I have not done a lot of work on my dissertation in the past week. But I have done some other productive things.

On Thursday night, Laura and I went over to B’s, where Laura practiced her upcoming conference paper for our working group. That was pretty fun. We drank too much wine, and then Laura and I decided to get late-night sandwiches while we were still in B’s neighborhood, because no such thing exists near our apartment. B and Sam had invited us to a hip-hop show that started at midnight, but we declined. (Oh, their band Blutschwester now has a myspace page. My favorite song of theirs is “Reise.”)

We went out to a bar near Odéon on Friday, with Britt and Elise. They were leaving on Saturday. They told us about some of the characters doing research in the Archives Nationales. One guy wears a tuxedo, and another guy dresses in nineteenth-century costume (presumably the period he researches?). I once saw a woman at the BnF who seemed to planning to go straight from there to a gala ball of some sort.

On Saturday night Laura and I went to the early showing of La Môme, a biopic about Edith Piaf. Apparently it’s going to be released in other countries as La Vie en rose. Which is kind of stupid, because there’s already a French movie called La Vie en rose, and if this movie is going to take its title from an Edith Piaf song, it should be called Non, je ne regrette rien. I’m glad I saw this movie, but it was not so great. It was way too long and repetitive, in a way that was very similar to De-lovely. There was all this jumping back and forth in time that didn’t seem necessary. There are so many characters (and they enter and exit so haphazardly) that it’s often hard to tell who’s who. The biggest problem is that the movie’s thesis is, “Edith Piaf channeled her suffering into her music.” And there’s one scene where they really beat you over the head with that thesis. Of course, this is exactly how French people think of Edith Piaf, so I don’t know if it would possible for a French director to do her biopic without having that as the thesis.

In our Textual Analysis class at UMass, we had to write a three-sentence summary of the action of each play we read. And we often used this exercise outside of class. My friend Danielle’s three sentences for Lorca’s Yerma were: “Yerma doesn’t have a baby. Yerma doesn’t have a baby. Yerma kills her husband.” My three sentences for this movie would be: “Edith Piaf suffers. Edith Piaf sings and suffers. Edith Piaf dies.” And there’s morphine addiction and triumph of the human spirit and a cameo by Gérard Dépardieu. Oh, and the actress who plays grown-up Edith Piaf (from 20 until her death at 48) is phenomenal. Anyway, if you decide to see this movie I would highly recommend reading a detailed biography of Edith Piaf before you go.

On Sunday Katie hosted a pancake brunch, and afterward I went to the Musée Carnavalet with K. and P. The Musée Carnavalet is my new favorite museum. It’s devoted to the cultural and intellectual history of Paris. And admission to the permanent collection is free. The first few rooms are devoted to shopkeepers’ signs from the 17^th-19^th Centuries. I was also very excited to see the famous portrait of Molière, and a painting of the Champs-Elysées before the Revolution (with no Place de la Concorde, or Arc de Triomphe, or neon lights, or department stores, or cars).

But now I must go work on my chapter, which I promised to send to the Early Modern Group this month. And this month is almost over.

It's funny how Paris keeps bringing back people from my past. This weekend I went out to dinner with my friend Angela from high school. She is living in Zurich, and came to Paris for Chinese New Year. She didn't go to the parade, though. She said the important thing is to have good food, and Paris has better food than Zurich.

Angela has a number of friends in Paris, so there were seven of us who went to a restaurant called Chez Paul, in the Bastille. (I had rabbit thighs stuffed with goat cheese and mint, followed by "tarte tatin" for dessert. All was very tasty.) After dinner we had planned to go to bars on rue de Lappe. The bouncer at one bar did not find us sufficiently cool to merit entry. Jason tried in vain to talk him into letting us in. My philosophy is that any bar that would deny me entry is not a bar I want to go to, so I was glad that the bouncer did not relent. We ended up at a place called "Wax," where we had one drink and then called it a night because we wanted to catch the Metro. But it was great to see Angela. She invited me to come visit her in Zurich, so I will have to find a long weekend to do that.

