The Paris Metro

I love the Paris Metro.  I love its smell.  I love its hallways.  I love its design.  I love its utility.  My friend Denny Swanger calls it one of the wonders of the modern world.  I'd be inclined to agree with that.  When she was here over Christmas, my daughter remarked that she thought maybe most people in Paris took the Metro for granted, that in essence, they sort of put up with it.  She's probably right (though like me, she's very fond of it!), but this is one of those rare cases where the people of Paris are wrong.  The Metro is one of the world's great urban transport systems.  No matter where you are in the city, you're seldom very far from a metro stop.  Within a half hour, sometimes a little more, often less, you can be almost anywhere in the city.

The system is actually pretty old.  The first line (still called "Line One") was built in 1900 for the World's Fair the city hosted that year.  Paris has hosted a lot of world's fairs over the years (the Eiffel Tower was built for one of them).  After that, it just continued to build more lines.  Today it has sixteen different lines (two of which are branch lines to two other lines).  The newest one, Line 14, was completed only a few years ago, and is the first fully automated line in the system--no driver.

I like the drivers, though.  There's something cool about the fact that they often use large mirrors in each station to watch people get on and off so they'll know when to close the doors.  The system is much higher tech than it used to be, with signs in each station now telling you when the next train is due, but those times have to be approximate because human beings drive the trains, and sometimes they speed up or slow down depending on the traffic.

And as the picture above shows, it's not all underground either.  There are several lines that come up on top and are elevated for at least part of their run.  One of  those, line six, crosses the river offering a breathtaking view of the Eiffel Tower.  Another, line two, travels north over the Canal St. Martin and crosses the tracks of two of the city's large railway stations.  A third, line 5, crosses the river down from Notre Dame, and passes right *through* one of the city's large train stations.

One of the cooler things about the system is that it is always being updated.  They're gradually building a beautiful new "light rail" system to ring round the city, hoping to get people off of the ring road, or Peripherique, which is often bumper to bumper with traffic.  The second phase of this project, called Tram 3, will be completed in a couple of years, then they're planning a third.  Likewise, they're always updating stations, and putting in new trains. 

The system helps pay for itself with advertisements.  I've seen the guys who paste these things up.  They do it in large sections, and it's quite impressive the way they make sure each section matches perfectly so as to make it look like a single large photo.  It's useful too.  I can always tell which movies are opening soon because posters will go up in the metro a few weeks before.

One of the cooler things about the Metro are the ghost stations.  Over the years, we've tried to spot them as the trains go by.  The one above is the St. Martin station.  Most of them were closed during the Second World War when use was down and then never reopened, usually because they were close to others and weren't needed anymore.  Today they're covered in graffiti, but if you look close, you can still see the old ticket booths, ancient ads, and old signs. There are around seven of them, and metro fanatics like me like to "collect" them!

I ride the metro every day, and every day I see different faces in this amazingly diverse city.  Of course, today, people are mostly messing with their ipods or talking on their cell phones, but there are still a good number reading novels and newspapers.  France is a reading kind of country.  Where else would a driver come on the intercom and apologize for a temporary delay because the train in front hasn't quite left the station yet?  I love the metro.

Lights in the City of Light

Paris is not called the City of Light just because it was the capital of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, though that certainly is one reason for the epithet.  In fact, the name is far more literal.  Paris never sleeps.  Its monuments are lit up every night, and it is therefore a great city to stroll once the sun goes down.  The bars and cafes are open, depending on the district, very late indeed.  Some stay open all night.  When the metro shuts down around 12:30 am, the city operates a special late night bus service called "Noctambus" which reaches most of its neighborhoods on strategically placed routes.  As long as you know more or less where you are, you can stay up pretty much forever, provided you don't need much sleep.

