced through the ages in Paris: scythes for removing gangrened limbs (ponce patients had been knocked out with sponges imbibed with opium or henbane), prosthetics that may have replaced those limbs in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, 17^th– and 18^th-century amputation kits, 18^th-century surgical kits, 19^th-century bladder stone retrieval instruments, the evolution of obstetrical forceps and much more. We learn about the origins of cataract removal in the 1700s.

The museum displays an original wood-and-brass stethoscope that René Laennec invented in Paris in 1816. Previously a doctor would place his ear directly on a patient’s chest to listen to the heart. Laennec worked at Necker Hospital, which was founded in 1778. The hospital’s originality in Paris at the time was that each patient had his or her own bed. In 1802 it was designated as a children’s hospital, the world’s first. Located in the 15^th arrondissement, it is still a world-renowned pediatric hospital.

Musée d’Histoire de la Médecine, 12 rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, 6^th arrondissement. Metro Odéon. Open 2-5:30pm except Thurs., Sun. and holidays. Entrance: 3€50.

Dupuytren Museum

From the Museum of the History of Medicine, you can cross the street to the Dupuytren Museum, which has existed since 1835 to present examples of anatomical pathologies.

The museum’s display of skeletons, skulls, bones, wax molds, organs in jars, paintings, drawings and photographs is not a pretty sight, but it’s a sight nonetheless, the kind that can either ruin your day or put into perspective the fashion boutiques of the nearby Saint-Germain Quarter. A plaque outside the Cordeliers complex where the museum is located honors the 1800 doctors who “died for France” during the First World War.

Musée Dupuytren, Centre des Cordeliers, 15 rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, 6^th arrondisssement. Metro Odéon. Open Mon.-Fri. 2-5pm. Closed late July to early September. Entrance: 5€, 3€ for students and teachers.

Saint Louis Hospital: The Courtyard and the Museum of Molds

Saint Louis Hospital, near Canal Saint Martin in the 10^th arrondissement, reveals Paris’s medical and hospital heritage at its most architecturally sublime and at its most infectiously and tumorously horrific.

During the Middle Ages and beyond, periods of plague could be devastating in the dense capital. In 1607 Henri IV fulfilled a desire of the Catholic Order of Augustinians, which administered the Hôtel Dieu, by ordering the construction of a hospital that could be activated during periods of plague. Sainted Louis IX, the hospital’s namesake, had himself died of the plague by the gates of Tunis 1270. The selected site was well beyond the city walls of the time. Contagious patients were further quarantined by being placed within a double walled complex, a feature that makes the central courtyard an exceptional oasis in contemporary Paris.

Two years before launching construction of the hospital, Henri IV had ordered the creation of a royal square in the Marais, later called the Place des Vosges. Two of the architects involved in that project, Claude Chastillon and Claude Vellefaux, were also involved in creating the hospital courtyard. Saint Louis therefore echoes the Place des Vosges in its use of brick and stone, but in a sparer, more modest way. Here, patients with contagious disease resided on the second floor.

Created to deal with epidemics, Saint Louis Hospital was used only periodically for its first 165 years of existence. Then a fire that destroyed the Hotel Dieu in 1772 made permanent use of Saint Louis indispensable while the central hospital was being rebuilt. Before long it too was indispensable in the expanding city.

The original buildings of the early 1600s now house administrative offices while patients come to an adjacent complex of buildings as the hospital has been modernized over the past 30 years. Historically specialized in skin diseases, the hospital now also focuses on other specialties as well, including hematology, oncology and organ transplants.

The old buildings meanwhile appear unchanged, except that now there is no sense of imprisonment in the courtyard but rather of security in a secret garden. Such security, in fact, that on weekday afternoon, in the sun or in the shade of the surprising variety of tree species here, this is the preferred playground for neighborhood preschool children, playing on the grass and the gravel paths while a parent or nanny looks on.

Nearby, however, in another part of the hospital complex, it’s another story—and not one for the faint of heart.

The Catacombs of Paris, “the empire of death,” as it says at the entrance, are all the rage for teens and young adults looking for the morbid, giggly thrill of following tunnels lined with millions of bones. But for something truly frightening, Saint Louis’s Musée des Moulages (Museum of Molds, open by appointment and during late-September Heritage Days) is a serious medical house of horrors. It displays wax models of actual tumors, infection and disease, including numerous examples of what has been called “the French disease,” syphilis. Children 12 and under are not allowed in.

Created in 1885 for the purpose of teaching dermatology, the hospital’s historic specialty, the 4807-piece collection is the world’s largest of its kind. The collection and presentation have held Historical Monument status since 1992. One leaves here with a strong will to remain healthy and to wash one’s hand frequently. Here is a glimpse of the museum (commentary in French).

Leaving the museum, some visitors may then want to say a little prayer at the old chapel at the opposite edge of the hospital complex, some may want to return to the courtyard for some leafy contemplation, some may want to flee the hospital complex for a seat in a café by Canal Saint Martin to drink a toast to each other’s health. And we can all rejoice in the discovery of penicillin.

Hôpital Saint Louis – Musée des Moulages. The hospital complex can be entered at 1 avenue Claude Vellefaux or 16 rue de la Grange aux Belles (12 rue de la Grande aux Belles for the chapel), 10th arrondissement. Metro Colonel Fabien or Goncourt, though if visiting the canal area as well you can approach from République. The historic entrance at the end of Avenue Richerand is currently closed for security reasons.

The courtyard of the Hôpital Saint Louis is open weekdays and entrance is free. The chapel is open Mon.-Fri. 2:30-5pm, except for holidays, and Sun. 10:30-12:00am. From late July to late August it is closed except during weekly or twice-weekly mass.

The Museum of Molds (at Porte 14, Secteur Gris) is open by appointment only, Mon.-Fri., 9am-4:30pm, by calling 01 42 49 99 15 or writing to musee.moulages@sls.aphp.fr. Also open during late-September Heritage Days. Visitors must be more than 12 years old. Entrance: 6€ (3€ for students), 7.50€ for visit with presentation in France. Audio-guides available in English for 2€.

Salles de garde: hospital pornography for young doctors

Combine morbidity and sex and you get the salle de garde, the dining room and hang-out for young doctors in their medical residency and other medical staff. At Saint Louis and other public hospitals throughout Paris, salles de garde are normally off-limits to visitors—and it’s probably better that way. Where young doctors may have once dined in refectories surrounded by portraits of the great figures in medicine that preceded them, many now eat among an orgiastic free-for-all of licentious art. This 20^th-century tradition, still alive and well, apparently helps keep the stench of death and disease at bay. In fact, among the codes of conduct of the salle de garde is the possibility to “Laugh at everything, at death, at omnipresent suffering, at religion, at patients. To counterbalance misfortune, the salle de garde becomes a place of pleasure and of boisterous pleasure.” The quote is from a document put out by the Public Hospital Administration of Paris. To see what French interns are contemplating when away from their patients, check out the website operated by the Association des Salles de garde (you must be 18 or older to enter the site). For a State-sanctioned illustrated study on the subject see here.

© 2015/2016, Gary Lee Kraut. An earlier version of this article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of the British publication The Connexion.

Continue to Part 2 of Paris Hospitals and Medical Museums

The post Off-Beat Touring: Paris Hospitals and Medical Museums, Part 1 appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

The Pasteur Museum: Pasteurization, vaccination and a beautiful crypt

Public health was on the upswing in the late 19th century in part thanks to the work of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). The Pasteur Museum and Institute, in the 15^th arrondissement, is a reminder of the positive effects of the famous scientist’s work on our daily lives. And Pasteur himself is buried in the basement in one of Paris’s most beautiful crypts.

It’s rare to have a scientist’s name given to a method rather than to an object or measurement, but pasteurization—partial sterilization enabling the demise of undesirable organisms—is known throughout the world. Beyond the reliable dairy products so associated with pasteurization, each time we lift a glass a beer or wine we can toast the great chemist. In fact, Pasteur discovered the benefit of heating wine before the benefit of heating milk when Napoleon III was looking to keep the wine sent to his soldiers from going bad. We can also pet the neighbor’s dog in peace thanks to Pasteur’s work in developing a vaccine for rabies.

Pasteur’s professional work as a chemist who came to practice biology had enormous implications on hygiene and medicine, and the institute that bears his name continues to work throughout the world to create vaccines and to eradicate disease.

The Pasteur Museum is an excellent introduction into his life and scientific times. It is part exhibition about his scientific accomplishments and discoveries through original instruments (explanations available in English), part tour of his apartment within the original building of the Pasteur Foundation. Ten pastels portraits that he drew between the ages of 13 and 20, hanging in his bedroom and in the dining room, unexpectedly reveal Pasteur to be an admirable visual artist before he turned to science. Being able to draw what one saw under the microscope was nevertheless an important skill for a 19th-century scientist.

The unexpected pleasure of a visit here is the chance to descend into the beautiful crypt where he and his wife are buried. For cryptophiles it alone is worth a visit to the Pasteur Museum. Inspired by the 5th-century Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy, the neo-Byzantine curves and remarkable mosaics form an ensemble that one would more likely associate with nobility or with a saint. Pasteur’s dark green granite tomb occupies the center of the crypt. His wife, who died 15 years after Pasteur, is buried by the altar.

The original building of the Pasteur Foundation, in which the museum is located, is part of the vast complex of the Pasteur Institute which includes departments for research, education and vaccination. The original foundation building was funded by “national subscription,” a form of crowdfunding at the time. The Pasteur Institute is a private institution. Nearly half of the Pasteur Institute’s budget comes from income from its own activities, just over one quarter is subsidized by the State and about a quarter comes from donations and real estate assets.

