Free Ransacking Paris by Patti Miller

XXème siècle ’, which showed a Norman Rockwell portrait – he was back-on as he looked in a mirror sketching his own face. I liked the ‘infinite mirrors’ idea of it: the artist who paints self-portraits can never really be outside the frame, but it also reassured that the self was a fit subject to consider; it has always felt like a slippery slope.
    The museum was on one side of the Luxembourg Gardens in the sixth arrondissement not far from Metro Odéon but, not yet knowing my way around that quartier , I came in through the opposite gate off the boulevard St Michel and walked up the gravelled path. Somewhere in these gardens, perhaps on this pathway, Simone de Beauvoir bowled a black hoop in childhood. The gardens where she had played were formal with paths and smooth lawns, statues and massed beds of Japanese wind-flowers, azaleas, amaryllis and lisianthus and, in the middle, a pond with green iron chairs scattered around it. People sat there and read and sunned themselves like cats but no-one lay on the grass; lawns were for beauty’s sake, not for lounging about. Seated around the pond they looked as if they were in Miss Brill , my favourite Katherine Mansfield story about a woman watching the world go by in a park in Paris.
    Up a side alley I came upon a group of people gathering around beehives near a summer-house. They were wearing white overalls and netted hats and gloves, as if they had stepped from a science fiction film or a Sylvia Plath poem. ‘I stand in a column/Of winged, unmiraculous women,/Honey-drudgers.’ I was puzzled – what on earth were beekeepers doing in the middle of Paris? The sight stayed with me: the loose, relaxed arms of the apiarists, their ‘moon suits and funereal veils’, the wooden boxes like the bee-hives along Bushrangers Creek Road, the white gravel under their booted feet, the bright blue lavender and the pink roses behind them. Perhaps this was where the honeycomb in the rue Mouffetard had come from.
    I headed back towards the museum. On one side there was an elaborate Italian fountain with marble statues and balustrades and a narrow pond, built in the seventeenth century by Marie de M é dicis, the widow of Henry IV. The Luxembourg museum had been her home, modelled on a palace in Florence, her hometown, and these were her Italian gardens. This was where nineteen-year-old de Beauvoir sat and argued about ‘pluralist ethics’ with Sartre, who took her argument apart until she exclaimed, ‘I am no longer sure what I think, or if I think at all.’ It was the beginning of her accepting Sartre’s opinions as more valuable than her own. I looked at the fountain for a while, mesmerised by the statue of the fearsome Cyclops looking down at two lovers and the atmosphere of drama and myth, shady and mossy in the middle of summer.
    In the exhibition there were self-portraits by Van Gogh, Duchamp, Matisse, Magritte, Monet, Degas, L é ger, Kahlo, Miró, Picasso, Mondrian, Klee, Hockney – and nearly everyone else I’d ever heard of. I studied them for much longer than I normally look at paintings, and took notes. They were memoirs in paint, observer and subject in the same tangled relationship.
    What I remember most clearly is the two portraits by Matisse. One was drawn when he was young, detailed and precisely shaded, the other years later, by which time his portrait had become just a few spare lines. I was struck by the way his drawing became less detailed, more pared back to essential shapes, as he grew older. Disturbingly, when I checked the exhibition notes online recently I couldn’t find a record of two pictures by him. But I remember them, and I have my notes which describe both portraits. I can see myself standing there on the polished wooden boards gazing at the small portraits and I remember the white Chinese-style dress I was wearing.
    The other thing I remember is a sentence in the exhibition