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.