20TH OF APRIL 1990, THOUGHT I'D WRITE AND SAY HELLO

Enjoying History and Art in The Louvre Museum

Today, The Jones have visited The Louvre. They were driving from the hotel to the museum by their own van while they read two more chapters of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The Grandma has prepared a funny day in one of the most beautiful and important museums of the world. 

They have travelled across the History, from Egypt to the Middle Age, the Catharism, the Jews and the Templar Knights; from the 17th century with William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes to the Contemporary Age with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Dan Brown and the Masons with their concept of utopic cities. All stories have had a linchpin: the transmission of culture from generation to generation, expressed in the most part of these cases with the symbol of a Rose.

The family has visited every room of the museum paying a lot of attention to every explanation of the local guides and asking as questions as they have wanted.

They are preparing a great party for next April, 23, the festivity of Saint George and they have bought different books to give to the rest of the family.

The Grandma has chosen a classic one: Marcel Proust's In the search of lost time, one of the best French authors of the universal literature. It's normal. She's 94 and she is thinking about the long past and the short future. 

Today, April 20, she has been a little nostalgic remembering a beautiful letter that an old friend from Valladolid wrote her in a day like today, twenty eight years ago, a letter that she never answered...

More information: In the search of lost time by Marcel Proust

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, 
they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. 

Marcel Proust

The Louvre is the world's largest art museum and a historic monument in Paris. A central landmark of the city, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement. Approximately 38,000 objects from prehistory to the 21st century are exhibited over an area of 72,735 square metres. In 2017, the Louvre was the world's most visited art museum, receiving 8.1 million visitors.

More information: Le Louvre Museum

The Jones are seeing the Mona Lisa in The Louvre

The museum is housed in the Louvre Palace, originally built as a fortress in the late 12th to 13th century under Philip II. Remnants of the fortress are visible in the basement of the museum. 

Due to the urban expansion of the city, the fortress eventually lost its defensive function and, in 1546, was converted by Francis I into the main residence of the French Kings. The building was extended many times to form the present Louvre Palace. 

In 1682, Louis XIV chose the Palace of Versailles for his household, leaving the Louvre primarily as a place to display the royal collection, including, from 1692, a collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture.

 More information: Memolition

In 1692, the building was occupied by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which in 1699 held the first of a series of salons. The Académie remained at the Louvre for 100 years. During the French Revolution, the National Assembly decreed that the Louvre should be used as a museum to display the nation's masterpieces.

The Jones are visiting the Louvre

The museum opened on 10 August 1793 with an exhibition of 537 paintings, the majority of the works being royal and confiscated church property. Because of structural problems with the building, the museum was closed in 1796 until 1801.

The collection was increased under Napoleon and the museum was renamed Musée Napoléon, but after Napoleon's abdication many works seized by his armies were returned to their original owners. The collection was further increased during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, and during the Second French Empire the museum gained 20,000 pieces. Holdings have grown steadily through donations and bequests since the Third Republic.

More information: Golden Number

The collection is divided among eight curatorial departments: Egyptian Antiquities; Near Eastern Antiquities; Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities; Islamic Art; Sculpture; Decorative Arts; Paintings; Prints and Drawings.

Claudia Jones, Owlie and The Nike of Samothrace

It has been claimed by some that the glass panes in the Louvre Pyramid number exactly 666, the number of the beast, often associated with Satan.  

Dominique Stezepfandt's book François Mitterrand, Grand Architecte de l'Univers declares that the pyramid is dedicated to a power described as the Beast in the Book of Revelation. The entire structure is based on the number 6. Elementary arithmetic allows for easy counting of the panes: each of the three sides of the pyramid without an entrance has 18 triangular panes and 17 rows of rhombic ones arranged in a triangle, thus giving 673 panes total.

More information: History

The myth resurfaced in 2003, when Dan Brown incorporated it in his best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, in which the protagonist reflects that this pyramid, at President Mitterrand's explicit demand, had been constructed of exactly 666 panes of glass -a bizarre request that had always been a hot topic among conspiracy buffs who claimed 666 was the number of Satan. However, the French President never specified the number of panes to be used in the pyramid.

Download The Louvre Guide by The Grandma

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, 

but in having new eyes. 

Marcel Proust

SAMUEL BECKETT: THE IRISH AVANT-GARDE WRITER

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. He is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd.

Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature for his writing, which, in new forms for the novel and drama, in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation. He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.

More information: Samuel Beckett Resources

The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927. He was elected a Scholar in Modern Languages in 1926. Beckett graduated with a BA and, after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast. 

Beckett travelled in Europe. He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, his critical study of French author Marcel Proust. Two years later, following his father's death, he began two years' treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Bion. Aspects of it became evident in Beckett's later works, such as Watt and Waiting for Godot. 

Samuel Beckett and his wife, Suzanne

In 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it, it was eventually published in 1992. Despite his inability to get it published, however, the novel served as a source for many of Beckett's early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks.

After the Nazi German occupation of France in 1940, Beckett joined the French Resistance, in which he worked as a courier. On several occasions over the next two years he was nearly caught by the Gestapo. In August 1942, his unit was betrayed and he fled south on foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse département in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. There he continued to assist the Resistance by storing armaments in the back yard of his home. During the two years that Beckett stayed in Roussillon he indirectly helped the Catalan Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse mountains, though he rarely spoke about his wartime work in later life.

More information: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy

Beckett was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government for his efforts in fighting the German occupation; to the end of his life, however, Beckett would refer to his work with the French Resistance as "boy scout stuff". While in hiding in Roussillon, he continued work on the novel Watt, begun in 1941 and completed in 1945, but not published until 1953, though an extract had appeared in the Dublin literary periodical Envoy.

Samuel Beckett's Works

In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit. During his stay, he had a revelation in his mother’s room: his entire future direction in literature appeared to him. The 1960s was a period of change for Beckett, both on a personal level and as a writer. 

 

In 1961, he married Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil in a secret civil ceremony in England, its secrecy due to reasons relating to French inheritance law. In the hospital and nursing home where he spent his final days, Beckett wrote his last work, the 1988 poem What is the Word, Comment dire. The poem grapples with an inability to find words to express oneself, a theme echoing Beckett's earlier work, though possibly amplified by the sickness he experienced late in life.

Suzanne died on 17 July 1989. Confined to a nursing home and suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson's disease, Beckett died on 22 December. The two were interred together in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris and share a simple granite gravestone that follows Beckett's directive that it should be any colour, so long as it's grey.

Download Words on Plays by Samuel Beckett

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. 

Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. 

Samuel Beckett