April 28-30
Breakfast on Friday was a little out of the ordinary for us in Paris. Joanna was thinking about noodle soup, which sounded good to me, so we went down to Mandarin.
After looking at the menu, though, Joanna forgot about soup and ordered sauteed dumplings in paper-thin wrappers and a dish we had seen someone eat on our last visit, chicken with coconut.
I had duck noodle soup, which was very good, and I didn’t even splash any onto my tie or vest. So far, so good.
The chicken dish was OK, but a little sweet for Joanna’s taste. The dumplings, filled with minced pork, were terrific. I tried a bit of both dishes.
From there it is a short stroll to Luxembourg Gardens. The gardens were designed by Marie de Medici when she was queen. I don’t know how much is attributable to her time and what came later.
The name may derive from a previous owner of the property, who among other entitlements was the something-or-other of Luxembourg.
Marie built a palace there, and now it is guarded by policemen with machine guns. The French Senate meets there these days, and Marie may be turning in her grave.
There is a baroque fountain named for Marie’s family, and a very interesting feature is a series of statues of queens and other notable women. They include Mary Queen of Scots (identified as Marie Stuart, reine de France), St. Clothilde, the fifth century queen of Clovis I, whose conversion to Christianity made the Franks into good guys. She is buried at the church of St. Genevieve not far from hotel.
After a rest at the hotel, we went to dinner. Everything here seems to be wonderful, but second only to the Louvre, dinner is a high point of a trip to this city.
Le Bistro du Perigord is a few blocks down the hill on Rue St. Jacques. (If you turn left out of the hotel, St. Jacques is the second street you come to.)
The menu had something we had to ask about, duck with five spices. That could be interesting, but we were going to share the plate, so we had to be careful.
We asked the waiter, who went to check with the kitchen. We didn’t know the French names of the spices, so he found someone who used a cell phone to translate into common English names.
We were doing all right—fennel, star anise, clove, and something else—until we hit No. 5, which was Sichuan pepper. That could kill Joanna.
Plan B was something called Terre & Mer, duck and fish, but the Perigord had run out of that.
So we ordered a grilled duck.
The starter was no problem, foie gras. Neither of us had tried it before. it came with a few sauces on plate, but they weren’t needed. We spread the liver on slices of toasted baguette. It was so good that the waiter had to bring more bread.
We had asked for the grilled duck cooked medium. Three filets came bleeding on the plate. Oh, wow, I said. Yuck, Joanna said.
I told her it was all right. She was just being prejudiced because Cantonese has no rare food.
Saturday we were out early to the market at Rue Cler. This is something that Rick Steeves recommends in his Paris guidebook. He recommends a visit so strongly that it made us want to go.
The market is about two blocks of a street with no cars. Grocers set up stands in front of their stores and there are plenty of bistros mixed in.
We passed a butcher doing the rotisserie chicken thing, but there were no tables there. We went to a place next door and had roast chicken with fries for breakfast around 11. I skipped wine because it was too early, and instead had my first coffee of the day.
We walked up and down Rue Cler a few times. It’s not far from the Eiffel Tower, has several hotels in adjoining streets, and may be another good neighborhood to stay in.
We also stopped for cream puffs at Maison de Chantilly. I had learned from a menu a few days earlier that Chantilly is whipped cream. But you can take it from us, it beats hell out of Reddi-Whip.
We decided to go next to the Eiffel Tower. We found a local map at a bus stop and read it a few times to make sure we had the directions right. I got us to Invalides, which is in opposite direction.
This is a complex that includes a residence for wounded veterans, an army museum, and Napoleon’s tomb. It is surrounded by lawns and gardens and is topped by a golden dome unmistakable when you see it from anywhere in the city.
Outside the Museum of the Army there is what may be the remains of an old moat surmounted by cannons. The evergreens on the lawn are trimmed to look like bullets.
From here, we saw a strange building in the distance, maybe a huge greenhouse, topped by a French flag. We had to go there, taking a route over the grass of a long park to save our legs and feet.
What I had originally taken to be the part of the park—four large pillars mounted by golden figures—was a bridge. We were about to cross the river.
It’s only after we got across that we saw a Rodin banner. The building is the Grand Palais. We were there on Thursday for the Rodin exhibition, but couldn’t recognize it from the opposite direction.
Up here in the high rent district, Paris is one of the best-maintained cities I have seen. When we were here first a few years ago, I thought it was pretty filthy.
Something has changed. They have cleaned up, or maybe I was just hanging out in bad neighborhoods before, or maybe my tolerance for dirt has increased.
