Yesterday I hopped the Metro (only one more day to get my money’s worth out of my February Metro/bus pass) to the Jacquemart-Andre Museum, a beautiful mansion belonging to a wealthy, art-loving 19th-century couple (Edouard Andre and his wife, Nelie Jacquemart) located on boulevard Haussman. This area near Parc Monceau is bordered by the grand 
boulevards so the home was very opulent. I had to giggle when the guy on the audio guide (included in the 9,50 euro admission price) said that the tour would show us the lifestyle of the “typical upper middle-class” and how they lived. The house looked to me like it belonged to a member of the upper UPPER-class!Monsieur Andre, a popular Parisian bachelor and sole heir to a banking fortune, built the house between 1869 and 1875; it was inaugurated with a sumptuous ball in 1876. He met Nelie Jacquemart in 1872 when he commissioned her to paint his portrait. No one knows if this is when they hit it off but they married nine years later. They spent time together collecting art from their travels (at least six months each year)—they especially loved Italy—and decorating the mansion. Their annual art acquisition budget was 500,000 francs (76,225 in
today’s euros)—double the Louvre’s budget at that time. So they would not bid up collections to the detriment of the Louvre, for example, plus they made many donations of art to the Paris museums. After Edouard died, Nelie continued to travel—even to the Orient—to collect more pieces; shipments of art were still arriving at the house seven months after she died.The paintings (Rembrandt, Botticelli, Fragonard, etc.), busts, tapestries, statues, and artwork are too numerous to mention but a couple things really impressed me about the museum. A double staircase wrapped around above a beautiful winter garden with large windows and a skylight two stories above leading to the open foyer which overlooked the music room on the first floor. This was built at the end of the house rather than in the middle as was more common in those days; but the materials (marble, bronze, and wrought iron with mirrors) were very vogue in the second Empire Period. It is suspected that the fancy staircases were revenge by the designer and architect, Henri Parent, who lost out to Charles Garnier, the architect chosen to design the Opera Garnier (which has its own beautiful staircase) (see 2/20/07 blog). I wasn't supposed to take pictures in here but I couldn't resist sneaking one of the winter garden (pa-leez!) with a hint of the double staircases.
The other impressive feature (to me) was that the paneling next to the entry doors in two of the rooms could drop into the basement or wrap around the side walls. This allowed three rooms to be opened into one huge and grand ballroom. The enlarged room could then easily hold 1,000 people comfortably with plenty of additional side rooms for private conversations, smoking, etc.Nelie and Edouard never had any children. So when Nelie died, as her husband wanted, she bequeathed the mansion and its collections to the Institut de France, which opened to the public in 1913.
After I grabbed a bus and then another Metro (it was sprinkling and windy and again, I want to get my money’s worth…) to go home for lunch, I headed to the Picasso Museum—only to remember that it’s Tuesday and the Picasso is closed on Tuesdays. So I continued with another 
portion of the Marais walk and ended up at the Memorial of the Shoah (Hebrew word for “catastrophe”), a Holocaust Memorial. This memorial was opened to the public in 2005 and is the largest research, information and awareness-raising center in Europe on the history of the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War.The memorial includes a wall of names and birth years of the 76,000 Jewish men, women and children deported from France between 1942 and 1944. It even includes the police files kept on the French Jews between 1940 and 1944. There’s a Wall of the Righteous with engraved names of people who rescued Jews in France during that time. The Crypt includes a very large black marble Star of
David representing the six million Jews who perished in WWII and who have no graves. In the center of the star lie the ashes of victims collected from various Nazi death camps as well as from the Warsaw ghetto. Soil from Israel was actually brought to this memorial so the ashes would be laid to rest in it.All of these Jewish memorials are very touching and I immediately tear up every time I enter one. This one was no exception.
On my way back to the apartment, I stopped at Saint-Gervais Saint-Protais, a gothic church built with the first classical façade in Paris in 1620. Since 1975 this church, allocated to the Fraternity of 
Monastic Communities of Jerusalem, is where the monks and nuns of Jerusalem pray the daily liturgy. Very fitting since it sits in the Jewish Quarter, the Marais. It also has the oldest organs in Paris and appropriately, shortly after I entered, someone began practicing. An additional treat for me as I watched a nun praying at the alter and wandered around the beautiful church with its little individual benches for worshippers.
