A sunny afternoon in the gardens

That would be the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, on the edge of the Latin Quarter. I worked in this neighborhood for several years in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The building itself, the Luxembourg Palace dating to the early 1600s, is now occupied by the French Senate. There are tours of the Senate chamber. There's also an art museum. But most of the action is outdoors.

And of course the puppet shows for children, tennis courts, the fountains and basins where children can float their little sailboats, and all the chairs where the wandering weary can sit and soak up sun and beautiful views. That's what I did on a hot Saturday afternoon.

Back in the day, you used to have to pay to use a chair. There were attendants who partolled the gardens and sold tickets to people who were seated. Nowadays it's all free.

As you can see, no expense is spared when it comes to flowers and manicured lawns. Le Jardin du Luxembourg is a real oasis in the middle of the city, especially when the weather is fine.

Our weather right now is similar to what you see in these photos, only slightly cooler. Yesterday our neighbor the mayor had us and other neighbors over for an afternoon in her garden. We enjoyed a five-hour lunch and interesting conversation. One piece of news was disappointing, however: Madame Barbier in the village has put her salon up for sale. She has developed allergies to the products that a hair-dresser has to come into contact with on a daily basis. We'll miss her after 10 years of the best haircuts we've ever had.

Paris in July: a café a day (4)

Le Café du Marché is on the rue Cler in the 7th arrondissement, not far from the Hôtel des Invalides and La Tour Eiffel.

Rue Cler is a short street full of food shops and cafés — a rue commerçante but not exactly a market, even though some shops display their merchandise out on the street, which is reserved for pedestrian traffic only.

The 7th is one of the most upscale parts of Paris — very BCBG (bon chic, bon genre), meaning stylish in a kind of preppy way.

Paris in July: a café a day (3)

Le Bistro au Franc Pinot is on the Ile Saint-Louis, in the middle of Paris on the Seine. It's not so much a café as a bar and restaurant.

There's no big awning and no outdoor seating, but Au Franc Pinot offers a splash of color all the same, along with a splash of franc pinot or "honest wine."

Maybe you can tell that I'm on a kind of post-vacation vacation. I still have so many photos of Paris that I want to post that I'm not really taking photos of the garden or vineyard these days. I take some cooking and food photos, and maybe I'll post some of those later.

For now, I'm just enjoying remembering what a good time I had in Paris in July — when the weather was so hot and at the same time so pleasant — and thinking how nice it was of CHM to put me up and put up with me chez lui those two times in one month. Our weather now is autumn-ish: chilly mornings with warm sunny afternoons, and very dry.

Paris in July: a café a day (2)

Au Roi du Café is at the corner of the rue Lecourbe and the rue des Volontaires — again, in the 15th arrondissement. First, a close-up, and then the full photo.

The photo yesterday and this one today were taken in the morning, before the heat really built up and sent people into the cafés. This is the café where I had a glass of white wine and some delicious olives back at the beginning of July.

If you live in an apartment with no balcony or terrace, a sidewalk café is the place to go for some fresh air, nice shade, and interesting people-watching.

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...

Paris in July: a café a day (1)

On the corner of the rue Lecourbe and the boulevard Pasteur, in the 15th, this new café opened a couple of months ago.

The weather in July turned sidewalk cafés into shady refuges from the heat for people out touring Paris on foot, as I was doing. Find a table, order whatever else you want to drink, and then add: « Et avec un grand verre d'eau, s'il vous plaît... »

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.

Looking ouest

Here's a close-in view of the quartier des affaires — the "new" business center of Paris — out at La Défense, on the western edge of the city. You're looking out over the Louvre and the Tuileries gardens. Slightly to the left, you can see up the Champs-Elysées toward the Arc de Triomphe and past it to the Grande Arche de la Défense.

The view from the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques isn't a familiar one, since the tower has always been closed to the public until this summer. I think the wide flat dome framed by the rooftops of the Louvre, in a park, is the Théâtre de Marigny. Below is a wider view.

La Défense is mostly office towers, housing 2500 businesses that employ nearly 200,000 people. It is also the site of a major shopping center and home to 20,000 residents. It's not quaint, but it makes for an interesting day trip. Go ouest, jeune homme...

Maybe you prefer this view of Paris...

I've done several posts about La Défense over the years, and you can find them here.

Le Louvre, part 2

As I said yesterday, there's often a long line of people waiting to get into the Louvre. I guess that's not surprising. In this first photo, the plaza around the Pyramide doesn't look very crowded.

But going around to the other side, you see all the people waiting to go down into the entrance foyer under the Pyramide. If you buy a museum pass that gives you access to many museums across Paris, you evidently get to bypass the long ticket lines.

Yesterday, too, I mentioned what the big open courtyard of the Louvre was like before the Pyramide was built. It was a parking lot. You can see it in the aerial photo below, which I found on the web but which is not dated.

Below are three more photos that I took on the afternoon of July 26.

On the local front, we learned a couple of days ago that another one of our neighbors has passed away, this one at age 71. He was the man who had multiple sclerosis and had become a shut-in. He fell at home several times last winter and people who were his care-givers called on us to come help get him up off the floor. It was a sad case. Two of the late neighbor's daughters are here right now. They say they plan to keep the house for the time being, but don't plan to live here year-round. So there will be another basically empty house in the hamlet — that makes five empty houses and four that are lived in.

Le Louvre, part 1

I didn't go into the Louvre when I was in Paris in July, but I did walk through the Cour Carrée and past the Pyramide as part of my 10 km trek July 26. The weather was just too beautiful for me to want to spend time inside that day. Here are just a few pictures I took at the Louvre as I toured central Paris on foot.

