The Comedie-Francaise, Gauguin & Botticelli.

Is there anti-American sentiment in France? And did I experience it?

The simple answers are "yes" and "no," but the questions must be viewed within a broad historical context. The affection between the French and Americans has a long and turbulent history, going back to the American Revolution, the French admiring our energy and enterprise, and Americans traveling to France for its art, theater, cuisine, and fashion. The French fascination with American pop culture arose during the jazz era and has steadily increased. The recent tension over our administration's policy in Iraq has been described as a "lover's quarrel," not to diminish the seriousness of the cause but to put the rift in perspective. It cannot last because there is otherwise too much underlying sympathy and interdependence, and the disagreement of governments does not translate perfectly into antipathy between peoples. Feelings were far worse during the early 1970s, when I recall being taken to task by total strangers because American fighter jets were bombing Hanoi.

In those days the working-class French, by and large, did not speak our language. It was while Jacques Chirac was Mayor of Paris in the 1970s that the city at last admitted that tourism was so important that it would behoove one and all to learn English. Now the American who hopes to practice his French must insist upon it, as every cabdriver and schoolchild is eager to speak English. I insisted and found people to be obliging.

So it was that I discovered that Parisians in cafes and on the street were no less friendly to an American because his government's foreign policy is widely condemned in Europe. And I heard this joke that conveys the mood of the French a propos the efforts of President Bush.

The Pope and the President are in a rowboat in high seas. A strong wind is whipping up the foam and blows the pontiffs skullcap off his head; waves carry the cap far from the boat. President Bush steps over the gunwale, walks across the water, picks up the Pope's cap, and calmly walks back to the boat. He puts the skullcap back on the Pope's head, pats it, and returns to his seat.

The next morning the headlines in the French newspapers read: PRESIDENT BUSH CANNOT SWIM.

It has been a while since theatergoers came from abroad to see new plays in Paris, or even lively productions of the classics. One devoted fan told me she had grown weary of riding the train to the provinces to see plays because the scene in the capital was so dull. But for two years I have been hearing that there was new life in the state theater, the Comedie-Francaise, under the general direction of Marcel Bozonnet, who took over as Administrateur General from Jean-Pierre Miquel in 2001. There was some progress during M. Miquel's eight years, during which the Comedie-Francaise took over the Theatre du Vieux-Columbier on the Left Bank, and opened the Studio-Theatre in the Carrousel du Louvre, for experimental works.

Miquel's tenure will be gratefully remembered as a bricks-and-mortar regime rather than for its artistry. History, has weighed heavily on the company. The well-trained actors--lacking the imaginative direction that would free them to find their own character as an ensemble--had grown stodgy, haunted by shades of Annie Ducaux, Louis Seigner, Jean Meyer, and other societaires of the beloved troupe of the post-war period. Now this appears to be changing.

The French drama fan was excited that she no longer has to ride the train to see a play like the American Tony Kushner's Homebody/ Kabul playing at the Theatre du Vieux-Columbier. With no time to spare, I wanted to get to the heart of the repertory, at the Salle Richilieu, the flagship theater near the Palais Royale, where they are staging reprise productions of Le Malade Imaginaire (1673) and Le Dindon (1896).

Moliere's imperishable story of the hypochondriac so obsessed with his bodily functions that he insists on betrothing his daughter to a dim-witted, reactionary physician (so as to have one in the family) and giving her legacy, to his scheming second wife is the sixth-most-often performed play in the theater's history. Now one can see why, under the classic direction of the Swiss metteur en scene Claude Stratz. With the revered Alain Pralon in the lead role of Argan (originally played by Moliere) and the saucy Muriel Mayette playing his faithful servant Toinette, the comedy sings.

The curtain opens upon Argan on a rough throne (which is also a potty seat) dressed in a robe which hangs open to reveal long underwear and a diaper. He also wears a white headpiece twisted at the top corners into little rabbit ears, a cross between a jester's cap and a baby's bonnet; Pralon has chosen to render Argan as a spoiled, tyrannical baby. Seated alone, he delivers the opening monologue, rendering his accounts to his doctors for treatments hilariously detailed. Enraged, he begins to ring for Toinette. When she does not come, Argan, wielding the handbell like a baby's rattle, stages a full-blown tantrum.

