Things we did in May

 There is a tennis ball hanging from the Eiffel Tower!  It is French Open time. 

 This guy is done riding a Velib' to work and is now riding even more interesting places.

 If you have talked to me in the last couple of years, I have probably mentioned the book The Hare with the Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal.  I mentioned the book before here and probably elsewhere on this blog.  I finally made it to the Ephrussi house over near Parc Monceau.

 Hôtel Ephrussi at 81 Rue Monceau

Excerpt from Hare with the Amber Eyes:

If this particular house in this particular streetscape seems a little stagey, it is because it is a staging of intent. These houses in Paris and Vienna were part of a family plan: the Ephrussi family was ‘doing a Rothschild’. Just as the Rothschilds had sent their sons and daughters out from Frankfurt at the start of the nineteenth century to colonise European capital cities, so the Abraham of my family, Charles Joachim Ephrussi, had masterminded this expansion from Odessa in the 1850s. A true patriarch, he had two sons from his first marriage, Ignace and Léon. And then when he remarried at fifty he had continued producing children: two more sons, Michel and Maurice, and two daughters, Thérèse and Marie. All of these six children were to be deployed as financiers or married into suitable Jewish dynasties....
By 1860 the family had become the greatest grain-exporters in the world. In Paris, James de Rothschild was known as the le Roi des Juifs, the King of the Jews. The Ephrussi were les Rois de Blé, the Kings of Grain. They were Jews with their own coat of arms: an ear of corn and a heraldic boat with three masts and full sails. Their motto, Quod honestum, unfurled below the ship: We are above reproach. You can trust us....

Another day, Pierre and I went to Musée Guimet to see the Clemenceau exhibit.  While we were there we wandered through the permanent exhibit.  Musée Guimet is France's Asian Museum and has an incredible collection. 

 1st century blown glass fish from Afghanistan!  These museums blow my mind!

  

At the top of the museum there was a temporary installation.