One of my earliest memories of going to the Louvre must date back to 1970, when I was a student in Aix-en-Provence and spent my two-week spring break in Paris. It was all new to me, and the size and diversity of the city was fairly intimidating. I thought I ought to go to the Louvre, so I did. I remember that I wandered all around the exterior of the building, but I couldn't find the entrance! It turned out to be a non-descript door (for the Louvre) with only a very small sign.

That was obviously before the Pyramide du Louvre was built in the 1980s. Now, you can't miss the entrance — there is almost always a long line of people waiting to get in. Back in March 1970, the weather was gray and gloomy, the buildings of the Louvre were gray and grim, and there were few if any people waiting to get into the museum. The courtyard where the Pyramide now stands was actually a parking lot for employees of the Ministry of Finance, which occupied nearly half of the buildings that make up today's Louvre museum.

Even if you don't go inside the Louvre to study and admire all the artwork in the museum's collections, there's a lot of artwork to see on the outside of the buildings. Here are just three photos showing some examples.

On another subject entirely — Saint-Aignan — I should say that our weather has turned gray and cool again, after a very hot and sunny month of July. We have, however, been spared the violent storms that have dropped large hailstones all around France, causing great damage to roof tiles, cars, and crops — especially vineyards.

First it was Vouvray, then Burgundy, and now Bordeaux and the Dordogne region. Here in Saint-Aignan, we've been lucky. The storms have mostly passed west, north, or south of us. We did have more than an inch of rain night before last, with some thunder and lightning. We needed the rain, actually, and we suffered no damage. The roof over the kitchen did not leak.

On est où, là ?

I know it happens to people who go on traveling and take a lot of photos. It's happened to me. Afterwards, you look at the photos, and you ask yourself: "Now what town, what village, what château, what church is this?"

So tell me where I took these pictures? There are obviously steep hills.

There's a big church at the end of a pedestrian street.

There's a garden up on a hill, and a river with a bridge.

Is that another town on the other side of the bridge, or more of the same town?

And there's another big church — one with several very tall, pointy towers.

Henri IV, Le Vert-Galant

This is a more unified post than many of the others I've done. I other words, it's five photos of the same subject: French king Henri IV on horseback at the western tip of the Ile de la Cité in the center of Paris.

Henri IV was king in during the two decades that surrounded the turn of the 17th century. He was the Protestant who said that Paris was "well worth a mass" — in other words, he was willing to become Catholic in order to become king. In fact, he had been baptized as a Catholic as a child and switched his religious affiliation several times over the decades.

However that may have been, Henri signed the Edict of Nantes, giving Protestants political and religious rights in France, bringing relative peace to the country after decades of wars of religion in the 16th century. To say that he was a controversial figure would be an understatement.

Henri IV was also the king who said he wanted every one of his subjects to be able to have "a chicken in the pot" — une poule au pot — at dinnertime every Sunday. He was much loved — more posthumously, I think, than during his 20 years as king  — and his legend grew as he came to be known as le bon roi Henri in succeeding centuries.

In 1610, Henri IV was assassinated, stabbed by a madman — a Catholic fanatic, they say — in  the middle of Paris, near Les Halles. Obviously, radical Catholics didn't love him. There were many assassination plots and attempts until at last one succeeded.

Henri's nickname was « le Vert-Galant ». He had 73 "official" mistresses, they say, and fathered 22 children. Vert in this sense means "racy" or "risqué"; a galant is a man who loves to seduce women. The park as the western tip of the Ile de la Cité is called Le Square du Vert-Galant.

Meanwhile, closer to the Tour Saint-Jacques...

No, don't get the idea that I'm through with the pictures I took from the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques in late July. I really took advantage of the first opportunity in the history of the tower to climb to the top by snapping a lot of photos, and I was lucky with the weather and the camera.

The Pompidou Center, a library, media center, and art museum, was built in the 1970s near the old church

called Saint-Merri, amid considerable controversy.

The views here are some shots of sights and monuments that are much closer to the tower, which stands squarely in the middle of the city. The Pompidou Center (a.k.a Beaubourg), to many a monstrosity, but already approaching its 40th birthday, is an example.

The new structure at Les Halles won't be a dome but will be what they are calling une canopée — as if Les Halles were a rain forest.

New architecture, new words, I guess...

Les Halles, the big transit hub and underground shopping center, nearby too, is another Paris feature that's approaching its 40th birthday. These were neighborhoods I lived in back in the late 1970s and early '80s — pendant les travaux. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Here's a view that combines the nearby and the distant Paris.

That's La Défense out there beyond the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe.

In the mid-1970s, I lived out in the western suburbs of Paris — Asnières, to be precise — while the new quartier d'affaires called La Défense, with its skyscrapers, was being built. I remember taking the train two or three stops to La Défense to do my grocery shopping back then because they had put in a huge underground supermarket there. Modern Paris — on n'arrête pas le progrès, as we say.

L'Ile Saint-Louis, which was a big real estate development 300 or 400 years ago — fairly late in the history of Paris — is now one

of the parts of Paris that most adamantly resists change (but has become pretty touristy).

The Seine was always the city's raison d'être. Now it is the feature that gives Paris a good part of its cachet. It's been cleaned up to the point that you see people fishing it it, if not swimming, and you see many more people soaking up the sun along its banks when the weather cooperates.

The steeple and towers of  Notre-Dame-de-Paris and the surrounding buildings

The last photo is one I took at ground level as I began my walk along the Paris-Plages summertime beach area the other day. Speaking of photos, I haven't taken very many at all since I got back from Paris more than a week ago. I'm overwhelmed with the Paris pictures for now.

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.