The situation this morning

One the radio a few minutes ago, a reporter said there are about 6,000 people who commute to work daily from Orléans to Paris and back. Normally, there are 10 trains in the morning, and as many coming back in the evening. This morning there were two.

Some pictures I took at the Arc de Triomphe in September.
This high-relief sculpture is called « Triomphe de 1810 ».

The reporter said a lot of people had arrived early at the train station in the north suburbs of Orléans to try to get a train. A lot of them had come by bicycle, thinking they might need their bikes in Paris if they got there.

Detail of « La Paix »

When I rode the train from Paris to Saint-Aignan one evening in September, the train made a stop at that station, which is called Les Aubrais. A group of about a dozen people, aged 25 to 40 I would say, were sitting together and engaged in lively conversation. They joked and laughed with each other, and were obviously really enjoying each others' company. Then they all got off the train together. They must have been some of the 6,000 people who live in Orléans, work in Paris, and commute by train.

« Départ des Volontaires en 1792 »
(also known as « La Marseillaise »)

Radio reports say there are no regional trains at all running today in many areas, including around Lyons and in Normandy. The A and B lines of the RER « n'ont pas démarré », according to France Inter radio — they didn't start up this morning. That means no RER trains at all are running between CDG airport in Roissy and central Paris, or on what used to be called the Ligne de Sceaux. Also, none are running across Paris east-west out to La Défense, where tens of thousands work, and to the eastern suburbs.

« La Résistance »

It's still early and details are just coming in. Car traffic around La Défense and on the expressways between Roissy and Paris is fairly normal, they said on the radio. I think a lot of people have decided not to drive today. A couple of years ago my mother was here and we went to Paris by car. It was a day when there was a big strike and the city turned out to be quiet and fairly empty, not choked with cars. We were able to drive all around and find parking with not a problem that day. You just never know.

A couple of cherubs

I just heard that trains are running on 10 metro lines in Paris, but in reduced numbers. When you think that hundreds of thousands of passengers ride the metro every day, you can imagine how crowded those few trains that are running will be.

The only TGV train of the morning from Marseilles to Paris left at 7:31 a.m., the radio says. It had exactly 27 passengers on it. I guess people who would otherwise have gone to Paris today changed their minds, given the transit situation in the capital.

« La Paix »

Meanwhile, Nicolas and Cécilia Sarkozy have started divorce proceedings. She went to court Monday night, they say, to talk to a family law judge. The judge went to see Nicolas Sarkozy at the Elysée Palace on Tuesday. If they go through with it, this will be the first time a French president has gotten a divorce while in office.

Detail of « La Résistance »

Years ago, President François Mitterrand, who was in office from 1981 to 1995, lived separately from his wife Danielle and had a long-term relationship and a child with another woman. Many in the press knew about the Mitterrands back then, but it was never made public. People's private lives are rigidly protected in France, even by the press. Or they were. The first the public knew about Mitterrand's second family was when his "illegitimate" daughter was seen among the other mourners at his funeral.

The Sarkozys seem to have chosen a less secretive way of doing things. Some would say they are being less hypocritical about their family life.

More Notre-Dame pictures

In two weeks, I'll be going back to Paris again. This time, Paris will be a stopover on my way to the U.S. That weekend, I'll fly to Atlanta with a friend and spend a few days visiting some other friends (Evelyn and her husband) who live in northern Alabama. Then I'll fly on to the North Carolina coast for nearly three weeks with my family there, returning to France just before Thanksgiving.

Notre-Dame and its flying buttresses

In Paris, I'm planning to have dinner with some people I have never met before. One of them participates in an Internet forum I spend time on. They are a couple from California who have actually met some people that I do know personally, and given my friends' recommendations I'm sure I will have a good time.

Candles burning at Notre-Dame

Right now I'm exchanging e-mails with the couple from California — they are already in Paris. We are trying to decide where to have dinner, and leaning toward a place called Aux Lyonnais near the Paris Stock Exchange, in the Rue Saint-Marc. It's a restaurant that is part of the Alain Ducasse group. It doesn't appear to be too expensive, and the food should be excellent.

