PARIS CARTE POSTALE

So pleasant to return to springtime sunshiny Athens. Paris was still in winter mode this past week with the bundled up look of hats, gloves scarves and umbrellas, but for our Paris “fix,” that was okay too. Although Paris like any large city fills you with its senses, I’m concentrating more on the visual; on this visit we wanted both the beauty from looking at artwork in museums, but even more, the beauty of just walking the city, discovering new parks, streets and neighborhoods. Just looking up at the six or seven floor Haussmann buildings, all with their cream colored limestone and black wrought iron balconies gives you a feeling of harmony.

Baron Georges Haussmann, under Napoleon III, was the one responsible for totally remaking the face of Paris, beginning in the 1850’s. The massive renovation plan was much criticized in his day for unnecessarily destroying the “old, traditional Paris,” dislocating thousands from their houses. Jules Ferry, one of his critics in the French parliament, wrote “We weep with our eyes full of tears for the old Paris, the Paris of Voltaire…when we see the grand and intolerable new buildings…the triumphant vulgarity, the awful materialism, that we are going to pass on to our descendants.”

Haussmann’s renovation was also criticized as a way of facilitating police to suppress insurrections that occurred regularly with barricades in the narrow streets. But the plan was also much praised for its aim to improve public health and change the dark, overcrowded and unhealthy medieval streets to wide, light and open boulevards. This was at least a step up to improve the lives of the poor.  Not like in the mid-16^th century under Louis XIV, whose solution to Paris poverty was to lock up thousands of beggars and homeless so they wouldn’t be seen on the streets.

The Haussmann can be found on a number of grand hotels, like the Lutetia, which housed displaced persons during and after World War II.

This might not be a Haussmann building, but it’s surely a pleasure to look at.

Fortunately not all of the old streets of Paris were destroyed; there are still plenty of narrow pedestrian streets to get lost in, like off of Blvd. St Michel, including Rue de la Huchette with all its shops, street food and restaurants, (see blog “A touch of the Grecque on Rue Mouffetard and Rue de la Huchette.”)

Perhaps coming from Athens, where, except for the Plaka area, so many 19^th century neoclassical buildings were destroyed and made into cement apartment blocks to house a growing population, it makes you starved for this pleasing-to-the-eye harmony. In Paris, large apartments have often been divided into two or more apartments to house people; the difficulty of finding a place to live in the city has forced many to live on the outskirts, the “banlieu.” Not only that, many of the old buildings have no elevator and not everyone wants to live in a 5th floor walk up, no matter how charming and historic it is.

As most great cities, Paris has to be discovered walking, as you find so many treasures along the way. A house right around the corner from where we were staying on Blvd Montparnasse had a sign that it was the atelier (studio) of Cezanne and Modigliani. Not too far away Manet lived. In the house shown below near Place de la Contrescarpe, Verlaine died and Hemingway lived. There are many traces of Hemingway around. (I think he would be shocked to see as we did, a “Hemingway steak” for 51 euros at his favorite restaurant “La Closerie de Lilas” near us on the corner of Blvd. Montparnasse and St. Michel).

Besides the torn posters of presidential candidates for the upcoming elections, the most prevalent street scene are groups of kids on class trips. The field trip is alive and well on the streets of Paris! The little ones stroll hand in hand full of excitement, the older kids texting on their phones, dragging their feet. Oh what teacher memories this brought back…

Notre Dame is closed of course – as you can see, the towers are in good condition, it’s the middle and back that had most of the fire and looks like it’ll take years to restore. 

You get a good view of Notre Dame from the top floor of Shakespeare & Company, with the jacaranda trees beginning to bloom along the Seine.

Shakespeare & Co. (now with a branch in Manhattan) is one of the fun places to go to in Paris. It’s a historical book lover’s paradise, as much a literary shrine as a bookstore. Inside are various editions of James Joyce’s Ulysses, as after all it was the owner Sylvia Beach who daringly published the book 100 years ago in 1922. The store is small and intimate; little passageways have epigraphs written over the doorways like “be not inhospitable to strangers for they may be angels in disguise” or “‘how do you know I’m mad,’ said Alice. ‘You must be,’ said the cat. ‘if you weren’t you wouldn’t be here.'” If you want a book on Paris itself, this is certainly the place. A sign as you enter says ‘no photos’ and I didn’t see anyone taking any on the main floor, though upstairs I think it’s tolerated.

Up the narrow stairs with pictures of D.H. Lawrence, Frank O’Hara, Carson McCullers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and many more, are the “reading rooms” (without much reading going on). In one room someone is softly playing the theme from “Amelie” on an old upright piano. And in another is a bulletin board with hundreds of messages like “thank you for this place of relaxation in the heart of Paris.” A manual Underwood typewriter sits on a desk in a little nook. (How great it would be to work in that little corner.) But the nicest room upstairs is the one facing Notre Dame and the front of the store. There’s a sign for silence. A girl reading in a chair is stroking a very content cat on her lap. A sign says don’t feed Angie the cat and another sign says “Angie the cat was up all night reading, please let her sleep.”  The girl finished reading, placed Angie down carefully, but the cat climbed back up on the chair and gazed out at the visitors around.

In the upstairs library part of the store, you can pull a book off the shelf theand sit and read to your heart’s content.  How about a 1,500 page book of the Literary History of Great Britain?  Or Will Dumas’ volume on the Renaissance. There’s always Thomas Carlyle, History of  Frederic the Great IV from 1898 or the letters of Oscar Wilde.

