Back to Paris

Tomorrow I'll be going to Paris again. I have an appointment on Thursday to have a document notarized at the U.S. Embassy. And I'd like to be able to take advantage of the possibility of going up to the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques to take some pictures while I'm in the city.

The Tour Saint-Jacques with the Pompidou Center in the background

The Tour Saint-Jacques is a Gothic-style bell tower that was constructed in the early 1500s. The church that stood next to it was demolished in 1793, during the French Revolution. The tower remains. It is 52 meters — 170 feet — tall, and it stands in the very center of Paris. For comparison, the towers of the nearby Notre-Dame cathedral are 69 meters tall — 226 feet.

Sixteen stories to climb

Weather in Paris might turn into a problem. It's supposed to start raining Friday morning. With any luck, I'll be able to schedule a tour early in the day and the rain will hold off. The Tour Saint-Jacques is open to the public this summer for the first time in its history, and accompanied tours one hour long are being given only on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

There's a weather station at the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques.

Detail shot of the top of the tower taken from the same spot as the one just above

There's a two-hour window of opportunity on Thursday mornings to make a reservation by telephone for one of the weekend tours. I'll be staying with CHM in Paris, so I'll make the call from his place, before I go to the embassy for my afternoon appointment. Wish me luck — with the weather, of course, but also with the 16 flights of steps I'll have to climb.

Views of each from the other

 










This is a photo of the Panthéon that I took in July of 2013 from the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques. You can see that the Panthéon was undergoing restoration work at that time. The Tour Saint-Jacques had recently been restored as well, leading to the tower being opened up to the public for the first time in many decades.

This is a photo of the Tour Saint-Jacques that I took in July of 2016 from the balcon du Panthéon. The restoration work at the Panthéon had been completed and the "balcony" had been opened to the public for the first time in many decades. There were three hundred stairs to climb at the Tour Saint-Jacques. There were only 200 stairs to climb at the Panthéon. Because the building stands on much higher ground, on the balcon du Panthéon you are higher above sea level than at the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques.

Figuring out lunch in Paris

Our weather is really hot again now. Welcome to August. Yesterday the temperature was up to about 85ºF (30ºC). Today it's predicted to hit the low to mid-90s F, or close to 35ºC. The sun really beats down. We don't have air conditioning. This morning I got up at about 5:15 a.m. and opened the house up completely to let in as much cool air as possible before we close up again to keep out the hot rays of the afternoon sun and the hot air.

A week ago I was in Paris. It was hot there too. It was especially hot on the streets, out in the sun. But that's where I was: walking. I figure I walked 10 kilometers around the city last Friday, and I took another fairly long walk on Saturday — maybe half as far, because my feet were starting to hurt at that point. And I was getting tired of sweating. The morning news just reported that July 2013 was the third-hottest month in France in 100 years.

The Tour Saint-Jacques in central Paris, seen from busy Rue Saint-Antoine

On Friday, I started walking where the no. 70 bus let me off, on the Left Bank end of the Pont Neuf. I walked through the Place Dauphine on the Ile de la Cité and over to the Place du Châtelet. I waited for about an hour to join the first group of 17 "tourists" and two guides to climb to the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques at 10 a.m. The 300-step climb was a killer — I'm 64 years old — especially because it had rained hard in the morning and when the sun came out Paris felt like a steam bath. Interestingly, all the people in the group were French except me and one young Asian woman. I don't think most tourists are out and about by 9:00 a.m.

This man — homeless, I presume — was enjoying a soft drink and had his cat tied to a tree
in the park at the base of the Tour Saint-Jacques.

After climbing up the tower, taking a lot of pictures, and then descending from the heights (16 stories up), I walked eastward to the Bazar de l'Hôtel de Ville department store on the Rue de Rivoli. I went in and got a blast of air-conditioned air to dry myself out slightly, and then I walked over to the Place du Bourg-Tibourg to sit down at a café and have something cold to drink. I ordered a tall glass of water... and a beer. I hardly ever drink beer, but on hot days it can be really refreshing.

View down onto a café at 10:30 a.m. from 16 stories up on the Tour Saint-Jacques

I continued my trek into the Marais and through the old Rue des Rosiers neighborhood. There weren't an awful lot of people on the streets — it was too hot and muggy, I guess, and in late July many Parisians have left the heat of the city to vacation in other parts of France, or in Spain or Italy, for example. I was just wandering, and wondering where I might have lunch and what I might eat.