A stained-glass window in Notre-Dame cathedral

Over the past few years, Walt and I have met quite a few people via the Internet. Some are people who've contacted me because of this blog for one reason or another, but most are participants in Internet discussion forums where Americans and British people who ofen travel to (or who live in) France exchange information and opinions.

I can't identify all these figures carved into the façade of Notre-
Dame, but I think the one holding his own head must be Saint Denis.
He is said to have walked north several miles after being beheaded,
and a great church was built where he finally dropped,
just north of Paris.

For the past few weeks, I've felt a little like Saint Denis myself. My head, even if still on my shoulders, was not screwed on straight because of the bout of bronchitis I lived through. I'm better now. Yesterday Walt and I picked up apples again — about eight wheelbarrow-loads. That makes at least 15 wheelbarrow-loads we have picked up over the past week, and maybe 20. Nearly all the apples go directly into the compost pile.

A row of kings carved into the façade at Notre-Dame

People have suggested that we sell all these apples, or at least give them away. The problem is, everybody here seems to have several apple trees. We have five of them, and all our neighbors have at least as many. The fact is, the apples we have the most of, since they grow on our largest apple tree, are not that good to eat. We can make good applesauce with them, and I've made very good apple jelly out of them, but we already have more applesauce in the freezer and more apple jelly in the pantry than we know what to do with.

Unidentified figure at Notre-Dame

Now that the apples are cleaned up, Walt can mow the grass one last time before wintertime weather sets in. Over the next two weeks before I leave for my trip to the U.S., we still have to get the vegetable garden cleaned up, which means pulling out all the tomato, eggplant, pepper, and zucchini plants and tilling up the soil with the rototiller. Then we'll be in good shape for next year's gardening season. We are hoping that next year's garden will be more productive than this year's was.

The center of Paris

Did you know that they've started uncovering the Tour Saint-Jacques again? It's been covered in scaffolding and big white tarps for what seems like years. Last month, I noticed that the top of the tower is again visible.

The Tour Saint-Jacques near the Place du Châtelet

There's nothing nicer to do on a sunny warm afternoon than walk along the quais de la Seine in the middle of Paris, enjoying the displays of old books and posters put out by the bouquinistes as well as views of the river and the surrounding monuments, neighborhoods, and streets.

Bouquinistes along the Seine

The booksellers have not just old books and magazines, but also posters, maps, and prints of all kinds. They sell sheet music and even little Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame souvenir trinkets.

An old map of Paris, showing the main monuments...

...and sheet music for an old wedding ditty

The word gai in French is used in several contexts that would be unusual in English. A individual who has a sunny disposition is called « gai ». Wine can make you gai. Somebody who is a "happy drunk" is said to have le vin gai, as opposed to le vin triste.

And gai ! is used as an interjection, as in the title of the song « Gai-gai, marions-nous ». Allons, gai ! means something like, "Come on, get happy!" As in the old song:

Forget your troubles come on get happy
You better chase all your cares away
Sing Hallelujah come on get happy
Get ready for the judgement day

The sun is shining come on get happy
The Lord is waiting to take your hand
Shout Hallelujah come on get happy
We're going to the Promised Land

Window shutters

I like the shuttered windows of Paris and of France in general. I especially like the white shutters you see on the Ile Saint-Louis.

South-facing apartments on the Ile Saint-Louis

When I see these fantastic apartments with big terraces and windows overlooking the Seine, I try to imagine who might live in them. Maybe this one belongs to the Pompidou family — Mme Claude Pompidou, widow of the late French president Georges P., lived for decades on the island. Maybe the one with the big white awning was her apartment. She passed away recently at the age of 94.

Notre-Dame de Paris

Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris

Notre-Dame was our last stop in Paris on September 21. Well, not really — we also went to a big shopping center at the Place d'Italie on our way back to our hotel. Notre-Dame was our last sightseeing stop, along with a walk down the main street on the Ile Saint-Louis.

