Saturday, 16 June, Off to the fair and to Aveyron

Written 4 July 2018

On my way out to buy breakfast, I paused to take photos of our irregularly shaped courtyard. The image at the left is what you see when you emerge from the tunnel from the street into the courtyard. Our entryway (one of four) is the dark opening in the angle of the building, at the end of the concrete and asphalt strips I'm standing on. The windows on the right in the foreground are the "buanderie," where you take your trash. It houses perhaps a dozen big rolling bins much like the ones we use in Tallahassee, one with a white top for glass, several with yellow tops for other recyclables, and the rest with green tops for everything else. The same code that opens the outer street door opens the buanderie.

In the photo at the right, the window with the brown blind is not ours, nor is the one to the left of it, but the next four to the left of that are ours—from right to left, the kitchen, the dining area, and the two bedrooms. The bathroom window opens out the other side of the apartment into an airshaft. As I looked out the window on this morning, a mésonge charbonnière (Parus major, coal tit) was rummaging in one of the window boxes.

The long narrow extension of the courtyard (at the right in the first photo) is lined on both sides with potted plants, of an impressive variety of species: herbs, roses, oleander, figs, bamboo, jasmine, pittosporum, rhododendron, clematis, loquat, juniper, Norfolk Island pine, amaryllis, avocado, chestnut (I think), ivy, an oak (!), an olive tree, and a bunch of ornamentals I couldn't identify.

At the inner end, hidden until you were right on it, was this charming alcove. I don't know who's it is or who uses it—maybe whoever lives behind the blue door? Perhaps the super?

The photo at the right is looking back toward the tunnel and street door. The buanderie is at the left, and you can just see the slits of light beneath the street doors. The street doors are heavy, old, battered wood, set in metal frames. During business hours on weekdays, they stand open, metal frames and all, so trucks the size of the tunnel can come in to make delivers (a couple of businesses have doors on the courtyard). Nights and weekends, they're closed, and in response to the door code, just one side of the wooden door unlatches so that you can push it open and step over the six-inch iron frame. The walls of the tunnel are covered with bulletin boards, mail boxes, and one of the several resident directories.

Once David was up and ready, we set off for our project of the day, the Musée des Arts Forains in Bercy (right bank, southeast of the Gare de Lyon). I found back it before we left home, in a computer search for Paris museums we hadn't seen. It's a private collection, and in the past it's been open to the public only occasionally and by appointment only. Now it's open every day, but only for guided tours and still by appointment only. I accordingly booked ahead through the website and printed our tickets before leaving Tallahassee.

Bercy used to be the warehouse district—ast stone barns covered acres and acres of the riverside—but when Paris's central market moved to Rungis and distribution of other goods was reorganized, the warehouses were deemed superfluous, and developers set about demolishing them and putting up office and apartment buildings. Fortunately, Jack Lang (legendarily popular and effective Minister of Culture) made them stop and preserve a good-sized chunk of land and part of the warehouses. Today, it houses a major covered sports arena, a big park, the French national film library, an ultramodern shopping mall, and the remaining section of warehouses, the Pavillons de Bercy, part of which are occupied by the museum.

Because it's a little tricky to get to on the metro (hard to time, since you'd have to change twice), and we didn't want to risk arriving late, we got an Uber ride there.

The name translates Museum of Fair Arts. As a result, David was expecting a museum about 4H clubs, livestock judging, and baking competitions, but I (having seen the photos when I looked up the website) had figured out that a French fair was not like the county and state fairs of our American youth but more like a traveling carnival, perhaps just the midway section of an American state fair.

Here we are, waiting outside the main entrance for our 11:00 a.m. guided tour, together with the others who had signed up. These stone buildings are the old warehouses. The banner at the right shows the museum's name and logo.

Above our heads, to the left and right of the entrance were long rows of niches sheltering these charicature busts of famous people, whom I mostly didn't recognize. The museum's owner apparently managed to save and purchase part of a larger collection that was being scrapped. I didn't catch where or by whom.

I thought the guide called them "meurices," but when I look up the word I can't find any reference to charicatures or busts in any spelling I can come up with. Anybody out there know anything about them?