And some people obviously do.  This fellow was playing his soprano sax on the quai by the river when I strolled by.  Playing rather well, too, I thought.  Of course, one of the city's more legendary images is of jazz musicians playing by its rivers, under its bridges, or, just as often, in its metro stations, though there they hope for a little money.  New York is famous for this image too.  The great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins once dropped out of public performance to practice, arguing, against all the people, musicians and non-musicians alike, who had *ever* heard him, that he needed to practice more.  When he returned to the music after his little sabbatical, the first album he recorded was called "The Bridge" for RCA.  It's still one of his finest albums, so maybe he was right and everybody else was wrong.  Paris is a city of music as well as light, and there are concerts here all the time.  American jazz musicians have been coming for years, getting the kind of attention--and money--they couldn't make in their own country.  But the city's lights mostly fall

on its magnificent monuments.  Here, you can see the Institut de France, built by Cardinal Mazarin in the seventeenth century to house the new Academie de France, the Olympian summit of French intellectual life.  It's still there today, and in the same building.  In front of it, connecting it to the vast Louvre museum, is my (and just about everybody else's) favorite bridge, the beautiful Pont des Arts footbridge.  There's always somebody on the Pont des Arts, and I think more marriage proposals have been made on it than on just about any other bridge in the world.  People picnic on it, chat on it, run on it, and yes, make out on it.  Especially the last.  It's best in the summer when the soft winds of the river waft down upon the flaneur as he stands there.  Tonight it's a bit chilly, but that's ok.  It's still a great place.  From its center, one can see the spire of Notre

Dame in the distance down river and the spire of the Eiffel Tower up river.  I'll blog about the Tower later, but Notre Dame, probably the world's most photographed cathedral, is also beautifully lit at night, and in such a way as to show up its graceful flying buttresses.  The square in front of the cathedral is filled with tourists all day, and, it seems to me, all night too.  I find myself wondering when on earth some people sleep, then I remind myself that I wouldn't be wondering that if I weren't up too, contemplating them.  If one crosses the Pont des Arts toward the Louvre, and then passes beneath one of is many arches into the "Cour Carre" (or square court), one can begin to see just how vast this largest of all the world's art museums really is.  Mitterand made the Louvre the centerpiece of his "Grands Monuments," cleaning it up, reorganizing it, and moving a ministry out of one of its wings so that the entire mammoth structure could be given over to the art collection amassed by kings and nobles and the Church over the

centuries.  Lots of people go to the Louvre thinking they're going to see the Impressionists, but those are in a different museum.  Not to worry, there's always the Mona Lisa.  If you get into the museum and want to find that, just follow the tourists.  They'll take you right to it.  I haven't been yet on this trip.  I thought I'd go late in the afternoon last Sunday when it was free, and popped in to see if there was a line.  There was, about a mile long, so I decided to take in the great museum some other time.  At night, though, the Louvre is closed (well, except to Ron Howard and his cast from the Da Vinci Code flick, which was actually filmed there at night, the first film I know of ever to be allowed to do that), and the courtyard around the massive and still somewhat controversial crystal pyramid that the great architect I. M. Pei designed for a new entrance is fairly peaceful.  If you stand directly in front of it at its center, you can look straight through the Napoleonic Arc du Carrousel up to the Egyptian obelisk that Louis Philippe managed to sucker out of the Khedive of Egypt in the early nineteenth century all the way to the massive Arc the Triomphe.  It is one of the great urban vistas in the

world.  But, for the flaneur, all these monuments can get a little...heavy.  They tend to bear down on one, and one seeks a little more lively place, so I head for the Place de Bastille.  Yes, it was once home to the fortress prison made famous in the French Revolution, but it's a large and very lively space now, open *very* late, and I stop for a Nutella Crepe (one of my truly guilty pleasures in Paris--fresh made, slathered with Nutella, and so hot it's almost hard to hold) and stop to watch a collection of kids doing hip-hop street dancing for pocket change.  They're fun to watch, and I give them some money.  I generally give money to street performers.  I like to keep them in business.  I give money to the buskers who get on the Metro and play and sing for me too.  I think it might irritate some of my fellow riders a little--I am encouraging them after all--but where else but in Paris, will I hear an accordianist, a gypsy violinist, and a Chilean singer in the same train in the same week?  Paris at night is a magic place.  Of course, one can say that about any number of cities, but, as always, there is something special and almost indefinable about this one.  Maybe it's the crepe.

