Les Confidents - Part 2

Here I am, still hanging around the Palais-Royal...I told you I can't get enough of this work...!

I found myself skulking around the garden, lying in wait to nab my two other favourite chairs by artist Michel Goulet...

I adore this quote by Charles Baudelaire: "La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton âme..." (The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul".

Les Confidents by Michel Goulet in the Palais-Royal (c) Capturing Paris 2016

And this one is by Paul Eluard: "Liberte: Je suis ne pour te connaitre, pour te nommer" (I was born to know you, to name you...Liberty).

Bonne dimanche a tous...

Les Confidents in the Palais-Royal (c) Capturing Paris 2016

Tuileries garden

It's a measure of the extraordinary allure of Paris, I think, that even empty garden chairs around a fountain in a public garden are gorgeous.  Don't they look inviting?  

May you too get to kick back this weekend in a gorgeous place...

Empty chairs in the Tuileries Garden (c) Capturing Paris 2016

Enchantment at the Palais-Royal - Michel Goulet's Les Confidents

When my mind wanders from my desk in Sydney to my last holiday in Paris, more often than not, it wanders to the garden of the Palais-Royal and the enchantment of Quebec artist Michel Goulet’s Les Confidents - ten ‘chair poems’ bearing quotes or short verses by twenty poets, French and foreign.  

Michel Goulet's Les Confidents at the Palais-Royal (c) Capturing Paris

The more I learn about this work, the more I fall for it.  

The chairs have been fashioned into ‘love seats’ by Goulet using original chairs from the Palais-Royal garden dating from the 1920s.  

Welded together, the chairs looking they are dancing - they are cosy, inviting, playful and comfortable.  

A small bronze object is placed between each of the chairs - a brown paper bag, an apple, a pair of binoculars, a piece of bread.  And a solar powered sensor allows you to plug in your headset to hear full readings of the poems by actors from the Comedie Francaise.  

Like all those familiar green iron park chairs in Paris, these can be picked up and moved around the garden at will.  

I kept returning to the Palais-Royal so I could try out each of the chairs, listen to the readings and sit in different spots in the garden.

I'm going to make a tough call - the quote from Emily Dickinson is my favourite:

Michel Goulet's Les Confidents in the Palais-Royal (c) Capturing Paris 2016

Que c'est bon - d'être en vie!  Que c'est infini - d'être.

Emily Dickinson 

My translation is - "How good it is to live, how infinite it is to be".  

Whimsical, tender, engaging, addictive - I utterly adore this work.

A happy chap in the Tuileries garden

I don't know why this guy in the Tuileries garden makes me smile so much, but he does.  

He looks so damn pleased with himself, playing to his non existent audience...

Sculpture in the Tuileries garden (c) Capturing Paris 2016

Musee Rodin

“My dear friend, you should see this splendid building and the room I have lived in since this morning.  Its three bay windows have an amazing view of a neglected garden, where, from time to time, one can see innocent rabbits jumping through the trellis work, as in an ancient tapestry”.

So wrote poet Rainer Maria Rilke to artist Auguste Rodin from the Hotel Biron in August 1908.  

By late October, Rodin had also taken up residence there in four ground floor rooms.  From 1911, he’d taken occupancy of the whole house.

View of the former Hotel Biron (now the Musee Rodin) from the garden (c) Capturing Paris 2016

A few days before Christmas in 1916 (one year before Rodin’s death), France passed a law to establish Musée Rodin on the site and exhibit the works that Rodin had gifted to the state.  Musée Rodin opened to the public in August 1919 and listed as a historic monument in 1926.

As I wondered through the glorious sculpture garden on a Spring morning, it felt easy to imagine how the garden might have looked when Rilke sat looking and writing through his window.  

For me, the Musée Rodin is one of the most beautiful of Paris’ vast number of gorgeous places.  

Even the security guards at the museum - stuck in the open air under the shade of a temporary tent at the gates to the site - seem to me to be the most good humoured of all the museum workers in the city.