Staff at a sidewalk café setting up for the lunch rush

I thought about going to one of Walt's and my favorite pizzerias, Le Sant'Antonio, but then CHM (who I was staying with) and I had talked about having Italian food that day or the next. And Walt was planning to make pizza as my welcome-home lunch on Sunday back in Saint-Aignan. I skipped the Sant'Antonio — reluctantly.

Walking on toward the Seine and the Ile Saint-Louis, I decided I'd eat an omelet for lunch. I figured CHM and I would have either Italian or Japanese for dinner later in the day, and an omelet wouldn't be too filling. There's nothing like a nice not-overcooked omelet — une omelette baveuse, or "drooly" — in a Paris café or restaurant. You never get that kind of omelet in the U.S., and I'm afraid I'm not very good at making runny omelets at home. I should try more often to perfect the technique.

As I was getting close to the bridge — Le Pont Louis-Philippe — that would lead over to the Ile Saint-Louis and then to Notre-Dame cathedral, I passed by a restaurant where I've had several good meals over the past five years. It's called the Café-Restaurant Louis-Philippe (link, link, link, link) and it has a big outdoor terrace in shade.

That makes for a very pleasant place for lunch when the weather is fine. And by coincidence, on the chalkboard announcing the day's special for lunch, here's what I saw: Omelette paysanne, salade verte. It was meant to be. (Paysanne means "peasant-" or "country-style.")

I sat alone surrounded by two men having lunch on one side of me and a man and a woman on the other side — all French. I eavesdropped shamelessly on their conversations as I enjoyed my omelet, salad, white wine, and coffee.

Paris domes: final installment

Here are a few more photos of domes that I saw on the Paris skyline when I was up at the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques last week. First, a view looking out over the Latin Quarter.

The main landmark you see in the photo above is the Sorbonne, with its green observatory domes and, on the right, the much larger dome of the Chapelle de la Sorbonne, which Cardinal Richelieu had built in the 1600s. In the distance, you can see the white dome of the larger and newer Observatoire at the end of the avenue of the same name. In front of the Sorbonne stands the Eglise Saint-Séverin and its steeple.

Looking in the opposite direction from the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques, you can see some of the best known domes of Paris, those of Sacré-Cœur, at the top of Montmartre.

And looking southwest, you can see not only L'Eglise du Dôme des Invalides, but also, in the foreground, the dome or cupola of the Institut de France, which includes the Académie Française and several other literary, artistic, and scientific academies.

The dome of the Institut stands on the banks of the Seine at the south end of the Pont des Arts, which is a footbridge linking it to the Louvre.

A couple of evenings ago, France 2 television's daily newscast ran a report about the Tour Saint-Jacques and the fact that it open to the public this summer for the first time since it was built in 1519. Here's a link. The Tour Saint-Jacques story is toward the end of the show and the guide who led the tour I was on is featured prominently in it.

Le pied, la main, la tête...

When I went to the Tour Saint-Jacques to see if I could book a tour in late July, I made sure I got there early so I'd be at the front of the line. It worked. But that meant I had to wait there from before 9 a.m. until the tour started at 10.

I took photos. Under the Tour Saint-Jacques, there's a statue of one of France's great men of science and literature. It must be protected from the elements by its placement under the arches and vaults of the tower, and I think it might have recently been restored.

Who is it? If I write « Pensées » maybe you'll know. Or « le pari de... ». Or « Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. » He was a mathematician and scientist, but also a philosopher and Christian mystic. Born in 1623, he died at the age of 39 of some mysterious malady.

It's not really clear that this man had any real connection to the Tour Saint-Jacques. One source says that the Baron Haussmann, who had the statue put up in the 1800s, mistakenly thought that the great scientist had performed experiments here. Another says he might have prepared here for meteorological work he did on a mountaintop in the Auvergne, or he might have demonstrated the findings from those mountaintop experiments at the Tour Saint-Jacques afterward for the Parisian public.

Blaise Pascal. That's him, with a thermometer, supposedly, in his hand. « L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature », he wrote, « mais c'est un roseau pensant. » A thinking reed...

Daylight in Paris - 1

La tour Saint-Jacques stands very close to the geographical center of Paris, and is just one kilometer north of Notre-Dame cathedral. It's all that remains of a 12th-century church that was called l’église Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie. The church was torn down in the late 18th century. The Saint-Jacques bell tower itself was built between 1509 and 1523.

I was lucky to be able to climb to the top of the tour Saint-Jacques in 2013 and take in the views from up there, 54 meters (177 ft.) above street level. It was open to the public for a few months in summertime back then, but it's closed to the public now, according to the Paris tourist office web site. Even if it were open, I wouldn't be able to make that climb again (about 300 steps). So I'm glad I did it nine years ago. The link just above will take you to some of the posts I wrote about it and some photos I took.