Fall colors come to the City of Light

Paris is a pretty city all year long, and every season has its attractions, but there are a lot of trees here, and when the fall colors arrive, there are places in the city that are spectacularly beautiful.  I strolled through two places that brought that home to me.  The first was the Parc des Buttes Chaumont up in the nineteenth arrondissement, and the second, just today, was the city's most famous cemetery, Pere Lachaise.  Both are not too far from where I live--lucky me--so I was able to walk to both of them from my apartment.  The Park des Buttes Chaumont was a gift to the city of the emperor Napoleon III and his ever-present prefect Haussmann, who formed it from an abandoned gypsum quarry.  As a result, it is very dramatic, with many steep hills, a beautiful lake, and views galore.  I wondered through it watching the Parisians at play--one can sit on the grass here--and took some photos.  Yellow was the color here--lots of hues on a sunny day.  This park also has a waterfall, which, considering it sits in the middle of a large city, is pretty cool.  Rather than babble too much about it, I think I'll let pictures do the work, then we'll go on a walk through Pere Lachaise.

The cupola sits at the top of the highest point in the park, and one can see a great deal from there, including, in the distance, the church of Sacre Coeur on the Montmartre hill, the subject of an earlier post.  But mostly, it's just a beautiful park where one can relax and catch the last rays of the late fall sun.  Parisians love their parks!

 Just today, I decided to visit Pere Lachaise.  The cemetery is only a few blocks from my apartment, and I've strolled through it many times.  Today, however, was November 1, All Saints Day, a very important holy day in the Catholic calendar, and also a public "holiday" in France, which has always had an interesting and somewhat complicated relationship with the Catholic Church.  At any rate, by tradition, Parisians visit the cemeteries on All Saints Day and place flowers on their family grave sites or just bring flowers to leave for others.  It's a very "flowery" holiday!  I'd hoped for lots of sunshine today, but I didn't get it.  Still, even though it was a bit gray, the late fall colors were rich, and I took a variety of photographs as I wondered through the cemetery.  It was crowded today with family members but also with quite a number of flaneurs, so I had more company in my strolling about than usual.

This is the "Mur des Federes," sacred ground to the Left in France.  In 1871, when the city was surrounded by German troops during France's first of three wars with that country, a proto-socialist government was formed which became known as the Paris Commune.  Marx hailed it as the first effort at a Communist Revolution, but it was a far more complicated affair than that and is well worth reading about.  Once the Prussian/German siege was lifted, the French Republic destroyed the Commune in a bloody repression, the last act of which was to take prominent members of the city government, line them up against this wall, and execute them.  Needless to say, once Socialists came to power in France, they made it a memorial, and the graves of prominent Socialists and Communists are nearby.  It's a fairly solemn place, and today, an extraordinarily beautiful one.

Interestingly, one of the most famous graves in the cemetery is also one of the most modest, but it is also the most visited.  I've never happened by it without seeing a crowd there.  For a while, the French had to post a police officer there to keep souvenir seekers from chipping off pieces of the grave stone--including the graves nearby, which infuriated families and motivated some to start a petition to get Jim Morrison transplanted out of the cemetery.  They failed, and he's still there--and still visited, all the time.

In fact, the most interesting thing about Morrison's grave is not the grave, which, as you can see, isn't much to look at, but the crowds of people who come to see it.  Today, of course, there was a larger than usual crowd milling around.  I do sometimes wonder what on earth the Lizard King would have made of it.  He was not notable for caring much about his fans.  Well, he's long past caring now.

One of my very favorite tombs in the cemetery is the cool art deco grave of Oscar Wilde.  Wilde died in relative poverty in Paris (quipping that he and poverty were not "well joined").  It is traditional when visiting his tomb to kiss it, preferably with a very strong lipstick on.  And women aren't the only ones who do it either!  Wilde was great fun, and I have no doubt he would have been pleased to be well visited.  He loved his public.

After my visit to Oscar, I wondered a bit, finding colors and taking photos.  It was getting late--Daylight Savings Time ended here this weekend--but I still managed to get what I thought were some lovely late fall pictures of one of the city's more...er...peaceful places!

Visitors often want me to take them to Pere Lachaise when they come, and I usually oblige.  It certainly is an impressive cemetery, but I confess that I generally prefer a live Paris to a dead one.  That said, Parisians do have great style, whether it's their fashions, their food, their art, their buildings, their literature...or their tombs!