Pouting comically, Pralon makes smooth transitions from infantile foolishness to stubborn caviling in arguing for his daughter's betrothal and an illegal will and testament. In this he is aided by the deliciously wicked Isabelle Gardien in the role of his wife Beline, and then by his brother Beralde, the voice of reason against quackery, played with contrasting vigor and wit by Alain Lenglet. Of the doctors, the young Thomas Diafoirus who comes to woo Argan's daughter Angelique, is the most amusing. Nicolas Lormeau plays the dimwit as a gangly automaton with facial tics, who has memorized his unctuous speeches, but before each utterance he must elaborately square his feet and shoulders, stretch his arms at his sides, and steady his twitching countenance.

The weak link in the ensemble is the ingenue, Angelique. The script was written on the cutting edge of a revolution not only in medical science (Diafoirus condemns Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood), but in women's rights. As played by the lovely Julie Secard, Angelique is too vulnerable, too quick to melt in tears as she is defending her right to approve her husband. Her lover Cleante, who poses as a music master to gain access to the household, is charmingly portrayed by the effervescent Laurent Stocker. More about him presently, as he is the only comedian with lead roles in both plays under review.

The story of the premiere of this piece is so dramatic that it has become part of the collective memory. The best productions build upon the ancient calamity as upon the ruins of a monument. The famous scene wherein Toinette poses as a doctor to convince Argan that all doctors are fools, Mayette carries off to perfection. She opens a dusty valise and pulls out cooking utensils--a meat grinder, a butcher's knife, and a long tube like the crepe snakes that spring from a jack-in-the-box. She goes to work on the wide-eyed Argan, interrogating him about his symptoms, and at the end of each of his lines solemnly pronounces the word "poumon" (lung). She says it is his lungs that all him, not his kidneys as the others have insisted. It was at this point in the 1673 premiere, on the fourth night, that Moliere in the role of Argan coughed real blood. The playwright died a few hours later, of a burst blood vessel in his lung.

It is a play about deception: Beline pretending to love Argan; the physicians claiming to know what they cannot; Cleante pretending to be a music master; and the wily Toinette dressing up as a doctor. Meanwhile Moliere, dying, was pretending to be a healthy man who believed he was ill. Finally, it is by feigning death that Argan learns the true feelings of his wife and daughter. Perhaps this gray area between truth and fiction inspires the dim lighting by Jean-Philippe Roy. If so, it is a point made at some expense. In any case one cannot watch the final scenes of Moliere's masterpiece--Toinette's imposture, and then Argan's playing dead to hear first his wife's cries of delight, then his daughter's sobs--without recalling the real-life tragedy underlying it all. Pralon plays the scenes of recognition with sensitivity, tempering sorrow with gentle humor.

Georges Feydeau (1862-1921), master of the French farce, is a hard sell these days. A Frenchman told me that his generation had been Feydeau'd to death as children by TV adaptations of his ribald comedies. So it is not easy to revive even a play as clever as Le Dindon (The Turkey, 1896) which has not been staged here since 1971.

The humor in Feydeau is almost entirely the humor of adulterous situations and sight gags, scheming and embarrassment, rather than of words. Moliere's three-hundred-year-old jokes laugh Feydeau's off the stage. When Lucienne, a married woman, discovers that Pontagnac, the man who has followed her home, is not only a friend of her husband Vatelin, but married himself, she is shocked. "Married?" she exclaims. "You, are married?" To which the lecher sheepishly replies, "Well, yes, a little ... "That is about as good as it gets, in Feydeau.

His technique is to take several, in this case four, couples, and stir them into a dangerous stew of flirtation and adultery. The married, high-minded Lucienne Vatelin, played with elegance and simmering sensuality by Florence Viala, is secretly welcoming the advances of the bachelor Redillon, who would risk his life to sleep with her, as would Pontagnac. Madame Vatelin defends monogamy, swearing she would only have sex with another man if her husband proved unfaithful.

