Day 47, Saturday, October 14, 2023.
Bob has been doing a fantastic job as tour director. He has found two little villages nearby that look interesting, Caunes-Minervois, which is known as the Red Marble Village, and Brousses, which has a working paper mill. First stop is the Red Marble Village. We find parking along a dry river bed and and a walkway with lots of red marble sculptures.
The sculptures are quite large…however this poor fellow has lost his horns.
We walk into the town and turn the corner to find this lovely little park with an old fountain and the biggest Sycamore trees…or at least that is what I thought they were. The sign says that they are 200 year old Plane trees. I do a bit of Googling and it seems that a Sycamore is a type of Plane tree or maybe a Plane tree is a type of Sycamore? It isn’t clear but I am not going to spend any more time trying to figure it out. Guess I need to start calling these trees Plane trees.
This is quite a pretty little village, with flowering Morning Glory vines, 
and lots of narrow streets. 
We had stopped at the tourist information and the walking map we picked up led us past this magnificent marble horse head. Of course I needed my photo with this one.
One interesting thing we saw was a couple being shown a very old, run down looking house by a real estate person (the man walking towards the doorway). Seems like they were seriously thinking of purchasing…it didn’t look very appealing to me, but?
Our walking tour soon leads us back to the square with the ‘Plane’ trees. 
We follow the tourist map to this hilltop view of the valley and the village and do our best to find the trail to the red marble quarry, but have no luck. It certainly isn’t well marked, and the trail just seems to die out. We can see the backside of the quarry which is a huge long pile of stone rubble along the road, but we don’t see any way to go further. 
We go back to the car where we have our lunch and then on the way back to town stop at a little “marble garden” to see several more marble sculptures.
On our drive to the paper mill we pass the ruins of three castles. There is a walking trail but it looks a bit more strenuous than we thought so we decided to keep driving to the paper mill in Brousses.
It is a lovely drive through vineyard after vineyard…
with hills off in the distance. I can’t help but think that owning a vineyard must be an awful lot of work and not nearly as idyllic and romantic as it is often portrayed in movies and novels.
We stop to try to find out what this strange machine might be. There are several buildings at its base, but no sign or explanation. Both wheels are turning slowly…maybe someone knows what this is?
The machine above was located right next to a huge solar panel farm and the ground is littered with these tiny white snail shells, but no sign of any live snails.
It took us a while to find the paper mill. We had the wrong spot pinned on Google maps but we eventually sorted it out. The Moulin à Papier, or Paper Mill in Broussess wasn’t what I was expecting. It used to produce paper commercially but now the granddaughter runs the mill which has been in the family for seven generations. They now make paper by hand using pretty much the same process that I use back home with our Paper Arts Guild. After a sheet of paper is made it needs to be couched (pronounced “cooched”) or transfered to another surface. Here they have been couched onto synthetic interfacing, then pressed and hung to dry in the rafters. Every year, artist Catherine Cappeau makes a collection of paper dresses, which you can see on display in the paper mill. 
This huge old Hollander is no longer in use today It is probably five times a large as the one we use in our guild. This machine is used to beat the fibres to make the paper pulp.
The Hollander in use today can be seen behind the hanging sheets. This is the area of the mill that is used for paper making. There are only two papermakers who work here today. They use a lot of recycled cotton cloth, mostly blue jeans and bed sheets. The only coloured paper they make comes from the colour of the cotton cloth that is used to make the pulp. The material is cut into small pieces and then processed in the Hollander. Interestingly, they also use horse and elephant dug to make paper as well.
Now this is a press!
There is little store here, where paper, handmade books, cards and other paper related items are sold. I think that most of the mill’s income likely comes from the tours they offer several times a day, every day except Christmas and New Years! They are set up for school tours as well. It was interesting, and there was a lot of equipment that was in use 100 years ago when this mill was in full operation. However I didn’t really learn anything new, other than our Guild members back home makes really good quality handmade paper and we don’t charge nearly enough when we offer items for sale!
Today it is the last paper mill in operation in this area. There were six paper mills here in 1845. This millstone grinder, with its 3 tonne stones used to grind 300 kms of recycled paper fibres a day in 1954!
There is a bridge over the Dure River and a little picnic area.
It is really pretty location.
There are some interesting clouds with shafts of sunlight on the drive home.
