About a hundred and eight years later, a Canadian tourist named Mike (not known at all throughout Paris) stood at what he now thinks must have been just about in the residue of Atget’s footprints and, using digital camera technology that likely would have sent Atget running to the nearest cathedral to pray that the demon he had just encountered would bother him no more, captured this shot.
I’m amazed how little the intersection has changed in over a hundred years – aside from the addition of a motor scooter and a few posts, it would still be an instantly recognizable location to Monsieur Atget.
A couple days earlier, that same tourist named Mike had snapped this photo of Leslie
standing in somewhat more nefarious footprints, as this 1940 image that is on display in the Galérie de l’Occupation in the Musée de l’Armée illustrates quite clearly.
To conclude my seemingly endless “How I Spent My Autumn Vacation” series, I’ve decided to break from the pattern set so far. Rather than drag you day-by-day through our week in Paris, I’m going to drag you instead through a bunch of the photos I took of the highlights, and augment the online album with some anecdotes. I figure it’ll take about three more posts or so.
Paris is home to many highlights – from the obvious like the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysées to the somewhat (to us, anyway) more obscure. You’ll be relieved, no doubt, to find that most of our visit was to see the obvious and well-known. Paris is... well, it’s Paris. It drips history
– this plaque, for example, marks the spot at one end of the Tuileries where Marie Antoinette met her fate under the guillotine’s blade. And just around the corner from where we were staying was a small hotel in which a not-insignificant piece of US history was crafted.
Paris oozes character; it radiates charm and it can be as casual or as frenetic as you choose to make it.
We had decided from the moment we first decided to visit Paris that we were going to locate ourselves centrally and travel largely, if not entirely, on foot. That we did. The area of the city in which we housed ourselves for the week is known as the St-Germain neighbourhood and its streets and sidewalks have been trod by artists, writers and the creatively bent from all walks of life. A quartet of blocks from the Seine’s famed left bank, St-Germain lies directly across that river from the Louvre.
But right off the bat, this will make you laugh. Long-time Baby Duck readers will recall when, months ago, I related the highlights of our visit to New York City, including our discovery that the renowned Frank Lloyd Wright exterior of the Guggenheim was completely encased in construction scaffolding and plastic. That, in its turn, recalled our years earlier visit to London, England, where my first view of the Tower housing what is arguably the world’s most famous timepiece – Big Ben – was in fact a view of a structure enclosed from base to spire in scaffolding and blue construction tarpaulin.
We had chosen this particular apartment in part because it promised a lovely little balcony on which we envisioned ourselves enjoying croissants and cafés-au-lait before starting each day’s touring.
So given the foregoing preface, you will not be in the least surprised at all to learn that this was our very first view of our week’s home in the City of Light.
That’s our “balcony” under the green portion of the tarp at the very top of the scaffolding tower. Now a lesser person might start to develop a bit of a stigma at luck like this, but once we got into the apartment, we reasoned it out this way. It would really be a base in which we slept. So we could either spend the first full day in Paris scouring about for similarly located accommodation without the accompanying construction, and relocate, or we could say to hell with it. We chose the latter and once we got past the minor irritation of having to check the television’s weather channel each morning simply to see what kind of day it was outside, it proved to be an acceptable choice.
(But let this be a warning to anyone who travels with me in future. You will encounter scaffolding, tarps and heaven-only-knows-what view blockers. However, I also enjoy wine and single-malt scotch so drowning your sorrows in my company will be a more than compensating experience.)
In very short order, we discovered a delightful little “croissanterie” just around the corner, which was a perfect alternative from which to launch our day’s touring over croissants and cafés-au-lait.
You might have heard singularly unsettling things about the functional design of some French public restrooms. Well I can confirm that at least one – the old hole-in-the-floor – does indeed exist and was, in fact, the very first public facility we encountered at the start of our trip. It was located along the highway on the day we drove from Paris north to Utah Beach. The only thing disconcerting about that experience was my failure to realize that stepping lively out the exit was required because the act of opening the door on departure triggered a fire-hose-like multi-jet water blast that cleaned the facility for the next user, drenching my shoes and pant cuffs in the bargain.
But I can tell you now that there is also a corporation dedicated to making the necessary biological experience an encounter with luxury. Take a minute to visit this website. The necessity that compelled our visit one day on the Champs Elysées gave way to utter bemusement – and not a little a-musement – as we found an entire boutique built around the facilities, including (if you didn’t already discover the product in your virtual visit) the opportunity to buy a bottle of Bordeaux called (here I simply must inject, “and I am not making this up”), La pissotière de l'impératrice, grand vin de Bordeaux, which does indeed mean, The Empress’s Urinal.
Oh, those wacky French.
One thing I discovered about l’Arc de Triomphe
is that although commissioned in 1806 and completed 30 years later, it is now for all intents and purposes the headstone for France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Keeping company with the many battles and battlefield heroes commemorated among the names carved into the underside of the arches, a plaque set into the floor carries the text of an exhortation from Charles de Gaulle after he escaped to England ahead of the Occupation in WWII. De Gaulle broadcast from London a call that effectively created the Resistance when he called on all French to rise up and fight the Nazi oppressor.
From the moment it hove into view, the Eiffel Tower was frequently framed in our cameras’ viewfinders. It’s all but impossible to take a bad picture when it includes the Eiffel Tower, however incidentally it might show up, however amusing the distractions and regardless of the weather. Cases in point:
On one of our days, Leslie and I went our separate ways for a few hours to indulge our respective interests – she, to commune with the Impressionists at the Musée d’Orsay, an art gallery now magnificently incorporated into what was at one time a huge railroad station that was opened as the gallery in December 1986.
For my part, well... guess. We had discovered quite by accident on our walk back from the Eiffel Tower that Paris is home to a large former veterans’ hospital called les Invalides that now houses the Musée de l’Armée.
No, don’t groan. Having already addressed copious amounts of things and places military in this blog, I won’t overload this entry with yet more militaria. But one feature of this Museum that I will share is the completely magnificent final resting place of Napoleon. A stunning ground level altar
leads the visitor down to what is officially a crypt, although it is about as un-crypt-like as can be, given the ornate sarcophagus in which the Emperor lies today.
Other than that, well it is just the usual humdrum display of the trappings of warfare through the ages.
And all of it is quietly overseen at the entrance by the Emperor himself.
One enormous gallery, in fact an entire wing of the Museum is dedicated entirely to the heroes of the French Resistance. (Which, in Paris, is pretty much redundant. If you fought the Nazi occupation, you were a hero.) Its countless personal artifacts are treated with the same reverence that the Vatican accords saintly relics. De Gaulle in particular
has earned an exhibit entirely to himself. (In fact, you will see echoes of the high regard in which Resistance fighters are held throughout the city, where plaques are frequently mounted where the Nazis publicly executed one or more countless such heroes, the executions being carried out in very public places in a fruitless effort to suppress the Resistance by making overt displays of the results of being caught.)
Next: The Louvre, without once mentioning the Da Vinci Code (oops), Notre Dame without once mentioning Quasimodo (oh darn... double oops) and some highlights from a few random walkabouts... Where in Paris can you buy a hamburger and fries for 35 Euros – about $50? This will be revealed. Take notes. There’ll be a test at the end.