Sunlit artwork in one of the side chapels

I've been trying to remember the last time I actually went into Notre-Dame. It might have been in 1988, when Walt and I spent a week in Paris after having gone six years without any trips to France at all. One of the things we did on that trip was to go up to the top of the cathredral towers, for the views. Again, I don't know if I had ever done that before, and I know I haven't been up there since then.

The south-facing rose window

Maybe I went into Notre-Dame in 1997 when I was in Paris with my mother and my niece, but I can't remember. This time, my sister decided to sit this one out. I was carrying a shoulder bag with our jackets (we didn't need to wear them) and some of our purchases in it, and you aren't allowed to take bags like that into the church. So Joanna volunteered to sit outside in the nice weather and keep the bag so that Janice and I could go into Notre-Dame.

Glass above the chancel

It was crowded but not as crowded as I thought it might be. I believe it is the most-visited tourist sight in Paris, ahead of the Eiffel Tower. I read that somewhere. There's usually a line to get through the front doors, but it moved pretty fast on this Friday afternoon. There is a separate line for people who want to climb up into the towers. It doesn't move fast, and we didn't do that. We had been up to the top of the Eiffel Tower earlier in the day, after all.

One of the best places for good views of the center of Paris used to be the rooftop café-restaurant of the Samaritaine department store at the north end of the Pont Neuf. Unfortunately, the Samaritaine has been closed for a year or two now. Inspectors said that the building itself, an Art Nouveau masterpiece built in the early 20th century, was unsafe and ordered it closed. I haven't heard whether work to reinforce and refurbish it is under way. It's a real shame. It was a great store, and it had a great observation deck.

Notre-Dame cathedral much, much older, of course. It was built in the 12th and 13th centuries. It has been restored and refurbished many times over the centuries — most notably by Viollet-le-Duc in the mid-1800s — and restoration work continues today. The building itself is described in the Michelin green guide as "one of the supreme masterpieces of French art," and it can accommodate a congregation of 9,000. In the 1970s, the building itself was cleaned, removing a layer of black grime and soot that had built up over the decades and centuries and giving it its current fresh look.

The Seine from the Pont des Arts

It was September 21, 2007, the last day of summer, and the day lived up to its name. The sun was bright and hot. The sky was blue with just the lightest haze in the afternoon. We had just emerged from the Cour Carrée of the Louvre and were walking across the footbridge called Le Pont des Arts.

A working tug, the Occitania, pushing a barge load of coal
or asphalt up the Seine toward the Pont Neuf

As often happens, a couple stopped us and asked me if I could take their picture with the Ile de la Cité and the Vert Galant in the background. I said yes and they handed me their camera; they could see that I was carrying a camera myself.

Sunbathing along the Seine near the Louvre

Joanna, Janice, and I had joked about people handing their cameras to strangers to have their pictures taken. What happens if the photographer you've pressed into service just turns and takes off running with your nice digital camera?

Le Vert Galant at the west end of the Ile de la Cité

I told J & J that those people on the Pont des Arts probably figured they weren't really risking much, since they were a lot younger than me. Even if I had turned and run, they probably wouldn't have had too much trouble catching me, at my age. Ha ha ha.

Three boats about to pass under the Pont Neuf at the same time

So I didn't take many pictures with my own camera. We just walked and talked. I did notice the boat traffic on the river, and the people sunbathing on the stone walkways down at river level. One woman was topless — very French, non?

Le Restaurant Paul on the Place Dauphine in mid-afternoon

We walked over part of the Pont Neuf (the oldest bridge in Paris, despite its New Bridge name) an onto the island. I wanted to walk through the Place Dauphine, which is an oasis of calm in the very center of busy, noisy Paris.

As for the Restaurant Paul, I have a memory. In about 1975, a professor from the University of Illinois and his wife took me to dinner there. It was the fanciest restaurant I had been to up to that point, and I was fascinated with the atmosphere and the food. It all seemed very exotic and ultra-Parisian to me, even though I had already lived in France for nearly three years by then. I have to say it was nice of Herb and Margo to invite me!