The doorbell rings. It is Maggy, an aggressive Briton with whom Vatelin recently had a fling abroad. Privately he tries to explain to her that they cannot carry on in Paris as they had in London; she blackmails him by threatening suicide, so he agrees to meet her in a hotel recommended by--his old friend Pontagnac. Now Pontagnac has Lucienne right where he wants her. When he has shown her husband in bed with Maggy, Pontagnac understands that Lucienne will take her revenge by sleeping with him.

I have not described half the plot or the eighteen characters who run in and out of bedrooms, under and over beds in L'Hotel Ultimas, screaming. Feydeau is known for his irreverence, his cruelty. He should be as well known for the pathos underlying his critique of marriage--so subtly captured by this ensemble. By accident the room Vatelin has booked for his tryst gets taken by a retired army doctor (Igor Tyezka) and his deaf wife (Catherine Salviat) who is passionate about the opera "because of the dancers" When people shout at her she cannot hear; but she understands every word her husband mouths to her inches from her face. The old major in parade dress, brandishing a riding crop, and his young wife pirouetting here and there, are clearly daft, but deeply in love. Such is the skill of Lukas Hemleb's direction. Nothing in the script suggests such feeling.

The mark of such impeccable ensemble work is that individual performances are not conspicuous. Yet I do want to single out Florence Viala, whose stately Lucienne is the conscience at the center of Feydeau's cyclone of shenanigans. As she follows the sleazy Pontagnac in pursuit of her straying husband it is with a heavy heart. When Pontagnac (seemingly) exposes the husband in flagrante (by hiding two electronic bells under the mattress), she is nearly inconsolable, and leaves the stunned Pontagnac to take her revenge with her admirer Redillon at his home, in Act III.

Young Laurent Stocker, the gifted, acrobatic comedian who is Cleante in Le Malade Imaginaire, plays Redillon. Stocker is shorter than Viala. His antics in wooing the faithful wife exaggerate the gestures of courting without ever dislodging the actor from his center of gravity. He shrieks in frustration, pulling his blond hair, then quickly recovers his dignity.

When at last Lucienne arrives to give herself to him, Viala lends new meaning to the phrase "letting down your hair." The dark hair has been chastely pinned up. Now as she removes the pins, shakes out the mane of hair, stretches seductively, and hikes up her skirt, Redillon is petrified; Viala becomes the sexiest woman I have ever seen on a stage, without removing a stitch of clothing. On the floor, downstage center, is a lion skin, complete with head and teeth. Stalking Redillon, Viala moves with the predatory grace of a lioness.

The star of this production is the German director Lukas Hemleb, who has brought the script up to date without doing it violence. And he does exciting things with standard set flats. In moments of great embarrassment or confusion, actors freeze while the walls surrealistically contract and expand. In Act III, in Redillon's apartment, the stage is raked at such an extreme angle that the characters (some in spike heels) keep losing their footing, sliding downstage, clinging to each other like voyagers on a storm-tossed ship.

The exhibit "Gauguin-Tahiti, L'Atelier des Tropiques," at the Grand Palais until January 20, is a helpful guide to the perplexed admirers of impressionism and post-impressionism who resist Gauguin's last works because of their strange, sometimes grotesque, content. (1)

On the hundredth anniversary of Gauguin's death, the curators, Claires Freches Thory of the Musee d'Orsay, and George Shackleford of Boston's Fine Arts, have assembled fifty paintings, thirty sculptures, and sixty graphic works telling the story of Gauguin's sojourns in Tahiti (1891-1893, 1895-1901) and his time in the Marquesas where he died in 1903. Forty photographs in the first rooms, some taken in the 1860s by Henri Lemasson, George Spitz, and others, with supporting text, establish that Gauguin's paintings of the tropics are less fact than symbolic fiction. Upon first arriving in Papeete the artist attended the funeral of the last king of Tahiti, Pommard V. French missionaries had toppled the idols, and the ancient temples were in ruins. If Gauguin meant to discover a savage purity, or paint a paradise, he would have to make it out of relics and old pictures.

