On Saturday some New York friends of ours had tickets to the Monet expo at the Grand Palais at noon, and invited us along.
"Mo-naaaayy," groaned my family member. "Anyone but Monet!" I do feel as if we've been seeing all too much Monet lately. We had visited the Orangerie, where Monet's water lilies are enthroned in a cathedral-like, hushed space of reverence, and the Musée Marmottan, in the 16th arrondissement, where frankly I was a lot more interested in the medieval illuminations.
A college friend of mine who later became a famous artist used to say that there was a certain kind of girl he could tell even from a distance "just adored the impressionists." He said it with slight disdain and I am starting to know what he was talking about. Monet is great, fine! I'm just sick of him, is all! But I digress.
It was freezing cold and two of us had unwisely chosen to wear skirts. But the coupe-file [line-cutting] tickets were for noon, and we showed up at noon, so I thought, no worries! I'll soon be inside the warm Grand Palais. Wrong! Forty-five minutes later we were still standing outside watching our breath with everyone else who had noon tickets. "We have a lunch at one," said our friends, who do not understand French time or they would never have programmed two events in two hours. "Let's give the tickets away."
Looking around for the line of ticketless art-lovers, I asked a guard where it was. He was not the brightest bulb. "You want to give away your tickets and go stand in line over there?" he asked, puzzled. "There the wait is for three hours. Why would you do that?"
"Bienvenue en France!" said the Frenchman we had lunch with. "There are no consequences to anyone for keeping those ticket-buyers in the cold. That is why it happens." [It happens quite a lot, apparently. Here's another account.] He then told us how someone had rented his boat over the summer and crashed it into a rock at five in the morning, totalling the boat. "Of course we both have insurance," he said gloomily, "but the person who rented the boat is best friends with the chairman of the insurance company. Who knows if I will ever be reimbursed."
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