McDoings: There and Back Again, Part 2

Tuesday, October 24

The exhaustion of being up for nearly 24 hours took hold, and Kittie, David and I all agreed to set no alarm for the morning. We were going to sleep for as long as we needed.

Tuesday breakfast

I remember waking up at around 3:30 a.m., wandering out to the toilet (which is situated just inside the front door), stumbling back to bed, then waking up about seven hours later.

Kittie and David were still out cold, so I got dressed, hobbled down all four flights of stairs and took a walk to the corner grocery store to work out the kinks and get coffee. The one thing we hadn't found at the health food store was coffee. I know Kittie and David love their coffee. I got a small bag of it, some lemon tart cookies and went back to the apartment.

Consciousness and blood sugar levels return.

Kittie got up and, with some invention, made coffee. It seems the bag of coffee I purchased was actually a bag of pre-measured packets, so she had to disassemble them, retrieve the coffee grounds and make the coffee. The coffee maker was horribly slow, taking about 20 minutes to generate a full pot.

When David awakened (Kittie threatened to Walnetto walk him*, I said let him sleep), Kittie made a lovely meal of free-range eggs, transubstantiated ham and organic bread and butter. It was very good in a bland, healthy kind of way.

Statue of Liberty model at Arts et Métiers

Our museum of the day was le Musée Arts et Métiers, which translates as Arts & Crafts, but the museum was more about invention and innovation in France, from the mid-1400s until today. And it was just a couple blocks up the street.

David, being mechanically inclined, loved this museum. I also found it fascinating, but at a slightly faster pace.

The museum is broken up into over a half dozen areas like construction & materials, scientific instruments, communications, energy, mechanical energy and transport. As is my typical habit in new museums, we did the whole thing backwards.

A thing with wheels captivates David.

This meant we started with transportation; a hall with full-sized and models specimen of the earliest of technologies (like the first steam-powered French automobile).

Most of the signage in this museum was in French only but, thanks to Rosetta Stone, I could make out enough of the text to understand what I was looking at. David did not have this problem. A friend to all machines and things with cogs and wheels, he seemed to be in his element.

Captain Nemo to the max!

At the end of the hall are the stairs to the next level. Tucked into a corner near these stairs is a most-astounding item, something that seems like a fever dream of Jules Verne. A fully functional diving suit, one of the first ever manufactured.

Airplane titled "Air No. 3"

The stairwell sports some stone benches, so I sat back and waited for David and Kittie to catch up. In general, I did need breaks when walking in museums. If allowed to stretch and walk, I felt much better. Standing and waiting drove me nuts and could provoke a twinge of muscle at any time.

Theatre du automate: antique wind-up toys

So I sat and stretched and stared up through the stairwell to another one-of-a-kind object, the third iteration of one of France's first powered airplanes, this one powered by steam. I checked carefully on the placard that went with the airplane, but it didn't specifically say whether the thing ever flew or not.

No satellite dish; a solar oven from the 1800s

Kittie and David catch up. I stand up, the back is fine. Stretch and walk. We climb the stairs and are treated by a new extensive hall with vintage and antiquated gears and cams and bearings of every kind, wheels and screws thought out and rethought. Some are so bizarre they don't look like they should mesh, much less turn. Some seem like abstract exercises in topology. Yet all these permutations lead to contraptions and inventions that hail the industrial era as a golden epoch of ingenuity.

Generator, ca. 1600

And directly in the middle of this hall was the Theatre de automate, a collection of mechanical toys and moving machines of amusement. There are a few very large and impressive toys: clowns, a magician, a beautiful lady, but none photograph well.

Telephone exchange

Once again, I am ahead of Kittie and David. I am entering the Energy section. There is a solar oven from the 1800s, and a device for generating electrostatic energy, designed and built in the 1600s. There are quite a few eye-opening things on display. The nuts and bolts of energy generation and distribution laid out in historical fashion.

Early fax machine

From the world of energy, I move into the next hall, which is communications. Here I am at home. The majority of the displays are iterations of the telephone, telegraph, phonograph, photography, cinematography. You get a real sense of how things exploded in the late 19th, early 20th century. Not just new ideas, but new applications that provided economic incentive to continue the inventing and innovating, driving progress just as doggedly as 21st century communications are driving ours at this very moment.

Phototypesetter: the green box on the left processed film;
the one on the right was just for electronic components.

The one last thing that I think is worth mentioning is a version of the first French photoelectronic typesetter. It's sitting across from a model of Telstar, so you can get an idea of how huge this machine is. All that to generate type. And the weirdest thing is: I know how to run that machine!

Beyond that was a section dealing with construction techniques and architectural models dating back to the 1400s. I was just finishing up with this section and looking toward the final hall with scientific instruments, but I realized the museum was going to be closing soon.

Model of construction of Lady Liberty

Kittie, David and I met back outside the museum. We were looking for a place for dinner. We stopped by the Café Arts et Métier, but it looked like they were only serving drinks outside, so we went around, trying to find a place I had read about online. We never did find it, but ended up back at the Café Arts et Métier, so we headed inside to eat.

Kittie had a list of French food she wanted to get while in Paris. One was escargot, another was foie gras, and a fourth was French onion soup. Here at the café, we started with a very friendly waiter who handed us off to a very friendly waitress. It was a really great experience.

Our spread at Café Arts et Métier

Kittie ordered the escargot and foie gras (canard) and a cheese plate. That was her starters. I can't recall what her main dish was, but David had veal Milanese (which looked good) and I had a crocque monsieur.

One of the things I enjoy most about dining out in Paris is that the people don't lean on you to vacate your table so they can turn it over. If you are ordered or have ordered, you can take as long as you like, linger over drinks, have another coffee, and it's no problem.

So after a leisurely dinner, we headed back to the apartment. Kittie and David made several excursions in the evenings when I was recuperating on my own. I'm glad that they didn't feel compelled to baby-sit me and my back, but to go out and enjoy their time in Paris. At this point in the vacation, I suspect they're having a really good time.