La est le temple is a magnificent tribute to the lost civilization. The yellow hill that sweeps the breadth of the canvas is bare but for a tiny purple idol at the top right, almost lost against the purple mountains. The hill where the temple once stood is bursting with ghostly energy, despite the dark barrier of the fence topped with skulls in the foreground; the hill overpowers even the huge red and violet flowers on the near side of the fence.

The exhibit instructs us in Gauguin's pointed symbolism--mostly Christian symbolism imposed upon native figures and landscape--an artistic syncretism. Je vous salue Marie (1891) is an adoration scene in which two native girls prayerfully approach a haloed Tahitian madonna and child. In Terre delicieuse 1892) a naked Eve stands next to a multi-colored tree. A lizard on a branch, overshadowed by a brilliant red bird, whispers the words of temptation into her ear while she plucks--instead of an apple--a flower resembling a peacock feather. In Paroles du diable (1892), the same woman, standing upon a swirling pool of pink, in shame covers her pubis, while a frowning gild-faced devil looks out at us from behind her, as if considering how to tempt her further.

The core of the exhibit is Gauguin's largest canvas, the twelve-feet-by-four-feet D'ou venons-nous? Que sommes nous? Ou allonsnous? (Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?). It was during his second stay in Tahiti in 1897, after a heart attack and a suicide attempt, that Gauguin commenced this painting which he conceived as his "testament" the ultimate expression of his wisdom about life and art. From right to left the twelve figures in shades of gold and pink represent the stages of life, from the peaceful infant in swaddling under the guardianship of three young women (one naked, with her back turned) to a sad old man with silver hair sitting naked far left, his hands covering his ears and one eye. Next to him is the celebrated Vairumati, Gauguin's most beautiful nude, a love goddess leaning on one arm toward the old man as if to tempt him.

The composition turns upon the central figure of a youth whose figure measures the canvas top to bottom, reaching up to pluck an apple. Midway between him and Vairumati is a standing idol, cobalt blue, and below him is a seated boy eating an apple. To right and left of the tawny youth are women: a sad matron in a purple robe gazing at him; two pink-robed women in a grotto considering the mystery of a red blossom. And over all--the deep Verona blue-green of trees and sky.

Surrounding D'ou venons-nous? are seven paintings supposed to have been "studies" for the large canvas. Some, including the brilliant Vairumati, where the goddess lounges on a golden throne against a scarlet background, are superior to the mural.

The choice to display the earlier paintings and magical wooden sculptures from beginning to end as if to explain the gestation of this huge canvas that consumed the last five years of Gauguin's life, produces an anticlimax. Never mind that he considered it his greatest: D'ou venons-nous? is grandiose, and a muddle. His palette--of unprecedented richness--finds its consummate balance and counterpoint in works such as Jour delicieux (1896), a portrait of several women standing in an orchard, their skirts a sonata of reds and purples; or the mysterious Le Reve (1897), in which two dark women are seated on the floor of a dusky bedroom that opens upon a vibrant landscape--that may be an open door or an unframed painting. Gauguin's skills as a draftsman were best suited to this medium-sized format; when his drawing is overextended he loses control of his colors.

Of all the painting exhibitions in Paris (there is also a Vuillard show at the Grand Palais) perhaps none has caused more excitement here than the thirty Botticelli works that Daniel Arasse has hung and lighted so perfectly in the little Musee du Luxembourg. Natural light has not been used in this space for many years. The curator understood that these paintings of tempera on wood thrive in the sunlight and take their meaning from it.

