March 15, 2002
10. Raft
If you are a herbologist, please identify this plant. I bought it assuming it was rosemary, and I've been eating it. However, I have learned to distrust my taxonomy when I bought an origan that wasn't oregano (but edible all the same). I bought an authentic oregano later in the week at the grocery store. I have never particularly had a green thumb. To my astonishment, my little herb garden has been visibly growing, although somewhat kinked by my plant-rotation strategy.
When the last-minute trip to Amsterdam fell through last weekend, I took a walk through a open air market. I had my video camera with me for once, so I took a "hidden camera" tour through the market.
Although it's going to look great in my "Two Years in Paris" video (after some post-production anyway), the captures are only mildly interesting. The real thing is very vivid -- there are booths for vegetables, for meat, for fish, for cheese, for flowers, for discount clothing, and for plastic, flimsy electronic whatsits. It's full of French people (and at least one Canadian), and they are all talking and choosing fruit and cheese and pointing at things.
The vegetables stalls are as bright as the flower stalls, and the meat stalls have way too many legs sticking up in the air for my liking. It's a sign of an over-industrialized food industry in Canada -- I am much more comfortable eating meat that can only abstractly be related to an animal. The idea of having to remove a head or a foot from my meat purchase makes me a bit nervous.
I have to admit that I haven't bought any food at an open air market -- it's much more convenient and familiar to go to a supermarket and purchase everything in one trip. I think you can obtain better quality food (as well as good conversation) by buying your vegetables at an epicier, your bread at a boulangerie (or better yet, a patisserie), your meat at a boucherie (but all seafood at the poissonerie) and your cheese at the fromagerie. In fact, I am now recognized at the boulangerie, and the one time I went to the fromagerie, I was treated to a ten minute lecture on the various cheeses (I picked up a delicious petit bleu rolled in raisins).
I learned something else this week about French swimming pools. I already knew that speedo-style swimwear was much more common for the gentlemen in Europe than in North America. I discovered that it is not just fashionable, it is mandatory in many pools. When I asked why, I was told there are two reasons. Based on the premise that swim shorts can be worn as regular shorts, forbidding them ensures that people will not wear street clothes in the pool. The other reason is that public outdoor swimming pools want to ensure that people won't jump the fence to enter without paying.
So I went to the local Go Sport outlet and bought my speedo-style swimwear, which were in fact Adidas brand. To celebrate the fact that Paris (unlike Canada) is not having freakish snow storms, I put a quick shot of me wearing my new maillot de bain here. Warning -- be careful what you wish for.
I had a special request for more information on two paintings from my Louvre visit -- The Raft of the Medusa and The Death of Marat. I didn't know anything about these pictures when I saw them for the first time, so I did a bit of research this week.
The rated-for-all-ages version of the story goes something like this: a frigate had to be evacuated out at sea, but there weren't enough lifeboats. Fortunately, they had enough time to build a raft so that everybody had a way to get to safety. The raft got separated from the lifeboats, so the passengers worked together to build a sail. In this painting, they see another ship and they are trying to get its attention. All fifteen people in the painting are rescued by the ship.
Put the kids to bed now; the actual story adds some gruesome details. The frigate Medusa was part of a fleet going to Senegal. As part of the negotiations following Napoléon's defeat at Waterloo, the British were returning the colony to French rule. The Medusa was carrying armament and 400 French subjects, including the new governor. The captain of the ship was being exiled for his political views.
The captain wasn't particularly apt and chose to assign all navigation duties to a passenger who claimed vast experience. Nearly immediately, they traveled out of sight of the other boats in the fleet and subsequently lost contact with them. The Medusa was travelling by following the line of the visible land rather than staying to deeper waters, and subsequently got stuck on a well-known and well-mapped shoal.
Fortunately, the problem solved itself when the tide raised the ship enough to float free with little damage. Unfortunately, the captain immediately manoeuvred the boat back onto the shoal, this time crippling it.
They were about 100 kilometers from land, and decided to evacuate the stuck frigate. Since only 250 passengers would fit in the available lifeboats, they decided to build a raft for the rest. The raft was three or four times as large as the painting it inspired and in addition to the 147 people, it was supplied with a little water, a little food and a lot of wine. The seas were calm, and the raft would be towed by the lifeboats.
On July 5th, 1816, they set out for land. When the raft was half-loaded, the captain tells them he will "be right back" to join them, and abandons the Medusa in one of the lifeboats. When the raft is completely loaded, it isn't sufficiently bouyant, so all the people stand waist deep in water. This makes it very difficult to tow the raft, so the captain and the governor cut the tow line after about 15 kilometers.
126 passengers survive the first night after the abandonment. At this point, both land and the Medusa are beyond their reach, but they manage to build a sail during the day. That night, they open the barrels of wine and manage to get very destructively drunk.
Only 66 passengers survive the second night. Hungry, incredibly thirsty, and delirious from exposure, they turn to cannibalism. After the third night, 48 passengers survive, but the weakest twelve are thrown overboard to save their meagre resources. The raft is riding higher in the water, because three quarters of the original passengers are dead.
On July 19th, the ship Argus spots the raft and rescues the fifteen survivors. The captain and his lifeboats had made it to land and civilization a week before, but wouldn't start organizing a search party until a week after the rescue had already taken place. Five of the fifteen passengers never recover and die soon after reaching land.
On August 27, a ship reached the "wreck" of the Medusa. It hadn't sank, and wouldn't sink for another few months. The ship was intact, and there were survivors on board.
There was a resulting political scandal -- the raft of the Medusa was popularly seen as an allegory of the abandoned common man. The captain faced execution for abandoning his ship when there were still passengers aboard, but successfully claimed that he had transferred responsibility to his flotilla of lifeboats. There were grand headlines, and government cover-ups, and "fashionable dandy" Theodore Géricault decided to paint a picture.
He did an incredibly job of research -- interviewing the passengers (usually the survivors, but also visiting others in the mortuary), spending months with compositions and drafts, and building models of the raft. The result was a huge masterpiece hanging in the Louvre -- for a sense of the scale, go back to my frame capture and look in the lower right corner.
The Death of Marat, by Jacques-Louis David in 1793, on the other hand, is just a painting of a guy stabbed to death in his unusual home office.
Am I unfair to Jacques-Louis David? Am I historically inaccurate regarding the Medusa? Let me and the rest of the world know.
Posted by The Inaccurate Tourist at March 15, 2002 12:00 PM