Day 0051

I'm loving my time here in Paris, even more so than my month in New York. Perhaps it's because I have my own apartment, and it is furnished by someone who reads a lot and owns an iron and ironing board. It feels like my own place. Everything is easy, the city is elegant, calm and welcoming, and being less than ten minutes walk from the Louvre is a privilege and a thrill.

I luxuriated in bed until long past midday today, listening to the audiobook of Madame Bovary, which I am devouring and enjoying immensely. I don't think I would be mentally equipped to deal with the ennui that is flooding her life at the moment if I were reading this at home in changeless, in-gazing Suffolk; but here in the heart of Paris my spirit is uplifted and I can pierce through to the rarefied, active world that Madame Bovary is seeking for. It exists!

Trouble is the fulfilled life of a dream-chaser comes at a cost of several thousand euros a month, and you've got to get them from somewhere. Perhaps the misery of scraping together money is not a universally bad thing though, as it makes the languid days of sensation-seeking all the more sweet in contrast. It's like enjoying a warm bed even more when you can feel the cold air outside it:

The clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our knee-pans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air.Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

I went back to the Louvre, went around the Parmigianino drawings exhibition again, and also took a stroll through the Grande Galerie. I didn't linger over anything, as I will be returning to pay due respect to the works there over the next few days. Suffice to say the Raphaels and Leonardos I stumbled over were enough to quicken the pulse and dampen the eye.

I had another go at pen and ink, this time working from one of the Parmigianinos from the exhibition. Putting the wash on at the end is the most fun part, when light and shade and volume suddenly spring out in seconds.