Luky
YEARS AGO WHEN MY DAUGHTER AND I WERE DOING A STINT AS NURSES IN LOURDES, WE MET THE LEADER OF A GROUP OF PILGRIMS FROM PARIS.
I'll call him Monsieur G.
Hinting broadly, I mentioned that I had always wanted to visit the Rue du Bac in Paris, and as I had hoped, Madame G invited us to her flat for dinner on the day we were to arrive in Paris, after which she would show us around.
I shall remember that visit to my dying day.
Not only was her cooking a tribute to French cuisine, but we had our first proper bath in three weeks.
Pity the poor
I had never before lived in a place without a bathroom, and now I know that poor people who have to are even worse off than I thought.
Not to be able to have my daily bath is worse than not having enough to eat.
How marvellous it is that so many people still manage to keep clean.
I'll try never again to criticize people who don't look overly well scrubbed.
Surprise
Between us, Madame G and I cooked up a little surprise for my daughter.
On our way to the Rue du Bac chapel, we got out of the bus in front of the Louvre.
My daughter looked around for the chapel before she realized we really had made it to her mecca.
She had begged me at Lourdes to take her to the Louvre as well as to the Rue du Bac, bu I had told her I didn't dare ask Madame G .
Then Madame astonished me by offering the trip itself.
Talk about sore feet! I cursed my vanity all the way up and down the corridors of the Louvre.
But talk about beauty - my jaw hung as I tried to take in the glory of the sculptures.
Did you know that the Venus de Milo has such a beautiful back?
One who knows
My daughter, who took art classes from sub A to matric and was doing fine arts at university, appointed herself as our guide.
She explained in detail why the Nike of a place that sounds like Alcatraz had no head, and another man had no feet.
"Spare me", I begged. "Till I knew how to drive, I always enjoyed a trip in the car.
Until I learn the finer points of art, I'll enjoy that."
Naughty Napoleon
At one point we entered a bottleneck entrance into a pharoah's tomb.
"Napoleon was naughty", Madame G admitted, "to steal all these beautiful objects from the countries he conquered."
But from her indulgent smile I gathered that Napoleon, right or wrong, had a great fan in Madame G.
Inside, rows of little men were carved from top to bottom.
Though they weren't much bigger than one's hand, the leg and arm muscles were evident.
Those little men could have jumped from that wall and you wouldn't have been surprised.
Those tapestries, those paintings - O glorious Rembrandt, how proud of you this fellow countryman of yours felt once again.
We saved the Mona Lisa for last, the last that is of our afternoon's trip.
I think you could spend a month going daily into the Louvre without feeling that you had taken in a fraction.
Once when I had told my dad how ugly I thought the Mona Lisa was, he said: "One day you may find yourself in the Louvre.
On that day you must look at her face from different positions.
You'll find her eyes following you everywhere."
Always looking
Remembering his words I stood in six different positions, and believe it or not, La Giaconda's mocking eyes seemed to turn on me each time, as though to say: "You thought I was ugly, did you?"
Sorry Mona. You're breathtakingly beautiful.
My daughter, being educated to appreciate art properly, took a different view of all the glory.
Yet in the end she astonished me by saying: "It was all terribly beautiful, and far more wonderful than I could have dreamt possible.
"But give me the human body as I saw it in Lourdes, wracked by disease and pain.
I'm going to leave university and start training as a nurse so that I can relieve suffering."
She did just that, much to the dismay of her father, who thereafter called her Florence Nightingale.
But I walked on air. To have a child in the medical profession had always been a dream of mine.
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