Paris Things to Do Tips by Nemorino Top 5 Page for this destination

It used to be even worse! Champs Elysées Review

In one word I can tell you what's wrong with the Avenue des Champs-Élysées: cars.

This street is marketed as "the most beautiful avenue in the world", and it really is beautiful except for the fact that there is an ugly ten-lane highway running right down the middle. There are four lanes of moving motor traffic in each direction (moving or creeping, as the case may be, or accelerating wildly when the traffic lights change), plus two lanes of parked cars on either side.

If I have measured correctly, the entire avenue is about 67 meters wide. Of that width, roughly 25 meters in the middle is devoted to motor vehicles, with a 21-meter sidewalk for pedestrians on each side. There are no bicycle lanes, at least not yet (as of 2011), but the council has promised to install bicycle lanes in both directions by 2014.

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While the current situation is unsatisfactory, to say the least, I keep reminding myself that for over half a century, from the late 1930s to the early 1990s, it was worse -- much worse, since nearly the entire width of the avenue was given over to cars.

By the 1970s, even car-loving conservative politicians couldn't help noticing that the character of the Champs-Élysées was changing. The grand hotels, luxury boutiques and elegant restaurants began to leave, being replaced by chain stores and fast-food joints.

So from 1991 to 1994 a sweeping rearrangement of the Champs-Élysées was carried out under the direction of the French architect and urbanist Bernard Huet (1932-2001).

Much of the construction work was coordinated by the engineering firm OGI (Omnium Général d'Ingénierie), which summarized the project as follows:

"The rearrangement of the Champs Élysées consisted of restoring the character of a promenade to an avenue which had become an immense open-air parking lot. To do this, the side roads were eliminated, a second row of trees was planted and the entire surface of the pedestrian area was re-paved in granite." (My translation.)

Planting a second row of trees may not sound like a huge project, especially since it was just a matter of replacing a row of trees that had been cut down in the 1930s to make room for cars, but in fact this turned out to be a long and very expensive project because in the meantime the dirt under the sidewalk had been replaced by a labyrinth of cables, water pipes, gas pipes, sewer pipes and tunnels, all of which had to be found and relocated.

Second photo: As you stroll along these wide granite-paved sidewalks today, it is hard to believe that for over half a century most of this surface was used for car parking. But it was.

There are about a dozen Vélib' stations on side streets near the Champs-Élysées, but none on the avenue itself. The ones I have used most recently are stations 8028 at 1 Rue Arsene Houssaye and 8003 at 63 Rue Galilée.

Directions: GPS 48°52'19.68" North; 2°17'57.12" East

Website: http://www.ville-et-architecture.com/bernard_huet/Huet_1998_amenagement_des_Champs_Elysees.pdf

The triumph of cars over people Arc de Triomphe Review

The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned by the Emperor Napoléon I in 1806 to celebrate the triumph of his armies over the rest of Europe in the early nineteenth century, particularly his triumph over the Russian and Austrian Empires at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805.

In recent decades, however, the Arch has merely served to demonstrate the triumph of cars over people. Cars have unlimited rights to careen around the circle that surrounds the Arch, where twelve major streets come together. People, if they want to visit the Arch, can only reach it by going through an underground tunnel like rats or moles.

Update 2012: I have now added four more photos: one of the sign showing people how to reach the Arc de Triomphe without being killed, one showing the entrance to the tunnel, one showing people in the tunnel and one showing traffic from inside the circle.

Next review from June 2012: From the top of the Arc de Triomphe

Address: Métro Charles de Gaulle - Étoile

Directions: The closest Vélib' station is 8028, followed by 8056 and 8057.
GPS 48°52'25.04" North; 2°17'40.99" East

Théâtre de la Huchette Literary Paris Review

On a rainy Friday evening in November 1966 -- it was November 28, to be exact, and the Métro was on strike -- I went to a small theater in the Latin Quarter and saw two absurdist plays by Eugene Ionesco called La Cantatrice chauve (usually given in English as The Bald Soprano) and La Leçon (The Lesson).

The amazing thing at the time was that these two plays had been performed every night at the Théâtre de la Huchette since February 16, 1957, so they were in their tenth year of continuous performance when I saw them in 1966.

Fast forward to 2011: the same two plays are still playing every night (well, six nights a week, since they're closed on Sundays) in the same theater. I wanted to see them again, but they were sold out on the one evening I could have gone. I think they are usually sold out in advance, since the theater only has eighty-five seats.

In my photo of the theater it says "53 ans" (53 years), but I think by now they must have changed that to 54. That works out to nearly seventeen thousand performances and nearly one and a half million spectators since 1957.