Two memories: Walt and I had a meal at the Restaurant Paul many years later — it was probably in the early 1990s. It was much less fancy than I remembered, but the food was good.

Walking through the courtyard of the Louvre

We left the Madeleine area and took the metro at the Place de la Concorde, heading toward Hôtel de Ville. I thought we'd get off the metro there and walk over to Notre-Dame, which was Janice's sightseeing request for the day.

La Pyramide du Louvre, which is the museum entrance

Instead, we rode just two stops and arrived at the Palais Royal station. I suddenly remembered the Pyramide du Louvre and I told J & J we'd be getting off the train here. Hurry! The weather was beautiful, it was just mid-afternoon, and we'd have time to walk through the Louvre to see the Pyramide and the Cour Carrée, cross the Seine on the Pont des Arts, cross over to the Ile de la Cité on the Pont Neuf, and then make our way through the Place Dauphine to the cathedral. That wouldn't take long.

One of the fountains in the Louvre courtyard
and one of the smaller pyramids

When the Pyramide was built in the 1980s, a lot of people thought it was scandalous to put such a modern looking structure down in the middle of a courtyard surrounded by the fine old buildings of the Louvre. Personally, I thought it was a big improvement over what was there before. I guess I'm not a traditionalist.

L'Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel was built
in the early 1800s to celebrate Napoleon's victories

I have a memory of going to the Louvre back in the early 1970s — it must have been the first time, and maybe it was in 1970, when I had decided to go to Paris for the two weeks of our spring break from school in Aix-en-Provence. Three of my memories of that stay are: taking to metro over to Les Halles before the last of the old Pavillons Baltard were taken down and seeing and smelling the chaos that was the Paris central market; walking around the park at the Palais de Versailles in a March snowstorm, dodging the big wet flakes; and going to the Louvre and not being able to find the entrance to the museum!

Molière, one of the many great French writers
whose statues adorn the exterior walls of the Louvre

I can't remember if the courtyard where the glass pyramid now stands was already a parking lot in 1970, but I do know that it was a parking lot at some point in the 1970s. There were some old trees in the space too, but mostly there were cars. They might have been museum employees' cars, but they might also have been cars belonging to employees of the Ministry of Finance, which at the time occupied the Pavillon Richelieu, the long building along the north side of the courtyard and on the Rue de Rivoli, which is nowadays fully a part of the Louvre museum.

Le Pavillon Richelieu as a backdrop
for what used to be the parking lot

The entrance to the museum was a nondescript doorway (if you can say that about the Louvre) that wasn't particularly well marked as such. I think you just had to know that the wonders of the Louvre's collections were accessible through that big, plain green doorway in the Pavillon Denon. I eventually found it that day in 1970.

Reflections of the Louvre in the glass of the grand pyramid

The Pyramide du Louvre, even if the space under it has been compared to the kind of wide open hall you'd find in a train station or an airport, is a lot better than a parking lot, from my point of view. At least it's monumental, as are the buildings surrounding it, and it's pretty obviously the main entrance.

The façade that faces the Pont des Arts along the Seine
and is part of the buildings around the Cour Carrée

Janice asked why the Louvre was built, what purpose it served before it was a museum. It's a good question and I bet a lot of people don't know the answer. It was the site of the king's château beginning with Philippe Auguste (Philip Augustus), Richard the Lionheart's friend, in the early 1200s. That original château was demolished by another great builder-king, François 1er (Francis I), in the early 1500s. Francis built himself a new Louvre, and others added buildings to the over the years.

A close-up of the same façade facing the Pont des Arts

In the 1600s, Louis XIV, the Sun King, had Versailles built as the main royal residence. By 1720, the Louvre was completely abandoned by the royal court under Louis XV. It was divided up into dwellings and was home to an artists' colony. Stovepipes stuck willy-nilly out the windows along the old façades. Taverns and shanties were built along the walls, and by 1750 the place was so dilapidated that some wanted it demolished. One of Louis XVI's ministers saved it for posterity.

