We caught the train to Paris, a 50 minute ride through the countryside, past countless villages and vast manicured fields of something or other. I loved peering into fenced back yards as we whizzed by to see their tidy vegetable gardens and garden tools. If I were on the other side of the house, I'd be peering into their lace curtained windows.
From the train station we took the Metro to the Musee Jacquemart-Andre, a gorgeous 19th century villa (I've taken the liberty of stealing a few pictures from their web site), to see the Mary Cassatt exhibit. We leaned into the paintings and pastels, as close as the guards would allow, to decipher her technique. We were familiar with quite a few paintings, but there were many we had never seen. The next day in the studio, several people tried utilizing her methods.
Before going to lunch at the Jacquemart-Andre Cafe, some of us posed at a little picture booth...
Lunch at the Jacquemart-Andre Cafe... I had their American Special in honor of Mary Cassatt (she was an American, born in Philadelphia but spent her formative art years studying under Degas in France); a club sandwich with a little barbecue sauce.
We split into two groups after the exhibit. I'm not quite sure what the others did (though I did see Christie and her husband, Stuart, returning with a gift bag from the Moulin Rouge), but my group hustled across town, passing over the tunnel where Princess Diana died, to catch an open-air tour boat on the Seine around Paris. We sat on the upper deck and quietly floated past the Eiffel Tower, the Musee D'Orsay, the Louvre, Notre Dame and other world-famous landmarks, passing under bridges while people above waved at us all along the way.
Then to the train station to catch our ride back to Fontaine-Fourches where dinner awaited us.
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