Friday, 6 October, Musée Carnavalet, l'Ambroisie, Chez Papa

Written 29 October 2023

Friday, we went to the Musée Carnavalet—the history of Paris through art. My Parisian friend Françoise took us there once years (decades!) ago, and I’ve wanted to go back for a long time, but it's been closed for renovations for years. Now it has finally reopened. It occupies (in addition to at least one other building) a house once occupied by Marie de Sévigné (if you ever took a course in 17th-century French literature, you no doubt had to read her collected letters), who knew everybody who was anybody in Paris in her day. For example, she actually knew D’Artagnan, from The Three Musketeers; did you know he was a real person? The house was called Carnavalet even in her time, and she referred to it affectionately as her little "Carnavalette."

The renovation is a masterpiece. The place is closed on Mondays, but otherwise the permanent collection is always free of charge (so no advance tickets, no timed entry; convenient free lockers inside for your coats). We walked our feet off touring maybe half of it. Much better than I remember, and I liked it even in the old days.

The collection covers a period starting with prehistory (e.g., flint arrowheads and a dugout canoe), but it doesn't take you through strictly chronologically. The first galleries you pass through display historic signboards for businesses ranging from locksmiths to taverns (lots of taverns) to cafés to furniture stores to hatters.

I was astonished to find the one at the right here reading "À la Tour d'Argent," ("At the [sign of the] Silver Tower"). It was for a wine merchant originally located on the Place de la Bastille. There's a restaurant there now, using that name, and I always thought it was trying to pose as the very famous restaurant of that name across the river from the Île Saint-Louis, but apparently it's just using the name that's been associated with that location since the 19th century.

The house has four interior courtyards (that I know of), and here are views of two of them from the museum's windows. While we were there, a larger one was being set up for an event of some kind, maybe a wedding.

This monumental staircase, togther with its trompe-l'oeil mural by Brunetti, was moved in its entirety to the museum from the Hôtel de Luynes, originally on the rue St. Dominique. Note that "hôtel" is used here to mean "impressive private residence" and not a place with rooms to rent.

At the right is a map showing the outlines of the various walls encompassing Paris as it expanded, starting with the tiny Gallo-Roman town in the 4th century AD and ending with the 19th century wall that was torn down and replaced with the city's current ring road. You can still see fragments of them here and there around town.

Written 30 October 2023

In a room full of scale models, I found these two. On the left is the Paris town hall (l'Hôtel de Ville) as it was in 1871, and on the right a modern view of just the façade. Note that the façade in the right-hand photo is end-on to the viewer, at the left, in the left-hand photo.

And here, at the left, is a scale (1:100) model of the Carnavalet. You can see the four courtyards, all different sizes and shapes. To the left of the main light-colored part is a darker-colored building, showing no detail, with a long narrow courtyard. That's a high school, the Lycée Victor Hugo. Behind it, too low to be visible in my photo, a gallery runs from the main museum to the (once again detailed and lighter-colored) Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, also part of the museum. I'm not sure we ever made it over there at all. We'll have to go back.

At the right is the monumental fireplace, original to the house, that just happened to be in the room full of models.

According to the label on this model, the "bateaux-mouches" have circulated on the Seine since the Universal Exposition of 1867. They first served to transport people actually going somewhere but then became popular as a means of sight-seeing because so many of the city's sights were right along the river. This model was in use about 1895.

Another "must-see" is this fold-out writing desk, the very one on which Madame de Sévigné wrote all those lively and informative letters!

At the right is a portrait of Charles Boucher d'Orsay, who was "Provost of Merchants" from 1700 to 1708. He's the one for whom the huge left-bank Gare d'Orsay train station (now the Musée d'Orsay) was named. I think he looks like a very interesting person.

I always thought of prehistoric man in France as being farther south, in the valley of the Dordogne, where Lascaux and the other cave paintings are concentrated, but at the left here, you can see a map of the principal mesolithic and neolithic sites just in the Île de France (the region surrounding Paris; modern Paris is the gray blob in the center), and as you can see, there are dozens of them.

And perhaps the museum's proudest possession is the dugout canoe shown at the right. Sorry about all the annoying reflections off the case; you can at least see the bow.

And the history just keeps piling up, layer on layer. We've been (on an earlier trip) to see the "Arènes de Lutèce," the Roman amphitheater over near the botanical gardens. Unfortunately, it can't be completely excavated and restored, because modern buildings were built over the top of a large part of it before its location was rediscovered.

A major reason we chose Friday to visit the Carnavalet was that our major restaurant for the day, l'Ambroisie, could only take us at lunch time, and the Carnavalet not only is just around the corner from it but is open all day for free, so we could go back after lunch if we wanted.

