Wednesday, 14 September 2011

Wednesday 14/09/2011, Central Library, Natural History Museum, Paris

Paris
14/09/2011

My room got cleaned: Nice clean room and squeaky sheets, life's simple pleasures. Lunch at the Spanish Maison turned out to be a fizzer; I walked in "low-profile" to check the menu/operating rules and they were serving steamed mussels. A Spanish speciality I know but a funny thing happened to me once in Spain.

It was at the La Coruna Crustacean conference and I went to a "sea-food festival" at a nearby fishing village, as you do when at a conference. The paella was magnificent, the octopus superb, but then there was the shell-fish dish! My flight(s) home were booked for the next day and I had fly just about the whole way back to Australia in the aircraft toilet. The 10 hour stop-over at Changi airport saved my life; I booked into the airport transit hotel with six bottles of water and re-hydrated, as well as showering and using their toilet frequently. The hotel arranged for appropriate medicine (related to quick-drying cement) and I got home in a reasonable state. I really was not well for about 48 hours, 36 of those hours were on aircraft or in transit lounges, mainly spent in, or in close proximity to, a toilet. Therefore, I do not not eat shell-fish, particularly Spanish ones!

I about faced quickly and ran; undignified maybe but to me quite justifiable. I bought my usual "Sandwich" from the Supermarket and ate it picnic style in the Park, watching the joggers go round and round! I may try for lunch again tomorrow but that was a close shave!

I spent a quite time at the Central Library just going back over a manuscript that dealt with molluscs and odd bits. I have managed to find and photocopy the original artwork or sketches for about a half of the species portrayed in the plates accompanying the Terra Australes Journal. These paintings and sketches had been re-grouped in the taxonomic "textbook" chapters, and did not indicate their origin. To be on the plates they must predate Lesueur's later American work so are definitely the original artwork from the 1801-04 Baudin voyage.

The story of matching up the Le Havre drawings with the Paris fish paintings is not so clear. The drawings may have been drafts for the final images hence are significantly different, or the Paris collection is based on a parralel but not identical series of images.

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