Dateline France, 12 June 1990 Report 22 After Kaye and I returned from our trip to the southwest of France, my folks took off to visit friends in Holland. We decided to see some of the 50 or so museums we had not yet visited. We started at the Rodin Museum, which is located in house where Rodin used to work. We of course had seen his bronzes in other museums, and there were many of the same ones here, as well as studies for them and the original plaster models in some cases. What I didn't realize was that he worked in marble a lot, too. But, since you can't easily make multiple copies of a marble, most of those sculptures can only be seen at this museum. Many of the marbles had heads or figures half emerged from the stone, reminding us of Michealangelo's unfinished statues. There were also paintings and sculptures that belonged to Rodin, and also sculptures by his lover, Camille Claudel. (Malcolm Atkinson, who is visiting Altair from Scotland, is living in an apartment owned by the Claudel family. The main house, adjacent, has many of her statues in it.) She is getting more appreciated as an artist in her own right, partially because of recent movie about her life. The Rodin museum also has a nice garden with more sculptures, including the impressive "Gates of Hell". Nearby is the Invalides, with Napoleon's tomb and the Army museum. The Invalides was built for disabled soldiers, who before could only hope for a life of begging. It still houses war veterans. It was built, I think, by a tax on army wages. The tomb, and the chapel surrounding it, are done on a grand scale. Napoleon's sarcophagus contains six caskets nested inside, in various kinds of wood and metal. His son's tomb is in the same chapel, along with some other relatives and famous French generals, such as Field Marshall Foch. (Every town in France seems to have a Boulevard Foch. He was the supreme commander of the allies at the end of WWI. Carnot is another common street name, but I forget who he was.) There is a church connected to the chapel, but we couldn't go in because a cadet from a nearby military school was getting married. We got to see the bride and groom exit the church under an arch of swords of his classmates. The army museum is extensive; we didn't see it all. We saw the armor and the exhibits on the two world wars. Also, one hall had a history of standard firearms of the French army. What I thought was most interesting there were the inspectors' kits for checking that rifles met specifications at the various factories. It included templates for the stock as well as the barrel, instruments to calibrate the bore, and even a guide to check that the trigger guard had the right shape. I later saw a similar kit for pistols and one for sabers. The next day we headed back in for the Picasso museum. He's not my favorite modern artist, but the collection was arranged chronologically, and was effective in showing his abrupt shifts in style throughout his career. The museum is housed in a building that used to hold chemistry laboratories for some French technical high school. From the Picasso museum we walked over to the Place des Vosges, which is the oldest residential square in Paris. There is a park in the middle, and apartments on all sides, with arcades underneath. The arcades are a favorite place for street musicians. While we were there, there was an oboe duet, a violin and electric harp duo, and a "Dixieland band" all playing at once along different sides of the square. In one corner is the Victor Hugo museum, which was free, it being a Sunday afternoon. It had the usual memorabilia, plus drawings he'd done and rooms moved there from other places he lived. The best was a dining room in oriental style where he had designed some screens and the hearth himself.