In the entryway, the large pink sign at the left repeated a bunch of the museum's hype in fancy lettering ("Five collections under one roof! Magic Mirror! Venecian salons! Chamber of marvels!" etc., etc.). Only when you looked very closely, as I did for the right-hand photo, do you notice that the lacy letters are made up of tiny dancers, harlequins, plants, musical instruments, animals, etc.

You can tell thjat these carousel horses, also in the entryway, are of French make, because (1) each has only a single lock of hair on its forehead, (2) their ears are turned to the side, (3) their tails are formed from the same material as the bodies, and (4) their heads are turned to the right. If they were German, they would have two locks on their foreheads, their ears would be turned to face forward, their tails would be made of real fiber, and their heads would be turned to the left. (French carousels turn counterclockwise, so the heads have to turn to the right to "face outward." German ones turn clockwise, so the heads have to be turned the other way.)

Once through the entryway, we found ourselves in what had been the alley between two rows of warehouses. Under our feet, you can see the railroad tracks that ran along it to facilitate loading and unloading. It was at this point that our guide (an animated young singer and poet moonlighting as a tour guide) told us that because they had more tours running that day than usual, they were going to show us extra stuff so as to spread the tours out more and that our hour-and-a-half tour would last two hours. Oookay, late lunch.

Written 5 July 2018

Carnival stuff was everywhere! Manequins dressed as harlequins sat in the trees. Colored light and flags were strung over head. Dangling from the roof in the entryway were the bottom halves of female manequins in hoop skirts.

Strolling along the alleyway, we passed both this carousel, set off to one side in its own little courtyard. The museum was advertising heavily its rental availability for parties, weddings, and other events, so I suspect that little courtyard, complete with working carousel, is available for, e.g., children's birthday parties.

We also passed the first charicature bust that I recognized. The one on the left is Louis de Funès, a French comic actor we're fans of. If you don't know his work, start with The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob; it's hysterical.

At the far end of the alleyway, we came to this structure, which the guide (that's him at the left) called a "magic mirror. It's a collapsible, round, wooden structure, with a rectangular entrance lobby that could travel from town to town with a carnival and be set up to become an instant bar and dance hall. Surprisingly, it's not the only one we've ever seen. Two years ago in Houston, we went to the winter festival at Bayou Bend, and they had brought one in (one of only two working specimens in North America) the occasion and used it as a refreshment stand.

The right-hand photo shows the interior. The "mirror" part comes in because the walls are lined with mirrors, which multiply the lights and visually expand the space. Note the "spider's web" pattern of the wooden dance floor.

Here's one of the wooden booths that line the walls; the mirrors at first glance might even be taken for windows.

At the right is an early version of a pinball game, called "toupi hollandaise" (Dutch top). A small metal top was wound with string and starts at the near end of the table. The player pulls the string through the hole you can see in the table edge to send the top spinning off across the table, rebounding from the metal pegs. The object is to get the top to go through the most distant wicket to ring the little bell that dangles there.

The place was also equipped with a gaily decorated player piano, which the guide demonstrated for us.

Next he took us inside the chamber of "naturalia," natural objects (mostly tree roots and driftwood) that happen to have grown into interesting or evocative shapes. Apparently such collections were a standard part of traveling carnivals. But the vast room also housed a huge number of nonnatural objects collected over the years. Unfortunately, the lighting was very low, so my photos didn't come out very well.

The object pictured at the left is supposed to look like that bottom of a life-size hot-air balloon. In place of a gondola is a miniature elephant (maybe three feet high at the shoulder), surmounted by a greenish-lit aquarium housing a model of a sort of Moorish castle and its grounds and in turn surmounted by a artifical flame purporting to heat the air for the balloon. The flame was a ragged cylinder of flame-colored silk, lit and blown from below to make it waver and dance like a real flame. Really pretty convincing.

At the right here is the manequin you can make out behind the ballon. She no doubt adorned the entranceway to some side show. Up in the rafters was a life-size fake gorilla holding a sequinned object in his hand. The guide assured us that the object was the actual belt worn by Josephine Baker for her famous banana dance. Bunches of bananas were hung from the belt, and her dance apparently caused them to move in fetching ways.