L'Eglise Saint-Merri

The Eglise Saint-Merri stands in the shadow, figuratively, of the Pompidou Center nowadays. It was the guide on my climb to the top of the Saint-Jacques in July who said that, this way: « l'Eglise Saint-Merri est un peu écrasée par la masse du Centre Pompidou... ». See my other photo here.

The church is on the rue Saint-Martin, just north of the Tour Saint-Jacques. Below is a photo of it and the surrounding buildings that I took from the top of the tower. I can't remember that I ever was inside the Eglise Saint-Merri before, even though I must have walked by it dozens of times over the years.

The church was built between 1520 and 1612, but in an anachronistic Flamboyant Gothic style. The site was where a saint named Médéric died in the 7th century. His remains are still buried in the church's crypt.

Several paintings in the church are from the 17th and 18th centuries. There's an example above that was the work of the painter Simon Vouet (1590-1649) and you can see another in the last photo, below.

The church's interior was modified in the 18th century, but stained-glass from the 16th century remains, and one of the church's bells dates back to the 1300s. It was saved from an earlier chapel on the site and is probably the oldest church bell in Paris.

During the French Revolution, Saint-Merri was turned into a saltpeter factory — saltpeter was one of the components of gunpowder. The church still has a fine organ, and concerts are given on Sunday afternoons several times a month.

Up to the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques

It was a hot and muggy July day in 2013 and there were 300 steps to climb on a steep, narrow spiral staircase. That's the equivalent of a 16-story building. I struggled but I made it. (I was 64 years old then, and I believe I was the oldest person in the group I climbed up with.) The tower is open to visitors from spring until autumn nowadays, but only 17 people an hour can go up. It's best to make a reservation if you want to do some climbing and take in the views.

Looking north toward Montmartre and the Sacré-Cœur basilica. And then looking southwest toward, bien sûr, the Eiffel Tower; the gilded dome of the church at Les Invalides where Napoleon's tomb is on display; and in the foreground the dome of the Institut where the Académie Française meets.

Here's what the steps up to the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques looked like. I had a tight grip on that rope "railing" to haul my body up to the top.

Looking west from the top of the tower you can see the Arc de Triomphe on the right; the 20th century business park called La Défense in the distance; and the rooftops of the Louvre in the foreground. Finally, closer to the Tour Saint-Jacques, you can see a lot of contruction cranes (the Forum des Halles was being updated); and the Saint-Eustache church in the middle of the image.

I took these pictures with a Panasonic Lumix ZS8 digital camera that I had bought in 2012.

Pictures of, not from, the Tour Saint-Jacques

Here we are on Monday morning. Schools all over France open their doors to pupils today. And the weather is supposed to be "torrid" — that's the term the weather woman, Valérie Maurice, used a few minutes ago on Télé-Matin. Here in our region, le Centre-Val de Loire, temperatures in the north are supposed to be about 30C (86F) and in the south they'll hit 34C (about 93F). Saint-Aignan is smack in the centre of the région Centre. I doubt that many French schools, if any, are equipped with air-conditioning.

For a while now, I've been posting photos I took from the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques in the center of Paris 10 years ago. Here are a few pictures of the tower itself. It was built at the beginning of the 16th century as the "new" bell tower for a 12th-century church that was torn down after the French Revolution, two centuries ago.

As always, you can enlarge these photos on your computer or tablet screen to see more detail. The Tour Saint-Jacques is about 175 feet tall. That's 300 steps to climb, with no elevator.

On another subject, we made another nine jars of tomato paste over the weekend, using tomatoes from our 2023 vegetable garden. That makes 14 jars in all — a total of three U.S. quarts (five British pints — nearly three liters). We put it up in hermetically sealed jars that we'll keep in our downstairs cellier pantry and use over the course of the winter.

P.S. A grape harvester just went by, followed by a tractor pulling a trailer. The 2023 grape harvest has started in the Loire Valley.

Yesterday in Paris

On Thursday, we had a couscous royal for lunch in a restaurant with Ellen & Paul and Peter & Jill. Here is a photo as a sort of teaser. I'll post some more photos next week when I'm back on my computer. I can blog on the tablet, but tasks like processing and uploading photos are definitely more difficult to accomplish than on a PC.

Le couscous royal: all this for one person's lunch 

Yesterday for lunch CHM and I decided to buy a spit-roasted chicken, some potatoes, and some céleri rémoulade from a shop in the neighborhood, and I picked up a bottle of Saint-Emilion wine to go with all that. Then I went out for a long walk around the city.

