At home with Victor Hugo

The morning (or, more accurately, the bus) took me to Étoile, where I had a lengthy stop during which to contemplate the Arc de Triomphe.

Meg and I met for church at St Michaels, off the Rue Faubourg St Honore, an Anglican church with services mostly in English, but also French and Tamil. It was very welcoming and quite small, with many of the regulars away for the summer. We got to meet a few people from all over, and got more accurate advice on our Bastille Day plans. More to the point, and slightly embarrassingly, I gleaned a couple of titbits of rural wisdom from the sermon that will help my thesis. It was also a really good service and sermon, which is perhaps the main point.

After the service we traced my steps back to the bus stop at which I alighted, in the process seeing a grumpy guard at the US or UK embassy (hard to tell which – they’re right next to each other) yelling at a tourist for taking a picture. Now, you may require permits in several totalitarian regimes, but France is still a free country as far as I know, and since they put the embassies on all the maps and you can’t see in, I don’t see what the problem is. I, for one, have a problem with such institutional flexing and posturing, but restrained myself from giving the man with the gun a good ticking off. I get uppity in the face of those self-possessed individuals of questionable authority.

One bus and a metro later, the seventeenth-century and sophisticated Place des Vosges was ours. Well, ours and some other people’s. Most of the time, I could imagine that putting the benches in the shade would be a good thing, but with a chilly breeze we wanted to be in the sun. We gave in and ate lunch in the shade, while talking about Oscar Wilde; perhaps an odd conversation topic when sitting in front of Victor Hugo’s house.

Oh, yes, Victor Hugo. I’m quite the fan, and this was our destination, his residence for sixteen eventful years and a preserved museum of his time there. It was a bit thin on personal info if you didn’t know much about the author (or we think it was; there was very little information available in English), but the draw of course was the chance to see where he lived. I wanted to see it, but didn’t have terribly high expectations. It’s a house, right? It’s not my preferred era of décor, and how personal could it really be?

Well, I was pleasantly surprised. The rooms were distinctive, and while they obviously belonged to their time period, they pointed more towards individual taste. There was a lot of red, which I liked, and particularly red patterns on white, like in this room.

I was a fan of much of his furniture, such as this patterned bookcase.

This chandelier so totally did not go with the décor, and I would have put it elsewhere, but Meg was right to draw my attention to it as something I would like.

There were many pictures of his family, most notably of his grandchildren, whom he spent the later part of his life tending to after his daughter’s death. This inspired him to write his collection of poetry entitled, “On Being a Grandfather”. There was also the “famous” portrait of VH, famous in the sense that it graces the “author” box on all the recent editions of his books.

I nearly squealed when I saw that his bedroom was deep red with dark wooden furniture, as this is my dream bedroom.

I absolutely loved his wooden furniture. Though, for the record, I think the rest of this room is hideous.

His Chinese room was an eccentric and overstuffed collection of oriental theme park goodness.

His view wasn’t too bad, either. I could live here.

Here’s Meg and Victor, deep in conversation. She’s asking why he needed to digress so much during Les Misérables, he’s explaining why it was essential to the scope of the novel and how it’s just nice to listen to his narrative voice.

As we looked around the last room, someone took a picture with flash, and as I was holding my camera (not remotely near my face, nor even switched on), one of the attendants told me not to take pictures with flash. I must have looked completely bemused as he repeated it more slowly, though still in French, when I began to catch on. And got to meet my target for this week, which was to work in each of my vocab phrases somehow in a conversation with a real French person. The problem with (and beauty of) this approach is that, towards the end of the week, I had to resort to starting random conversations with real French people, to varying results. In any case, this conversation (or argument) swept up the rest. Now, I am aware that I could just have nodded in an irritated manner and proceeded unhindered, but after La Defense I was feeling touchy and in need of vindication. And slightly ready to take on people who were liberally and inaccurately exercising their dubious authority.

In translation, then:

He: No flash!

Me: I don’t have flash on.

He: (sigh) No photos with flash!

Me: Flash is not on.

He: You may not take a photo with flash.

Me: I did not take a photo with flash.

He: You took a photo with that camera; it flashed!

Me: I did not just take a photo.

He: There was a camera flash!

Me: Well, it was not mine!

This proceeded for less than a minute in such a fashion, before he shrugged and said (in English), something like “it’s all the same”, the significance of which I don’t know. In any case, if only to have conversations centred on the phrase, “Pas flashe!”, I thoroughly recommend taking on Parisian museum attendants after this week of museum going; only in the Louvre were they remotely relaxed and un-threatening.

Down at Place de la Bastille, the concert was beginning. We descended into the metro and headed home, Meg with the Fireman’s Ball to come that evening.