Pasteur didn’t travel much, but he asked his students to deal with local health and hygiene problems wherever they may go, leading to what has been called “scientific evangelization” as his work and emphasis on the scientific method spread around the world. In addition to the Paris headquarters, there are 32 Pasteur Institutes around the world, employing 2400 people in more than 60 countries.

Pasteur left behind a detailed trace of his actions and methods in studies, letters and other documents. Due to the importance and extent of his work, the Pasteur archives have recently been listed in UNESCO’s International World Register of the Memory of the World. Those archives are maintained and have been digitized by the Academy of Sciences and the National Library of France.

Musée Pasteur / Institut Pasteur, 25 rue du Docteur Roux, 15^th arrondissement. Metro Pasteur. Open Mon.-Fri. except for holiday and August. Visits at 2pm, 3pm and 4pm, without reservation for individuals. Visitors must show ID to enter the Institut Pasteur complex in which the museum is located. Adults: 7 €. Students and children: 3€. Reservations required for groups.

Musée Curie and the treatment of cancer

The free little museum at the Curie Institute (5^th arrondissement) provides an introduction to radioactivity, radiation therapy and the life of double Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie (1867-1934) and her husband Pierre (1859-1906), with whom she shared her first Nobel.

Born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, Marie arrived in Paris in 1891 to continue scientific studies that she had begun in Poland. She married the French scientist Pierre Curie in 1895. Together the Curies discovered radioactivity through polonium and radium. They shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903 with Henri Bequerel for their research into radiation. Marie thus became the first woman to receive the Nobel. Pierre’s life was cut short in 1906 when he was run over by a horse-drawn carriage. In 1909 the University of Paris and the Pasteur Institute joined forces to create the Radium Institute with her at the helm. She later received a second Nobel for chemistry for her work into polonium and radium, making the first double winner, man or woman, in different fields.

Once the scythe of WWI and the flu pandemic of 1918 had passed and the work of Pasteur and others had paved the way for improved and increasingly extensive vaccination, cancer was recognized as a major killer in France. While the virtues of radium therapy had been known since the early 1900s, channeling it for therapeutic value remained a work in progress. The Curie Foundation, which opened in 1922, became the first center in France devoted to fighting cancer with radiation therapy.

Marie Curie died of leukemia in 1934. The following year the Curie’s daughter and son-in-law also received the Nobel in chemistry for their discovery of artificial radioactivity.

The Radium Institute and the Curie Foundation merged in 1970 to form the Curie Institute. This little museum occupies the ground floor of the building where Marie had her office, which can be seen as she knew it. Research, education and cancer treatment are the institute’s aims. About 50% of its research funds come from the State, while medical insurance covers 100% of medical care provided by the institute.

In 1995, the ashes of Pierre and Marie Curie were transferred to the Pantheon, just around the corner from her office and from the museum. She thus became the first woman to enter the Pantheon for her own achievements.

Musée Curie, 1 rue Pierre et Marie Curie, 5^th arrondissement. RER Luxembourg. Open Wed.-Sat. 1-5pm. Closed holidays and August and for two weeks late December-early January. Entrance is free, while donations are welcome.

Val de Grâce and the Museum of Health Service of the Armed Forces

In 1670, 14 years after decreeing the creation of the “general hospital” of La Salpêtrière, Louis XIV decreed the construction of a royal “hostel” to lodge officers and soldiers who were disabled, old or obsolete: Les Invalides. More than 6,000 men were admitted at Les Invalides between 1676 and 1690.

One visits the complex now as the Army Museum and as the site of Napoleon’s tomb beneath the great dome, yet portions of the Hôtel National des Invalides still provide medical services for veterans.

But it’s at Val de Grâce, the military and teaching hospital the 5^th arrondissement, where you’ll find the Museum of Health Service of the Armed Forces (Musée du Service de Santé des Armées). This museum is so rarely visited that coming here you might feel like an intruder in the defense department, or an honored guest.

The central structure of the Val de Grâce complex was originally built as convent under the patronage of Anne of Austria in thanks for having given birth to a son, the future Louis XIV, after nearly 23 years of marriage. During the French Revolution, the convent was transformed into a military and teaching hospital, and it has remained so ever since.

Entrance the museum also gains access to the Baroque chapel of Val de Grace, one of the jewels of 17th-century religious architecture in Paris, as well as to the convent cloister. The museum occupies a portion of the cloister complex.

While covering much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the museum is particularly informative concerning the medical needs, care and developments of those wounded during the First World War. The war’s destructiveness brought forth the massive need for medical intervention to deal with the effects of bullets, shrapnel, explosion, mustard gas, horrific conditions in the trenches (rats, malaria, “sick” water), psychological trauma and the flu pandemic.

The State created the museum during that war to show the public the efforts that were being made on behalf of the “poilus,” as the French infantrymen were known. A major display (to be avoided perhaps by children for its grotesqueness) is wax models of the faces of the men were made unrecognizable by artillery wounds, known as “les gueules cassées” in French. The models—considered a medical success story for the army—show faces before and after maxilla-facial surgery, a field with more than ample patients to study and improve their techniques.

Musée du Service de Santé des Armées, 1 place Alphonse Laveran, 5^th arrondissement. RER Port-Royal. Open Tues., Wed., Thurs., Sat., Sun. noon-6pm. Closed Jan. 1, Dee. 25 and the month of August. Entrance: 5€.

George Orwell fleeing a Paris hospital

If, after touring the hospital and medical heritage of Paris, you’d like good bedtime hospital horror story, read George Orwell’s essay How the Poor Die. Published in 1946, the brief essay is based on his experience in the public ward of Cochin Hospital (14^th arr.), which he refers to as Hôpital X, where he spent two weeks when suffering from flu or pneumonia.

“During my first hour in the Hôpital X,” he wrote, “I had had a whole series of different and contradictory treatments, but this was misleading, for in general you got very little treatment at all, either good or bad, unless you were ill in some interesting and instructive way….As a non-paying patient, in the uniform nightshirt, you were primarily a specimen, a thing I did not resent but could never quite get used to…. It was not the only hospital I have fled from, but its gloom and bareness, its sickly smell and, above all, something in its mental atmosphere stand out in my memory as exceptional….For it was a hospital in which not the methods, perhaps, but something of the atmosphere of the nineteenth century had managed to survive, and therein lay its peculiar interest….”

Hopefully what will stand out in your memory as you visit these hospitals and museums is something more cheerful. And we can all toast: Santé!

Return to Part 1 of Hospital and Medical Heritage in Paris

© 2015/2016, Gary Lee Kraut. An earlier version of this article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of the British publication The Connexion.

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Blois (pronounced a sharp blwa, vampire-like) holds a prominent place on the map, yet its castle is often ignored in favor of more photogenic stars of the valley. Chambord, Chenonceau, Villandry, Azay-le-Rideau, Usée and Saumur, for example, readily lend themselves to adjectives such as majestic, exquisite, idyllic, dramatic, elegant or storybook. (Match the adjectives with the chateaux and you get a free subscription to France Revisited for the rest of this year.)

Blois Castle, le château de Blois, stands on a rise on the right bank of the Loire but it offers no great photo op from the river. The Blois Tourist Office might well sue me for libel for showing this gray-weather shot from the bridge across the river.

And the main entrance to the castle is more promising though still not as imposing or impressive or fairy-tale as we’d like our castles to look, particularly when seen under an indeterminate sky.

But that doesn’t make Blois any less notable. This is in fact the most historically and architecturally significant of the chateaux of the Loire Valley. Admittedly, that isn’t a line you use to get your spouse to choose Blois as a vacation destination or to get your 12-year-old excited about a trip abroad (how about telling him/her that there’s a Magic Museum with dragons in the windows across the square?). Nevertheless, Blois is a key to understanding the valley’s castle-scape.

What it lacks in outward photogenia it makes up for in details, in revealing history and in convenience to daytripper and valley bikers. Blois does have character(s). You just need to get closer to see it/them.

Let’s take a look.

Amboise Castle, a left bank chateau 22 miles downstream, is more photogenic from across the river but it’s now far less notable inside. Amboise is where Charles VIII (born 1470-reigned 1493-died 1498) died from fracturing his skull on a door lintel (careful when visiting old castles, folks, they weren’t designed with Disney building standards in mind, and just you try suing someone for tripping on a cobblestone).

Charles VIII and Queen Anne of Brittany were childless, so with no direct heir his cousin Louis d’Orléans ascended to the throne as Louis XII (1462-1498-1515).

Louis XII

Louis may have had Orleans in his name but he was a native Blésois, as the inhabitants of Blois are called. A century earlier, in 1391, his grandfather Duke Louis I d’Orléans, brother to then king Charles VI, had purchased the fortress of the Counts of Blois whose power had waned. He took full control of the county six years later. While most of the counts’ fortress was razed to its foundations to make way for the new castle of the mounting Orleans clan, Louis I kept the fortress’s Great Hall (1214), one of the largest civil halls in France still existing today from that period.

Louis XII would in turn raze much of the castle of his father and grandfather, again conserving the Great Hall as he pursued a transformation of the family castle to make it worthy of a king. (We’ll return to the Great Hall later in our visit.)

Louis XII greets us above the entrance.

Below him, his symbol: the crowned porcupine. His motto: qui s’y frotte s’y pique, meaning rub against him and you’ll get pricked (literally) or cross swords with him at your peril or if you don’t watch out you’ll get burned.

The initials to either side of the porcupine: L for Louis and A for Anne, you guessed it, of Brittany, his cousin’s widow. Anne was no looker, but having the duchy of Brittany in her dowry made her quite the catch. Louis therefore obtained the annulment of his own childless first marriage to wed her. Anne’s symbol, the symbol of Brittany, was the ermine, a pattern of black stoat (weasel) coats against a white background.

