A Musée de beaux Arts is what we would call an art gallery, and Nancy has a very good one which charges an admission price for those of a certain age which is even more modest than for those who have not yet attained the same lofty heights. It therefore would have been remiss of us not to have revisited it this morning.
During the course of that visit, one of us accidentally discovered a several adjacent upstairs floorboards that softly squeaked in what to his ears appeared to be the same key. Inspired by the “Nightingale Floors” we had trod in Japan last year, it was understandable that he would start to tap out an experimental beat with the three sympathetic yet barely audible notes. How was he to know that those notes were not particularly inaudible to anyone less audiologically challenged than he? In fact, it would seem that not only were they more than barely audible, but they echoed through the entire gallery sufficiently loudly to completely mortify the other of us who was busying herself by removing herself as quickly as possible from the source of the distraction, at the same chastising the distractor in hushed tones. A (smiling and thankfully unarmed) museum attendant arrived at about the same time to find the cause of the cacophony mid-tap, and though she was clearly reminded of Fred Astaire in full flight, the performance was brought to a rather sudden end.
We, having seen all we intended to see, (and one of us having heard enough as well) tootled off to find a bus to the Museum of History of Iron which has a permanent display of the work of Jean Prouvé the chap who designed our dining room table among other possibly more notable structures. That’s not all it offers however. Many will not know nor probably care that the Eiffel Tower had been fabricated in Lorraine from iron mined and shaped from and in the surrounding regions. Much of the museum’s display is devoted to exactly how that occurred and while that visit seemed like a logical way to round off our afternoon, by late afternoon, we were just a little museum overdosed. With our minds saturated by a surfeit of facts and colour and a preponderance of Eiffel Tower images we set off for home into the face of a tropical downpour, managing in the process to just as effectively saturate our bodies too.
2 comments
Always an enjoyable view and read; often superb in artistry and expression; but occasionally, beyond superlatives and to be consumed by the senses over and over again.
Thanks @Ian McCauley! I'll catch up shortly so you don't have to re-read the old stufff! :-)
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