The Arsenal Pavilion: The Best Paris Panorama

In a kind of urbane no man’s land, located in the dog-ear angle of the Celestin’s triangle between the Blvd. Bourdon, the lock of the Saint Martin canal and the Blvd. Henri IV, the Arsenal Pavilion offers without any doubt, the best and cheapest panorama over Paris city.
”Be yourself the Eiffel Tower” could be the tag line of the sight experience, a 3D Paris scale model, propose you as a preamble, in the middle of the hall room.
All around, Paris city’s historical steps are very well documented in french and english speaking. 12 scenes liven up your visit from “The enclosed city” to “Paripolis” or “Le Grand Paris”.
For modern architecture lovers and dilletantes, “Archi-Bus” paths n°88, 95, 96 and a the subway route n°6 are a lively way to arouse and entertain their diary translations outside the Center for Information, Documentation and Exhibition for Urban Planning and Architecture of Paris.

More: http://www.pavillon-arsenal.com/en/home.php

Pavillon de l’Arsenal, 21 Blvd. Morland 75004 Paris – 01.42.76.33.97
Open from thuesday to Saturday from 10:30 AM to 6:30 PM and from 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM on Sunday
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TAG SCENES

The enclosed city
1190: The walls of Philippe Auguste
1365: The walls of Charles the V
The embellished city
1605: Henri IV’s royal city
The city of promenades
1670: The design of Louis XIV
The dream of a global city
1784 – Walls of the Fermiers Généraux, Louis XVI
The complete city
1802: The projects of Napoleon I
The inner and outer city
1833: Haussmann predecessors
1840: Thiers enclosure
The planned city
1853: Prefect Haussmann’s city of lights
Modern conforts
1889: Living in Paris
Another landscape
1902: What regulation for Paris?
The open city
1919: A social project for Paris
A city in movement
1954: Change of scale
1967: Lafay-Lopez steering plan (PUD)
Return to history
1977: A city reglemented, the POS
Metropolis
2009: Le Grand Paris

The Small Pantheon

Which palace is right bank, Quai Conti, front the Louvre Museum Arts Pavillon?
The Wisdom Parliament or the Wise World Parliament,  The Small Pantheon or better said the Living Pantheon, are all the same! It is the Institute of France.
Here meet French Literature academicians. They’re called the forty Immortals. They wear two-horned hats, a sword and a green coat. Science Academy, Politic Academy, Fine Arts Academy meet there too.
The monument is dedicated to the Roman Godess Minerva, the same as Athena in the Greec Mythology.

The Chamber n°303 Mirror

Decorated by Christian Lacroix, The Petit Moulin Hotel’s chamber 303, in the Marais quarter, may be the right place to train 69 pleasures.
Book it straigthaway for Valentine’s day! You may need to ask your financial adviser to open a credit account to pay it by steps. Chamber 303 stay is 250 euros!
The hôtel “Amour”, 8 Navarin Street in Pigalle, very close from the Erotism Museum, 72 Clichy Boulevard, is an another adress suggested by Thierry Soufflard in his guidebook “ The Best Places to Kiss in Paris, Parigramme, 2002”.

The 7 Museums Hill

Roma, Istambul and Lisbon are 3 cities to sport the 7 hills cities nicknames, but just 1 gets an hill with 7 museums. It’s the Paris Chaillot hill in the sixteen district of the city of lights! The mankind museum, the french monuments museum, the Galliera museum, the city’s modern-art museum and the Tokyo Palace art center, the navy museum and the Guimet museum about asiatic arts! Surfin Internet site, www.lacollinedesmusees.com! There is a download-pass to visit four including the Quai Branly primary arts museum. Don’t forget the aquarium!

The Triumphal Kiss

The arch is a monument that Napoleon Bonaparte ordered to built in 1806, to improve the west side access of the city. He may dream to celebrate “Grand Army” triumphs making it passing under the arch. The snag is that works never finished before he lost the war against european allies. Nevertheless, when he married for a second time in 1810, he asked architects to arrange a scaffold in order to arrive at Paris with the austrian princess and to give her a triumphal kiss under what was still a “Proto-Arch”.

Src: Paris de Place en Place (Guide Historique), Marc Gaillard, Ed. Martelle – 1997, p.104

The Triumphal Road

One of the most remarkable perspectives to be seen in Paris is the Triumphal Road also knonw as “La Voie Triomphale”. The Triumphal Road starts from the Carrousel Triumphal Arch inside the Louvre Courtyard to follow the sunset line through the Tuileries Gardens, lines up on the obelisk in the Concorde Square and goes up the Avenue of the Elysian Fields before to cross under the Triumph Arch, the Star square and to go down in the direction of the Defense Arch.