Viewed from the outer square, Louis XII’s brick-and-stone wing, circa 1500, speaks of the end of an era (Gothic). Inside we follow the call of a new era (Renaissance), a pleasure palace with a vast hallway and a succession of royal apartments. The main Louis XII wing now houses the town’s Beaux-Art Museum (more on the museum later). A chapel, truncated by subsequent developments at Blois, also remains from this time.

Louis and Anne had two surviving children, daughters, Claude and Renée, however the succession laws of the French kings stated that the crown could only pass to a male heir. That meant the search for good (i.e. useful) marriages for the girls and likely inheritance of the crown by cousin François (Francis). There was therefore no better marriage for Claude (de France), the elder daughter, than to cousin Francois (d’Orléans).

Francois I

In 1515, less than a year into their marriage, Louis XII died and Claude’s husband became King Francois the First (Ier in French). (France has had plenty of Kings Louis and Charles and several Kings Henri but only two Kings Francois, the second being his grandson who reigned for only 17 months before dying from an inner ear problem at age 16.)

Claude, already duchess of Brittany by virtue of her mother Anne (she also inherited her mother’s looks), was therefore queen. Claude died at the age of 24, which gave her enough time to have seven children, including the future king Henri II—or perhaps it’s better said that having seven children by the age of 24 killed her, and getting syphilis from her husband didn’t help.

While Francois has gone down in history as a powerful builder king, Claude is remembered in the name of a sensual green or yellow-green plum, la reine claude, found ripe in markets in August. Francois I remarried after Claude’s death but had no children with his second wife, Eleanore of Austria, though plums continued to grow in the castle gardens. (Those gardens no longer exist; the city has grown into it.)

Francois grew up at the Chateau d’Amboise. It was there that he invited Leonardo da Vinci to be his neighbor. But Claude was naturally fond of her home castle at Blois and Francois I was intent on keeping it up-to-date. That meant tearing down portions of his predecessor’s château, already démodé, and creating something stylish and avant-garde.

This year France is commemorating the 500th anniversary of the coronation and reign of Francois (Francis) I. Chateaux great (e.g. Chambord) and small (e.g. Beauregard), however deeply or tangentially touched by the architectural and decorative spirit of the era of Francois I, are unfurling images of the broad-shouldered king with the long straight nose, sporting a thin moustache trickling into a full beard, wearing tights or armor, sitting in equestrian glory or standing in fur-lined grace. Blois itself is hosting a bookish exhibition called “Royal Treasures, the Library of François I,” running July 4-Oct. 18, 2015.

The equestrian statue of Louis XII may get the photo op at the entrance to Blois Castle, but it’s Francois I’s see-and-be-seen staircase that draws the lens once in the courtyard—though how to photograph it properly without looking like it’s been seen in a funhouse mirror is anyone’s guess.

Let me try again.

I give up. Photography may have become the lazy man’s travel writing but a skilled photographer still has his place.

Francois I (1494-1515-1547) would go on to launch enormous royal projects at Chambord, Fontainebleau and the Louvre, but he made his first mark on royal architecture at Blois. Palaces constructed or altered in his name were signed with his royal symbol the fire-breathing salamander and the motto nutrisco et extinguo referring to flames that nourish his people and extinguish his enemies.

The salamander sets the tone for decorative relief by the base of the showy outer staircase that defines the Francois I wing.

This is Blois’ architectural claim to fame. With loggia for nobility to look out onto the courtyard and to be seen from below, the theatrical staircase (1515-1519) and the wing of the castle that it serves set the stage for a new architectural style that would now developing throughout the valley. The Francois I wing gave royal momentum to the French Renaissance, thanks largely to Italian architects and decorators in its early phases.

This is no Eiffel Tower. Go to the top of the staircase and you’ll have little more than a view of tourist tripping over cobblestones down below (be sure to look up, though at the way in which the structure meets the ceiling). Nevertheless, this remains one of the architectural treasures of the Loire Valley. Again, not enough to plan a honeymoon around, but there you have it, 16th-century architectural sophistication—dramatic staircases were becoming all the rage.

If approaching from the train station, a 10-15 minute walk, your first view of the chateau is the back of the Francois I wing. Based on an Italian model, it looks more like an apartment building in Rome than a royal castle along the Loire.

It used to overlook the castle gardens but now faces a city road that wraps around a tremendous Atlas cedar. Beyond the cedar, one can also see from the balcony the orangery where citrus trees from the castle gardens were placed in winter. (The historical building now houses a gastronomic restaurant.)

Francois gets the architectural shout-out for this wing with the famous staircase, but the historical tale told inside speaks more about the era of his grandson Henri III.

Henri III

Francois I’s son Henri II (1519-1547-1559), who eventually died from being poked in the eye during a jousting tournament, preferred to place his architectural monograms elsewhere, including on the Louvre and at Fontainebleau. But Blois continues to speak of the presence of Henri II’s queen Catherine de Medicis and of their third son, Henri III (1551-1574-1589).

Henri III’s era of the French Court was as perverse and manipulative as our own in terms of power struggles, festivities, fashion, intrigue and assassination. We have our own politics in which a vocal, heavily armed group proclaims that the “true” religion should guide policy; we, too, go in for fear mongering, lies and rumors passed off for evidence that one man or one party will destroy life as we know it; we too hear the siren of the politics of nostalgia, etc. Admittedly, we prefer to assassinate character more than body these days and we pretend that telling an armed public that “someone ought to shoot that guy” is just an expression of disagreement, but we surround our politicians with a sizeable security detail just in case.

In 1576 and again in 1588, Henri III convoked at Blois an assembly of the Three Estates: the clergy, the nobility and the Third Estate, i.e. all others. The assembly took place in the Great Hall of 1214, originally built as a multi-purpose hall for the Counts of Blois. At its best the Estates (or States) General, as it was called, served as an advisory body offering wise counsel to the king. Otherwise it might be a way in which those with lesser or no power could let off steam or a quarrelsome nuisance that the king would ignore. The body met periodically at various venues from the early 14th century until 1614, then not at all until 1789, when discontent was so loud that Louis XVI could no longer postpone the reunion—but more than reunion, revolution was in the air.

The Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants marked the tenure of Catherine de Medicis and her three successive royal sons. It came to a head during the reign of Henri III. It was bad enough that factions of warring nobility saw no room to compromise, but the ultra-Catholics felt that disaster would befall the kingdom since Henri III was childless, making the heir to the throne his cousin Henri de Navarre, a Protestant.

The Great Hall is a magnificent space for its time and for a family photo op on the throne. Portions of the apartments of Catherine de Medicis and of Henri III are also visible. It’s less the heavily restored décor that makes them significant as the events that took place there. With the right guide (human or audio), the events that took place but gets us thinking about how similar the power struggles of the late 16th century are to the politics of our own time.

In order to calm the warrior spirit of the hawkish Catholic nobility and clergy against the Protestants (Huguenots) on the occasion of the Estates General of 1588, Henri III had the Catholic leader Duke Henri de Guise assassinated as the duke was walking through the king’s bedroom to a supposed pow-wow with the king.

“My God he’s tall,” the king is reported to have said upon seeing his slain rival. “He even looks taller dead than alive.”

The Duke de Guise’s brother, the Cardinal de Guise, also a conspirator against the king, was assassinated in Blois Castle the following day.

Twelve days later, Queen Mother Catherine de Medicis, died here of natural causes at the age of 79.

And seven months later, on August 2, 1589, Henri III was in turn assassinated, caught off guard while on the pierced chair (i.e. the can) at the royal Chateau de Saint Cloud (near Paris). His assassin was a monk named Jacques Clément who represented forces of what we would now call the religious far right.

Upon Henri III’s death the king’s chronicler Pierre de l’Estoile wrote: “This king would have been a good prince had he been born in a better century.” It’s doubtful though that such a century has ever existed.

Henri IV

Heir and party to the Wars of Religion, Henri IV was not only a distant cousin rising to the throne but was also a Protestant, two strikes against him that meant he had to conquer his kingdom. He would eventually convert to Catholicism to be in phase with the majority, but without abandoning the reformers.

Photo Henri IV. The central role that the Loire Valley had played in royal politics was coming to an end as the Bourbon kings asserted a firm hand throughout the kingdom and took up more frequent residence in Paris and then Versailles. Henri IV’s main association with the Loire is far downstream at Nantes, where he signed the edict that granted the right to Protestants to practice their religion in peace along with certain politic rights, thus closing the Wars of Religion in France.

He nevertheless showed enough interest enough in Blois to order the construction of a new building in the gardens. As a builder, his heart—before it was pierced by an assassin monk in Paris in 1612—was more focused on urban projects in the capital.

After his assassination his queen Marie de Medicis assumed the regency for underage Louis XIII. But a power struggle ensued when he son reached royal majority in his mid-teens and he exiled her to Blois to keep her from meddling in affairs of state. A painting in the Louvre, La Fuite de Blois by Rubens, shows her escaping from Blois through the construction site that had been launched by Henri IV. That building was never completed and was eventually demolished.

(To recap royal deaths from 1498-1612: Charles VIII died from banging his head on a door lintel at age 27; Louis XII died from intestinal trouble at age 52; Francois I died from septicemia related to fistula around the unmentionables and kidney failure at age 53; Henri II died from a brain infection caused by being poked in the eye at a jousting tournament at age 40; Francois II died from an ear infection at age 16; Charles IX died from pleurisy at age 23; Henri III was assassinated by a monk will sitting on the can at age 47, and Henri IV was assassinated by a monk while riding in his carriage at age 56. Not pretty, but, ah, but the castles they built!)

