Entre Les Murs

French Arts and Trades

We introduced B to our Sunday morning market ritual today.  The market is less crowded with Paris packing up for summer holidays.  Many of the merchants were absent, their spaces often taken over by cheap clothing, umbrella and tchotchke vendors.  B explored the remainder and to Janet's horror, evinced some interest in the triperie (purveyors of liver, kidneys, brains, tripe, head cheese, etc.).


There's a museum for everyone in Paris and in the afternoon we took our guest, an engineer, to the Museum of Arts and Trades (Musée Des Arts et Metiers).  There was a fascinating array of measuring devices, structures, machines, and models of machines, ancient, antique and modern.  The collection included everything from medieval sextants to a Cray computer.  (Janet spotted a pair of Curta calculators, a mechanical device that William Gibson fans will remember from his latest novel, Pattern Recognition.)

The interpretive signs and displays are very good where they exist, but I could have used a few more. It didn't feel quite cohesive, in that I often didn't see the development from one thing to the next, or the significance of the article.  The arrangement, while broadly chronological, sometimes seemed a little haphazard. Partly this is owing to my weak French, since, while there was a great deal in English, not everything was translated, so I'm sure it would have been much clearer if I'd made more effort with the French texts.  And perhaps I was expecting a science centre.  Paris has one of those, but this isn't it: this is a traditional museum.

posted 23.7.06