La Tour Saint-Jacques in the center of Paris

Thanks to The Beaver, who comments here and lives in Montréal, I had learned that the Tour Saint-Jacques in Paris is open to visitors this summer. In my nearly 45 years of living in and visiting Paris, I've never been up to the top of the tower (it's 16 stories high). It's squarely in the center of Paris, so the views have to be stunning. I'm not sure it has ever been open to the public before.

Unfortunately, all the tours yesterday afternoon were already full. There's a sort of a quirky system for reserving a tour. You can make a reservation for any day of the week if you phone in on Thursday morning between 10 and 12. Otherwise, you have to go to the tower and see if there is any space available on one of the tours that day. You might get in immediately, or you might have to reserve a tour later in the day. You can't reserve for any other day (unless you do so by phone on Thursday morning).

C'est clair, non ? Anyway, the upshot is that all the tours were booked yesterday afternoon, and I haven't yet decided whether to go back today to see if I can join a tour (they're not "guided" tours exactly, but accompanied). I might have to come back to Paris later this summer to go up there. In September, the tower will be closed to the public again.

So instead of going up to the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques, I walked through Les Halles, over into the Marais, and up to the Place de la République. It was sunny and hot out, and there were throngs of people on the streets speaking every language imaginable (including a lot of Americans of course). I'll post some pictures next week.

Le balcon du Panthéon

Two weeks ago, les parties hautes (the upper levels) of the Panthéon in Paris were re-opened to the public. The 18th-century monument, located in the center of the Latin Quarter, has been undergoing major renovations for several years.

I was surprised when I heard about le balcon du Panthéon, because I don't think I was ever aware that visitors were allowed to go up there. The "balcony" offers a 360º view of the Latin Quarter, the historic center of Paris, and much of the city. I want to go up there this year. Walt might go on May 2, when he'll be in Paris on his way to Montréal and New York.

You might know that I really enjoy seeing Paris from on high. In my life, I've been up to the top level of the Eiffel Tower three or four times (1970, 1997, 2007...) that I can remember. Walt and I climbed the stairs up to the Eiffel Tower's first level, and maybe the second, some 25 years ago. I've been to the top of the Tour Montparnasse as many times, with Walt, CHM, and my friends Evelyn and Lewis (last year), among others. The links here will take you to some of my photos.

A few years ago, when it was first opened to visitors, I climbed up 300 steps to the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques, which stands square in the middle of the city. I took dozens... nay, hundreds... of photos from up there. You can see many of them in these blog posts.

I have good memories of going up into the towers of Notre-Dame and out onto the rooftop with Walt in maybe 1988. « Monte là-dessus — tu verras Montmartre », we joked. We also went up to the top level of the Arc de Triomphe one year — at least 20 years ago — and, around that time, up into the Grande Arche de la Défense, west of Paris proper, for the views from there.

The Panthéon as I saw it from the Jardin du Luxembourg in August 2009. You can see several other photos of the Panthéon by clicking on this link or this one.

So how have a remained ignorant of the balcony of the Panthéon all these years? I worked in the shadow of the monument back in 1974-75, when I was on staff at the University of Illinois Year Abroad Program. We had our office on the rue Soufflot, just down the street. As early as 1970, on my first trip to France, I spent two weeks in a hotel just down the hill from the Panthéon, near the Place Maubert. I was a teacher at the nearby Sorbonne in 1975-76.

Despite all the time I spent in the neighborhood, I never knew I was missing out on a chance to go up to the balcony that surrounds the base of the dome of the Panthéon. Now I have all these digital cameras to take up there with me. I can't wait to go this summer. You have to pay the 8.50€ entry fee to get into the Panthéon, plus a 2.00€ surcharge for the guided tour up into the parties hautes du monument. Not bad.

By the way, yesterday I was wondering how high the Panthéon balcony is compared to the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques. Walt looked it up. He found a site that gives not only the height of the buildings but also the altitude above sea level of the ground that various Paris monuments stand on.

It turns out that the Tour Saint-Jacques is built on ground that is at 35 meters above sea level, and the top of the tower is 54 meters above ground. That means that when you're up there, you're at about 89 meters (or some 290 feet) above sea level.

The Panthéon, built on top of the big hill called La Montagne Sainte-Geniviève, stands on ground that is 58 meters above sea level, and the staircase (200 steps) that leads up to the balcony is 35 meters tall. So when you're on the balcony, you are at 93 meters, or about 305 feet, of altitude. I think I got all that right.

Here are links to several web pages in French, with photos, about the Panthéon and its balcony: easyvoyage.com, the newspaper Le Parisien, franceinfo.fr, and paris-pittoresque.com.