Still seriously overfed from all the tasting menus, we held ourselves to three courses, plus, of course, the amuse bouches, bread and butter, predessert, and three kinds of mignardises they insist on bringing.

The first amuse-bouche was, once again, hot crusty gougères; they've been very popular in Paris of late.

At the left is the bread service—a crusty round loaf cut into quarters, accompanied by a generous disk of delicious salty butter. It's fun to see the trends that run through Paris restaurants from year to year. The last couple of visits, gougères have been all the rage as amuse-bouches, and this year, suddenly everybody is serving little round crusty breads cut into quarters.

The actual first course was langoustine tails in a "feullantine" (sheets of sesame crisps) with sautéed spinach in a mild curry sauce.

My main course was another round of sweetbreads. The tiny cubes on top looked like cooked carrot from the braising mixture but were actually tiny, crispy croutons. Not quite as perfect as the ones at Violon d'Ingres but excellent nonetheless. Accompanied by a quenelle of braised spinach.

At the right are the cute little raviolis filled with ricotta and chopped fresh sage that came with them.

David chose breast of pigeon roasted with figs and beets and declared them excellent.

Then it was time for the predessert, a sorbet of three red fruits with a tiny johnny-jump-up pansy on each serving.

For dessert, I chose the "dacquoise praliné—two thin sheets of crisp meringue sandwiched with an almond-brittle cream. It was listed on the menu as coming with strawberries, but the waiter warned me that, in this season, they were serving it with plums instead. Fine with me.

David chose the bitter chocolate shortbread tart with Bourbon vanilla ice cream. He tried to bite into the black stick protruding from his ice cream, assuming it was chocolate, only to find it was half a Bourbon vanilla bean—rather too tough to chew.

At the right here is the assortment of mignardises. I ate one of the tiny madeleines and a couple of the cocoa-dusted almonds, but I wanted nothing to do with the raspberry tarts—the gold foil that chefs love to stick on thing like that does not play nicely with my silver-amalgam fillings.

Over dessert, the waiter volunteer to take our picture at the table.

When we'd finished, we pondered going back to the Carnavalet, where I felt we'd barely scratched the surface (and of that, I've documented only a small fraction here), but as has become normal for us, we decided just to head back to the hotel to rest up. We must be getting old. Again, we'll just have to come back.

Not being sure what the prospects for dinner would be in our neighborhood, I had made reservations for the evening at a bistro within walking distance of the hotel, and it was a terrific find.

Chez Papa is actually a chain, with a half dozen locations in and around Paris, but we liked it alot, but eating light there? Forget it.

They heard us speak English and brought us English menus, which I had a lot of trouble reconciling with the French menu I'd seen on line. Finally, I asked to see a French menu so that I could compare individual items, and that cleared up a lot. The French menu offered a lot of "pitchounes," which translates "little girls." Comparison revealed that it just meant "small portions" of various dishes— good to know for next time, except that they all seemed to come with a lot of other stuff added on.

But it did clarify "salmon filet with smoked duck fins," which turned out to be filet of salmon with smoked-duck scales, i.e., a layer of little disks of smoked duck on top.

We started with the charcuterie board for two, shown here at the left. Huge. Raw ham, two kinds of salami, a big chunk of country pâté, butter, pickles, lettuce and tomato, and lots of country bread.

I ordered a salad for my main course, and what I got is at the right. There's lettuce down there, at the bottom of the 8"-high bowl, delicious and perfectly dressed, but it's buried under strata of raw ham, about half a pound of garlic sautéed potatoes, almost the same amount of confit chicken gizzards, some tomato wedges, a confit duck wing the size of a chicken drumstick, and a dozen giant croutons (unfortunately break-you-teeth hard).

David ordered cassoulet and got a gallon of it, blisteringly hot but really, really good. They offered us a take-out box for the 3/5 of he couldn't eat, but we wistfully declined. No fridge, and a whole series of other restaurant reservations coming up.

At the right is dessert—pear tart entirely hidden under a blanket of hot chocolate sauce, boiling and bubbling around the edges. They definitely believe in serving their food hot.

And incidentally, we learned in the course of this meal why David had such a very difficult time making our hotel reservations for this trip. We were in Paris from Wednesday to Wednesday, and hotels had all kinds of vacancies for the beginning and end, but Friday and Saturday were booked solid everywhere! At Chez Papa on Friday evening, though, just as their main courses arrived, the couple next to us changed places at the table, so that he could see the TV over the bar. It turns out that the Rugby World Cup was played in France this year, at venues all over the country, starting with the early matches in September and culminating on 28 October. The evening we were at Chez Papa, France played Italy in Paris (and won). Fortunately, the rioting in the streets was mainly well north of us. But it also explained why we saw so many matching t-shirts on what looked like random tourists. The Irish, in bright green shirts, were particularly prominent.