When George Perec wrote La Vie: Mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual), he created a puzzle where a building represented a world, every piece a piece of it detailing the puzzle of life, through every chapter as the author saw fit. Discovering new things, new essential components of life, new possibilities, new fatalities. The book’s storyline is said to represent some of the variety of events in human life.
Whether I agree with such a probability, the Musée Carnavalet is the representation of the major eras in which Parisian events happened to live. Through aisles, architecture, classical gardens, found objects from the near past, or more unrecent one (for ie, the paleolithic era in the Orangerie), Paris is at its best and worst. A true and simplified rendition of its spirit evolving through time are shown through paintings, sculptures, ballrooms. Every atmosphere at the ready to make the visit worth its while. I was surprised by non-poor bedroom of Marcel Proust, or even a self-portrait of the Duchesse de Greffulhe, Proust’s muse for the Duchesse de Guermantes.
Another surprise is the relief scultpure of Henri the IVth under a pouring rain, a previous statue surmounting the main entrance at the Hotel de Ville, now sitting in one of the Museum’s squares. For Carnavalet is a duet of hotels and a mixture of old artefacts from the city acting as a living mausoleum of eras. In the gardens, the arch of Nazareth, previouly living on the island of the Cité, peeking from the columns, the statue of Victory, the original from the current on the column of Chatelet. Starting from the 16th century and so on, expansions by Mansart or locataire with the likes of Madame de Sevigne, make it a salon with modern women, taking in litterature and society subjects. The great minds of the centuries, like Voltaire, Diderot or Moliere have their portraits here, the intimity of the salons through classicism and neoclassicism furniture.
In the 19th century, a network of avenues rises up from old districts. Prominent (or protruding) buildings are destroyed and leave gaping wounds for the boulevards in Haussmann’s project. Like photographs, paintings are here to present a Paris from the past with incredible infrastructures and medieval slums all the same.