Near and on the Tour Saint-Jacques

The photo on the left above is not part of the Tour Saint-Jacques, but is nearby on the place du Châtelet. I think I took it from ground level, as I did the three other photos, which show architectural details of the Tour Saint-Jacques itself.

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Yesterday we realized that our land-line phone had been out of service for nearly a week. I had only tried to make one call during that week, and it was to our friend Sue in California. I couldn't get her phone to ring. Then yesterday I tried to call a local number, and I couldn't get it to ring either. At that point, Walt realized we didn't have a dial tone. We think that the "micro" electrical outages we've been having for the past month might have been the cause.

Our phone is plugged into our fiber optic router, which we rent from the Orange telephone and internet provider. I contacted Orange, and within half an hour the phone started working again. The problem was that we had to enter an 18-character password full of required capital letters, lowercase letters, and various numbers to get the internet working again. And that had to be done on 7 or 8 computers and tablets. That pretty much kept us busy for most of the day. I just got the last computer connected this morning.

I'll always have Paris...

... I hope. I suddenly realized yesterday that it was 10 years ago this summer that I climbed up to the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques in Paris to take in the views and take photos. This gothic-style bell tower is all that's left of a 12th century church that used to stand on the site before it was torn down during the Révolution of 1789. The bell tower itself was built in the early 1500s.

The Tour Saint-Jacques stands 54 meters tall (that's 177 feet) at approximately the geographical center of the city of Paris, so the views are spectacular. The tower is owned by the city of Paris, and was opened to the public for the first time in many decades in the summer of 2013 after a ten-year restoration project.

I must have walked past the Tour Saint-Jacques hundreds of times between 1970 and 2013, when I first got a chance to climb to the top. I lived just a 15-minute walk from it for three years, 40 years ago. Over the next few days I'm going to post some re-edited photos that I took from the top of the tower in July 2013.

Saint-Germain-des-Prés...

...including a café, Le Flore. The other famous café in the Saint-Germain neighborhoods is Les Deux-Magots, of which I posted a photo earlier.

From the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques, looking out over the place Dauphine and the western end of the Ile de la Cité

toward Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the 15th arrondissement beyond

In the photos above and below, you can see the tower of the Eglise de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which was built in the fields or meadows (les prés) outside the city of Paris around the year 1000. It replaced a Benedictine abbey that had already been in existence for 400 years but had been sacked repeatedly by invading Norsemen in the 10th century.

Here and below, one of the oldest church towers in France, according to the Michelin Green Guide

The abbey (a monastery) grew into a huge walled complex of buildings by the 14th century. The wall with its defensive towers was torn down in the 17th century when the area was developed as a new residential zone. As you can see, today it is in what we know as central Paris. The church, which as been greatly altered over the centuries, was dedicated at the time when construction of Notre-Dame cathedral was just getting under way. The remaining Saint-Germain bell tower — two others have long since been demolished — is one of the oldest in France.

In the 20th century, Saint-Germain became known for its two famous cafés, hangouts for Paris Left-Bank intellectuals, writers, and artists (Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, Juliette Gréco, and so on). Across the boulevard from the cafés is the Brasserie Lipp, then and maybe still frequented by writers and political figures in search of a choucroute garnie. The neighborhood has really changed over the past 40 years, however. No longer bohemian and intellectual, it's now fashionable and touristy.

In the 1960s and '70s, the hub of activity in the Saint-Germain neighborhood was an establishment called Le Drugstore, which was right across the boulevard from the Café des Deux-Magots, at the corner of the rue de Rennes. It was a good place to go for coffee, a hamburger, or a club sandwich, not to mention an ice cream sundae. Au Drugstore Saint-Germain, you could buy a newspaper and a pack of Gitanes or Gauloises, and then lounge on the terrace for part of the afternoon. Unfortunately, it was the target of a terrorist bombing in the mid-1970s (I worked in the neighborhood at the time). Two people were killed and more than 30 injured. But the Drugstore re-opened and stayed in business until the mid-'90s. It's gone now, replaced by an Armani boutique.

I know Walt has many memories of the Drugstore and the Saint-Germain neighborhood — Saint-Sulpice and the Alliance Française — from the early 1980s, when he lived there for a few months in a pension de famille. The proprietor of the boarding house was Madame Cornille — which can be translated as  "Mrs. Black-Eyed Pea" — and one of her employees was a decrepit old codger that Walt dubbed « Croque-Monsieur ». Judy "Seine Judeet" remembers these characters as well, I'm sure, as do I. Encore une fois, de bons souvenirs...