Paris continued

When I left the Musee D'Orsay I went for a wander through the Latin Quarter, and reflected on how for years - YEARS - I had assumed the 'Latin' in Latin Quarter was in the South American, Latino, sense, and not the Latin-speaking scholar sense, and on how that makes very little historical sense at all. Really glad I didn't incorporate that into any essays. Visited 'Shakespeare & Co', the legendary English-language bookshop on the banks of the Seine, which, were there to be supplies of bread to nibble on, I could happily have never left. Most of the upstairs level is lined floor-to-ceiling with books that aren't for sale, but that you are 'welcome to refer to' and it has lots of odd corners to sit in and read. Downstairs it is a mix of new and second-hand books, and In English! So very exciting! Paris is full of fabulous-looking bookshops that I kept going to bound into to explore, and then with a sudden slump of the shoulders, would recollect that the vast majority of its contents would be unintelligible to me.
Tearing myself away from my new papery friends, I crossed over to the middle of the Seine and had a wander around Notre Dame - beautiful, lovely glass, not much more to be said.
I headed off to find the nice-looking restaurant I had seen earlier, which of course I didn't, instead, I ambled in extravagantly incorrect directions for a really quite vast amount of time. I stumbled upon the College de France, and the Place de Michel Foucault, and as much as it would have been tempting to sit round questioning the power appropriated through naming such places and so on, plummeting blood sugars drove me on... and into an unfortunately bad chinese restaurant. Such a waste of what otherwise would have been excellent mushrooms.
The next day (that's right! we're only up to Wednesday!) I headed of to the Pompidou Centre. Aaaah. Happy days!
They are currently holding an exhibition of Rauschenberg's combines - Charlene, I saw Charlene!!! The tragedy of this exhibition was only being able to see it once. Having read about Rauschenberg and seen so much of this work in reproduction I was ecstatic to finally see it, and see so much of it. The exhibition was organised chronologically, showing the development of R's use of collage between (I think) 1954-1968. Excellent!
The rest of the Pompidou took most of the remainder of the day - swathes of 20th century art - I go to my happy place just thinking about it...
I headed back to the hostel via la fromagerie, la boulangerie et du vin rouge - c'etait tres bien.
Thursday: Musee du Picasso - I heard mixed reports about this, so my expectations weren't unduly inflated, and so I was most pleasantly elevated by my experience there. I could see how the collection itself could be disappointing if your expectation was that it would contain the most famous works, but I really liked the very early pieces that they have, and a lot of the drawings and his first collages, showing how Picasso constantly changed as an artist. Especially the collages, because they are fascinating to me. And some of the drawings were utterly brilliant. I really do resent him for being so damn good at everything. Freak.
Then I travelled to the other side of the town to the Dubuffet Fondation, via lunch, rain, and a most elaborate detour - I really do create some interesting voyages, based on only wanting to take one metro line between two places. It isn't very sane, but you do get to see quite a bit of Paris ('Nous tu detestons' say J & T (their french isn't very good I'm afraid)). The Fondation is located in Dubuffet's old house, and has a decent number of works from about the mid-70s into the 80s, which were good to see, but as I am mostly interested in his work from the 40s and 50s, not absolutely mindblowing. But for that I would have to travel to Switzerland. After that I performed more circuitous wandering, and found the Eiffel Tower, always makes it easier when what you are looking for is a large pointy landmark. Had a wander around it, got snappy with the lenses, considered climbing up, but based on it being cold at ground level, and me already being tired and misanthropic, I decided to sit down and have an icecream and do the crossword instead. And ponder how I am perhaps a little too in touch with my inner-nanna.