When all the work was finished — the marble topper installed on the lower part of the breakfront; the pictures overhead re-hung (a business that necessitated the re-hanging of other pictures elsewhere) — I cast about for a new place for tools. I’m speaking of tools in the Daddy sense here, not in the virtual sense that comprises PhotoShop. Screwdrivers, hammers, the electric drill and its accoutrements, tape measures, pliers, wrenches (including sets of Allen wrenches both metric and inched). I settled on a drawer in what we call the pyramid. The pyramid is a chest of drawers, as tall as my chest, that tapers in width from a base of just under a yard to a top of just over a foot. There are lots of drawers in various sizes. The drawer that I chose for the tools that I wanted to keep handy (drill not included) was currently stuffed with linen towels. These, I decided at once, would be better stored somewhere else, and the sturdy drawer would itself serve as a handy toolbox.

All of a sudden, piles of linen towels were all over the dining table, in stacks of no particular coherence. I began to arrange them, starting with the Primrose Bordier tea towels for Le Jacquard Français. (I can’t find any images; Bordier died in 1996 and LJF has moved on.) I decided to unfold one or two for Quatorze — it was Quatorze, of course, who had done all the work. My favorite Bordier is a black and white image of the garden of the Palais Royal, but I also have a very strange towel that features the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Tour Eiffel, and the Louvre — all wildly out of scale, so that the towers of Notre Dame loom over the spire of the Tour Eiffel, and the Louvre looks so pathetically low-slung that Quatorze sighed with regret. He had mistaken it for the Tuileries, which, as you know, was burned to a hulk during the Events of 1871, and subsequently demolished. Oh, no, I said, that’s the Louvre, the front of the Sully wing. I do have a photograph of the Tuileries, I added, as I reached down Peter and Oriel Caine’s Paris Then and Now (Thunder Bay, 2003), a feast of views old and new, on facing pages, of the most beautiful city on earth. I still remember holding the book for the first time and losing my breath when, leafing through it, I came on the view looking west from the front of the Sully. Today, it’s of course dominated by I M Pei’s celebrated pyramid — the principal entrance to the museum. In the anonymous photograph from 1860 on the opposite page, however, the vista is blocked by the inner wall of the Tuileries Palace — which, by the way, is where monarchs have actually lived ever since Catherine de Médicis built it in the Sixteenth Century. (The Louvre, formerly a castle out of DisneyWorld, has always been a place of business.) Now, anyway, it was the turn of Quatorze’s jaw to drop.

And so the work portion of the afternoon folded into the show-and-tell part. I don’t know how long it will take for Quatorze and me to share everything that we have in the way of items of interest to anyone who likes Paris and the Eighteenth Century, but I do hope that we never altogether run out of fresh treasures. And who knows? Maybe we’ll live to see the old palace rebuilt. That would be great fun.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Gotham Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.