Gaston, Duc d’Orléans

Louis XIII saw no need to keep Blois Castle in the French crown and so gave it to his younger brother Gaston in 1626. Had the power days of Blois ended? Not if Gaston could help it. Any pretext was good for Gaston (1608-1660) to conspire against or otherwise disobey his brother because as long as Louis XIII and Queen Anne didn’t have a son he remained first in line for the throne.

By the second decade of their childless marriage, Gaston could reasonably dream of occupying the throne should his older brother predecease him. Blois would then become a royal residence again.

So Gaston hired one of the top architects of the time, Francois Mansart, to build a new wing to his castle, thus bringing Blois into the modern era of the 17th century. Gaston may well have rebuilt the entire castle, razing the previous structures like an old villa on beachfront property, but the throne eluded him. In 1738, after nearly 23 years of marriage, Anne of Austria gave birth to a son (presumably fathered by Louis XIII). The existence of a healthy boy distanced Gaston one step further from the crown, and when Louis XIII died five years later, the boy became Louis XIV.

The Gaston wing resembles a stand-alone chateau and is notable for its relatively early Classicism, but viewed from the courtyard it sticks out as ambition gone wrong; the focal point of the courtyard remains the Francois I wing with its external staircase. Architect Francois Mansart would lend his name to the mansard, a high-pitched roof pierced with windows, then coming into fashion.

The grace of the Gaston/Mansart wing comes especially from the symmetry of the central structure with pavilions on either side reaching out to embrace the courtyard. Through his work here and elsewhere, Mansart nevertheless helped usher in an architectural style that would later become associated not with Gaston Ier but with Louis XIV.

Louis XIV’s prime minister Mazarin, tired of Gaston’s conspiring against the crown during the king’s youth, eventually exiled Gaston to Blois. There he lost the ambition (and perhaps the funding) to complete his dream castle.

The decorative elements of the interior were never finished. The interior monumental staircase of the Gaston wing, crowned by a copula, looks like a grand stage between plays. But Blois was now far from center stage, and the Loire Valley itself was soon but a sideshow as, about the time of Gaston’s death in 1660, Louis XIV began drawing plans for the entire theater district move to Versailles.

The Beaux Arts Museum

The main Louis XII wing houses a small collection that lends itself as much to pleasant if disinterested meandering as it does to a more studious examination of representative 16th- and 17th-century paintings, and to a lesser extent 18th- and early 19th-century works, including glossy, theatrical historical works from the early 19th century called “troubadour” paintings.

For students of 19th-century restorations of medieval and Renaissance castles, Blois Castle is a must see. But since none of those students is reading this, we might be tempted to pretend that that the original equestrian statue at the castle entrance wasn’t actually destroyed during the Revolution and that this window with the ermine of Anne of Brittany has been safely in place for 500 years.

No, let’s not pretend. Let’s be truthful here: The history of French chateaux is rarely that of a single moment in history, and all the more so at Blois. What we see is the result of evolving tastes and ambitions, good fortune and bad, and restoration. In 1788 Louis XVI, five years short of the guillotine, abandoned any royal prerogative to Blois Castle. It then served as barracks for troops and officers with no interest in protecting its historical significance. With the Revolution soon banging at the door there was no interest in protecting its royal symbols either. What was saved was saved for practical rather than historical or emotional reasons.

Then, several decades later, historical mindfulness came calling. In 1840 Blois became one of the first royal complexes in France to be designated a historical monument. Major restoration began several years later, beginning with the rehabilitation of the Francois I wing. The Beaux-Arts Museum opened in 1869.

A room inside this chateau is dedicated to the 19th-century restorers, particularly one Félix Duban, an architect who oversaw the restoration of Blois Castle until his death in 1870. In his terrific travel book “A Little Tour in France,” Henry James, writing in the 1880s, laments the heavy-handed restoration work that he encounters on his tour of the provinces. Nevertheless, it’s thanks to that post-royal history—as barracks, as possession of the city, as object of restoration—that we get to see and to appreciate the lessons in history and architecture that Blois teaches.

To Blois or not to Blois

That remains the question. Is it more rewarding to aim for the monumental unity of Chambord, the loveliness of Chenonceau, the dramatic view of Chaumont, or to get studious with Blois? You can’t go wrong as you plan or wing your way through the castle-rich area of the Loire Valley between Blois and Saumur. Still, a traveler much choose between chateaux while leaving time to enjoy the other pleasures that the region offers—vineyards, gardens, culinary explorations, a zoo, a long stroll by the river.

The architectural developments themselves may seem insignificant 500 years on. Nevertheless, Blois, considered a (perhaps the) key to the Loire Valley, deserves attention.

© 2015 Gary Lee Kraut

Useful information

Château de Blois, Blois Castle, is open daily except Dec. 25 and Jan. 1. Fencing demonstrations are given July 13-Aug. 16, 2015. One reason to spend the night in or near Blois is to attend the wonderful sound-and-light show in the castle courtyard, April 4-Sept. 20, 2015.

Blois Tourist Office, is next to the castle at 23 Place du Château. Tel. 02 54 90 41 41. The office and its website also provide information about chateaux in the surrounding area.

Maison de la Magie, the magic museum and fun house across the square from the castle entrance. Watch for the dragons in the window. Open April 4-Sept. 20 and Oct. 17-Nov. 1, 2015.

Loire à Vélo is the name of the Loire Valley biking system covering a cycle trail of about 500 miles. Its official website is here.

Getting to Blois: From Paris, there are infrequent direct trains to Blois from the Austerlitz Station. They take 1 hour 25 minutes. More frequent indirect trains take 2 hours, arriving in Blois via Orleans (from Paris’s Austerlitz Station) or via Saint Pierre des Corps (from Paris’s Montparnasse Station). A daytrip from Paris is possible. One worthwhile approach to beginning your longer Loire Valley stay in Blois is to spend the first day and perhaps night in the town before renting bikes or a car for wider explorations in the valley. Bus service from Blois goes to the nearby chateaux of Beauregard, Cheverny and Chambord. Inquire at the Blois Tourist Office or see the bus schedule here.

Lodging in Blois and the surroundings area

B&Bs

La Maison de Thomas, 12 rue Beauvoir, 41000 Blois. Tel. 09 81 84 44 59 or 06 60 14 41 41. In the heart of the town, a friendly townhouse for those without wheels or for a night in Blois before or after a biking trip.

16 Place Saint Louis, 16 place Saint Louis, 41000 Blois. Tel. 02 54 74 13 61. At Philippe Escoffre’s B&B a 5-minute hike uphill from center, three cozy rooms look out to the cathedral and over the river. Yes, the name is the address.

Le Plessis, 195 rue Albert 1er, 41000 Blois. Tel. 02 54 43 80 08. On the downstream edge of the town with a chemical-free, salt-water swimming pool.

Le Clos Pasquier, 10-12, Impasse de l’Orée du Bois, 41000 Blois. Tel. 02 54 58 84 08. Claire and Laurent Nicot’s B&B in a 15th-century manor house is another 1.5 miles further downstream.

Hotels

Côté Loire – Auberge Ligérienne 2 place de la Grève, 41000 Blois. Tel. 02 54 78 07 86. A 2-star hotel and restaurant in Blois by the river.

L’Auberge du Centre, 34 Grande Rue, 41120 Chitenay. Tel. 02 54 70 42 11. Nine miles south of Blois. I found this 3-star village hotel with a pleasant restaurant. A choice stop during a biking trip in this portion of the valley.

La Maison d’à Côté, 26 rue de Chambord, 41350 Montlivault. Tel. 02 54 20 62 30. An 8-room inn with restaurant (1 star Michelin in 2015) 6 miles upstream from Blois toward Chambord

Le Château du Breuil, 23 route de Fougères, 41700 Cheverny. Tel. 02 54 44 20 20. Ten miles southeast of Blois, in the countryside two miles from the Chateau de Cheverny, Véronique and Bernard Gattolliat’s 39-room 4-star hotel with restaurant an swimming pool.

Domaine des Hauts de Loire, 79 rue Gilbert Navard, 41150 Onzain. Tel. 02 54 20 72 57.Ten miles downstream from Blois, across the river from Chaumont, a 4-star chateau hotel and restaurant. The 170-acre property also has a tennis court, outdoor pool, a pond where one can fish and bikes.

Restaurants in Blois

For a daytripper, one of the cafés below the chateau de Blois should suffice, or simply a sandwich and pastries from one of the bakeries in that area.

For those spending the evening: I’ve fond memories of a relaxed, gastronomic dinner at Christophe Cosme’s Le Rendez-vous des Pêcheurs, 27 rue du Foix. Tel. 02 54 74 67 48. Closed Sun. and Mon. There’s also the Auberge Ligérienne, a part of the hotel Côté Loire noted above. For a more formal meal in an airy historical setting there’s L’Orangerie du Château, 1 avenue Jean-Laigret. Tel. 02 54 78 05 36. It occupies the former citrus green house or orangery of the chateau. Also closed Sun. and Mon. For a more contemporary decor, more contemporary gastronomy, Assa, one mile downstream from center on the edge of the Loire, has 1 Michelin star (2015). 189 quai Ulysse Besnard. Tel. 02 54 78 09 01. Closed Sun. dinner, Mon. Tues.

– GLK

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La Toilette: The Invention of Privacy, in which la toilette refers to acts of washing and grooming, opens with an early Renaissance tapestry from the Cluny Museum—The Bath—depicting a blonde noblewoman clad in her headdress and jewels (but nothing else) enjoying a refreshing summer-time dip in the garden, accompanied by servants, musicians and attendants of both sexes.