Today Laura and Thomas and I went to the Catacombs, which are very close to our apartment. It's shameful that we hadn't been there yet (almost as shameful as the fact that I haven't been to the Musee d'Orsay yet). But now we have. At the end of the eighteenth century, it was decided that some of the cemeteries of Paris needed to be emptied for reasons of public health. But where to put everyone's bones? The underground quarry near Montrouge, naturally. So the bones are stored in well-organized stacks, with decorative touches here and there. And there are quotes engraved on plaques, with appropriate sayings about death. I almost wonder if it wasn't designed by Martha Stewart's ancestors.

I found the descent down a really long spiral staircase, and then wandering down long hallways to be a little eerie. But once you get to the rooms with the bones, it's not so much creepy as solemn. Well, except that sometimes there are security guards sitting in dark corners, and it can be surprising to come across them. At the end, you go up 83 winding steps. There's a sign that suggests taking the stairs slowly, which is good advice.

I had forgotten about this picture that Jacob took when he was here. I'm standing in front of the movie poster in the Metro at Alesia. The roof curves up, which is why the angle is funny.


I also noticed the graffiti "Kari" on the poster. The French word for "graffiti artist" is "taggeur." Kari seems to be fairly prolific, as I have seen his/her work in a number of locations.

I spied an interesting comment last night on the Metro. Across three white Comedie-Francaise advertisements was written, "Sarko n'est pas le probleme. Il est le symptome." Meaning, "[Right wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy] is not the problem. He is the symptom."
Laura bought a universal remote control today, so now we can watch TV again. We are pretty excited about that.

Laura and I just got back from seeing the utterly fabulous film Moliere, directed by Laurent Tirard and starring Romain Duris. Now, obviously I am predisposed to enjoy any movie about Moliere, but Laura also really thought it was pretty great.

The premise of the movie is similar to Shakespeare in Love or Dick in that it is an imaginative rewriting of history. Moliere was imprisoned for his theatre company's debts to a candlemaker in 1644. His debt was paid by a bourgeois artisan named Leonard Aubry, apparently out of the goodness of his heart. (But eventually Moliere's father repaid Aubry.) The following year Moliere joined up with most of the same actors and toured in the provinces for about 13 years.

The first ten minutes are kind of a cheesy mess, with a lot of "Look, we're actors! At Versailles!" (in a theatre that wasn't built until nearly a hundred years later, which annoyed P. but didn't bother me so much). And Moliere wanders around all moody and says eight thousand times that he really wants to be a grand tragic actor.

But then we flash back "thirteen years earlier," and we see the imprisonment and the strange circumstances of Moliere's debt being paid. And this is where the film starts to be genius, because Moliere walks into a palimpsest of every play he ever wrote. The name of Moliere's benefactor is Monsieur Jourdain (the title character in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme). He asks Moliere to coach him in acting in two plays he has written in order to impress Celimene (the leading lady from The Misanthrope). All this must be kept a secret from M. Jourdain's wife, Elmire, so Moliere poses as a clergyman under the codename Tartuffe. Meanwhile, Jourdain's older daughter Agnes is tossing notes over the hedge to her suitor as if she were in The School for Wives, and there are subtler references to The Imaginary Invalid and The Learned Ladies in the tutelage of younger daughter Louison. The plot is basically The Bourgeois Gentleman, but dialogue and situations from other Moliere plays abound. There's a great scene with Moliere/Jourdan doing the Alceste/Oronte argument over Oronte's poem from The Misanthrope, and a delightful entrance into Celimene's salon that is straight out of Les Precieuses ridicules.

But I don't know if you need to get all of that to enjoy the movie. (It certainly helps, just as knowing more about the Watergate scandal might increase your enjoyment of Dick.) There is a very poignant aspect to the ending that is true in spirit to the mingling of comedy and tragedy in Moliere's life. And we get to see a lot of the scenes from earlier played out on stage by the troupe (in Marie-Antoinette's little theatre, with Philippe d'Orleans, the troupe's patron, front and center in the audience).

All of the acting is really fantastic. Romain Duris gives an acting lesson about how to act like a horse in which he explains that different horses have different personalities, and proceeds to show three very different possibilities, with total commitment. And everyone else has the difficult task of playing all of Moliere's types in one character. Ludivine Sagnier as Celimene and Laura Morante as Elmire are particularly delightful.

I really hope this movie comes out in the U.S. It would be a shame if it didn't. I'm going to have to find a way to own it on DVD someday. I think it would be a really useful teaching tool, at least for the way I teach.