At the left here is a wooden model, a couple of feet high, illustrating the features of the hand that a palm reader examines. The guide was careful to point out that it is always the left hand; a palm reader who offers to examine your right hand must therefore be a charletan.

A display case contains dozens of miniatures of the Eiffel Tower, of many different sizes and and designs. The guide authoritatively informed us that the word "gadget" originated when a Monsieur Gadget (pronounced, of course, gad-JAY) was the first to think of making and selling little souvenir Eiffel Towers, though it turns out that Wikipedia isn't buying that story. He also told us that the Eiffel Tower is the most miniature-souvenired object in the world and that the Statue of Liberty comes in second. That, I could believe.

In the next room, we got our first hands-on chance. In this carnival booth, players sit at twelve stations across the front, and each is given a wooden ball. When the guide says go, the players roll their balls up the sloped wooden surfaces in front of them, trying to drop it through one of a dozen or so holes at the top end, color coded by difficulty. Behind the guide is a board with 12 wooden horses and jockeys, each with its own slot. Each time a ball drops through one of the easier holes, the corresponding horse advances by one "step"; a ball through the most difficult hold moves its horse forward three steps. The first horse to move all the way to the left rings a bell and wins the race. The game is apparently modeled on an actual race that took place in the 19th century.

Another room housed, in ornate niches high on the walls, wax figures from Madame Tussaud's collection. The wax museum is now part of the Musée Grévin, and some years ago, they decided to update and to get rid of some of their less popular historical figures. The fair-museum owner snapped them up, and, in addition, bought a large lot of historical costumes from the Comédie Francaise. Now the wax figures wear the costumes—very odd to see, among many others, Alexander Graham Bell wearing the clothing of a 17th century courtier.

While we were there, we were treated to exerpts from La Traviata sung by other figures, high in the rafters. The singers were audioanimatronic, and concealed spotlights directed our attention to each one as it was about to sing.

Here's one of several "orgues de Barbarie" on display. I find that term translated as "street organ" or "barrel organ," but these were not the sort of thing you see organ grinders playing. They're portable in the sense that they could be transported with travelling carnivals, but one person couldn't possibly life them. This is the smallest one we saw. I'm not sure of the difference between an orge de Barbarie and a calliope. The guide warned us it would be loud before he turned it on, and he was right!

At the right is a closer view of the set of pipes inside it.

The organ is played like a player piano by a wide folded cardboard strip with punched holes. The guide explained that these cardboard patterns were developed originally to control Jacquard looms and were only later adapted to musical uses.

At the right is a view behind the instrument. You can see the cardboard strip being fed in (it emerged from the other side and dropped in folds back into another box), and you can see the large drum it thumped from time to time. On the other side was a snare drum.

At this point, the guide gave a whole little lecture on the differences among clockwise and counterclockwise carousels and then asked uswhether we knew the difference between a "manège" (which I've been translating "carousel" and is the same as the word for "riding stable") and an "attraction"? I found the question baffling—isn't just about anything in a carnival an attraction, and isn't a carousel just one of them? Turns out I was fooled by the word "attraction," which in French fairground parlance means not "attraction" but "ride." The difference is that a carousel is any ride that turns in a circle and an attraction is any ride that doesn't (like a swing, train, bouncy castle, or slide).

Next, the group was divided in half, and half of us got to ride a traditional carousel while the others played another version of the ball-rolling game, this one commemorating a famous historical race in which Parisian café waiters had to run an 8-km course while carrying a tray bearing a bottle of wine and three brimming wine glasses. Note that the course they must run here is painted in black and white squares, like the tiles on the floor of so many Parisian cafés.

David and I rode the carousel first. I was wearing a skirt and therefore had to ride my horse sidesaddle. A mother who had about a three-year old girl with her tried to get the girl to ride with her on one of the benches, but the toddler howled until allowed to ride an animal, in this case a sheep. I sang along happily with the carousel's sound track, which was Edit Piaf's Tu me fais tourner la tête ("You make my head spin; you're my personal merry-go-round . . . ."). It was a French carousel, so of course, it turned counterclockwise.