The tapestry is nine-tenths fantasy since bathtubs had been taboo for the general population since the late Middle Ages, when contemporary physicians stigmatized immersion in water, deemed to be an unhealthy substance laden with mysterious “venom.” Dry cleaning was the norm for centuries, with perfume and ointments applied with bits of cloth.

Most significantly, personal grooming—no matter how intimate—was truly a public affair until the dawn of the eighteenth century when it (gradually) became less acceptable to entertain guests while seated on a bidet. Pictures of semi-clothed ladies at their toilette and make-up tables (significantly, the show includes no pictures of men powdering their wigs) went underground, like some of the bawdy François Bouchers from the 1740s that the museum displays.

Beginning with delicate images (Dürer, Primatice, the School of Fontainebleau) and barreling towards Georges de La Tour’s remarkable Woman Catching a Flea, the show segues into portraits of better-known bathing beauties like Pierre Bonnard’s Marthe (painted in an era when dedicated bathrooms became havens for private, relaxing escapes) and winds up with ironic, post-modern photos and c-prints signed by Alain Jacquet, Erwin Blumenfeld, and Bettina Rheims.

All in all, the French clean up quite well.

© 2015, Corinne LaBalme

La Toilette, Naissance de l’Intimité, Feb. 12-July 5, 2015, at the Musée Marmottan Monet, 2 Rue Louis Boilly, 16th arr. Metro La Muette or RER Boulainvilliers. Closed Monday.

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So subtle is the interplay of surveillance and performance that it took this reviewer several minutes to grasp the true significance of the abundance of security personnel. As I visited the allocated space within the glass and steel building designed, I was increasingly enthralled by the way in which the foundation’s curators, financiers and merchants have create, inadvertently perhaps, a choreography of security personnel that offers deep insights into the work of the artists and the working of the foundation itself.

We spectators, arriving on Sunday afternoon with invitations and those invited to pay at the gate, were like shadows milling about, an unobtrusive audience leaving free range to the gestures, expressions and movement of the security personnel, themselves circumscribed by the work they “guarded.”

Dennis Oppenheim’s Table Piece, 1975, acquired by the foundation in 1996, occupies the larger of two rooms downstairs, where the presence of the vigils turns an examination of public discourse into a curatorial tour de force, however unintentional that may be. Oppenheim’s table organizes the space like the basement ping-pong table of American suburbia. Two doll-like figures, resembling Paul Simon circa 1969, sit on chairs at opposite ends of the long narrow table. One is gold and is dressed in a black suit, the other silver with a white suit. They call to each other “black, white, light, dark.” Evocative enough on its own, the installation is given greater presence thanks to the foundation’s decision to place a guard at each end, the one stout and vague in his gaze, the other a slight brune with glasses. But the overall effect would be narrow were it not for the presence of yet another guard in a corner of the room. Long jet black hair, an apprehensive stillness over a poised stance, she approaches after a moment the corpulent fellow and mouths something unheard as the Paul Simons quicken their dialogue of “black, white, light, dark.” (Performers will likely change through the length of the show.)

The French word for security guard is vigile. Linguistic “false friend” though it may be, I cannot help but think of the performers here as “vigils.” Their presence made for a tremendous performance piece in the eyes of this reviewer. Removed from the spectator yet one with him they stand near walls at the juncture of surveillance, witness, patience, participation.

Each work revealed itself in its dialogue with the vigils, and those interactions are so seamlessly spread throughout the space that one feels no dead zones of the they type that one might feel in, say, the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. Indeed, it’s unlikely that a public museum could achieve the intensity of what is best called Dance of the Vigils.

A most extraordinary dialogue between the “vigil” and the artwork is found the smaller room in the basement. The room is dominated by Ron Mueck’s In Bed, 2005, created for the Ron Mueck exhibition of 2005. A stunning piece on its own, a giant figure lies as though in bed, knees raised, and watches visitors enter the room. Ill? Depressed? Psychotic? Dreamy? Expecant? Renounced?, the viewer wonders before noticing the guard standing awkwardly nearby, anxious witness to both the expression on the face of the figure and the wondering gaze of the viewer. But no? He is not witness; he is protagonist, a man caught between two worlds—the reality of the viewer and the unreality of the sculpture. He now skirts the room, entrapped, a man who cannot escape his larger-than-life wife or mother but aware that he must perform his “duty.” This is my favorite of the vigil scenes.

There are many others worthy of attention. A vigil at the bottom of the stairs, standing against a canary-yellow wall, is doomed, it seems, to watch visitors descend the final 6 steps after the landing. What, one wonders, is he watching, is he waiting for, is he expecting? He appears to be counting our rise and descent: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. I went up and down several times trying to grasp the nature of his performance. The rest rooms, I discover, are to his left down the hallway, one wall of which is bordered by transparent installations echoing the glass and steel of the building. The vigil against the canary yellow wall, counting our steps, therefore stands as ironic commentary on the transparency of numbers: years, dates, visitors, costs, etc. Fascinating.

The foundation’s anniversary exhibition opened against a backdrop of rain clouds, sun showers, bright blue sky and May greens. It is dense with quiet staging of the apprehensive gaze of the personnel and the works on display. These “vigils,” each with a subtle mix of attentiveness, sexuality and distraction are dressed in black suits, black shoes, black ties and white shirts for the men, narrow black slacks and prudent blouses for the women. Some wear an ear piece, but for what?, the viewer wonders. In anticipation of Godot? of a bejeweled donor? of the entrance of an artist with “vision” or “plastic wit”?

One male performer touches his earpiece as though to wonder if an organization so well-funded and clear-goaled a man might stand alone, apart, disconnected, perhaps abandoned. It’s a wonderful echo of Il Cavaliere di Dürer, 2011, by Allessandro Mendini, the work beside which he stands.

No sooner does that brief action take place than our—my— attention is drawn to that of two vigils standing together the playscape towers of Bodys Isek Kingelez’s Projet pour le Kinshasa du troisième millénaire, 1997. Approaching, I hear that they are discussing New York. Brilliant.

Inside, Raymond Hains’ Brise-lames de Saint Malo, plage du Sillon, 1994, and Jean-Michel Alberola’s Eclairage en groupe, 2014, serve as timid reminders that we are in France, otherwise the dearth of works by French-born artists draws attention to the lonely thumb in the garden by sculptor César, that seems to say that the new realism of the past 30 years is how little attention living French artists get (deserve?) on the international market. The panels describing the individual works are in French while the “vigils” are unnamed, undated. A brave curatorial approach, that.

I visit the garden, as is called the greenery that surrounds the glass box of the building. Through the transparent wall a vigil checks her phone. She is standing behind the brightly colorful partition “OMG!” by Allessandro Mendini and Peter Halley, 2014. How wonderful this illusion of hiding behind the bright wall while seen through the transparent wall, as though the latter were coverage by the mere fact of being an enclosure. Archictect Jean Nouvel should be pleased by this homage to his work.

At the food shack by the garden café, its chairs empty but for the rain, a vigil, the only “client,” stirs his coffee, his red umbrella by his side. “Les photos,” he says, “sont interdites.” “Il est interdit,” he says, “de fumer dans le jardin.” His tone is light, apologetic yet clear, an magnificent articulation of the use of the word “interdire” (to forbid) in contemporary art foundations, where freedom of commerce encounters freedom of art under the complex gaze, at once placid and anxious, biding and operational, in need of coffee or a smoke or a message from the world beyond, of a dozen security figures. A celebration of artistic freedom circumscribed only by the forbidden and the unsaid.

I return inside, drawn still to this extraordinary performance of the security personnel. At times the “vigils” don’t seem to watch as much as they do to submit to the space, the sound, the color, the movement. I look up to the bookshop balcony. There, arms crossed, stands a vigil with shave head—an excellent choice of figures since we think of him as the most guard-like. He stands as straight-faced commentary on the hinge of the conversation between commerce and art; the vigil against the canary yellow wall stands between foundation and basement; the vigil furtively checking her phone stands between the opaque and the transparent; the vigil by In Bed acts out the works emotions in a confrontation between display and (in)security; a vigil stretches discreetly from the back of the screening space, loosening wrists, stretching shoulders.

Is this planned or unintentional or inevitable? No matter. I cannot imagine a better way to celebrate the foundation than with this Dance of the Vigils.

1984-2014: 30 Years at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, May 10-Sept. 21, 2014. 261 boulevard Raspail, 14th arrondissment. Metro Raspail or Denfert-Rochereau or RER Denfert-Rochereau. Open daily except Monday 11am-8pm and until 10pm on Tuesday. 10€; 7:€ for students and those under 25; free for children under 13 or on Wednesday for those under 18. For further information see www.fondationcartier.com.

© 2014, Gary Lee Kraut

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At 39€ (21€ for children ages 4 to 12) for three consecutive days and 54€ (29€ for children) for six consecutive days, the card throws open the doors to over 100 sights and activities along the Riviera and into the Mercantour Montains which rise up from the coast. The card can be used for consecutive days between April 26 and October 31, 2014.

Most of the major art museums along the coast and inland are accessible with the pass: the Bonnard Museum at Cannet, the Picasso Museum at Antibes, the Cocteau Museum of Menton, the Fernand Leger Museum at Biot, and many others. Taking in several of these museums over a 3- or 6-day period reveals the influence on the work of these 20th artists of the light and leisure along the Riviera. The Maeght Foundation, at Saint-Paul-de-Vence, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, is also included. Entrance there alone normally costs 15€.

