I have spent the past two days looking at books at the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal. I am somewhat annoyed with myself that I didn't start doing this sooner. It's lots of fun. It reminds me of when I had a seminar at the Newberry Library. There are penciled in names of authors of dirty plays.

I discovered three new plays this week. They may or may not work their way into my dissertation. One is called La Chauve-Souris de Sentiment, and it's like a stupid dirty joke I learned in seventh grade. You know the one about the guy who decides to get a venereal disease and give it to his girlfriend as revenge for her cheating on him? Well, in this play it's the girlfriend's servant who volunteers to give him the venereal disease. But it's unclear whether she actually has one or not.

Another play is called Les Femmes a la mode, which sadly does not mean "Women with Ice Cream," but rather, "Stylish Women." It's ostensibly an adaptation of the seventeenth-century libertine dialogue L'Ecole des filles. I find it hard to believe that it was ever performed.

Those two plays are in an anthology of libertine plays that was published in 1773. The third play is called Le Danger des liaisons and seems like it would be related to the novel Dangerous Liaisons. There is a character who is similar to Madame de Merteuil, but far less sophisticated. And the young girl is named Cecile, but she's smarter and of better moral stock than Cecile de Volanges. The play was done in 1783, and Laclos' novel was published in 1784, so it may have been an influence. I'll have to ruminate on whether that is a useful argument for my dissertation or not.

V.S. is back in town for a week, to see Ariane Mnouchkine's new show on Sunday. I'm going to call tomorrow to see if they have tickets available for Sunday, because it would be quite an experience to go see the Theatre du Soleil with her.

This weekend I had a visit from Ken, a friend from the Western Massachusetts era of my life. He arrived on Saturday afternoon, which was the first really beautiful afternoon of the spring. Needless to say, every inch of green space in Paris was mobbed. We walked through a couple of small parks where there were some people playing ping-pong on the public outdoor ping-pong tables. Then we arrived at the Jardin du Luxembourg. Having only ever gone to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the winter, I have never seen it crowded. Even in French in Action videos, it's never really crowded. Not like it was on Saturday. Wow. Ben, dis-donc, il y avait du monde!

We went into the Saint-Sulpice church, which was very pretty. And we walked along the Seine, then through the Marais. We stopped for an aperitif on the terrace of a cafe near Chatelet, and then we had dinner on the rue du Pot de Fer (Iron Pot Street), near the rue Mouffetard. Our waiter apparently decided that we did not order correctly, and so he brought us the things we should have eaten. And we ate them, and they were delicious. After dinner, we met P. and K. for a drink at Dandy's. There was bonding over enjoyment of board games (I am so not surprised that Ken and Danielle are avid players of those weird European board games like Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride). So much so that we decided to have P. and K. over to play games on Sunday night.

On Sunday morning Ken and I got up and headed for the Louvre. But it was absurdly crowded. So I took him past the Comedie-Francaise and the Opera, and then we got a sandwich and walked along the number 8 Metro to the Musee Carnavalet. The Carnavalet was not crowded at all, and there were some different rooms open than when I went before. I could go back to the Carnavalet once a week, I think. It's a new experience every time, because they open and close rooms like that. At one point Ken stepped on a rug, and got yelled at by the security guard. And you know they could have put in a barrier to make sure no one stepped on the rug, but that's not how the Musee Carnavalet rolls. We also saw their French Revolution collection, which is much more curated than their other collections. And very impressive.

We had dinner at a Corsican restaurant near the Centre Pompidou. I had the Beef Carpaccio, which turned out to be thin slices of raw beef on a green salad with parmesan cheese and a vinaigrette dressing. It was really good. And we drank a nice bold Corsican wine.

Ken had wanted to go to a game store to buy a game, but none were open on Sunday. So we ended up playing Scrabble. We played three games. Katie smoked everyone in the first game, then P. ran away with the second game (on his second or third turn he got 81 points for Plaza on a triple word score with the Z on a triple letter score). The third game was really close, though.

Ken left Monday morning, and I went with P. to Pierre Frantz's seminar on eighteenth-century French theatre on Monday afternoon. "Seminaire" basically means "lecture" in France. This one was pretty great. I'm definitely going to continue to attend. I kind of wish I had started going in the fall.

I found out yesterday that I got a fellowship for the entire 2007-2008 academic year. Kudos for me!

So here is a picture of me with the large beer in Brugge. It was not very easy to drink, and toward the end it made loud glug-glug noises.

I spent the weekend in Belgium, with Julien. Brugge was very nice, but kind of a tourist trap. I had moules-frites (mussels with french fries) and an enormous-looking beer at a restaurant on the Market Square on Friday night. We walked around all day Saturday and saw the churches and architecture, and the Choco-Story Museum. I liked the "History of Chocolate" portion of the Choco-Story Museum. The demonstration of chocolate-making was given in Flemish, and the room was very crowded, so we didn't get much out of that except a tasty sample of chocolate. Afterward we took a long walk to the outskirts of the city to see some windmills, and then followed the river around to some other sites.

On Sunday we went to Ghent, which has a lovely picturesque canal. We ate lunch al fresco, even though it was a little cold. There were a lot of Belgian boy scouts and girl scouts running around, apparently engaged in a scavenger hunt. Sunday activities included two live animal markets, mainly selling birds and rabbits. And there was a neat flea market near one of the churches. I mostly looked at books, of which there were a few in French. There were also two large boxes of porn DVDs lying on the ground. One little girl started going through them and quickly decided she wasn't interested.

Julien had thought we could spend the whole day in Ghent, but there really wasn't very much to do. So I checked out the "Belgique-Luxembourg" Michelin Guide that I had borrowed from my landlord's bookshelf, and we decided to stop in Kortrijk on the way back to Paris. It was a tiny town, with a very interesting tower in its central square. There were some weird plaster sculptures in a park. It had rained, so the plaster was kind of disintegrating. We also saw a bus trying unsuccessfully to make a turn to cross a tiny bridge, and holding up traffic on both sides of the bridge. Then later we thought we saw the police arresting the bus driver.

It was a fun weekend, and a nice break. But I didn't feel like working yesterday, so I read a mystery novel I found downstairs. Well, actually I saw the mystery novel and decided I had to read it, as it's been ages since I read a mystery novel. It was Hard Time, by Sara Paretsky, which meant that it was set in Chicago. One of the first major events that happens to V.I. Warshawski in this novel occurs at the corner of Glenwood and Balmoral, which I used to pass all the time. So that was fun.