The November Louvre 11-30-15

Well heck, here we are at the end of November, the time is flying.  Just over 9 months into our adventure and the short days are upon us again.  We went to the Louvre today because Deb was interested in seeing the Lyon collection which I mentioned in an earlier post.  It's the only group of Impressionist paintings still left on display in the Louvre because the Lyon's stipulated that the terms of donation were that the paintings must be constantly on display and that the collection cannot be split up.  It must be seen as a whole and it is quite impressive, given that it was collected entirely between the first and second world wars.
The numbers of visitors at the Louvre seems to be so low now, there is not the constantly crowded feeling that we had during the summer.  It is nice to sit in a room and not be constantly looking around people walking through, to view a painting.
There was a large demonstration in the Place de la Republic last night, of protesters demonstrating about the world climate change meeting and unfortunately the protesters trashed the memorial to the victims of the shootings last week that had been set up at the base of the large sculpture of Marianne, the symbol of the French republic.  They were picking up the candles and other objects and throwing them at the police, so some head-cracking ensued and over 100 were arrested.  Today the memorial was pretty much cleaned up and people were replacing broken articles.  It seems a bit disingenuous of the meetings to have corporate sponsors paying, like EDF and Air France since they are among major contributors to the emissions issues.  Like most corporately funded studies they tend to come out with rather skewed results.
In the evening we had dinner with a young friend of niece Elizabeth's, Sara.  She has been in Paris for 5 days, returning tomorrow, and had not had a proper Parisian dinner.  So we had her come out to our neighborhood and we went to Aux Arts et Science Reuniss, the little restaurant that we like so well. It was a very nice meal, Sara had duck, I had venison, and Deb had steak.  Afterwards we went back to our apartment for a little visit and around 10:00 we put Sara back on the Metro for her room.