The culinary arts also have their place in the Côte d’Azur Card with access to Escoffier Museum of Culinary Art at Villeneuve-Loubet. And the coast’s most popular museum, Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, which normally costs 14€, is also free with the card. Other than several of Nice’s major museums (notably the Museum of Modern Art and the Chagall and Matisse Museums), which aren’t included, the variety of sight and activities in Alpes-Maritimes, as this corner of France is officially called, is well represented by this single piece of plastic.

Possession of the pass doesn’t imply that you’re sole interest in travel along the Riviera is its museums as it also gives access to a variety of outdoor sites such as Menton’s Serre de la Madone Garden and Monaco’s Exotic Garden. You can even use the pass to take the boat from Cannes to Ile Saint-Honorat (one of the Lerins Islands), for a guided tour at Grasse, Antibes or Vence, to play miniature golf in Antibes, to go to the racetrack at Cagnes-sur-Mer or to go sea kayaking at Cap d’Ail or Menton.

Don’t worry, you’ll still find time for a leisurely walk by the beach and an unhurried moment in the café.The choice of a seat is all yours.

The Côte d’Azur Card is available at tourist offices throughout the region and in hotels and other accommodations, as well as online (later this month) at the official website for the card, www.cotedazur-card.com.

The Riviera’s official portal for tourist information is www.frenchriviera-tourism.com.

© 2014, Gary Lee Kraut

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Jewish quarters come and go, but anti-Semitism never goes out of fashion. Most recently in France—we are in 2014—there’s been a growing attraction (patent yet limited) of the “quenelle,” a down-turned Nazi salute now understood by most to be an anti-Semitic, anti-establishment gesture. It has gained favor among individuals and groups who believe that Jewish concerns, interests and history get too much airplay, in the way that some in France and elsewhere will unify in their antagonism against homosexuals, gypsies or others.

The Deportation Memorial

Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, political opponents and others were among the 200, 000 men, women and children deported from France to Nazi concentration camps between 1940 and 1944 who did not return. The French Deportation Memorial that honors their memory lies at the eastern tip of Ile de la Cité, behind Notre-Dame Cathedral.

At the back of quiet little park, steep stairs lead to a high-walled triangular courtyard where the Seine can be seen flowing toward barbed iron. A first-time visitor might think that itself is the monument before noticing a narrow passage formed by two blocks of stone leading into the memorial crypt.

Inaugurated by President Charles de Gaulle in 1962, the memorial crypt contains the Tomb of the Unknown Deportee. The remains placed in the tomb are those of an individual who died in the concentration camp of Neustadt. A long alley containing 200,000 points of light extends beyond the tomb. Triangular urns inscribed with the names of concentration camps contain earth from the camps and ashes from their crematoria. Lines of poetry inscribed on the walls speak of pain, loss and tragedy. The entrance is barred to the cells to either side the alley. We peer into these cells unable to see the dark corners, unable to fathom what suffering they might hold.

An annual ceremony is held here on the last Sunday in April. That has, since 1954, been designated as the National Day of Memory of the Martyrs and Heroes of the Deportation, which is close to the date of the Hebrew calendar on which Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah, is commemorated.

The Shoah Memorial and the Holocaust Center

Of the 200,000 individuals memorialized at the Deportation Memorial, about 77,000 were born Jewish, and they were specifically targeted to be exterminated because of that. The majority of those Jews were killed in Auschwitz and Birkenau. Several thousand died in internment camps and some thousand others were otherwise executed or killed in France. The memorial to their memory is in the Marais, a large district (broadly the 3rd and 4th arrondissements) that had sizeable Jewish population at the outbreak of the war. The Shoah Memorial/Holocaust Center building is situated within a 10-minute walk of the Deportation Memorial to one side and rue des Rosiers to the other.

Roundups and Deportations

Following Germany’s defeat of France and the Armistice of June 22, 1940, the Germans occupied the northern half of France and a wide swatch down the country’s Atlantic coast. With Paris occupied, the French government, having originally decamped to Bordeaux, made the spa town of Vichy its headquarter. There, on July 10, 1940 Marshal Philippe Pétain, a hero of WWI, was voted full governmental power, hence reference to the French government from then until the Liberation of France in 1944 as the Vichy government.

An estimated 270,000 to 300,000 Jews were living in France in the late 1930s. Within several months after France’s armistice with Germany, the policies of the German occupiers and new French laws led to Jews being progressively excluded from professional life and dispossessed of property. Jews, defined by French officials as individuals with at least two Jewish grandparents, were required to register with the local police, constituting files that would eventually be used to round up Jews for deportation.

In collaboration with Germans and on their own, the French government along with local and state French police began rounding up Jews in 1941, first primarily foreign Jews then increasingly French Jewish men. Jews were required to wear a yellow star as of June 1942. The massive and all-inclusive round-ups in the Occupied Zone would follow.

During the mass round-up (rafle in French) of July 16-17, 1942, 13,152 Jews were arrested in Paris and the Paris region. The event was exceptional not only for the number of Jews that were arrested in a single well-organized sweep but for also the fact that it embodied a clear shift in policy to the deportation of women and children along with men. Many of those arrested were corralled at the winter cycling stadium—the Vélodrome d’Hiver, commonly known as the Vél d’Hiv—that then stood just beyond the Eiffel Tower. From there they were moved to the transit camp at Drancy, northeast of the city, and then by train to Auschwitz.

Though not the only round-ups of the war period in France, those of July 1942 have come to represent the injustice and horrors of deportations throughout that period in France.

In 1995, at the site of the Vélodrome, President Jacques Chirac officially recognized on behalf of the nation France’s responsibility, under the authority of the Vichy Government and in collaboration with the Germans occupying the country, in the deportation of French Jews.

While the sculptural group shown above has been placed near the river, a memorial stands by the site of the former velodrome at 8 boulevard de Grenelle.

The Wall of the Righteous

Of the 270,000-300,000 Jews in France prior to the start of the war, nearly 75% survived by their own means, through the help of Jewish resistance organizations and/or through the assistance of non-Jewish French, through efforts both individual and collective.

For a variety of reasons, a larger percentage of French Jews escaped the Shoah than Jews from most other European countries. That partially explains why France now has the largest Jewish population in Western Europe. (Another reason for its size is the many Jews who arrived from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco as those countries gained independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s.)

Righteous Among the Nations is a title granted since 1963 by the State of Israel via the Memorial Museum of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to non-Jewish men and women who helped save Jews from persecution during the war. The names of over 3300 Righteous, whether French or acting in France, are inscribed in bronze plaques along the alley, now named  Allée des Justes (Alley of the Righteous), that borders the north side of the memorial. Inaugurated in 2006, the Wall of the Righteous also contains the name of the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon, a largely Protestant village whose religious leaders and villagers, some of whom are individually designated as Righteous, helped save numerous Jews. French Protestants had known periods of tremendous intolerance and murder at the hands of the Catholic majority and nobility from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

On the opposite side of the Allée des Justes can be seen a plaque indicating that more than 11,000 Jewish children were sent to the camps from France, including more than 500 from this, the 4th, arrondissement. Such plaques are now found on schools in districts throughout Paris where Jews lived. Some 6100 of those children lived in Paris. A sign facing the playground in Square du Temple, a park on the northern edge of the Marais, lists the names of 87 children (les tout-petits) from the 3rd arrondissement who weren’t yet old enough to attend school before being sent to the camps.

Entrance to the Shoah Memorial

Ten years after his speech at the site of the Vél d’Hiv, President Chirac inaugurated the Shoah Memorial and Holocaust Center on January 27, 2005, on the Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust and for the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity, marking that year the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Security here is attentive, humorless and direct, as at the entrance to other major Jewish sights, notably the Great Synagogue on rue de la Victoire (9th arrondissement), but one can nevertheless freely enter the memorial (if without a weapon), whereas the synagogue requires prior arrangement for those who aren’t normally affiliated with it.

The names of death camps are written on a circular memorial in the courtyard, above the memorial crypt. Along the nearby wall seven bas-reliefs (1982) by the sculptor Arbit Blatas symbolize the camps. Text on the façade of the building written in Hebrew from poet Zalman Schnoeur’s adaptation of a line from Deuteronomy 25:17 is translated by the center as follows: “Remember what Amalek did unto our Generation exterminating 600 myriad bodies and souls, in the absence of war.”

Below that is written in French the words of Justin Godard, former government minister, Honorary President of the Committee for the Unknown Jewish Martyr: “Before the unknown Jewish martyr, incline your head in piety and respect for all the martyrs; incline your thoughts to accompany them along their path of sorrow. They will lead you to the highest pinnacle of justice and truth.”

History of the Shoah Memorial

The Shoah Memorial and the Holocaust Center form a single entity whose mission is “understanding the past to illuminate the future.” The building combines a museum, a documentation center and reading room, France’s largest (by number of titles) physical bookstore on the subject of the Holocaust, an auditorium for screenings, symposia, debates and presentations, offices and a memorial crypt. Though the building, as a Holocaust center, was inaugurated in 2005, the memorial itself had already existed.

Already in 1943 there was awareness among some Jews in France that evidence and testimony of their persecution would be necessary for the time when justice would be demanded. In April of that year Isaac Schneersohn invited 40 militant leaders of the various political factions in the Jewish community to his home in Grenoble, in the unoccupied zone, to set up the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation. But in September of that year the Germans entered into the unoccupied zone (referred to as the Free Zone by the Vichy government), causing Schneersohn and others to go underground as part of the Resistance. There, efforts continued to collect secret archives, including those held by the Vichy government and by the Gestapo in France.

After the war the CDJC began classifying these archives and established a publishing house to publish books and journals about the Shoah. The CDJC was soon called upon by the French government to provide evidence for the Nuremberg Trials.