The Swiss Valley

“It is a recess in the greenery, where the river sings / …
/ Tangling wildly in the tattered grass / Silvery; where the sun from the proud mountain / Glimmers; Its a little valley that sparkles with light…” wrote A. Rimbaud in a famous poetry ‘The Sleeper in the Valley’ also known as ‘The Deserter’…

Quite anything to deal with indeed!
Indeed-indeed, Paris gets mountains and hills as some dales and valleys. Most part are eastern side as the eastern neighboorhood department, The ‘Val de Marne’ and many cities around: Eurodisney/Marne La Vallée, Val de Fontenay, Val Fleury, etc.
Anyway, the best one is without any doubt the ‘Swiss Valley’, very nearby the Champs-Elysées Avenue, just behind the ‘Grand-Palais’. The place is astoundingly quite and most part of time, lonely enough to be transported far away from the urban jungle.

Src: http://the-french-experience.net/poem-le-dormeur-du-val O Vale Suiço

Paris Tahrir Square Genius

The Runt of Freedom

As July identify at once and the same time the Bastille Column and the Fall of the French Monarchy, it is easy to be fuddled and mingle angels and genius, Louis XVIII and Louis-Philippe, Charles X and his grandson Henri V, French revolutions and republic’s numbers! Let shed light on it…

The Bastille Genius isn’t an angel as its 2 wings may suggest. He’s a Genius!
But first of all, what a Genius is indeed? Michelangelo, Mozart, Einstein, were genius but Baba-Yaga, Agathodaemon, Decher-inty-imi-houst-insy, are genius too! Michael, Gabriel, Raphael aren’t! They’re more appointed as angels. What about Daniel, Ariel or Mumiah from the Cabbala? Sculpture served the confusion representing winged genius as angels but the genius is first a nature, a mind trend, a spirit inclination ascribable to the godlike or not, where as, angels are its most unmediated messengers!

Obvious, the Bastille genius isn’t Cupid as many believe because his nakedness. On one hand, the flaming torch he sports, represents the civilization. On the other hand, broken chains, the despotism defeated by the liberty. The Bastille genius is therefore the metonymy of the Liberty as the famous American Lady or the ‘Liberty Leading the People’ by E. Delacroix, painted just 10 years before the Bastille Genius arrival in Paris (28/07/1840). As the genius, she’s going topless. Should the genius could be his offspring progeny and the torch, a sky-brush then? Some says the genius is ‘Gavroche’, the Victor Hugo’s Paris scoundrel in ‘Les Misérables’, who lived inside an elephant plaster-cast, stored on the Arsenal canal sides to adorn the square centre from 1814 to 1846. Nonetheless, the fall of Bonaparte and the come-back of the Bourbon’s Monarchy with Louis XVIII (1755-1824) first, and Charles X (1757-1836) afterwards, stopped workings until the 2nd Bastille uprising in July 1830 (27, 28, 29): ‘Les 3 Glorieuses’.

Royal ordinances, restricting the freedom of the press, reducing the electorate and dissolving the assembly (wound up over the new president’s cabinet, the Prince of Polignac), gave rise to the Faubourgs riots and hasten the king’s exile.

Against all odds, the cousin of Charles X, Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, supported by conservatives, pre-empts the republican upholders to become the king of a new constitutional monarchy. It is then not so excessive to credit the citizen-king, part of the Bastille genius embodiment, in the sense that, unlike Bourbons, he knew the importance to make concessions to its opponents and promote the national union.

The July Column on which the Bastille genius stands above was between others symbols*, the recognition of civil liberties supporters. A year later to the day after the July Revolution, the new king laid the foundation stone of the edifice. Jean-Antoine Alavoine designed the column and Auguste Dumont the Genius. The whole monument was inaugurated for the JR’s 10 years birthday (28/07/1840). Basements of the elephant waterspout were kept to bury the 504 corpses fallen under July gunfires. Their names are all engraved along the column and the genius may looks like the chemical precipitate of their soul. 196 others Spring of Nations heroes joined them few years later, because little by little, liberties were trampled, republican banquets forbidden and misery more and more blatant. The Bastille Genius looked like more and more the runt of freedom. Working class raised up again in February 1848 to enshrined the end of the July Monarchy and give birth to the 2nd republic, launched on that same French ‘Mïdän at Taḥrǐr’ square, i.e, the Liberation Square in Arabic.

Vosges square has a twin sister in Charleville

They were designed by 2 brothers according to the rule of 4

Note that the symmetry obey the Rule of Four: 4 sides, 4 span arches for every pavilion-blocks, 4 bay-windows on each floor, 4 skyligts-dormers and 4 waterspouts in the square 88! 88 is the Vosges department number-plate!

