How to make a bad impression

As far as work goes, I've been feeling pretty good about myself lately. Not because I've been working a lot, per se, but because of what I'm doing: I just started researching at the Musée d'Orsay for a museum back in the US. My job is to comb through files in search of any pertinent information on the French painters in the US museum's collection, and any published or unpublished material on the paintings in the US museum itself. The documentation center at the Orsay is on the fourth floor, and my preferred seat is by the window, overlooking the Seine. Surrounded by shelves and shelves of brown acid-free boxes, long white tables, and overhead lamps that hang too low, I've become friendly enough with some of the documentalists, so going to work has been satisfying, to say the least.

Last week I was working on Léon Lhermitte, and despite my background in the decorative arts, I knew nothing of this painter. I quickly became intimate friends with him and his series of wood block prints and pastels. Things got good and exciting when I had to start cross-referencing his files with separate files on 19th century Parisian Salons. He'd won an award or two, and I wanted photocopies from the Salons which proved those distinctions. Next I mined exhibition catalogue bibliographies for other references to his work, and happily copied the relevent pages from those other works. I carefully flipped through crumbling gallery catalogues (in which his work was featured) that survived from the 1890s, and copied those fragile pages as well.

Lhermitte is known for painting real figures in his life, and I wondered about the tired faces and ample bodies that he painted. It seemed fitting to be learning about Lhermitte's fascination with farmers and farming (potatoes and wheat, notably) just as I was vamping up my own home garden with kale (the first sprouts have shot up!).

Today I was a bit less excited to start on Monet because there are more than 80 boxes. And, to be frank, because it's Monet. This summer I visited his house in Giverny, and only after seeing his magnificent gardens am I willing to look at his work with a little bit of pleasure. Monet completed about 2,000 paintings, and many of them center around his homes, including those at Giverny and Argenteuil. A little bit boring, non? I started to think that if Monet had been around in the time of Facebook, he probably would have photo-bombed his page with photos or paintings of Giverny much in the same way that many of us photo-bomb our own pages with personal photos, too. The main difference is, he was able to afford some fine bottles of Bordeaux because of the success of his repetitive canvases; I have not yet reaped similar rewards.

As I rifled through boxes on Argenteuil this afternoon, I kept seeing files labeled with ''Wildenstein'' and then a number. I sensed there was something important in this coding, but didn't think to figure it out on my own. And there is no such thing as a stupid question, right?

Proud of my fearlessness (stupidity?), I walked up to the documentalist and asked what that coding meant. Today the front desk was occupied by an unfamiliar face. The man was seemingly disgruntled to be disturbed from his work, especially to be disrupted by an outside researcher. Who was a woman. And foreign.

I pointed to the mystery code on the front of the file and asked for help. ''Well,'' he snidely began, ''that refers to Daniel Wildenstein, who is the author of the catalogue raisonné of note for Monet's body of work. It is the ultimate reference guide when doing research on Monet.''

I cringed as I realized I'd been caught. I tried to imagine what he must have been thinking about me, and the countless hours I'd spent researching in his department, while seemingly knowing nothing of 19th century French painting. Gathering from his reaction, researching impressionism and not knowing about Wildenstein is a little bit like studying American movies of the 20th century and not knowing about Siskel and Ebert (or, since I clearly don't study film either, insert your more academic movie critic here). Fortunately, I didn't have too much time to feel self-conscious, because my upset stomach, which has been surprising me with bouts of trouble since Thursday, revved into action.

So in addition to feeling foolish about my mediocre knowledge, I also began to feel self-conscious about my inefficiency at work. Whenever I walked by the grumpy documentalist to get to the ladies' room, I imagined him scoffing and uttering a very soft, ''putain!''

Last week I was explaining this job to a friend here, and he remarked, ''that's great! And then you'll get to write up your findings, right?'' I paused for a minute, wondering if I should feel bad that I didn't have to draw any impressive and intelligent conclusions about these painters. Then I said, ''no. That's not my job. I'm just doing the research, which I send to the US. I don't really feel the need to have any big ideas. I'm simply happy to be learning.'' And that is the truth. I don't want to be an expert on Lhermitte or Monet. I simply want to go back in time, pretend I'm living in the late Victorian period (sans oxygen-restricting corset, of course), and see that a lot of the painting that came out of this time was not overwhelmingly sophisticated: it was a bunch of guys sitting in their backyards, thinking it looked pretty, or feeling sad that industrialization was taking over, and setting paint to canvas.

I'll be back at the Orsay tomorrow afternoon, scouring everything and anything written by Monsieur Daniel Wildenstein. More importantly, I'm looking forward to moving on to Renoir later this week.