The Paris metro early on a Sunday morning

Can you imagine the Paris metro with no people in it? It's easy — all you have to do is go down into a station at about 6:30 on a Sunday morning. As you can see, I had the place to myself.

This is the Ségur station, in the 7th arrondissement. It's just on the edge of the 15th, and a five-minute walk from CHM's apartment. Twice in July, at the beginning and again at the end of the month, I had occasion to take the metro from Ségur to the Gare d'Austerlitz. It's a direct line — no changes all the way to Austerlitz.

My train back to the Loire Valley was at 7:38 a.m. on those Sunday mornings, so I left CHM's place on foot, pulling my suitcase behind me, at about 6:30. I wanted to make sure I'd be at Austerlitz on time. As you can see, one time I had to wait more than eight minutes for a metro train to pull into the station. The other time, I was luckier and the wait was shorter.

I had time to examine all the advertising and posters in the Ségur station. There were no people to block my view. There was plenty of seating.

I arrived at Austerlitz with time to spare. No jostling, no lines to stand in — just a smooth ride. Even at the Gare d'Austerlitz metro stop, there were few other travelers.

As I walked along the platform at Austerlitz, I noticed that the metro tunnel was all lit up ahead of me and the train I had just gotten off of. There was a metro employee in the tunnel, but I tried not to get him in the picture or let him see that I was taking a photo. He might have thought I was a terrorist or something.

I headed for the sortie and walked through a series of corridors and up a few flights of stairs to get to my SNCF train, destination Blois. One Sunday, I had time to sit down and have a café and a croissant before my train was announced. The other Sunday, I had less time but I never had to feel rushed.

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...

Paris street faces

Walking around one of the neighborhoods where I used to work in Paris — the area of Saint-Germain-des-Prés off the rue des Saints-Pères — I noticed these two "street faces" or architectural ornaments.

I think I was on the rue du Pré-aux-Clercs when I saw these figures. Things like these are why it pays to walk in Paris whenever you can. Taking the bus is another way to tour the city, because you get great views of places and people, but it's not like being on foot.

I didn't color the eyes blue — that's the way they really are.

I haven't been very good about responding to comments recently. I do read all the comments, of course, but often it's on my tablet where it's not as easy to leave a comment as on the laptop I'm using right now to type this text.

Mme Bavard, Bob, really. Bet the name fit. Our Peugeot dealer here, from whom I bought my car, is named Monsieur Danger. I wonder if Mme Barbier is going to change her name if she goes into another line of business...

One of these days, I'll get back to posting food and cooking pictures. Want to know how to prepare zucchinis/courgettes? :-)

Paris in July: a café a day (5)

This is another café in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. It's near Invalides, on the avenue de la Tour-Maubourg at the corner of the rue de l'Université. It's a nice urban neighborhood but not what you would call quaint. It's near the river and not too far from the Eiffel Tower.

Walt and I almost always go have a meal or a glass of wine at Le Centenaire when we are in Paris. We have a really good memory of the place that dates back to 1995. Back then, we had been on vacation in France for nearly three weeks, staying in a rental property (un gîte rural) that we  found lacking in charm, atmosphere, and convenience. It was near Cahors down in the southwest. We left the gîte several days earlier than planned and drove to Avignon, where we stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights. We were headed to Paris to spend a few days there before flying back to San Francisco.

At the time, when in Paris we often got a room in a hotel just outside the western gate of the Luxembourg Gardens, off the rue de Fleurus and near Saint-Sulpice. As we drove up the autoroute from Avignon to Paris that day in October — it takes a few hours — we talked about where we would stay in Paris those few remaining days of our trip.

What about an apartment rather than a hotel room? I stopped the car at a rest area and made a call from a phone booth to a rental agency in California that specialized in short-term Paris rentals. We had rented an apartment from them the year before, on the Ile Saint-Louis, and really loved it. This time, they had a last-minute deal on a small apartment in the 7th. We booked it on the spot. I think it was $75 a night.

We drove our rented car into Paris at mid-day — it was the weekend, so there was almost no traffic. It was beginning to rain — it might have been the first rain we'd seen in our three weeks in France. We were early; check-in at the apartment wouldn't be for a few hours. We found a place to park the car and spotted Le Centenaire on a street corner.

We had lunch. It was the best roasted chicken we thought we had ever tasted. The wine was good too, and the frites and the salade verte. We were happy to be back in Paris rather after nearly three weeks of doing entirely too much driving on twisty narrow roads. Even the rain seemed like a nice turn of events, and appropriate for Paris. De bons souvenirs...