The Art of Gilded France

I am a Francophile, and that is defined as any American who can stand to be around the French for any length of time.

I love the French and admire the way they do things because they have a flair about them and add a degree of elegance to almost everything they touch. The Parisians in particular know how to do two things very well; they know how to cook and they know how to gild stuff. All over the city of Paris there are golden palaces dedicated to the pursuit of the cultured life and in them you can generally (and without any effort at all), find something good to eat.

I admire the French way of doing things so much that after seeing “Julie and Julia” I purchased on amazon.com “The Art of French Cooking” by Julia Child and those two other women. The fact of that purchase was a surprise even to me because my theory has always been that if something can’t be microwaved, it was never meant to be eaten in the first place. The book is an impressive 684 pages not including the index and as a Texan I’ve scoured the recipes for Julia’s French equivalent to Chicken Fried Steak but have yet to find anything that remotely resembles tough flank steak smothered in sticky white wall paste. The truth is I bought “The Art of French Cooking” just because I like having it in the house.

The Paris Opera House

The other thing the French are able to do is build buildings, and they like to slather gold on everything that isn’t tied down. “The opera house is a treasure-box of gold” begins a poem by Amy Lowell “Gold, gold, gold and to light the Beaux-Arts splendor of the interior of the building are an abundance of indecently clad human figures that hold aloft multiple and dazzling globes of illumination. They are like writhing, twisting torches of light and of course they are all covered in bright yellow metal. It is a wonderful sight…much too beautiful for it to be a fitting place for Gaston Leroux’s novel of a hideous Phantom that lives in the basement. There is in actuality an underground lake, just like in the story, or at least that is what they told us when we were there.

In August 2009 I took the picture that I later translated into this Pastel and Colored Pencil drawing entitled “Paris Opera House.” Everything about the building is grand..the Grand Staircase, the Grand Foyer, the Grand Chandelier. The interior of the Garnier is an interlocking maze of corridors, stairwells, alcoves and landings that during Opera Season allow the fluid movement of large numbers of elegantly dressed people and gives them the space in which to socialize during intermission. It is rich with velvet, is literally dripping in cherubim and nymphs and is downright scandalous in sumptuous Baroque Architectural excess. I am impressed by the building in the same way that I am always impressed by Paris and the French way of life. It makes no apology for it’s finely tuned exhibition of excess and neither do they. “Gold in a broad smear across the orchestra pit: Gold of horns, trumpets, tubas; Gold -- spun-gold, twittering-gold, snapping-gold”

I never tire of going to France, and who knows, before my next trip like Julie, I may let Julia teach me how to cook.

"Paris Opera House" Catherine L. Gauldin 2009 All Rights Reserved