Wandering through the Latin Quarter

I hadn't really strolled the true Latin Quarter of the Left Bank yet, so I decided to start where it's busiest, right at the Place St. Michel.  This particular "place" (sort of like a square, except there's nothing "square" about it) sits directly across the river from Notre Dame Cathedral.  Its biggest landmark--well, aside from that little church--is the Gibert Jeune Bookstore, which has been selling books to students and non-students alike for a very long time.  Since I can't possibly resist a bookstore, I pop in and have a look, always searching for new books on the subjects I'm researching even though I'm pretty sure there aren't any.  I don't find one, but I do decide to get a new "plan de Paris"--the little book with maps of all the quarters and a metro map too.  I've had the same one for many years, but my eyes have declined, and I can't see it anymore.  The new one is bigger, but still fits in my back pocket.  Such are the wages of age.

I walk out of Gilbert and head up the huge Boulevard Saint Michel, one of the large Boulevards Haussmann ripped through the city in the 1850s.  Partly, he and the emperor Napoleon III (nephew of the one you've all actually heard of) wanted to clean up the city, clear its air, and give it great vistas.  But they had a slightly more sinister goal too--to make it easier for soldiers to put down riots and revolutions by making it harder for Parisians to block streets with barricades.  Napoleon III and Haussmann were both overthrown in the Revolution of 1871, so that didn't work so well, but Parisians have made their peace with their boulevards, and they do offer lovely vistas of the city.  I head up the grand boulevard toward one of the city's great museums and medieval buildings.  Interestingly enough, it was originally built to take advantage of one of Paris's only Roman landmarks, the bath house constructed for the Roman city of Lutetia in the second century.  That's a shell now, though one can tour it if one cares to.  I walk 'round it to take in the beautiful fifteenth century building that was constructed next it, the main house of the Parisian abbey of Cluny.

My students hear all about the Abbey of Cluny, the source for the reform of the medieval church in the 11th century, but I won't put you to sleep with that little lecture.  Today, the former abbey house is home to the State Museum if Medieval Art.  I go at least once every time I'm in Paris, but I'm feeling especially cheap this year (that damned exchange rate again), so I decide to schedule a visit on the first Sunday in November when the museum is free.  I'll blog about that later.  From Cluny I head up the street through a large complex of buildings that constitute one of the most famous universities in the world, the Sorbonne.  In French administration-speak, it's "Universite de Paris I" because there are several other state universities in Paris, and rather than give them all creative names, French bureaucrats have just numbered them.  It was a socialist thing.  The Sorbonne, though, still keeps its name.  It's been around since the twelfth century when it boasted professors like Thomas Aquinas and Peter Abelard--pretty big names those.  It was THE center of learning and it's still pretty impressive even today.  I take a picture of the entrance to the chapel that Cardinal Richelieu had built to try to bring the often rebellious professors and students under his control.  Like that ever worked.  It still doesn't, as any good university administrator will readily, if ruefully, admit.

Part of the university main buildings sit on the aptly named "rue des Ecoles" or street of schools, and this causes me a somewhat misty moment as I remember that the first hotel where I ever spent a night in the city was on this street, the Hotel St. Jacques.  It's still there, though I think maybe they've installed bathrooms in all the rooms.  When I stayed there, the bathroom was down the hall.  I couldn't afford a room with a bathroom, not least because my wife and baby son (who's now 28 and a loving father of three boys himself) were staying with me.  I remember we ate at a lot of cafeterias.  Such is the poverty-stricken life of a graduate student.

Leaving aside this brief mental stroll down nostalgia lane, I continue climbing.  My immediate goal is the city's oldest hill, which once housed its oldest church, the church of St. Genevieve.  This lovely old church played an important part in the city's history.  The king the French claim as their first, Clovis, was buried there in 511, which was a pretty long time ago.  He was the first ruler to make Paris a capital, and it's pretty well been the capital ever since.  He was also a Merovingian king.  I've no idea why the Wachowski brothers decided to make a character in their Matrix movies "the Merovingian," but that's all my students think about when I try to tell them about the Merovingian kings.  At least they're no longer asking me if Dan Brown was right, that Merovech I, a long-haired barbarian chieftain who would have just as soon killed you as look at you was a descendant of the Virgin Mary.  Sigh.  But I digress.

It would be nice to report that the beautiful old church is still there.  Alas, not so.  In the late eighteenth century, Louis XV and his successor (his grandson, actually), Louis XVI--the one who lost his head--had it torn down and replaced with a massive new domed church in the shape of a Greek cross.  The new church was barely finished by the time the Revolution decided it didn't think much of churches, so they turned the new one into the Pantheon and made it a massive mausoleum for French heroes.  Lots of famous people are here--Voltaire and Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola and Jean Jaures, and the Curies.  The last person to be interred was Andre Maurois in 1996.  I guess nobody since has been great enough.  One can pay and tour that too, though it's kind of dark and gloomy.  Might save that one for a free Sunday too. 