Fountain, pyramid, and Pavillon Richelieu

Anyway, the place has a long and not always glorious history. François 1er, a great lover of Italian art and patron of Leonardo da Vinci, started putting paintings into the rooms of the new Louvre he had built in the early 1500s. A century later, Louis XIII had put together a royal collection of some 200 paintings.

This is Montaigne, the essayist who died in 1585.
He said: « Nous sommes de grands fous :
"Il a passé sa vie en oisiveté," disons-nous ;
"je n'ai rien fait d'aujourd'hui."
— Quoi, n'avez-vous pas vécu?
C'est non seulement la fondamentale,
mais la plus illustre de vos occupations. »*

By the time Louis XIV died in 1715 after a 75-year reign, his collection numbered 2,500 paintings scattered through many royal palaces around the country. That royal collection was the basis for the Louvre museum, which was established at the time of the French Revolution at the end of the 1700s. Nowadays, the collection includes hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of works of art.

* We are such fools: "That man wasted his life doing nothing," we say; [or] "I haven't accomplished anything at all today." — Really! Did you not live? That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of our occupations.

Over by La Madeleine

I went out today. It was just a trip to Intermarché to buy some groceries. But it was the first time I had been in the car since the Saturday two weeks ago when I drove back from Paris. That day, I came home in the rain, and it has been gray, damp, and rainy in Saint-Aignan ever since.

Here's a cheery picture to liven up
the gray, damp, rainy days.

In a comment on another posting, Claude of Blogging in Paris mentioned once having had une pneumonie ambulatoire. Well, I also once had what we call "walking pneumonia." Maybe that's what I had again this time. My only symptoms were a tickling sensation down in my chest and a dry cough for days on end. No sore throat. No head cold. Just a low-grade fever for a few days. Now I'm better, though not yet fully recovered.

The chocolate penguins are nice.
Or are they frogs? I can't tell.

In my posting about the restaurant Chartier, I mentioned that I thought the waiter might not have realized that I was a foreigner. He was pretty gruff — not rude, but not pleasant either. When I say he might not have realized I was a foreigner, I'm saying at least as much about people in Paris as I'm saying about my own spoken French. Not being recognized immediately as a foreigner is something that has been happening to me in Paris for 30 years.

Often, Parisians are just not paying attention. They are too busy, in too much of a hurry. They also are used to frequent contact and dealings with foreigners who speak French to one degree of fluency or another. If your French is pretty good, they don't pay attention; they just get the facts and get their business done.

Little cakes and pies, and big macaroons

In Saint-Aignan, however, the local people take one look at me and they know immediately that I'm not French. I don't even have to open my mouth. They think I'm British, of course; it doesn't occur to them that an American might live here (or even less that an American might speak French). They all say they hear my Anglo-Saxon accent, and I'm sure they do. Je n'y peux rien — there's nothing I can do about that. Most of them have never before encountered a foreigner who actually spoke French, so they hear the accent loud and clear.

I was very used to Paris, where I could "pass" as a French-speaking person. Whether people thought I was Belgian, Alsatian, or Swiss, I don't know — they probably knew I had some kind of accent, but they didn't assume I wasn't a francophone. When I came to Saint-Aignan I was kind of shocked that I was identified as a foreigner as soon as I came into view, and as an anglophone as soon as I started talking, whether in person or on the telephone. I'm used to it now.

Eyeglasses chez Louis Lafont

So here I am still writing about a trip to Paris that ended two weeks ago today. After lunch chez Chartier and the walk past Opéra down toward La Madeleine and a stop in the so-called outlet store, where prices were sky-high, we got serious. Janice was on a mission. She wanted to go to the optical shop called (Louis) Lafont. There were actually two Lafont shops near Place de la Madeleine: one on the north side of the Boulevard des Capucines, and the other down on the Rue Saint-Honoré. We went to both.