Square 88?
Louis and Clément Métezeau weren’t twin brothers but they gave birth to two self-same squares: The Vosges Square in Paris and the Ducale Square in Charleville-Mézières, on the road to Luxembourg!
The main difference between both squares is the central platform occupied in Paris by the public garden Louis XIII surrounded by lime trees, while in Charleville-Mézières, the site is barren, just dressed with a waterspout in the midst. This allows a better appreciation of the symmetry and the decorative style ‘Henri IV-Louis XIII’*; i.e, the combination between limestone quoins, steep roof slates and bricks. Note that the symmetry obey the Rule of Four: 4 sides, 4 span arches for every pavilion-blocks, 4 bay-windows on each floor, 4 skyligts-dormers and 4 waterspouts in the square 88! 88 is the Vosges department number-plate! Because that new territorial administration of the French revolution was the first to pay his tax to the process, it earned the last title of what has been originatively inaugurated as the ‘Royal Square’.

The fitting stop to write some postcards!
The Vosges square is the oldest Paris square still conserved in accordance with the original drawing**. It replaced the Tournelles royal hotel that was made destroyed by the queen Catherine de’ Medici who took it abhor after king Henri II’s dreadful death***. Henri IV ordered the new square creation but Louis XIII’s ringing with Anne of Austria (07/04/1612) inaugurated it. Arcades around were during a time the main swashbuckling Paris scenario! All town houses around are private apartments remembering the old french gotha as the Hôtel de Sully, Hôtel de Coulanges, Hôtel de Rohan-Guémené, turned into the Victor Hugo’s museum. The mastermind lived there between 30 and 46 years old. At the n°1bis (Hôtel de Coulanges), next to the king pavilion, the marquess of Sévigné, an another French literature top-gun, inspired numerous readers! The fitting stop to write some postcards!

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* The eastern central wing of the Versailles castle, the Dauphine square and the Saint Louis hospital in Paris are others Henri IV-Louis XIII samples specimens.
** The east-side of the Dauphine Square (1607) has been swept in the nineteenth century to open the view toward the white-marble façade of the justice court backyard.
*** Henri II got the eye speared in the Saint-Antoine street by the Montgommery Count (10/07/1559).

Behind the Petit Palais Gateway

Every corner gets spellbound

The Paris City Fine Arts Palace*
Cross over the golden mighty gate of the Petit Palais is the biggest step through many others doors wide-open onto important art schools. It prevails first of all, to underline the access of the institution is free as all Paris city museums (They’re 14 in total). Besides; such a membership hideouts for sure, an affiliation with the fair-sex and the Grand Palais with the male-sex, according with the point it is managed by the Rmn**, i.e: the French State. Are you following me?
You may disagree before but not after visiting it! It should even give you more temptations to discover it! Let’s you convince, you won’t repent!
The creation is from Charles Girault that isn’t, by the way, any brother of the Opera house architect: Charles Garnier! The Petit Palais is indeed, as it first name indicated it better, the Paris City Fine Arts Palace.

‘Mystic, Plastic, Thinking and Matter’
As well as the south pavilion ceiling dedicated to the women triumph by Georges Picard, every room presents art masterpieces. Inside the Courbet Galery, the ‘Bitten Women’ (by a snake) sculpted by Auguste Clesinger and ‘Mariette’, the ‘Roman Odalisc’ by Camille Corot, are 2 good illustrations.
Every corner gets spellbound! Giandomenico Facchina mosaics are ritzy! Stained glass windows from the studio Champigneulle, dishy! Murals by Paul Baudouin, Maurice Denis, Fernand Cormon and Alfred Roll, startling! The entrance hall, arranged by Albert Besnard summarizes the artistic approach through 4 topics: ‘Mystic, Plastic, Thinking and Matter’… Does Fine Arts or fair-sex are all that?
Garlands and wrought ironwork banisters overstate even more the femininity of the place as if they were fine lingerie decorating the peristyle, lining the small inside garden.

‘Art and Women share really the same qualifier’
The grandeur of the diferent proficiencies exhibited (enamel, cabinet-making, jewellery, maiolica, galsswork, terracota, etc) as the topics scope proposed all along the visit (landscape art, human portraits, religious icons, greek statuary, etc), honour as well the genus fair. Art and Women share really the same qualifier: Beautiful! It ends up to be difficult to step out the Petit Palais once a time inside. In the real world, doors are much more closer compared with the one imagined by Jean Carriès for instance. They’re just stoneware snips and sketches indeed but enough to feel full of a new creativeness.

- * Petit Palais: http://petitpalais.paris.fr/fr
– ** Rmn: Reunion des Musées Nationaux (http://www.rmn.fr/)