I head round the right side of the Pantheon toward one of my favorite strolling streets in the city, the medieval rue Mouffetard.  Well, it used to be a favorite, but the old rue Mouff, as it's called, ain't what it used to be.  Turkish food joints have moved in along with tourist trinket shops, and the street has lost much of its charm, becoming a tourist street.  I try to fight off the guilt I feel at my snobbery in finding this change distasteful, but I can't do it.  Too many tourists, and it really was a lovely street the first few times I visited the city.  Oh well.  At the bottom of the street is one of the city's really lovely little churches, though, the Church of St. Medard.

Unlike the street whose end it anchors, this little church has lost none of its charm, with its cool flying buttresses, its wooden interior, its clean medieval lines.  I imagine that the old church of St. Genevieve must have looked something like this before it was replaced by the grandiose thing that sits on the top of the hill, but maybe I'm just being hopelessly romantic.  The old church is long gone now, so we'll never know, and it's nice, I guess, that Voltaire and Marie Curie can share a space of honor.

Beyond the church of St. Medard, I wander some of the back streets of the Latin Quarter.  The sun is fading a bit, but the city is still beautiful in this light.  I pass by a playground crowded as all the playgrounds in the city always are in the late afternoon with the sound of small children laughing and playing, and I admire simple streets in the city, normal streets with normal shops and no monuments, the kinds of streets that delight the flaneur with their simple sights and smells, with their shop keepers willing to serve with a pleasant "bonjour monsieur," throwing out buckets of water onto the pavement in front and sweeping it to keep it clean.  Parisians like to keep their city clean, well, except for the dog owners, but we won't go there.  I head into a metro station and home.  I'm planning a nice little meal for myself tonight--some soup, a fresh baguette, and a farm-made Camembert, the cheese of the gods.

From a King's Pavillion to the Lost Temple

Sounds a bit like an Indiana Jones movie, doesn't it?  Nothing quite so dramatic, but I decided to take my walk on the outer edges of the Marais today.  The Marais is the oldest neighborhood in Paris, and one of the few that wasn't carved up into huge boulevards by Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s.  It still has a lot of its smaller, picturesque streets, cool little shops, and green hideaways--also some grand city houses of the old elites.  I get off the metro and haven't walked half a block before I look left and see a beautiful archway.  I recognize it as one of my favorite squares in the city, the beautiful Place des Vosges.  I found this cool aerial photo of it on the net, but of course, that's not how it looks when you wonder into it.  It's been called the Place des Vosges since early in the French Revolution, named for the first French department (equivalent to an American state) to pay its taxes to the Revolutionary government back in 1792.  I find myself wondering how many states in the U.S. would seek out that particular honor?!  Before that, it was the Place Royale and represented one of the very first efforts at some kind of urban planning.  Henri IV set out the plans for the square and built the first pavillion (which is still called "The King's Pavillion") and "invited" his nobles to pay for the others.  As a result, Paris has one of its most beautiful squares.  Today it's sunny, and so I stroll through the Place des Vosges.  It's the only large green space in this part of Paris, so it's always a popular place for local people to sit and take the sun and for kids to drum up a fast soccer match. 

One of the cooler things about it is that the city closes about half the lawns each day but allows people to lounge on the other half.  That way, they preserve the grass!  It's very French.  After a slow stroll around I leave the Place des Vosges and meander into the Marais past the (closed for renovation) Picasso museum by which there are some very cool little art galleries.  Presumably, people who visit the museum must be in the mood to buy unusual art.  Anyway, I head up toward the Rue Bretagne at the outer edge of this part of the city and take in the sites.  Traffic seems normal to me even though reports claim the French aren't driving as much right now to conserve fuel.  As those of you who've been following the news know, the big French unions have been demonstrating and striking over the conservative government's decision to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the age for full pensions up to 67.  Most countries are doing something similar (the US will have to soon), but it's a big deal here.  It's perceived as a step back in the safety net, which it is.  Anyway, they've been blockading most of the country's refineries, and gas supplies are running low.