Louis Lafont, optique et acoustique

In the first Lafont boutique, there was a nice young woman clerk who spoke pretty good English and who was able to talk to Janice and Joanna about the business. I stayed outside taking pictures for a few minutes, and then went in and just observed their interactions. It was nice. We walked by the other store, down on the classy Rue Saint-Honoré, but J & J didn't even want to go inside. They had seen.

Had enough yet?

We were also looking for a perfume shop at 422, rue Saint-Honoré, but it turned out to be just a doorway with a perfume company's sign next to it. Corporate headquarters, but no boutique. So Joanna was not able to get the perfume her daughter wanted from Paris. We couldn't find it anywhere.

The pâtisserie where I took the pictures included in this post was the shop next door. I didn't get the name of the shop, and I can't find it on the French yellow pages site. I think it's a new shop and not yet listed. It's at either 422 or 424, rue Saint-Honoré. You might want to stop there for some of those big macarons if you're in the neighborhood (Place de la Concorde or Place de la Madeleine, for example).

Just across the street from Lafont's boutique and the pâtisserie was the dome of the chapel called Notre-Dame de l'Assomption. Before the French Revolution, it was part of a convent, but the rest of the buildings were torn down during the 1790s. The chapel was spared, and it was here that funeral services for Lafayette (of Revolutionary War fame) were held in 1834. The novelist Stendahl's funeral was held here too, in 1842. The dome is completely oversized and out of proportion with the chapel it sits on top of; evidently, Parisians called it the Sot dôme, the "silly dome," after it was completed in 1676.

Also nearby was the house that the revolutionary figure Maximilien Robespierre lived in for the last years of his life.

Plaque commemorating Robespierre's last Paris residence

The inscription on the plaque says "In this house Maximilen Robespierre lived from 17 July 1791 until his death on 28 July 1974 (10 Thermidor, Year II)." That was year two of the revolutionary period. He was guillotined, like so many others.

The Grande Roue on the Place de la Concorde

Our next destination was the Place de la Concorde, on foot. From we took the métro toward the Hôtel de Ville for our next stop: Notre-Dame.

Walking around Opéra

After lunch, J, J, and I walked down the Boulevard des Italiens toward La Madeleine. We had a couple of errands to do in that neighborhood. Janice wanted to go look around in an optical shop called Lafont that she had seen on the web. Joanna wanted to find a parfumerie, a perfume shop, on the Rue Saint-Honoré. And there was that outlet store to see about.

One of my favorite view spots in Paris is the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Rue Lafitte. When you're walking down the boulevard, you come to the Rue Lafitte and look left. This is what you see.

L'Eglise Notre Dame de Lorette
with Sacré Coeur floating above it

Since it's one of my favorite views, I'll put in a second picture, this one zoomed in a little more. I just looked in all my guidebooks — Michelin, Cadogan, Baedecker's, and Eyewitness — and none of them has an index entry for Notre Dame de Lorette. The church is in the 9th arrondissement, at the bottom of the Rue des Martyres, a famous market street (think Rue Montorgueil, Rue Mouffetard). A friend of mine lived up there many years ago.

Sacré Coeur seen from the boulevards

We walked on, past café terraces full of people sitting out in the sun down, to the Place de l'Opéra. I looked up and noticed the statues on top of the opera house. It was a good chance to see if my camera could capture them.

La Poésie, a sculpture by
Charles-Alphonse-Achille Gumery

The architect of the grand opera house, Charles Garnier, commissioned these sculptures in the 1860s and 1870s. The Opéra opened in 1875. Many of Paris's great buildings and monuments were put up in the 19th century.

Apollon, la Poésie et la Musique,
a sculpture by Aimé Millet

We walked on down the Boulevard des Capucines toward La Madeleine and we stopped in the so-called outlet store we had seen earlier from the window of the 42 bus. It turned out to be sparsely stocked with highly over-priced merchandise (who's surprised?).