>>Next small theatre review: Espace La Comedia<<

Address: 23 Rue de la Huchette, 75 005 Paris

Directions:
Vélib' 5033
Métro Saint Michel
GPS 48°51'10.75" North; 2°20'43.35" East

Phone: 01 43 26 38 99

Website: http://www.theatre-huchette.com/

Maison Victor Hugo Literary Paris Review

All you loyal readers of my Bacharach page (thanks again to both of you) will recall that in 1840 the great French novelist Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, spent three days in Bacharach and wrote an enthusiastic description in his book Le Rhin, first published in 1842.

In one of my Bacharach General Tips, called Victor Hugo on the Rhine, I translated some passages from his book in which he described the town of Bacharach as "the oldest heap of human habitations" that he had ever seen in his life.

And in one of my Bacharach Things to Do tips, called Fürstenberg and Falkenburg, I translated his account of his meeting with three lovely girls at Falkenburg Castle, now better known as Reichenstein, which is one and three-quarter lieues (leagues) upstream from Bacharach. Today we would give the distance as 7 km, but Hugo would turn over in his grave (in the Panthéon) if he heard me saying that, because he was a fierce opponent of the metric system of measurement.

Victor Hugo was born in Besançon in 1802. In 1832, when he was thirty years old and already a successful novelist and playwright, he rented a large apartment (280 square meters, we would say today) on the second floor of a building at the southeast corner of Place des Vosges. Hugo and his family lived in this apartment for sixteen years, from 1832 to 1848.

This apartment is now a museum about Hugo's life and work, and the floor below is devoted to special exhibitions.

Second photo: An old poster in the museum advertising Victor Hugo's complete works at 25 centimes per volume. Note the silhouette of Notre Dame in the background, a reminder of his novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

Third photo: Another old poster in the museum announcing a meeting at the Théatre de la Gaité in Paris on May 30, 1878, to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the death of the French writer Voltaire (1694-1778). Victor Hugo presided at the meeting and also gave a speech about Voltaire.

Fourth photo: In the museum.

Fifth photo: A room in the museum, with a portrait of Victor Hugo.

Address: 6 Place des Vosges, 75004 Paris

Directions: Vélib' 4107
Métro Bastille, Saint-Paul, Chemin-vert
GPS 48°51'16.95" North; 2°21'56.56" East

Phone: 01 42 72 10 16

Website: http://www.musee-hugo.paris.fr

Hugoffenbach at the Théâtre Musical Marsoulan Literary Paris Review

This is a small new musical theater that you'll never find if you don't go looking for it with the exact address and a good street map (like the map called Paris Voies Cyclables by Media Cartes, which I can still highly recommend).

The theater is located on the Rue Marsoulan (which I bet you've never heard of) which is so far to the east that it's even beyond Place de la Nation, not far from the suburbs Vincennes and St-Mandé.

Even if you find the address you might walk right past the theater because it's in a faceless modern building and the entrance (second photo) looks more like a dentist's practice than a theater.

But when you get inside it's very pleasant, with 180 comfortable red plush seats for the spectators. The theater opened on November 1, 2008, and at the time it was said to be the 131st theater in Paris. (I haven't counted, so I'll just take their word for it.)

The Théâtre Musical Marsoulan presents musical spectacles of all types, traditional and contemporary, for children and for adults. One of their first productions was the operetta La Péricole by Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880), which I saw in the summer of 2008 at another small theater on the east side of Paris, the Espace La Comedia. (And yes, I am listening to a recording of La Péricole as I write this.)

The show I saw at the Théâtre Musical Marsoulan in February 2011 also had to do with Jacques Offenbach, but also with the great French writer Victor Hugo (1802-1885), whose house and museum I had just visited that same afternoon. As you can see from their dates, Offenbach and Hugo were contemporaries, and both were alive during the "Second Empire", the eighteen-year period from 1852 to 1870 when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte ruled France as Emperor Napoléon III.

The musical spectacle "Hugoffenbach" combined texts by Victor Hugo, mainly expressing his outrage at Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's seizure of power, with satirical songs from Offenbach's operettas which were exceedingly popular in Paris during the Second Empire.

The show "Hugoffenbach" was complied, written and directed by Patrick Mons, who also played the role of Victor Hugo and spoke his texts with great clarity and dramatic feeling. He was joined on the stage by Marie Blanc, mezzo-soprano, Philippe Scagni, baritone, and Thierry Garcia, guitar -- all of whom are also excellent actors.

Though I was aware of Offenbach's reputation as a satirist of the Second Empire, I had never thought very much about what that meant. The juxtaposition with Hugo's angry texts put Offenbach's songs (some of which were quite familiar to me) into their historical perspective.

As it happened there was a panel discussion on the stage after the performance. I found the discussion quite interesting, but it did get a bit academic after a while, which was not surprising because the panel members were mainly professors. They argued, for instance, about whether Hugo and Offenbach had ever actually met in person, which seems unlikely because Hugo was in exile during the Second Empire and Offenbach was living in Paris. They agreed, however, that Hugo saw one of Offenbach's operettas several times in Brussels, since he was not allowed to set foot in France.