Still under Schneersohn, the CDJC in 1951 sought to create a memorial to the victims of the Shoah and eventually obtained this plot of land owned by the City of Paris. Schneersohn passed away in 1969.

The Wall of Names

An estimated 78,000-80,000 Jewish men, women and children were deported from France between 1942 and 1944. Of them, some 76-77,000 did not return. (The round numbers in this article are approximate as figures vary among the most serious sources. Those given in this article are generally those presented at the center.) Past the security box at the entrance from the street, one approaches the building through the narrow passage between walls inscribed with the names and dates of birth of these individuals, listed alphabetically by year in which they were deported.

The Memorial Crypt

The building housing The Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr was inaugurated in October 1956, three years after the laying of its cornerstone, and in February 1957 ashes of victims from Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, Mauthausen and from the Warsaw Ghetto, placed in earth from Israel, were buried in the memorial crypt.

A Biblical quote in Hebrew on the back wall of the crypt reads: “Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow. Young and old, our sons and daughters were cut down by the sword.”

A map of the Warsaw Ghetto and an actual door from the Ghetto are now on the opposite wall. Off to the side, behind Plexiglas, are the “Jewish Files,” the index cards created between 1941 and 1944 under orders of the Vichy government and the will of the police department of the Paris region indicating the identification of Jews. These are the files that were used by French police in complicity with the Nazi occupier to know the identity and address of Jews to be rounded up for eventual deportation. Though present here for their association with the memorial, the files belong to the National Archives of France.

The Permanent Exhibition

The Shoah Memorial was officially listed on the register of historic buildings in 1991. But it soon became evident that of the need to enlarge the building and bring the CDJC and the Shoah Memorial together a single entity. A major transformation of the building led to its reopening in early 2005. The facades and the crypt of the original building were integrated into the new structure.

Other than to coming pay homage to the memory of victims of the Shoah, the permanent exhibition in the sub-basement museum is the most instructive aspect of the memorial and center for first-time visitors. Through photographs, texts, documents, films and recordings, the exhibition provides an excellent overview of the history of anti-Semitism in Europe and the events of the war period, followed by evidence and testimony gathered during the post-war period. While the films and recordings are in French only, the texts are in both French and English.

The center’s board of directors includes a number of well-known Jewish figures in French political, intellectual and economic life, currently among them Eric de Rothschild (president), Robert Badinter, chief rabbi Gilles Bernheim, Alain Finkielkraut, Serge Klarsfeld and Simone Veil. Among the memorial’s partners are the City of Paris, the Paris region (Ile de France), the Ministry of Education and the French train company SNCF.

© 2014, Gary Lee Kraut

The Shoah Memorial, 17 rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier, 4th arr. Tel. 01 42 77 44 72. Metro Saint-Paul or Pont-Marie. Open Sunday to Friday 10am-6pm, until 10pm on Thursday. Closed for certain Jewish holidays as well as Jan. 1 and Dec. 25. Admission is free except for the auditorium and some educational activities. Free guided tours for individuals are given Sundays at 3pm in French and the second Sunday of each month in English.

The 7000+ titles available through the center’s bookshop are listed online at www.librairie-memorialdelashoah.org.

The Museum of Jewish Art and History, is also in the Marais at 71 rue du Temple, 3rd arrondissement. Metro Rambuteau or Hôtel de Ville. Open Monday to Friday 11am-6pm, Sunday 10am-6pm. Exhibitions open until 9pm on Wednesday. A 15-minute walk from the Shoah Memorial and also in the Marais, this museum is housed in a 17th-century mansion called the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan, a building occupied in 1942 by number of Jews, 13 of which died in the camps. The permanent collection shows glimpses of Jewish life in France through the centuries and mounts notable temporary exhibitions.

Related articles on France Revisited:
– Paul Niedermann: Interview with a Holocaust Survivor and Witness in France
– In Search of a Jewish Quarter:  Rue des Rosiers and the Jewish Food Court of Paris

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* * *

Between 1870 and 1900, a period of great influx of Jews into France, you’d be unlikely to find a wealthy Jewish resident of Paris going into the Marais for kugel or gefilte fish, let alone a falafel. Leave that to the tourists and the working class schnooks, they’d say. Well, maybe not. Maybe they’d send a servant or two to Rue des Rosiers for some kishke and kreplach or stay for a meal when in the neighborhood for some philanthropic mitvah.

Otherwise, prosperous Jews in Paris in the latter decades of the 19th century likely felt more at home among the bankers, industrialists and aristocrats of the 8th or 9th arrondissements than in the Pletzl, the Little Place, as the heart of the then-significant Jewish Quarter around Rue des Rosiers was known. In any case, wealthy Sephardim, such as the de Camondo family, a Jewish banking family that had made its fortune in the Ottoman Empire and Italy, would have been more familiar with Turkish spanakopita and kaskarikas and yufka than with the Ashkenazi fare found in the Marais, where the vast majority of Jews were then Ahkenazim. Anyway, by the time the de Camondos established residence in Napoleon III’s France in 1869, they were probably well accustomed to the foodstuff of aristocracy.

The Camondo family’s rise in wealth originated through commerce at the end of the 18th century. By the early 19th century the fortune was sizable enough for Isaac Camondo, based in Istanbul, to open a bank in his own name. Isaac died without children and so his brother Abraham Salomon Camondo (1781-1873) inherited the bank and greatly developed. Having aided Italian unification through loans to the newly formed kingdom, Abraham and his grandsons (Abraham’s son died in 1866) were ennobled by Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel II. The parallel with the (de) Rothschilds led the (de) Camondos to be known as “the Rothschilds of the east.” (See this article about the Rothschilds in Paris.)

The Camondo family’s French story begins in 1869 when the elderly Abraham Salomon Camondo followed his two grandsons Abraham (1829-1889) and Nissim (1830-1889) to Paris to further grew their successful family.

Abraham and Nissim elected to live in what was then becoming one of the most exclusive quarters in the capital, the area around Parc Monceau. Through the 1860s and into the 1870s, members of the imperial aristocracy and of the haute bourgeoisie built stately mansions surrounding the park’s genteel greenery and theatrical décor. Here one could stroll by a colonnade of Corinthian columns in partial ruin, watch duck in the oval pond of a naumachia (the basin Romans used for mock naval battles), walk over a Chinese bridge and visit an Italian grotto and an Egyptian pyramid. The sight of well-dressed (faux) explorers visiting (faux) ancient ruins on an afternoon in Parc Monceau might have been reminiscent of paintings by 18th-century French painters Watteau, Fragonard, Lancret or Bouchet found in the Louvre—or on the walls of neighborhood residence since living with great wealth now required a backdrop of great art and perhaps some antique furnishings.

Soon after they arrived in Paris, brothers Abraham and Nissim de Camondo built mansions side by side overlooking the park. Several streets away, Edouard André, heir to a Protestant banking family, built an even more ostentatious home on the new and expansive Boulevard Haussmann. When, in 1881, André married Nélie Jacquemart, they formed a couple of the most devoted art collectors in Paris. Their home and collection are open to the public as the Jacquemart-André Museum, which gets the lion’s share of museum attention in the quarter, leaving relatively few visitors to the exceptional home and collection of Moïse de Camondo.

The collectors in the de Camondo family weren’t brothers Abraham and Nissim, who arrived in Paris as business-minded adults, but their respective sons, Isaac (1851-1911) and Moïse (1860-1935). The cousins continued to live side by side after their fathers died, both in 1889.

The Republic of France was the center of the art world between 1870 and WWI, and while Isaac had a taste for modern art, Moïse (Moses) was devoted to the styles of the pre-Revolutionary Kingdom of France. Having arrived in France as a child, Moïse developed a taste in decorative arts that was more French than the French. He considered the beauty of decorative art of the 18th century, particularly the period from 1750 to 1789 (the second half of Louis XV’s reign and Louis XVI’s full reign) as “one of the glories of France.”

Moïse de Camondo, like his cousin next door, grew up in a Napoleon III-style mansion bought by his father in 1870. After the death of his mother in 1910 he had the home demolished in order to build his dream home. Modeled after the Petit Trianon, that little jewel of a palace at Versailles that Marie-Antoinette used as her getaway house, Moïse’s new home combined the luxury of a modern mansion of the 1910s with a space that could ideally present his 18th-century decorative treasures. (The former home of his uncle Abraham and cousin Isaac, which would have had much in common with the home Moïse had demolished, can still be seen next door.)

The brothers would eventually bequeath their extensive art and decorative collections to French cultural institutions. Isaac, who never married, left his collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings to the Louvre (many of them are now in the Orsay), while Moïse bequeathed his home and collection of 18th-century decorative arts to the Union Central des Arts Decoratifs. The UCAD, an institution created in 1882, is now called Les Arts Decoratifs, and oversees the Museum of Decorative Arts and affiliated museums, including the Nissim de Camondo Museum, where Moïse’s home and collection are still largely presented as he wished.

Whether or not you’re greatly interested in 18th-century decorative arts, the museum is remarkable in its combination of three different points of interest: an extraordinary decorative arts collection, the technology and services of an ultra-modern home of the early 20th century, and the life and times of the de Camondo family as bankers, philanthropists, collectors and Jews. Use of the audio-guides (free with the entrance ticket) or a human guide is highly recommended.

Rooms specially designed to receive Moïse de Camondo’s growing collection are fitted with antique wood paneling and present marquetry, inlaid tables and other furnishings by great names of French cabinetmaking in the latter decades of the 18th century, such as Oeben, Riesener and Jacob, along with paintings, bronze clocks, vases and chandeliers. Methodical in his purchases and with a sense of symmetry in his home, he often purchased items in pairs. The pieces often have a known history relative to high aristocracy or royalty, such as Marie-Antoinette’s chiffonier, a table for her needlepoint work. A room off the dining room was built to showcase Moïse’s porcelain collection, including two Sèvres dinner services (“Service Buffon”), each piece of which is illustrated by a different bird.