When we switched and played the ball-rolling game, I found it much harder than the horse-race version, but because we got to play twice, David got the hang of it and actually won the second race.

At least one carnival game we walked but, but didn't play, was new enough to incorporate some Disney characters. Another, which the guide didn't talk about but is shown here at the right, consisted of a set of small "railroad tracks" starting at table height but then curving upward. On the tracks rested a small boat, maybe a foot long. As far as I could tell, the player would pull the boat backwards against resistance of some kind and try to get it to roll all the way up the track to ring a bell, sort of analogous to the one where you pound on something with a mallet to make a slider ring a bell at the top of a pole.

The final carousel we got to ride was of German make and was powered by the riders! It consisted of a circle of heavy-duty bicycles, with slotted screens to protect our feet and hands from the wheel's spokes. They were all tilted inward toward the center to help counteract the centrifugal force. The guide told us that a group of young Paris firemen—the famous "sapeurs et pompiers," renowned for their size, fitness, and athleticism—had recently gotten it up to 63 km/hr!

Here, at the left, the guide sits on one of the bikes as he gives us the detailed safety lecture. Take off anything loose that might fly away. No one under 16 on the bikes. If you lose the pedals, don't try to get them back because they'll bash you in the shins and calves; put your feet up on the wheel casing in front of you for the rest of the ride. And hold on.

David wouldn't go near it, but he held my hat and purse. I couldn't ride a bike because of my skirt, so I had to sit on a little bench, one of which was set behind each rider. At the right we're all loaded up and ready to take off. At the sound of the bell, the riders started pedalling, and they got up quite an impressive turn of speed! I hung on for dear life and had a ball! At the end, when the guide had slowly applied the brakes and brought us back to a standstill, he estimated that we'd gotten up to 17 or 18 km/hr.

All in all, a pretty great take-in. The tour was nominally only in French, but the guide spoke some English, so he provided a few quick translations for the 4 or 5 English speakers in the group, especially during the safety lecture. The museum's website is easy to find—just Google "musee des arts forains paris."

The tour did indeed last two hours, so we were definitely ready for lunch when it ended. I had scoped out restaurant possibilities in the neighborhood beforehand, and they ran heavily to burgers (including a Five Guys!) and other fast food, including a branch of the hilariously named chain "Indiana Tex Mex," which is not what we were looking for. But I did find the Auberge Aveyronnaise (the Aveyron Inn; Aveyron is the department where Millau and its famous viaduct are located), which promised aligot, one of the dishes I had hoped to have at least once. I was a little puzzled by the notation on their on-line menu that it was served "with garlic on request"—isn't garlic a major component of aligot, by definition?—but it definitely sounded promising.

When we got there, it was spinning-off-the-map busy, and definitely not with tourists. But the waitress said she'd try to find us room, and she did—a tiny table for two in a corner. After studying the menu, we decided to do the full three-course lunch and to have a light supper later. David started with a Salade Rouergue (Rouergue was a province of France that later became the department of Aveyron), which included (besides lettuce and tomatoes) lardons, walnuts, chunks of blue cheese, and slices of pear.

I jumped at the chance to start with bulots (small whelks), served cold with mayo. They had already been extracted from their shells, but their little round opercula were still attached. On the side was a delicious salad of thinly sliced cold cooked beets, carrots, and cheese.

For our main course, we both selected the simplest offering—aligot-saucisse (aligot with a hot cooked sausage). When asked whether we wanted garlic with that, I asked whether the aligot didn't already include garlic. Apparently not—they leave it out and serve it on the side—so she set a little jar of chopped garlic and a spoon on the table.

Aligot is a mixture of about 45% mashed potato, 45% young Tomme de Savoie cheese, and 10% chopped raw garlic, beaten together until seriously elastic. At the left is my plate, showing a large pool of aligot and its accompanying sausage. At the right is what my first forkful looked like. You can see David's stretching similarly in the background. Between our plates are the little white pot of mustard for the sausages and the glass jar full of chopped garlic, which turned out to be almost too mild for the purpose. (The experience did not win me away from the idea of putting the garlic directly into my aligot.)

