In which we play Artist

Some miles outside Paris is an impossibly small town called Giverny.


Literally.

But in truth, it’s a beautiful village, almost magical. It feels rather like time has stopped, and in a sense, it has: this is where Monet spent his last years. This is where his famous lily pond is, where his beautifully unplanned garden still thrives, where his house remains much as it was during his life. Monica and I took a day and went to visit it.


This is one of the streets in that town. It looks like a fairy tale house, like maybe this is where Beauty and her family lived, with the careful stonework and crawling ivy.


This is the view just as you enter the gardens. It gives you a good sense of what the garden is like: overgrown and all muddled together, but cleanly laid out.


The first path we took. This family ahead of us were very cute: the little kid kept running around, and the two men watching him (his parents?) kept apologizing to people as he got in their way.



I had deleted one of these at first, but I couldn’t stick to it. I love both of them. This is a path up to the house which you are (clearly) not allowed to walk on.


Another little peek of the smooth green lawns between the tangled gardens.


A glimpse of a wing of the house over a riot of flowers that make it look like summer, instead of a rainy fall day.


A stone bench in the gardens, one of those things that kind of look like they grew up alongside all the flowers.


This little path was roped off. I don’t think I could’ve resisted following it, otherwise. I do love following curved roads, where you can’t quite see where you’re going but it’s so beautiful that you don’t care.


To get to the lily pond (called, enchantingly, “Les Nymphéas”), you take the stairs down into an overgrown underground brick tunnel, follow it for a short distance, and come upstairs to this view.


Something about this forest fascinates me. It’s not part of the gardens, but it’s not wild enough to be totally natural.


The rain was beginning to show just as I took this picture, and my flash went off for the first time, which is why this looks all eerie and mysterious. I thought it was pretty, at the time, but this looks very cool too, almost like a tributary of the Styx.


You cross through that little grove of bamboo from the last picture, and the path leads you to the lily pond. This is the first view we got of it.


It’s really raining now. Monica and I ran for the covered bridge (along with a handful of other tourists) when it started coming down, and this picture was taken from there.


The view on the other side. You can really see the rain in this one.



While we were waiting for the rain to calm a bit, Monica turned to me and said, “I want a picture of you with the rain!” She was angling me under the bridge with the rain and trees as a backdrop, but then it occurred to me to stand in the rain. I absolutely love this picture, between the vibrant green of the trees and my black coat and my red umbrella. (This is Monica’s picture, saved off of Facebook.)


Another angle of the pond, after the rain had gone. (It was a very quick shower.)


I imagine this trellis is beautiful in summer, all in bloom, much as the water lilies would be.


A rather blurred photo from behind what looks like a Japanese maple. I don’t know why this picture is so comparatively blurred: I didn’t do anything differently.


A close-up of one of the many bridges in the garden. Much to my disappointment, there was no great white bridge, made famous in one of Monet’s paintings, which, actually, I have a picture of from my visit to the Musee d’Orsay.


I was trying to get this to focus on the willow branches in the foreground, so the background would be prettily blurred. It didn’t work as I’d hoped, but I like it anyway.


This is what I miss about Providence: there are trees like this growing out of the sidewalk. There are no trees in Paris, not outside the gardens (fortunately, I get to walk through the Jardin de Luxembourg two days a week). At least, none of the big old ones like this.


The old boat in the smaller section of the pond, clearly there for effect. (I think I saw a hole in the bottom. I’m too tall for my own good, sometimes!)


When I was very little, I wanted to live in a house like this, with a backyard full of hens and maybe a goat. It is pretty, isn’t it?


The main house. I love how they’ve cleared off only enough ivy for you to see that yes, it’s pink. A very pretty house – inside, too, though we weren’t allowed to take pictures there, much to my disappointment. They had a great number of Monet reproductions (with references to where the originals are hanging) and old furniture, including those great old mattresses that are so rounded in the middle you can’t imagine how people stayed on them.

We left back through the pretty little town, and I couldn’t resist taking photos.


This is why I love the countryside. I don’t think I’d be happy living in a town like this: too easily bored. The suburbs are bad enough, coming home and realizing that everything closes at 10! But being in a big city like Paris makes me realize how I build up a kind of tension that really only gets released at great beauty. Walking home at night past the lit-up Notre Dame and across the Seine can, actually, do it, but this does it much better.


As we were walking through here, I just kept taking these huge deep breaths. The combination of the recent rain and the fall air and all the green around just made it so fresh.


This was the main street. Again, could never live here, but isn’t it lovely?


There was a little hut in front of this house advertising cider sales. We were incredibly disappointed that it wasn’t open, but we thought this house was adorable.


This is the ivy growing up the side of the entrance to the underground “crosswalk”. It’s not like that street was busy enough to need one, but I guess the massive numbers of tourists warranted it.


The rain started up again just as we got to the bus stop, which was in a kind of unpaved parking lot in a field. I took a picture of this because Monica was talking about how she’d wanted for years to “frolic in a field”, and lo! A field! But it was raining, and the bus was there, and we decided the hour-long train ride home would be more pleasant dry.

I’ll leave you with a series of close-ups of flowers I took throughout the gardens. It might’ve been better to spread them out, but I couldn’t think of a better way to fit them in, so here they are, all in a bunch.










And a very prettily-singing bird!

Next up: Nuit Blanche, or, Look, We Can Put Art Exhibits EVERYWHERE!

(Apologies if I sound a little old-fashioned and/or sentimental lately. I’ve been re-reading some Louisa May Alcott online (it's cheaper than the American library, or buying new books, and I like to have something fun and easy to read at night), and her writing style is starting to seep into mine. When I start preaching morality at you, I’ll know it’s time to stop, but I haven't said "cross as two sticks", yet, so all is well.)