Important Parisian animals

Duck couple

A nice resting spot

The rabbit tasked with guarding the tomb of Napoleon

Notre-Dame, Natural History, Paris Mosque

Went to Notre-Dame right after it opened this morning, so caught some of a mass in progress: Wow, it’s just like in Conclave!

The Natural History museum is a bit of an odd place: one doesn’t, in daily life, get used to seeing quite that much aging taxidermy in one place. They also made a fake thunderstorm with the ceiling, for some reason. Same, shark.

Right across the street, the Paris Grand Mosque, modelled on al-Qarawiyyin in Fez:

At the Arènes de Lutèce, a Roman amphitheatre:

Père-Lachaise and Médée

First, pregamed Cherubini at le cimetière du Père-Lachaise:

Other highlight, my good buddy Joseph Fourier:

Apparently Pierre-Simon de Laplace was initially buried there, but was removed to Normandy, so I couldn’t get the full set {s ∈ C}.

Cherubini’s Médée in the afternoon, at the Opéra-Comique. The building is Opéra-Comique.v3, as v1 and v2 both burned down.

I saw Médée at the COC relatively recently, a production whose insanely opulent stage design had the effect of overpowering the relatively lightweight music so comprehensively that it made the attempt at horror seem laughable. This was the opposite; it had a small period orchestra, simple set and modern but not overly self-conscious costumes, and added to the spoken libretto with small extra speeches and bits of pantomime that had the effect of actually making the music seem serious and suitable for the topic.