Another early morning to try to beat the museum crowds. This morning’s expedition was to the Musée de l’Orangerie. Located in the gardens outside the Louvre, this building was once – as its name implies – the place where the Tullieres Palace (which was burned down by the Commune in 1871) grew citrus fruits. We started on the lowest level and saw many of the same artists as yesterday – Renior, Cezane, VanGogh, Picasso – before realizing we should probably scurry upstairs to see the main attraction before the crowds grew too large!

Behold! Monet’s Water Lillies. These gigantic paintings (6.5 feet tall and nearly 300 feet long each!) take up two large oval rooms. A sign at the entrance says that Monet himself designed the rooms (including the natural skylights) to be a meditative space enjoyed in silence. So we did. And it was lovely 🙂

After the L’Orangerie, we were feeling a little hungry, so we stopped at a cute little Boulangerie for a couple of sandwiches, a cappuccino, and a piece of a galette. Ray’d been eyeing these “King Galettes” for a couple of days – they are these huge, expensive cakes enjoyed specifically for Epiphany. We grabbed just a small one and it was delicious! We enjoyed our treats in a nearby park and were tickled that it happened to be a park just outside a church whose steeples we’d seen at the end of our street at our Airbnb for days and couldn’t figure out what it was!

Refreshed, we headed over to the Rodin Museum. This former mansion (which I just learned was the original destination for the Water Lilies paintings we’d just seen!) is dedicated to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Inside the museum were a number of rooms looking at his process and showing early mockups and tests for final works. It was fascinating to see the process “in action” so to speak. There were a number of pieces where the didactics explained how one particular sculpture was adapted a bit to be turned into another one we would see later.

The outside of the museum was lovely as well and contained many full-size sculptures. We were even able to see a version of “The Gates of Hell” (inspired by Dante’s Inferno) which we should’ve been able to see at the Musee d’Orsay yesterday but it was out for cleaning.

After a rest at home for a bit, we ventured out once more. This time, to go SHOPPING! We had a couple of things we wanted to be sure to grab before we left the city, so tonight’s as good a time as any!

And that was pretty much our day! I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with how much we’ve been able to see, enjoy and do without wearing ourselves out too much – or contracting COVID, fingers crossed! We have to test tomorrow in order to make our flight home. We discovered that the pharmacy two doors down from our place does antigen testing with a quick turnaround, so fingers crossed that we test negative and that the test “works” for the airlines! More tomorrow!