One of the professors also pointed out that the outraged texts used in "Hugoffenbach" were ones that Hugo wrote immediately after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's seizure of power in 1851, and that Hugo became less angry as the years went on. This did not sit well with some of the non-academic people in the audience, who were not interested in minor quibbles but mainly wanted to praise the actors and singers and say how impressed they were with the production.

Actually the panel member I found most interesting was the one who said the least. She was a young graduate student who was writing her dissertation on the dramatist Victorien Sardou (1831-1908), author of many plays including La Tosca, which later became the basis for Puccini's opera Tosca.

(Update: Victor Hugo seems to have known this neighborhood, because the Théâtre Musical Marsoulan is just a few blocks from 62 rue Picpus, the location of a convent in Hugo's novel Les Misérables.)

>>Next small theatre review: Theatre de l'Ile Saint-Louis<<

Address: 20, rue Marsoulan - 75012 Paris

Directions:
Vélib' 12016
Métro Picpus or Nation
GPS 48°50'48.22" North; 2°24'12.41" East

Phone: 01 43 41 54 92

Website: http://www.theatremarsoulan.com

Passy: The House of Balzac Literary Paris Review

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), author of La Comédie Humaine, lived in this house in Passy for seven years in the 1840s.

He did not own the house, but was the tenant of a five-room apartment at the level of the garden. He once wrote that he enjoyed going out into the garden, "emerging into the Paris sunlight in this carbon dioxide-filled atmosphere, where flowers and books thrive like mushrooms."

But he seems to have spent most of his time in the house, working. He wrote: "Working means getting up at midnight every evening, writing until eight o'clock, having lunch in a quarter of an hour, working till five o'clock, having dinner, going to bed, and starting over again the next day."

Balzac was heavily in debt during this period, so to hide from his creditors he rented under the pseudonym of "Monsieur de Breugnol". But they sometimes found him anyway. Tradition has it that Balzac made use of the back door on Rue Berton to escape from his creditors when they were knocking at the front door on Rue Raynouard.

Of course he did not have a view of the Eiffel Tower, which wasn't built until half a century later.

The house is now a museum which belongs to the City of Paris. Admission is free except when there is a special temporary exhibition.

Address: 47, rue Raynouard, 75016 Paris

Directions: Vélib' 16112
Métro Passy
GPS 48°51'19.44" North; 2°16'50.56" East

Phone: 01 55 74 41 80

Website: http://www.balzac.paris.fr

Musée de la Vie Romantique Literary Paris Review

This museum is about The Romantic Life, but not "romantic" in the sense of people falling in love and giving each other flowers. Rather it is about a group of artists and writers who lived in Paris during the period of Romanticism in the nineteenth century.

The house originally belonged to the painter Ary Scheffer (1795-1858) and it remained the property of the Scheffer-Renan family until 1983, when it was given to the City of Paris to be turned into a museum. (Actually the city could have had it as early as 1898, but the City Council turned it down at the time so it stayed in the family for another eighty-five years.)

Besides paintings by Ary Scheffer and his brother Henri, the museum also has exhibits about the writer George Sand (1804-1876) and other writers, painters and composers of the period.

Second photo: In the Memorabilia Room on the ground floor.

Third photo: Bust of the scholar and philosopher Ernest Renan (1823-1892). Renan married Ary Scheffer's niece Cornélie Scheffer in 1856.

Fourth photo: A room in the museum with a portrait of the Princess of Joinville, painted by Ary Scheffer in 1844.

Fifth photo: Ary Scheffer's house, now the Musée de la Vie romantique.

Address: 16 rue Chaptal - 75009 Paris

Directions: Vélib' 9028 or 9019
Métro Saint-Georges, Pigalle, Blanche, Liège
GPS 48°52'51.09" North; 2°19'59.82" East

Phone: 01 55 31 95 67

Website: http://www.vie-romantique.paris.fr

Opéra Garnier from the third level of box seats Opéra Garnier Review

What I have found while booking Paris opera tickets online is that usually only the higher-priced categories are on offer, starting at 40 or 45 Euros.

So this time I didn't book online, but just went and took my chances at the box office. The Opéra Bastille was nearly sold out, with 85 Euros being the cheapest seat available, so I passed on that, but at the Garnier I got a place in the third level of box seats for only 25 Euros -- more than double the price I pay for an opera ticket in Frankfurt am Main, but hey, this is Paris.

At the Bastille box office you can buy tickets for the Garnier as well, and visa versa.

Second photo: Audience and spotlights at the Opéra Garnier.

Third photo: Spectators in the third level of box seats.