You sure wouldn't know it to see the traffic, which is just as crazy as usual.  I make my way down the street to a gorgeous little park called the Parc du Temple (thus the title of this post).  It's almost perfectly rectangular, has a great little playground for kids which, at this time of day (close to 5 pm) is fairly crowded, the kids having gotten out of school for the day, and parents trying to tire them out before dinner.  The sun is fading now, but it's still shining on one side of the park, and those benches are all crowded with people grabbing that last vestige of fall sunshine.  I know this because I go over to grab a little myself. 

One of the odder things about being a historian of France in Paris is that there are usually two Parises I inhabit, the modern one everyone sees, and the historical one behind it that I tend to see.  It's sometimes a bit like having double vision!  In this case, the park sits on the original site of the great monastery of the Knights Templar, the subject of endless goofy Dan Brown-like suspense thrillers.  The Templars were in fact a religious order of the middle ages which did become very wealthy.  King Philip IV decided to take all their money at the beginning of the 1300s and used a charge of heresy as a cover for the theft.  It was a nasty business, but then Philip was a pretty nasty fellow.  He did succeed, however (killing all the Templars he could lay his hands on in the process), and all the property of the Templars became royal, which also conveniently allowed him to set up one of the very first central treasuries in the world.  From such actions are modern states made.  The remains of the Templar properties stayed up for centuries, and the keep--the original castle--was eventually turned into a prison.  Louis XVI and his son who would have been Louis XVII (the so-called "lost dauphin") were imprisoned there before the king was executed by the guillotine.  It was a complete wreck by the mid-19th century and Haussmann tore it down to make a park out of it.

As I walk through the park, with its pretty little lake and bird houses, I wonder if anybody else who spends time here ever thinks about these things.  I decide they probably don't.  I must be the only lunatic contemplating a king two centuries dead in the fading sunlight of a pretty October day in Paris!  The historian's curse, I guess.  But it's been a great "flaneur" wandering this pretty part of the city.  I pop into the "Temple" metro stop named for guess-what, and head for home, making sure to pick up a fresh baguette on my way back to my apartment.  Fresh bread, after all, is one of the true glories of France.

Boules Players in the Luxembourg Gardens

OK, I'll make a confession here.  I had a goal.  I was actually going to see something, or rather, to see if I could see something.  But I decided to take my time getting there.  The weather was lovely.  The sun was out, so I took the great Paris Metro (still have to blog about that!) to Odeon on the Left Bank in the heart of what is still called the Latin Quarter.  It really ought to be called the university quarter, but this is Paris, and old names often stick, so even though nobody much studies Latin anymore in the universities, the quarter still takes its name from the fact that they used to...a couple hundred years ago!  It's a lively place as is anyplace where students congregate, and I come out of the metro right by one of my favorite statues, the one of Georges Danton, the great revolutionary leader (and martyr) in a heroic pose.  It's where students traditionally gather to start demonstrations and marches.  Danton would have liked that.  I take a quick appreciative look at old Georges, then head up the rue de l'Odeon past some very cool shops, including Sandreme Ganem which sells colorful teapots that are fired and kiln dried right there.  I head past the Odeon Theatre, one of Paris's older ones and there in front of me are the gates to the Luxembourg Palace and its beautiful gardens.

The palace was originally built for Marie de Medici, yes, THAT family.  She was the wife of King Henri IV and mother of Louis XIII, and she had the palace designed to look like the Pitti Palace in her native Florence.  Today it houses the upper house of the French Legislature, which they also call the Senate.  Nice digs.  I was entering an end I hadn't entered before, strolling along, when I came to a lovely fountain, called, not too originally, the Medici Fountain.  I stopped to take in the view and read the little plaque (in French) that explained to me that it used to be a much longer lawn, but that Haussmann, who redesigned the entire city in the 1860s, wanted to cut a new boulevard through it, so he moved it in closer, and had the pool designed to make it look longer.  Clever fellow Haussmann.  It's a peaceful green space, and there were people lolling about.  The Luxembourg always has people in it because it's one of the few large green spaces on the Left Bank.  But I continued on to the large circular pool that sits in the center of the gardens.  Around it were large numbers of the little metal chairs that are a sort of minor landmark of the city.  There were a number of people sitting about, taking the sun, and, of course, the usual number of couples sitting side by side taking in each other--a recurring theme in this unquenchably romantic city.  I sat down to watch people stroll by.  The Luxembourg is a remarkably democratic kind of place.  Every kind of person wonders through--older couples and younger ones, French people and people from every imaginable nationality.  There was a Russian couple, and a family with large numbers of kids whose ethnicity I couldn't quite identify--eastern European by the sound of the language.  I sat for a while until two men sat in back of me and lit up cigarettes.  If I hadn't been downwind, I would have stayed, but I was, so I left.  Lots of people outside the United States smoke.  Lots inside do too, but fewer.  France passed a law a few years ago banning it indoors, and remarkably, French people decided to obey that one, but that means they all smoke outdoors.  So it was time to move on.

