au Musée Rodin

I went to the Musée Rodin a couple weeks ago (and am just getting to writing about it now). Flavia, my host lady accompanied me. I remember my friend Judy telling me it was one of her favorite places she visited while she was in Paris and it definitely amounted to time well spent.

My favorite part (besides the statue of a hilariously confident Balzac pictured here!) was seeing the work of Rodin's mistress, Camille Claudel. Flavia told me that she was his student first and later became his mistress and it was artsy and tumultuous and ended badly of course. As Camille surpassed Rodin in ability, he became jealous to the point of driving her mad! She spend the last 30 years of her life in an asylum. (I don't know if this is the movie version she told me but it's all I got.)
 
In the actual sculpture anyway, her mastery of sculpture beyond his is evident. Claudel had a finesse Rodin did not, though she is obviously of his school in her general style. To me, the greatest difference between the two was in the gesture of the people, especially the women, each portrayed. While Rodin's male figures are active and grounded in power poses, taking up a lot of space, the women are sort of waning, bending, being small. The only piece in the Rodin Museum where a woman isn't hugging herself/bowing sort of in shame is one with no head or arms where her legs are spread open to give a view similar to L'Origine du Monde, if you know what I mean. (If you don't know and you google it, just know it's NSFW. Like, super not...)

In contrast, not only does Claudel portray women in  ordinary situations in which I suspect Rodin was never very interested like Les Causeuses (The Gossips), but she does it with such a fine, capable touch as to almost make Rodin's bronzes resemble his sketches more than a final piece. Perhaps it's the masculine/feminine opposition at work in Rodin's rough surfaces and Claudel's more polished sensibility. I actually don't know much about it. I never read the little curator notes and the Musée Rodin doesn't have a complete collection or anything. (Apparently one of the reasons her brother had her committed to an institution was because she was destroying her work.) And I love the texture of the surfaces Rodin creates, especially how he renders hair and beards. The Rodin Museum really lets you see so many of his works all together, it's impossible to deny he was a genius of his time. You can kind of tell he didn't think much of women, but I find it absurd to judge art based on some moral objection to the person who created it. So, I admit he was a genius. And it satisfies me to say, Camille was too, only more-so. In fact, according to Wikipedia, "The novelist and art critic Octave Mirbeau described her as 'A revolt against nature: a woman genius.'" That's right. He thought "woman genius" was an oxymoron.

Definitely worth going to when you're in Paris. More on that later! I'm compiling a list that the skinny on a bunch of Paris museums. Should be interesting...

at the grocery

First of all, not all French people shop in little markets like this one (this is the one in Amélie where Domonique Bretodeau hears the cabine telephonique sonner, sonner, sonner...) BUT a lot of them do. However, they do have supermarkets. And in fact, (well, I'm not really sure it's a fact more like rumor maybe) I heard that WalMart was inspired by France's Carrefour. Maybe it was the other way around but I don't really care. What they say about not being able to get peanut butter, or as Davis Sedaris hilariously complains, about it only being sold in a one-sitting tin can, that's not really true! You can get your peanut butter if you really insist on being American and not eating the very worthy Nutella instead. But it comes in smaller quantities than the double-gallon Costco packages. (I'm not judging. I love Amcerican-sized Costco peanut butter.)

What I found most illuminating was what other things they had on the American aisle at the supermarket (and likewise on the Middle Eastern aisle, the Brazilian aisle, the Jewish aisle etc.) Voici:

So basically, it's everything you need to indulge your fatty, sugary homesick food binge when the fatty, sugary French food exhausts you!

Next time I will take a photo of the yogurt aisles (yes, plural) because they are frankly, quite insane. Actually it seems to be the same in Britain and is getting there in the US, because I saw a Guardian article asking something like, "How much is too much choice in the yogurt aisle?" Or maybe it was on David Leibovitz's blog (wherein he also comments on ridiculous things you can get in French supermarkets here.) Enjoy that one.

The family I live with is pretty busy. The mom, Flavia, is a great cook but doesn't make a huge fuss with the 5-course meals every night. She's a music therapist (more on that later) and she has two highly energetic, brilliant children to deal with. Her husband Dominique does lots of the work and they are very egalitarian in household things, but he doesn't work at home like Flavia does, so the cooking falls to her. She doesn't like going to a bunch of small shops to do all her grocery shopping, so she took me to LeClerc, a shopping center/grocery/everything store kind of like WalMart the first weekend I was here. It's right down the street, perhaps just as close if not closer than the bakery. Although Americans romanticize the old-world, old-timey shops where everything is specialized, we would hardly countenance waiting in that many separate lines. I went there Tuesday to buy a few things to contribute to the household, and I think aside from the yogurt aisle, the biggest section is the wine department. Pretty darn impressive. The wine "cave" even had this plastic-y wallpaper stuff on the outside that made it look like it was built of stone blocks like a castle. Funny.

I was delighted to find such gourmet indulgences (for me) as lavendar honey from Provence as well as more common (in France) items like Breton butter. The candy/chocolate aisle is of course divine, as in France, chocolate must contain 30% cacao to be legally called chocolate. I'm all for such laws, but they would never pass in the US! Hershey's in only 6% cacao and I'm sure they wouldn't stand for it.