Finally after asking several people for directions a delivery man tells me that we need to go upstairs and cross the street. Voila! Success. They do have our reservation but we have to wait 45 minutes for them to clean the car. Once in the car we discover that our Peugeot does not have plug ins for USB’s, only some other strange looking plug. Luckily a Hertz employee was walking by and I asked him for help. Another 15 minute wait and he brings us a device that plugs in to the cigarette lighter that has two USB ports. We are finally on our way, heading to Chartres to visit the cathedral. We do amazingly well getting out of Paris and to Chartres, My navigation skills are still pretty good and Bob did a great job driving.
The view towards the altar. We took several photos of the stained glass but it kept looking very washed out…
The wall of the sanctuary is absolutely amazing. The detail of the carving is incredible. The screen has forty niches along the ambulatory filled with statues telling the life of Christ. I particularly love the donkey.
One more view of this enormous cathedral, before we head back to Paris.
And although some of them are in really bad shape, I have no doubt that they will be repaired rather than demolished.
As we leave I notice another example of street art. I saw another walking back to the car and I thought it looked like a Banksy, and this one could be too? Turns out there is an exhibit of Banksy’s work here in Chartres. We missed that too. 
It is busy when it takes 11 minutes to go just over 2 1/2 kilometres! We are both happy to get home and glad our first day with the car went so well.
and the beautiful Marble Hall.
I particularly wanted to see Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, but was pleased to find his Judith painting here as well.
The Kiss is one of Klimt’s most well known paintings. It is a large painting, 183 x183 cm.
It is nice to be able to see the painting details up close.
I am also surprised by how many Egon Schiele paintings are on display. It is quite special to be able to see the original paintings of some of my favourite works by these two painters. I didn’t realize that these paintings were so large. Looking at reproductions in books can be deceiving. The Embrace and…. 
the Family are both much bigger than I imagined…
as are these paintings.
Schiele’s Self Portrait is the smallest painting, about 41 x 33 cm.
I didn’t know Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Napoleon was here either. I am so glad I was able to visit this museum. This painting is enormous, 272 × 232 cm!
This painting shows the Vienna Naschmarkt in 1894. It has changed a bit over the years!
We meet up in the gardens outside the Belvedere and then walk towards St. Charles Church. 
There are so many interesting buildings along the way.
We had a huge surprise when we entered St. Charles Church. Two enormous floating mirrored balls that reflected the church…
and us. We are almost in the centre of the reflection but we are very tiny. “Aerocene” is a contemporary art installation by Tomas Saraceno, an Argentinian artist who lives and works in Berlin. The floating reflective balls are 10 and 7 metres in diameter.
Then we notice the scaffolding that goes high up into the dome, and that is where we are going to go! We thought the elevator ride we got a ticket for would be inside a bell tower. Nope! We ride to the top of this scaffolding and then climb a bit further, onto that platform you see leading into one of the round windows in the dome!
Looking down from the top of this ‘elevator’ we notice a workman adjusting lights high up in the dome, yet still far below us!
We have a great view of the dome paintings. It is interesting the way the gold highlights look up this close…
and we have a great view of the other dome paintings. We are crazy high up!
Bob walks back down to this viewing platform so I can get a photo. Notice how he is suspended…nothing below him!
This photo shows the platform that Bob was standing on in the last photo.
We spent quite a lot of time way up there in the dome, and it is getting dark when we get outside. If you look closely you can see some people standing in the round window on the dome. That is the window we were standing in! What an amazing experience. There was restoration work carried out in the dome and the elevator is being kept for a while. The fee to ride up into the dome is a way to make more money for further restorations.
Walking back towards the metro we pass the Opera House…
and take photos of these performers from Tibet. They have a performance later tonight and were taking publicity photos outside the Opera House.
While the men posed, some of the women were busy applying their makeup. 
This is a a huge paper art installation we pass in a walkway near the metro.
A close-up shows lots and lots of writing, musical notations and random marks.
We get home, have dinner, then I head off to a drop-in drawing session with a Meetup group at a pub called Monami.
I had coloured some of the pages in my sketchbook at home before the session. Interesting to draw on but they don’t photograph very well. 
We were pretty much rubbing elbows as we drew and my views weren’t always great but it was lots of fun.
I finished the session with a 20 minute leg study. I felt quite comfortable going out in the evening by myself. The metro is easy to navigate and there were lots of people about.
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