I left and walked toward the corner of the gardens where only those in the know go.  They go to watch the Boules players.  Boules, or Petanque (or Bocci Balls for those of Italian extraction, though in that version the balls are larger, ceramic instead of metal, and brightly colored) is a *very* traditional game in France.  Many people play it, but mostly it's older men, often retired, and it is the most French of games.  I was pretty sure there would be boules players at the courts in the corner of the gardens, and I was rewarded with a fair number of them.  The game isn't too complex.  You throw a small "target" ball about fifteen feet out, then each team tries to get its balls as close to the target as possible.  The first players aim for accuracy, then there are "strikers" (well, that's what I call them), who try to target the enemy's balls and knock them away.  The balls all look remarkably similar, and I often wonder how the players tell them apart, but they do.  Real old-timers have little magnets on the end of strings that they swing down to pick up their balls without having to bend over.  It's a social game.  People talk, measure the distance between balls, laugh, and enjoy the weather.  Family members are often there.  In this case, there were several wives sitting to watch.  One was knitting.  Acquaintances would show up, shake hands with the men, do the little kiss on both cheeks (the real ones, not the fake ones you see on TV) with the women, talk about this and that.  It's said that France is a nation of villages, and certainly Paris is a city of them.  When I sit and watch the Boules players, I feel a part of the village.

I sat for a half hour or so and admired the skills.  It's a lazy game, but it fits the culture somehow, and one can easily imagine everybody repairing off to the cafe afterward for a little glass of wine or beer, or maybe a coffee.  Time to go.  Out I went by another gate and headed for the church of Saint Sulpice.  I hadn't been there in many years, so I decided to take in the famous Delacroix paintings that grace one of the chapels.  I found the church being restored, with scaffolding in front of it, but the entry was clear.  Saint-Sulpice was once the seat of the most important seminary in France where most of its great bishops were educated.  That's moved on, of course.  A few years ago, the church drew the bizarre attention of Da Vinci Code tourists because there's a meridian line in it.  It was actually put there to figure out when Easter would be, but Dan Brown invented all kinds of nonsense about it in a book packed with nonsense, and so for a while, mobs of tourists came to gawk at it.  I hope they left some money.  Maybe that's what's paying for the restoration of the front!

Anyway, I'm not there to look for the body of the Virgin Mary or any weird albino priest murderers.  I'm there to look at art.  In the first bay to the right as you enter are the last three great masterpieces of the 19th century painter Eugene Delacroix.  He moved near to the church to paint them, and that house, where he also died, also houses a lovely little museum dedicated to his work.  I go into the chapel, and sit on the bench and admire the work.  It's not well presented because it's not well lit, but if you sit there long enough, you can see the remarkable liveliness of it.  I particularly like the fight between Jacob and the Angel, which seems to me to be far more passionate than the usual bit of church art. 

Anyway, I wander 'round the church (which is also renowned for having one of the finest pipe organs in France) and realize that, like so many late baroque churches, it's not really that interesting...well...unless you're looking for secret code stuff!

I head out of the church and back to the Odeon, say a final little farewell to Danton, and head down into the metro network.  It's been a great walk, but I'm looking forward to dinner with my friend Gordon in one of our favorite restaurants, and nothing will keep me from that!

