Travels with a Gourmet

Saturday afternoon was spent at the Musée Nissim-Camondo, a mansion overlooking the Parc Monceau filled with Moise Camondo’s collection of late 18th century art, furniture and decoration. The museum showcases the home as it would have looked when Moise and his children lived in it. The rooms have been lovingly preserved and the furniture and decorations are exquisite as is the architecture of the mansion itself. The bathrooms and kitchen were modern for their time and showed the wealth of the Camondo family. When Moise’s son Nissim died in the first world war, he changed his will and bequeathed his home and everything in it to the state to be made into a museum in memory of his son, Nissim. Moise died in 1935 and the museum was inaugurated in 1936. The last of the Camondo family, Moise’s daughter, Beatrice and her two children died in Auschwitz in 1943. Such a tragic end and an incredible legacy – a museum worth visiting.

After a late breakfast on Sunday morning, we went to another museum that A had never been to and that I had last visited in 1993. It was a bitterly cold day and we almost left the queue and gave up but we were let into the museum after about ten minutes. There were quite a lot of people waiting in line because it was the first Sunday of the month when all museums are open to the public for free.

L’Orangerie, originally built in 1852 to house orange trees during the winter, was opened to the public in 1927 first to display Claude Monet’s Les Nympheas and later to house the collection of Jean Walter and Paul Guillame. Renovations began in 2000 and when the museum reopened in 2006, Claude Monet’s works which were previously underground were now brought up to the first floor where light filtered in and the rest of the paintings were transferred down below. Now, the collection is presented in a modern space with large windows letting light in from the Jardin des Tuileries.

It was past one when we left the museum and headed over to Angelina on the rue de Rivoli, another of our Paris favourites. As always, there was a line of people waiting to be seated. This time the wait was longer than at the museum but we were indoors and right beside the display counter of patisserie which made the wait bearable. Most people were having Angelina’s famous Africain (thick, dark hot chocolate) and a pastry but we decided to have a light lunch and shared a club sandwich and a salad with anchovies and hard-boiled eggs. Breaking tradition, we shared a Cafe Liegeois (coffee ice cream), even if it was so cold outside instead of the usual hot chocolate. We wanted to browse around Galignani, the bookstore, right beside Angelina but they were closed so we put that off for the following day, our last in Paris.