The show is titled "Botticelli: de Laurent le Magnifique a Savonarole," but any political influence upon the paintings is negligible. If the madonnas grow sadder in the 1490s it seems likelier a result of the painter's aging muse than Savonarola's severe theocracy. Arasse appears to have two related intentions: to emphasize the unique effects of Botticelli's translucent medium, and to demonstrate his powers as a neoplatonic symbolist, a visual poet who used the effects of light to penetrate the surface of things and explore religious mysteries.

Botticelli's Birth of Venus was a pin-up in dormitory rooms when I was in college; his Primavera is one of the most popularly reproduced images of the Quattrocento. (Neither is here.) Our generation came to love his gently eroticized madonnas without knowing that anyone could feel otherwise about them. But in tact dais Florentine artist, successful in his lifetime, was condemned to obscurity by the Mannerists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, only to be rescued from oblivion by Ruskin in the nineteenth. What offended connoisseurs in the interim were the eccentricities that now fascinate us. When Leonardo and others had mastered the use of shiny oils and the realistic details of anatomy, Botticelli went on working in the softer tempera, on wood, and distorted the human figure, elongating arms and fingers, tilting necks at impossible angles, as suited his peculiar purposes.

A round tondo placed at the entrance, Vierge en adoration devant l'Enfant, is a keynote for what is to follow. The blond Virgin, her long hands joined in prayer, swoons above the child, whose head rests on a spray of roses. Roses float above, and pale pink blossoms as glowing as the young virgin's cheeks. Next comes the Madone a la roseraie (from the Louvre), in which Mary's dark robe sets off the caress of the bright profiles of mother and child. Mary's faint halo, a golden filigree against the pale blue sky, and the roses next to it, are the source of the divine light that bathes the coral pink faces. I had never seen the magnificent La Vierge a l'Enfant et un ange from the Musee Fesch in Corsica. The fair-haired angel at the right is lifting the infant into Mary's arms. The rippling gold-stitched embroidery of the garment hems, upon the angel's powder-blue robe and Mary's of deep green, completes an overhanging pattern of festooned vines and fruits. Here the light source is somewhere above the viewer's left shoulder, but descends brilliantly via the faces of mother and child, as through a prism.

As if to wake us from a dream, to see that Botticelli's vision is not all sweetness and light, there appears a troubled Saint Augustine at his desk, contemplating the equilibrium of the miter and the astrolabe. He guards a nook where Arasse has hung a group of gory paintings on the subject of Judith and Holofernes: one with Judith beating the severed head, another showing the bleeding, headless cadaver.

In the main salon are some portraits of young women in profile, long-necked, stark; but there is a beauty with peach-golden skin, and strawberry blond hair covered by a limpid coif. There is a dazzling Portrait d'homme avec la medaille de Cosme l'Ancien, in which a red-capped youth holds a large medallion against his black cloak--it appears to be real gold, blurting the line between art and reality. Also in this room are several large allegorical pictures on pagan subjects, including the tragic Pallas et le centaure wherein the goddess's pity for the monster is manifest.

But the showstopper is the enormous L'Annonciation (1481). The painting is twenty feet wide and eight feet tall and one is immediately struck by the great distance between the angel hovering outdoors far left with his huge white wings and Mary in her blue robe kneeling beneath a white lace valance at the right edge of the canvas, a corner of the bedroom. Gabriel is slightly larger than Mary is; they take up no more than an eighth of the surface area. Beyond a great expanse of checkered the within the bedroom we see the large, elevated bed--with its single pillow. The painting is vertically divided by one of three ornate arches, the entrance to the Virgin's bedchamber. To the left of this arch a walkway leads up to garden and hills, the vanishing point. The long walkway and the bedroom floor, at tight angles, are of equal length on the surface of the painting, creating the illusion of an immense interior.

The angel and his message are borne upon a scarcely visible beam of light whose source is the arch behind him. This light passes through the opening of the middle arch, narrowly suggested by a vertical stripe of rose, as from our human perspective we can neither see the source of divine inspiration, nor the passage of the sacred mystery (the Conception) through the astonished Virgin's bedroom door.

(1) "Gauguin-Tahiti, L'Atelier des Tropiques" will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from February 29 through June 20, 2004.