From Montmartre to Pigalle--what a place to start

Usually, I work on my research and writing in the morning, exercise a bit, and take the afternoon to do my wandering about, but today I worked longer because I had an atrocious cold this weekend and didn't get the work done I wanted to do.  So, I decided to eat early and wander a bit at night.  Where to go?  It was a pleasant evening, and thinking the weather might soon turn damp, I decided to go up to Montmartre and meander down from there.  Montmartre is a very touristy place, both because it offers a great free view of the city, and because there's a huge church up there which looks like it was transplanted from medieval Byzantium.  Sacre Coeur Cathedral (translated as the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart) is made of white limestone which, rather bizarrely, only gets whiter when it rains, and it rains a lot.  So it's pretty white.  I don't like the church much.  It was built by the Third Republic in 1871 after it crushed the Socialist Paris Commune explicitly to ask heavenly forgiveness for that particular sin--the socialism, not the crushing.  Old leftists like me are therefore put off by it.  Right now, for some reason, it makes me think of Sarah Palin. It's also kind of ugly inside, but maybe that's just my bias at work.  I don't go in unless someone who's visiting me drags me in there.  Then I sit and stew.

Anyway, I didn't go up to Montmartre for the church.  I came for the view, which is stunning, even with lots of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts littering the stairs in front of the church.  There were tourists there, of course, a relatively loud group of young Germans on this occasion, but they moved along, and I contemplated the city I adore.  What strikes one from that vantage point is how level the buildings are.  The city passed laws and regulations decades ago controlling the height of its buildings.  Builders cheat now and then, but not by much, and the lack of the sort of canyons that mark many other cities helps give Paris its character, the sense of a city that one can live in and breathe in, even if too often, the air smells of cigarette smoke.

Anyway, I wandered away from the view and toward the supremely touristy Place du Tertre, where blizzards of tourists get their sketches made by "artists" who demand outrageous prices and get them.  It's full of restaurants French people never visit, but if you can manage to look past that--and it's tough--the buildings are still lovely, and you can still get some sense of what the village of Montmartre was once like, the one where real artists used to live, people like Utrillo and Dali, especially if you get out of the Place du Tertre, which I do with dispatch.  Freed from the crowds, I start downhill on a deserted street and find the lovely little Place Goudeau, a verticle little tree-lined park with benches and one of those marvelous little Wallace Fountains in the middle.  These were placed around Paris in the 1870s by an English philanthropist bothered by the fact that poor people had to pay for water.  They're still a great place to get a drink of pure water.  This photo shows the one I saw, though it was made in the daytime.  As I sit on a bench, I observe a young couple on another bench.  Since I'm a flaneur and not a voyeur, I don't watch too closely.  Not that they care.  Couples in Paris never do.  It's a stereotype of the city that it lends itself to lovers.  Sometimes stereotypes are true.  That one certainly is.

I leave the Place, head down one of the pretty stairways for which this district is famed and find myself on the tiny one-lane rue Andre Antoine.  It's very quiet here--the shops are all closed and people seem to have gone to bed early.  I decide to go wherever this little street takes me, and pretty soon I know exactly where it's going.  I've been dropped rather unceremoniously into the middle of the red light district of Pigalle.

Pig Alley as some American servicemen once rather aptly mispronounced it, is one of the oldest red light districts in Europe, and that's saying something.  I try not to come to Pigalle on purpose, especially at night, when it is at its tacky worst, but, here is where my feet have led me.  The neon signs are bright, in lurid reds, purples, and pinks.  "Sex Shop!" and "Sex Toys" and "Live Girls" blare at me as I wander down the street.  There are touts out front of some places trying hard to get my attention.  This is the only place in Paris where I ignore people who want to say hello, and I think about how sad that is.  In the middle of it all, of course, is the famous, or infamous Moulin Rouge, its huge electric windmill circling overhead, a line of people always at the door ready to pay 150 euros per person--that's $210 at present exchange rates--for a third-rate meal with second-rate champagne to watch a fourth-rate girlie show.  The place is always sold out.

In among the sex shops and tacky peep shows are those Turkish kebab places that seem to have sprouted everywhere in Paris like some kind of culinary Canadian thistle.  They're busy too.  I pass a small bar with men talking on telephones and wonder if they're pimps, and it strikes me that there really is no more lonely or desolate place in a city than a crowded red light district.  Every city has one, and this one is more famous than most.  And it's busy, swallowing up yen and euros and rubles and dollars.  I decide I've had enough for the evening.  I didn't come to Paris to get depressed, it's misting a little, and I don't want to get wet, so I pop into the Pigalle metro station, and the city's wondrous subway system--the subject all by itself of a future post--sweeps me back toward my apartment atop the sixth floor on the northeast side of the city.  I'll wander somewhere else tomorrow, but not in Pigalle again...not if I can help it.