Fourth photo: My ticket for box 18, seat 5. On the ticket it clearly says "Visibilité réduite" = reduced visibility, and that was certainly true, but there was fortunately no one behind me so I could simply stand up whenever I wished.

Address: 8 rue Scribe, 75009 Paris

Directions: Vélib' 2015 or 2014
Place de l'Opéra, Metro: Opéra
48°52'16.73" North; 2°19'54.97" East

Phone: 08 92 89 90 90

Website: http://www.operadeparis.fr/

Händel's Giulio Cesare at the Opéra Garnier Opéra Garnier Review

All you loyal readers of my Halle page (thanks again to both of you!) will recall that there I talked about the great opera composer Georg Friedrich Händel, who was born in Halle in the year 1685. His birth house and several adjoining buildings have been nicely renovated and now form the Händel House and Music Museum of the City of Halle, along with the Center for Händel Research. After eighteen years in Halle, three in Hamburg and four in Italy, Händel settled in London where he wrote most of his forty operas, thirty oratorios and hundreds of other musical works.

In February 2011 at the Opéra Garnier in Paris I saw a fine performance of Händel's sixteenth opera Giulio Cesare (Julius Cesar) which he composed in London in 1724. This is only the fourth Händel opera I have seen, out of forty or so that he composed -- I have described the other three in one of my Halle tips called Händel as an opera composer.

Even though Händel was originally German and lived most of his adult life in England, his operas were all in Italian, simply because Italian was the main language of opera in those days (just as English is the main language of pop music today).

This opera Giulio Cesare takes place in Egypt in the year 48 B.C. and has to do with Caesar's Egyptian war and his love affair with Cleopatra.

As it was staged in Paris, however, the opera took place in the storeroom of a museum (I suppose the Louvre), where some of the statues came to life and started re-living their quarrels and love affairs of 2,059 years before. This is not exactly a new idea -- I once saw Verdi's Aida staged this way at the State Theater in Berlin -- but I thought it worked very well.

Second photo: Program of Händel's opera Giulio Cesare (Julius Cesar). The picture on the cover of this opera program is part of a famous painting called "Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners" by Alexandre Cabanel, painted in 1887. Less than half the painting (around 40 %) appears on the cover. Visible in the original painting, but not here, are two prisoners dying horrible deaths from poisons that are being tried out on them.

Third photo: Statue of the composer Georg Friedrich Händel in the lobby of the Opéra Garnier.

Address: 8 rue Scribe, 75009 Paris

Directions: Vélib' 2015 or 2014
Place de l'Opéra, Metro: Opéra
GPS 48°52'16.73" North; 2°19'54.97" East

Phone: 08 92 89 90 90

Website: http://www.operadeparis.fr/

Susan Graham as Iphigénie! Opéra Garnier Review

All you loyal readers of my Nürnberg page (thanks again to both of you!) will recall that there I talked about the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) and his opera Iphigenie in Aulis, composed in 1774.

Here in Paris I saw the sequel, Iphigenie en Tauride, with the American mezzo-soprano Susan Graham in the title role. She has been one of my all-time favorite singers ever since I saw her as Octavian in Birmingham, England, in the 1990s. As Iphigenie she was fantastic as usual, and was enthusiastically cheered by the audience in the Opera Garnier.

The orchestra and the other singers were first-rate, as well, and the attractive stage set included reflecting walls that could be raised or lowered at appropriate times. Up where I was sitting we saw the orchestra and conductor reflected on those walls, and the folks downstairs saw the reflection of the golden balconies of the large hall, which I thought was a beautiful way of incorporating the magnificent architecture of the building into the staging of the opera itself.

The one thing that detracted somewhat from the performance was the fact that the stage director had decided it should take place in an old-people's home, so there were about twenty extra players as old women limping around the stage at various times. Normally I am quite good at figuring out what the stage directors are trying to say (I know some of these folks and am on their wavelength, so to speak), but this time I was quite baffled. And I wasn't the only one, because when these extra players came on stage to take their bows at the end, the whole house erupted in loud boos. (Which was a bit unfair to these poor ladies who were only doing what the stage director told them to do. As this performance was not the premiere, the stage director was no longer there to take the blame.)

Second photo: Spectators taking their seats in the upper balconies.

Third and fourth photos: The paintings on the ceiling were commissioned by André Malraux, then Minister of Culture, and were painted by Marc Chagall between 1960 and 1964.

Fifth photo: Statue of the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck in the lobby of the Opéra Garnier.

Address: 8 rue Scribe, 75009 Paris

Directions: Vélib' 2015 or 2014
Place de l'Opéra, Metro: Opéra
GPS 48°52'16.73" North; 2°19'54.97" East

Phone: 08 92 89 90 90

Website: http://www.operadeparis.fr/