Le Declin de L'empire Americain

Not a whole lot going on at the moment. A few weeks ago I went to see a French play for the first time. While I enjoyed the overall experience, I was completely lost with the dialogue since all the actors spoke so quickly. They might as well have been speaking in Mandarin Chinese. Naturally, you miss out on part of the experience when you can't understand any of the jokes. C'est la vie! The play was titled 'Le Declin de L'empire Americain' (The decline of the American Empire). The play had nothing to do with politics or the United States for that matter.

Plot Synopsis:

Eight intellectual friends: four men and four women from the Université de Montréal department of history, prepare to have dinner together. The ensuing conversations range from their professional lives to politics, but primarily concern their sexual exploits. The group has plans to gather at a secluded house for dinner. While the four men prepare the food and reflect on their promiscuity, the four women discuss their own affairs at a nearby gym. At the dinner table, conflicts soon arise when Dominique reveals that she herself has had affairs with two of the men there -- one of whom is married to Louise (also present).

I haven't taken many photos recently since the weather has been quite cold, but here are a few. Most were taken near Le Musée Georges Pompidou.


The Golden Man


Statue #1 near Pompidou


Statue #2 near Pompidou


Statue #3 near Pompidou


Statue #4 near Pompidou


Place de la Replublique





A tempting restaurant


A flier from my first French protest to defend immigrants who were arrested and deported for not carrying proof of residence papers.

Chateau de Chantilly

Last weekend I went to visit the Chateau de Chantilly which is located about 40km north of Paris nestled on a property covering 7800 hectares. It was this gorgeous estate that dates back to the middle ages. The Château de Chantilly stands at the heart of a vast domain covering 7 800 hectares, located in one of the largest forests near Paris, Le Massif de Trois Forêts (Chantilly, Halatte and Ermonville forests).

The grand chateau housed a museum with manuscripts dating back to the middle ages and works by Raphael where the attention to detail was simply amazing. While walking around the vast property I thought it would be the perfect setting to film a James Bond movie, which as I found out afterwards, they did, 'A View to a Kill'. (not one of the better Bond films, but oh well)

Brief History of the Chateau:

The estate began in 1484 when Chantilly came into the possession of the Montmorency family. The first mansion (no longer extant, now replaced by the Grand Château) was built in 1528-31 for the Constable Anne de Montmorency, by Pierre Chambiges. The Petit Château was also built for him, around 1560, and probably by Jean Bullant. In 1632, after the death of Henri II, it passed to the Grand Condé who inherited it through his mother, a Montmorency.

Several interesting pieces of history are associated with the Château during the 1600s. Molière's famous play, Les Précieuses ridicules, there received its first performance in 1659. Madame de Sévigné relates in her memoirs that when Louis XIV visited in 1671, his maître d'hôtel committed suicide when he feared the fish would be served late.

The original mansion was ruined in the French Revolution. It was repaired in a modest way by the last Condé, but then entirely rebuilt in 1875-81 by Henri d'Orléans, duc d'Aumale (1822-97) to the designs of Honore Daumet. (The new chateau has met with mixed reviews. Boniface de Castellane summed up one line of thought: "What is today styled a marvel is one of the saddest specimens of the architecture of our era - one enters at the second stage and descends to the salons".) In the intervening years, the entire property had been confiscated from the Orléans family between the years 1853-1872, during which interval it was owned by Coutts, the English bank. In the end, the Duc d'Aumale bequeathed the property to the Institut de France upon his death in 1897.

The château's art gallery, the Musée Condé, houses one of the finest collections of historical paintings in France (after the Louvre), with special strength in French paintings and book illuminations of the 15th and 16th centuries. The library of the Petit Château contains over 700 manuscripts and 12,000 volumes, including a Gutenberg Bible and Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry

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Chateau de Chantilly


View of Building housing Horse stables


Some Guy


Cool Statue


Entrance to the maison





Le Maison entrance


Inner courtyard





View of Chapel inside the maison


Painted Ceiling


le Parc


View of the chateau from the park


another statue


Another angle of the maison








One last view of the chateau before leaving


The Last couple of pics were just thrown in for the hell of it.


Eiffel Tower in Autumn


This face just made me laugh


Trying a new angle


Enjoy!

Nissim de Camondo musée

Not much to say right now. It looks like I'll be attending Le Cordon Bleu for a culinary course beginning in January. I'm pretty psyched for that. Should be intense but rewarding. We'll see...

On a completely different note, here are some more pictures taken around Paris. The first set of pics is from the Nissim de Camondo musée in the 8th. The Camondo's were a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family who moved to France from Turkey in the 19th century. It was an amazing home in spectactular condition on the inside.

Brief history of the Camondo family:

The Jewish family originally came from Spain, where they fled from the Inquisition. They moved to Italy and then Turkey (Constantinople) where they became successful bankers. There were two brothers, Nissim and Abraham de Camondo, and they moved to Paris in the 1870s. They built houses, rather mansions, next to each other. The houses eventually fell into the hands of their sons. Isaac, Abraham's son, collected art from the Far East. He died childless and most of his collection was donated to the Louvre.

Nissim's son, Moise de Camondo, had an impressive and vast collection of French decorative arts of the second half of the eighteenth century. Nissim de Camondo (1892 - 1917) was a French banker. Named for his grandfather, he was born into the Camondo family of Paris, the son of the prominent and wealthy Jewish banker, Moïse de Camondo. As the only son of two children, Nissim de Camondo was expected to take over the family business. However, immediately upon the outbreak of World War I, he joined the Aéronautique Militaire, serving as a pilot.

Lieutenant Nissim de Camondo died in 1917 in aerial combat in Lorraine and was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris.

On his death in 1935, Moïse de Camondo bequeathed his Paris mansion at 63, rue de Monceau in Paris including its contents and a major collection of art to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs to be used to create the Musée Nissim de Camondo in his son's honor.

There are three floors to this large museum: the lower ground floor (the kitchens), upper ground floor (reception room -- all the formal rooms), and the first floor (the private apartments). The servants' dining room on the lower group floor indicates that the house had 12 people on staff, from gardeners to butlers.

The upper ground floor, where guests would visit, is filled with treasures. So many of the pieces have history.. silverware commissioned by Catherine the Great of Russia.... vases that once adorned the private chambers of Marie Antoinette at Versailles.

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maison de Camondo


Nissim de Camondo


Camondo Office


2nd floor hallway


Japanese piece near the staircase





Interesting carving


another angle


Salon


cool table




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Bois de Boulogne (16th arrondissement)


Decorative Balcony


Funky Statue that caught my eye


Church in the 8th

Parc de Bagatelle

Visited this beautiful garden inside Bois de Boulogne which is nice to do on a weekend.

Brief History of Bagatelle

In the eighteenth century the west part of the 'Bois de Boulogne', near Paris, was an area where several members of the royal family and their favourites used for the building of discreet and rural hideouts, away from the court.

In 1720 The Duke of Estree built the original house for his wife, this house was sold in 1772 to the Comte of Artois, brother of Louis XVI, The King of France. By 1860 the domain was surrounded by the public part of the 'Bois de Boulogne', a forest landscaped between 1853 and 1860 as a 'public promenade. After some difficult negotiations the City of Paris bought the domain in 1905.

Paris established a plan wanting to create a park as

- A witness of the history and styles of the garden history of the 18th and 19th centuries
- A garden to demonstrate gardening technics
- A garden to present the newly created plants.














These sculptures must be art nouveau














a wildcat...