Advised by curators at the Louvre and the Union Central des Arts Décoratifs and in contact with major antique dealers, Moïse continued to enrich his collection until the end of his life. He sold pieces to buy better pieces.

While wishing to present the art de vivre of the ancient regime, Moïse de Camondo had also instructed the architect René Sergent to provide all of the high-luxury comforts of his own time, complete with an ultra-modern kitchen, heating, bathrooms and car park.

In an alliance of two powerful banking families, Moïse married Irène Cahen d’Anvers in 1891. Irène had been painted by Renoir as a child, her curly long brown hair falling down her back and wrapped around her shoulder like a fur cape. They were married at the Grande Synagogue de Paris on Rue de la Victoire. Five years and two children later she fell in love with an Italian count who was a racehorse trainer, the era’s equivalent of running off with the pool boy. In the divorce, Moïse was granted custody of the children.

Their son Nissim (named for Moïse’s father) was the intended heir to the home and his collection, as well as of the bank, but he predeceased has father, dying in air combat during WWI in 1917. Moïse then closed the bank and eventually bequeathed the mansion and its furnishings to the Union Central des Arts Décoratifs in Nissim’s memory.

Their daughter Béatrice showed no interest in her father’s passion for 18th-century decorative arts. She nevertheless inherited a sizable fortune. Horses were her passion, and in any case she had a family and home of her own. During the German occupation of WWII, she felt protected from expanding anti-Jewish policies by her wealth, assimilation and position in French society. By then, her late father’s Paris home and collection had become a museum. If she had inherited them the collection would undoubtedly have been dispersed since her own possessions were eventually seized when she, her husband Léon Reinach, and their children Fanny (born in 1920) and Bertrand (born in 1923) were arrested in 1942 for being Jewish and deported (Léon, Fanny and Bertrand in Nov. 1943, Béatrice in 1944) to the death camp at Auschwitz. They did not return.

This is one of the most beautiful of lesser-known museums of Paris enlivened by a fascinating family history, ideally followed up by peaceable stroll through Parc Monceau.

© 2013, Gary Lee Kraut

Musée Nisim de Camondo, 63 rue de Monceau, 8th arr. Metro Villiers or Monceau. Tel 01 53 89 06 40 or 01 53 89 06 50. Open Wed.-Sun. 10am-5:30pm. Entrance: 7€50, includes audio-guide. Joint tickets including entrance to the Museums of Decorative Arts, Fashion and Textile and Advertising, all on Rue de Rivoli, are available for 12€.

The post Nissim de Camondo Museum: The Glory and the Tragedy appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Bordeaux intends do it. Already on the map—and now increasingly so for Americans thanks to its cheery cycling PR—the city is now planning its own beacon of a museum, the Cité des Civilisations du Vin, dedicated presenting the pairing of wine with culture and with civilization, on the drawing board for 2016.

Between the two there’s Biarritz, a thick dot on the map ever since Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugenia began vacationing here in the 1854 (see this Biarritz Hotels article for more history). But for long-distance travelers the Biarritz brand is no longer as evocative as Bilbao or Bordeaux

In the early 1990s, I remember, Biarritz was all the rage for European-minded Americans who’d heard of the luxurious Hotel du Palais, the renovated aquarium, the particularity of Basque culture and an airport that only the best travel agents knew about. As a playground for surfing, golf and runs on the beach and as a destination for seawater therapy, Biarritz didn’t need a major museum to call attention to itself.

Well aware of the intense competition for the short attention span of those long-distance traveler (the one who counts if you want to fill your tax coffers and create a few jobs) and the absence of high-tech or research companies (the ones who count if you want the national government to take notice), the powers that be—first among them Didier Borotra, mayor since 1991—thought it was high time to rebuild the Biarritz brand. And so about a decade ago they began toying with the idea of declaring Biarritz a resort town—and why not a business-friendly town, too—with a special relationship with the ocean: think Biarritz, think ocean; think ocean think Biarritz: Biarritz Ocean, for short.

The project came to fruition with the restoration and expansion of the town’s aquarium, le Musée de la Mer (the Sea Museum), and the creation of a new museum la Cité de l’Océan (Ocean City), both inaugurated in 2011.

Musée de la Mer, the Aquarium

Biarritz now has one of France’s largest aquariums. American visitors may have seen larger, more kid-friendly aquariums, complete with live dolphin shows and high-sensation films.  Despite the feeding of the seals and of the sharks, there’s less showmanship here. Nevertheless, the Sea Museum does indeed echo the town’s relationship with the Atlantic Ocean.

Facing the sea in a stylish Art Deco building of 1933 that was renovated and expanded in 2011 as part of the Biarritz Ocean project, the museum-aquarium follows the Gulf Stream in its presentation of a Caribbean lagoon, sharks, seals, rays and barracudas, while also presenting examples of life in the Indo-Pacific region.

East Coast Americans like to claim the Gulf Stream as their own, as it follows the hurricane track from the Caribbean to Maine, with a Canadian afterthought while passing by Newfoundland, after which it disappears from our maps and minds. Yet its current and climatic influence continue on the other side of the ocean where the North Atlantic’s wide river branches north toward Ireland and Scandinavia and south toward Africa.

As a grown-up destination Biarritz and the surrounding Basque Country has much to offer in terms of culture, food, sports and romance, and a fascinating cross-cultural trip could include Spanish Basque Country (Bilbao et al.). Yet the town and its surrounding also offer a nice backdrop for family fun, and the aquarium is a part of that.

Cité de l’Ocean

Another part of that is the Cité de l’Océan, the major project of Biarritz’s reinforced relationship with the ocean.

The building, designed by the American architect Steven Holl in collaboration with the Brazilan Solange Fabiao, takes the form of a simple wave unfurling toward the beach, with life visible under the swell, i.e. underground. It’s an easy metaphor though not exciting architecture.

Unfortunately, the wave building sinks unobtrusively in the landscape 500 yards from the beach and a long mile from the center of town, so it takes some effort getting to and from. An argument can be made for taking a healthy walk along the beach to get there, but it’s an argument that few will buy into, opting instead for one’s rental car, a taxi or the regular bus service from the aquarium. As a vote for the bus route, combining the aquarium with the Cité de l’Océan is the most direct way to get into the spirit of Biarritz Ocean.

Through interactive exhibits in French, Spanish and English, 3D films and daily activities, the Cité de l’Océan informs about various aspects of the oceans and our relationship with it: origins, tides, waves, myths and legends associated with the ocean, the evolution of life-forms (with the whale as the prime example) and the weather (visitors “ride” a boat through a storm).

Early on in the town’s reflections on a new museum a decade ago there were voices in favor of devoting it to surfing, then to incorporating surfing as a secondary aspect. But by the time it opened surfing appeared as minor afterthought, with only a small portion devoted to the sport, which is something of a shame given Biarritz’s history with surfing, not to mention my own surfing lesson (as told here).

The museum largely targets a family audience with children 7 to 13 years old, though older children and adults have much to learn here. It’s a natural complement to a visit to the aquarium, which can appeal to all ages. At the Cité de l’Océan I found myself interested though not impressed, entertained by not enthralled. A more sensational interactivity would help, but it is indeed informative if you pay attention. They have managed to keep the museum from being “chiantifique,” loosely meaning boring science, but haven’t quite made a thrilling museum either inside or out. Nevertheless, presenting the high stakes of climate change, biodiversity, over-fishing, the effect of a heavily populated coastline, the need to creating drinking water by desalinization and the acidification of the ocean was never going to be as sexy as a photogenic piece of contemporary art à la Bilbao or a museum explaining how Europe owes its existence to wine à la Bordeaux.

The museum is far from being an international calling card. Though most of its eggs are currently in the tourism basket, Biarritz (population 30,000 and home to 10,000 secondary residences) still aspires to attract research and production companies involved with the ocean. This has yet to materialize. Whether Biarritz can indeed develop its brand association with the ocean remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, Biarritz’s attempts to getting mileage from its historical relationship with the ocean are not far-fetched; though less evocative than Bordeaux’s relationship with wine, it has more historical basis than Bilbao did with contemporary art two decades ago. There’s still room for the project to develop.

Meanwhile, the Cité de l’Océan does have a nice enough restaurant, Le Sin, in its favor.

For the international traveler, these museums remain are secondary to the overall attraction of Biarritz. The town’s major assets are its exceptional site and all it has to offer in terms of sports, spas, a daily food market and the weather. You don’t need museums to enjoy that, but it’s nice to know they’re there in case you’ve brought along the kids or in case it rains.

© 2013, Gary Lee Kraut

Biarritz Océan is the umbrella title for the Musée de la Mer Aquarium and the Cité de l’Océan. The museums are open daily except Mondays  November to March (open Mondays of French school vacations during those months). Closed the three middle weeks of January. Joint tickets are available for the two museums. The Cité de l’Océan is free for children under 6; the aquarium is free for children under 4.

For more on Biarritz on France Revisited read: Biarritz: The Surfing Lesson and Biarritz Hotels.

Official site of the Biarritz Tourist Office: http://tourisme.biarritz.fr/en

Getting to Biarritz: There are direct flights to Biarritz from Paris and other French cities as well as from various northern European capitals (London, Dublin, Copenhagen, Brussels, Rotterdam, Stockholm). By train, Biarritz is 5:20 from Paris and 2:00 from Bordeaux.

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