Each time aligot was ordered, a cook came out of the kitchen with a copper saucepan in which it had been beaten and beat it up again for the entertainment of the diners, stretching it and letting it stream back into the pot before scooping up a large mass of it and, in one smooth move, dropping it onto the plate, deftly cutting it off against the rim with the spoon, and getting the spoon back into the pot without dribbling any anywhere. I tried to get a shot of the process, and these two are the best I could do, while he served a nearby table. He moved too fast for me to get a very good shot of the serving process.

It was delicious, but neither of us could finish all of the aligot. The folks at the neighboring table came back for seconds.

For dessert, David ordered "notre incontournable millefeuille," that is, "our Napoleon, which is a must." As you can see, it had little in common with the small, neat, square Napoleons you see in shop windows. Note also that it was in the shape of a long rectangle and that we're looking at it end on. David ate the whole thing. This was our first encounter with this strange, misshapen, oversize millefeuille, but not our last. Several other restaurants were offering them, and David ate several. It must be one of this year's trends. Another was garnishing dishes with Oxalis leaves, which I'd never seen before but was everywhere this year. Last time we were in France, the hot new garnish was tomato sprouts, which I didn't see a single one of this year.

My dessert was the special of the day, a strawberry Pavlova, and it was excellent. I too ate the whole thing. The meringue was of a different texture than I usually find (or make) in Pavlova. It was baked more quickly, so it was a little browned on the outside and still white on the inside, and although it was crispy, it wasn't hard. I'll have to try that.

While we ate, we observed why the restaurant was so crowded. In addition to the regulars, all of whom were crammed into the front room with us, they were serving a large group (maybe 100) of older guys in the back half of the room. A couple of them seemed to have their wives with them, but mostly, it was just guys, all in white shirts and jackets but without ties. Then I saw a couple of servers going by with trays of millefeuilles that they took upstairs, so there must be another room up there. Finally, as we were finishing our desserts, the folks upstairs finished and started to come down, and they came, and they came, and they came! The guys in the back of the room were just the tip of the iceberg. There must have been another 300 or 400 upstairs, all dressed very similarly, many with flat brief-case-sized bags, a few with carry-on sized rolling suitcases, none of them looking at cell phones. Almost all in late middle age and male, although half a dozen seemed younger. They were clearly well fed, convivial, and in a great mood. The party in the back of the room broke up as well, and those guys came out to join the others in their steady stream out the door.

When they were finally all gone, and only a few stragglers were still trickling down the stairs, I asked the waitress who the heck they were! A group of Aveyronnais guys come up to Paris for the weekend; this was their parting banquet, and they were headed home. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that last concept. Would we, for example, sign up for a weekend trip to New York, the finale of which was to be a meal in the best north Florida restaurant in the city? Very strange.

And then the pageant continued. Relays of waiters and waitresses started bringing down huge round trays of empty plates, and one guy made five trips, each time bringing down two cases of empty wine bottles, and he was going up for more as we left. It was truly spectacular.

After that big meal at lunch, we wended our way home by metro and did a load of laundry. The apartment didn't seem to have a drying rack (except for a rickety one hanging out the bathroom window into the air shaft), but it did have a battleship-class ironing board with two racks for hanging and folded items, so I set that up in the kitchen and hung and spread our laundry on that to dry. Worked fine.

In the evening, we went out for omelets at the Progres. Dessert was a two-tone chocolate mousse that was just too chocolate for me. The white phase turned out not to be white chocolate but some sort of rich foamy sauce that made it even heavier.

Across the street from our sidewalk table, above the door of a pharmacy, was this beautifully embellished space invader. I've never really understood the thing about urban space invaders, but you see them dotted all over Paris, sometimes made of tiles, others just painted on or otherwise crafted. They were thick on the ground in this neighborhood.

On the street corner near our table was this traffic light, which the waiters use as a menu rack. Note the two black-edged red menus tucked between the light and the pole . . .