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By John Masters Meridian Writers’ Group PARIS—The Musée d’Orsay might not have the weight of Madrid’s Prado or St. Petersburg’s Hermitage or the Louvre, just across the Seine, but it is one of the most enjoyable museums you’ll ever walk through.
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A former train station houses the Musee d'Orsay

By John Masters

Meridian Writers’ Group

PARIS—The Musée d’Orsay might not have the weight of Madrid’s Prado or St. Petersburg’s Hermitage or the Louvre, just across the Seine, but it is one of the most enjoyable museums you’ll ever walk through.

In fact, its very lightness is one of the most appealing things about it. Built in an old railway station, it uses the vaulted glass roof that once covered the tracks and platforms to fill the space with sun and give it an airiness many other museums lack.

A soaring roof, natural light, air that always seems fresh and the constant, gently echoing burble of human activity give the Musée d’Orsay both drama and an intimacy, as if you’re part of a large but private conversation.

Oh, and the art. There’s plenty of that, too.

The museum is the main repository for French Impressionist works: Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin. The Impressionist Gallery covers the entire history of the movement, from its beginnings, with Fantgin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix (1864) to its end, with Cézanne’s Woman With a Coffee Pot (1894).

In between, its walls display some of the world’s best-known Impressionist works, and seeing the originals, rather than copies, stimulates a fresh appreciation of their beauty. Renoir’s The Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876) nearly jumps off the canvas at you — or invites you to leap into the whirl of revellers.

Likewise, when you stand in front of Monet’s Woman With a Parasol (1886), a painting that can seem very bland in reproductions, you can almost feel the breeze pushing the grass and the woman’s white dress, and smell the spring air.

What’s equally delightful is discovering Impressionist painters you may never have known existed, but whose work is of as high a calibre as those you’ve known forever. Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), for example.

Impressionism is the museum’s heart, but its broader mandate is the arts from 1850 to 1914. And not just painting: sculpture, furniture and photography have their place here, too.

There are works by Rodin and lesser-known sculptors, such as Joseph Bernard (1866-1951), whose marble frieze La Danse (1891-1915) is like an early Art Deco riff on classical Greek themes.

The museum also has an Art Nouveau wing. Art Nouveau rejected the corseted forms of the mid-1800s, emphasizing instead a more “organic” approach to design. One of the best examples is the Charpentier Room, a complete chamber of swirling mahogany, oak and poplar that’s a bit like walking into a semi-tamed forest.

Because of its smart architecture, the Musée d’Orsay will stave off that creeping museum ennui longer than most such places. But when it hits, there are two eating places to recover in.

The first is tucked away on the fifth level. A modern café, it has the back of a huge, Big Ben–like clock face for one of its walls. The other is on the second level, is all gilded moulding and glass chandeliers, looking much the way it would have when the trains still stopped here.

ACCESS

For more information on the Musée d’Orsay visit its website at www.musee-orsay.fr .

For more information on Paris visit the Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau website at www.parisinfo.com .

PHOTO CAPTION

Colin Peter Field presides over the Hôtel Ritz’s Bar Hemingway, the Nobel Prize–winning author’s home away from home for more than 30 years.

PHOTO CREDIT

John Masters/Meridian Writers’ Group

Sipping the perfect cocktail at the Ritz’s Bar Hemingway

By John Masters

Meridian Writers’ Group

PARIS—When it comes to mixing drinks, Colin Peter Field is a perfectionist. Take his dry martini, for example: it’s served in a crystal glass that’s been refrigerated to precisely minus 18.4 degrees Celsius — the lowest temperature, Field has discovered, before the stem cracks when held by the expectant imbiber.

Field is the bartender at the Hôtel Ritz’s Bar Hemingway — although “bartender” in this case seems as poor a word for what he does as “tinkerer” would have been for Einstein. Field is a maestro both at preparing drinks and at making charming, witty conversation (or sliding unobtrusively into the background). A sort of compassionate Oscar Wilde with a silver shaker.

Field, an Englishman who says, “Ever since I was 14 I wanted to be a bartender,” has presided over the Bar Hemingway since its reopening in 1994. The room had only been used for special events since the 1980s, but had a glorious past. Originally the Petit Bar, it opened in 1921 and was discovered by Ernest Hemingway in 1925. The Nobel Prize–winning author would still recognize the place: although a small hutch was added in 1997, the main room remains tiny, cozy and panelled with light oak.

“Hemingway came to the Ritz,” recalls Field, “and said, ‘If I die and go to heaven I’d like it to resemble the bars at the Ritz.’” Plenty of other famous people have had a drink here, among them Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, F Scott Fitzgerald and Cole Porter, but Hemingway was a regular for more than 30 years. When he rode into Paris with the American army liberating the city in the Second World War, the Ritz was the second place he visited, after a stop at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co. bookstore. In the Petit Bar, according to Field, “he downed 51 dry martinis.”

Indeed, Hemingway’s love of alcohol is supposed to have led to the the creation of the Bloody Mary. As Field tells the tale, the author was looking for a drink that his wife, Mary Walsh Hemingway, couldn’t detect on him. The Petit Bar’s Bernard Azimont came up with a tomato juice and vodka concoction that passed the test. “That bloody Mary couldn’t smell a thing!,” Hemingway is reported to have gleefully told Azimont.

Under master mixologist Field, the Bar Hemingway continues to introduce new drinks. (A collection of them is in Field’s book, The Cocktails of the Ritz Paris , published by Simon & Schuster.) His most popular — outselling even the dry martini, is the Serendipity (calvados, fresh mint, apple juice and champagne).

His latest is the Opus Dei (vodka, fresh grapefruit juice, champagne and a drop of sugar, over ice), whipped up for The Da Vinci Code . (Robert Langdon, the book’s main character, is staying at the Ritz when his adventure begins.)

His most expensive — and the world’s most costly commercially available cocktail, according to the Guinness Book of Records — is the Ritz Side Car. It uses 100-year-old cognac Field discovered in the hotel cellar, Cointreau and lemon juice. Shake 10 times and serve: 400 euros.

ACCESS

The Bar Hemingway is open Monday through Saturday from 6:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. Men require jackets. No cell phones allowed.

For more information on the Bar Hemingway visit the Hôtel Ritz Paris website at www.ritzparis.com .