The city does have a large, very quiet vacuum cleaner that we saw picking up wrappers and cigarette butts off the sidewalk in front of the palais. A few dozen of those things could go pretty far at cleaning up. At least, this one did.
We walked up Champs Elysees. There is a lot of Beaux Arts decoration on the buildings and in the parks. Joanna became fascinated by the ornate decoration on the lamp posts—heads and traceries and neo-classical ornamentation.
We also passed a memorial—abundant flowers, flags, streamers, mourning bands—for the policeman murdered in front of the Turkish office of tourism on April 21.
At L’Etoile, there is an entrance to an underground passage to reach the Arc de Triomphe. When we got to the entrance to the Arc, there was long line waiting to get in. So we continued to the other side of the intersection to the Avenue de la Grand Armee.
It’s a neighborhood of motorcycle dealers, including one Indian dealer. I didn’t know Indian was still in business.
We went as far as the point where the road divides and were getting a little tired, and so turned around there before we got good and lost.
We rode the No. 43 bus back to Musee Orsay stop. On the way, we passed a bride and groom strolling down the middle of the boulevard.
Walked down the Boulevard St. Germain to the restaurant district. We bought pastry for dessert, but decided to eat at Place de la Sorbonne, in the same block as the hotel.
We went to Tabac de la Sorbonne. We had an omelette with potatoes, ham, and Emmental. Excellent.
I had a quarter liter glass of Bordeaux, which Joanna sipped. It was very good as all Bordeaux are. No, as all the wines are. In this country you don’t get bad wine. Only get good wine and better wine.
I wanted a bottle to take to the room, and up the hill is a clothing store that also sells wine. I bought an 8 euro bottle of Bordeaux superieur labeled Grand Theatre, bottled by Univitis Cooperative Societe Agricoles in Les Leves, Gironde, France.
Not great, but the best cheap wine I’ve had in a long time.
It went well with dessert, an apple tart with almond and a millefeuille, a napoleon-like creation, with pistachio cream and chocolate mousse.
Sunday we went to the 11:00 service at the Eglise St. Etienne du Mont, on top of the hill known as Montagne St. Genevieve, a short walk from the hotel. Etienne is the official dedication of the church I’ve been calling St. Genevieve.
I’m not sure of all the details, but a church has been on top of this hill since the time of Clovis I, the Frankish king who was the first to become a Christian and also the first king of all the Franks.
He built an abbey for St. Genevieve, who was eventually buried there. So were Clovis and his wife, Clothilde (now also a saint). She is said to have encouraged Clovis to be baptized.
The Church of St. Etienne, or Stephen, replaced the original abbey church sometime in the Middle Ages.
The current Pantheon was originally proposed as a replacement church to be dedicated to St. Genevieve, but was later largely secularized after the French Revolution.
A little confusing, huh? But that’s all part of the fun.
Joanna told me later that she didn’t understand a word of the service, which was in French, but the music was great. That goes for the two of us.
We went to a bistro around the corner, Les Huitres, where we had onion soup.
No knowing any better, we headed for the Musee d’Orsay, the Impressionist museum, but found it overwhelmed by the Sunday crowd. The Tuileries are right across the river, so we went there to the Orangerie Museum, which is also an Impressionist heaven.
Monet designed two adjoining oval rooms to display large studies of water lilies painted specifically for the space.
I was crazy about the water lilies when I was a kid in college. Now my taste is much more inclined to the classics. But there is something interesting about the use of color.
More interesting to me was a temporary exhibit, selections from the Bridgestone collection in Tokyo. The founder of the Bridgestone tire company started to collect Western-influenced paintings by Japanese artists and then moved to work by Europeans, mainly Impressionists.
There are also later pieces, and his descendants manage the collection today.
The permanent collection of the museum is stunning. It consists of works once owned by a leading art agent, Paul Guillaume, who championed many of the moderns now considered mainstream: Gauguin, Cezanne, Renoir, Modigliani, Utrillo. One whom I hadn’t heard of was Andre Derain. There was probably more of Derain’s work than anyone else’s in the exhibition.
It is intriguing that his style becomes more and more representative and classical as he ages.
It had begun to rain a bit, but we made it to the Cafe de Paris in the eatery district near Notre Dame before the drizzle turned serious.
Dinner began with a caprese salad made with burrata instead of conventional mozzarella. When you cut burrata, cream runs out.
There was a chicken dish on the menu, but it is cooked with no skin or bone, so we took the salmon alternative. Very tasty, and with a half bottle of Bordeaux, very satisfying.
We took a cab home to stay dry.
Stay happy, everyone, and remember, you always get a second chance to find a good Impressionist.
Harry
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