I have a distant recollection of walking all the way from the Gare du Nord to lunch in the Café Marly by way of the nineteenth-century arcades so beloved of Walter Benjamin. I tried to reconstruct this journey in reverse, starting in the Galerie Vivienne not far from Adrien Gardère’s office:-
I spent the day in Paris at the Studio Gardère talking through Adrien’s plans for the installation of the Royal Academy’s collection in Burlington Gardens. Of course, I am not allowed to say anything of what is proposed. Suffice it to say that it is a pleasure to talk through – and be talked through – a set of plans which are the result of so much careful and imaginative thinking about how and where the collection should be displayed, not just in the collections gallery upstairs in Burlington Gardens, but across the site as a whole.
Most of what I saw of Paris was the view through his apartment window:-
And the filing cabinets which he inherited from the lawyers who had been in the apartment before:-
Plans for the Fondation Louis Vuitton were drawn up by Frank Gehry in 2000. It then took a long period of gestation, including difficult discussions with structural engineers, before opening in the Bois de Boulogne in October 2014. It’s an incredibly grandly theatrical building, generously proportioned, with an excess of mechanical swooping over and towards the viewer and a series of roof terraces from which one can view the surrounding countryside:-
We went for a meeting with LVMH which began in the exhibition on the history of Louis Vuitton at the Grand Palais, drawn from its archive of trunks. It could have been a bit dry, but was animated by being curated by Olivier Saillard, the director of the Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, included relevant fashion, and was designed by Robert Carsen, who has created a series of intelligently theatrical installations:-
It was spectacularly hot and sultry as we walked round the grounds of La Ribaute, the silk mill where Anselm Kiefer lived and worked for a period of fifteen years before moving to the warehouse of La Samaritaine in the outskirts of Paris. I had forgotten the intensity of its classicism, the names of gods defining the experience of the ruins. We walked further and saw more than on our previous visit last summer, conducted through the fields and installations by the silent gardien as it got hotter and hotter. I had not registered the intensity of the experience of the natural environment, the ants invading the lead, the orchids and herons, the artificial lakes, the birdsong. It is reminiscent of an eighteenth-century landscape park, like Stourhead or Stowe, the natural environment elaborated to balance the artworks placed in a circuit to be experienced in sequence.
There is talk of La Ribaute being taken over by the French and German government jointly. I don’t know anywhere so expressive of late twentieth-century historical sensibility, much more so than most museums.
This is the converted silk mill:-
I had low expectations of the Pont du Gard, being a bit sceptical of 3 star sites in the Michelin guide. But it’s hard not to be impressed by the scale of its engineering, making it possible to bring water from the Eure to Nîmes forty miles to the south, across the valley of the Gardon and making the feats of Telford in the nineteenth century look purile:-
We stopped to buy a picnic lunch in Uzès, a centre of Huguenot, and later Catholic, silk production in the barren countryside north of Nîmes. This proved nearly impossible. Was it because it was Monday ? Or a bank holiday ? Or just lunch-time ? We only caught glimpses of the inner town, with its medieval bell tower attached to a more modern cathedral, the dusty streets, the adjacent bishop’s palace and ducal castle:-
We drove through the empty countryside south of Barjac through the lush fields and green landscapes of the northern Pays du Gard, stopping only to investigate the small fortified village of Lusson, with its churches and late medieval castle:-
We left the valley of the Rhône at Pont St. Esprit and climbed into the hills and vineyards of the Pays du Gard just south of the Ardèche until arriving near Barjac:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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