Upstairs too you’ll see something you don’t see in most book stores:  beds among the books.  For decades, visitors have been allowed to sleep there in return for working in the shop, shelving, cleaning up, etc. I asked one of the young store workers if people were still welcome to sleep there. During the pandemic, this stopped, but now “guests” are staying there again.

Upstairs is a picture of the amazing Sylvia Beach, who acted as “banker, post office and friend” to American, English and Irish expatriates. She opened the original store (in another location nearby) in 1919 and closed it in 1941 due to the war.  It was reopened in 1951 by the colorful American George Whitman. Always an adventurer, after serving in the army in WWII, he studied in Paris at the Sorbonne, and from his place on Blvd St Michel, he started a lending library where people could read or borrow a book. Some time after he opened a bookstore in its current location across from Notre Dame on Rue de la Boucherie, Sylvia visited the store, and Whitman adopted the former name of Shakespeare & Co. (When his daughter was born, he named her Sylvia after Sylvia Beach.) He lived in the rooms above the store and the collection of books that you see actually belonged to him, along with some later donations. Some of his thoughts are seen below in 2004 on the outside wall when he “retired” from running the store at the age of 91.

In 2006 he was given a medal for his contribution to the arts, and died five years later, aged 98 in his apartment upstairs.

When we were in Paris three years ago, we went to a book reading there. We were told that the readings are still on hold from the pandemic but due to start soon again.  Next to the store they sell only antiquarian books, and next to that you can check out the Shakespeare & Co. café. 

Time is moving on, and much as I’d like to, we can’t stay more. There would never be time for major museum visiting. If you have to choose just one museum (after the Louvre that is) it must be the Musée d’Orsay, with mostly French art from 1848 to 1919.  Opening in 1986, it has the largest Impressionist collection in the world.

It’s not just the collection but the building itself – it  was originally a Beaux arts railway station built around 1900. It’s interesting that the station was considered an “anachronism” then, as the way it was constructed hid the new technology of the time.

The first Sunday of the month, the museum is free and the line outside snakes around and around. There are blue skies and the parks are full of joggers but the sun hasn’t warmed us up at all and we’re still shivering in the line.

Impressionists were very unaccepted in their day and it was actually a journalist’s ironic article that gave rise to the name. The Salons, the State sponsored juried exhibitions that could launch an artist’s career, were terribly concerned with propriety in subject and in form. Poet Charles Baudelaire encouraged the Impressionists to embrace the “poetry of modern life” and indeed the Paris paintings are so bustling with life, the cafes, the absinthe drinkers, the theaters, dances, public parks. No one captured this life better than Renoir.

But besides the city, on the other hand, the countryside inspired so many paintings with small quick brushstrokes, luminous colors and shimmery gardens.

The tea is ready to be poured. All those women in their parasols and long willowy dresses, are so at peace and repose like Renoir’s rosy cheeked healthy looking girls playing piano.

To complement Renoir’s subject of “City dance and country dance” (1883),

I add an updated version of Parisians dancing tango on the Seine.

Back then at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20^th century, there was tremendous optimism in the air. Bertrand Russell wrote that his generation then genuinely felt that wars belonged to the past. Little could they imagine the 20^th century genocides, crimes against humanity and horrors of World War I and II, and now continuing in the 21st, a horrifying war that drags on and can’t end easily.

The main floor of the Musée d’Orsay is a perfect place for monumental sculpture. You can get an idea of what the interior of the train station looked like.

Across the Seine from the Musée d’Orsay, the museum of L’Orangerie was designed specifically in 1927 to hold several of Monet’s nympheas, or paintings of water lilies that he grew in his garden pond in Giverny. From 1916 to 1926, he actually did 250 of these paintings, at different times of the day and seasons, in these later years of his life, when he was losing his sight (as Rick Steves points out, like Beethoven losing his hearing). The paintings were done as a gift to the museum. A sign suggests “silence” for this “peaceful meditation in the heart of the city.” And it really is. You need to sit down and look, up close and far away, and lose yourself in the colors and brushwork. It’s really the most impressionistic work of all as it’s all a play of color and light.

But L’Orangerie is not just Monet’s Water Lilies. Go downstairs to see the impressive collection of Paul Guillaume, art dealer of the early 20^th century who “discovered” Modigliani and other impressionists and post-impressionists including Matisse and Utrillo, who was born in Montmartre and painted scenes of the area throughout his life.

When we go outside, it’s late in the day, the clouds are shifting into different patterns in the sky in an impressionistic play of light.

As you join the crowds walking toward the Pont du Carrousel and the Louvre, vendors try to sell you Eiffel tower key chains in various colors, and people are trying on knit caps and berets at a table set up. A few hardy souls are sitting around the fountain.

Also completed in 1900 like the Musée d’Orsay for the Paris Exhibition, the Petit Palais (along with the Grand Palais across the street) has pieces from ancient Greek vases to byzantine icons to tapestries of the middle ages to paintings and sculpture up to world war I. It has a great sculpture collection from the late 19^th century. At that time, sculpture was everywhere, not only museums but in the streets, on building facades, in public parks, city squares.

I liked this 1885 plaster model by Audrien Gaudez of a child prodigy with a violin, who represents the 17th century composer Jean Baptiste Lilly, the favorite musician of Louis XIV. He’s shown in a chef’s hat with his foot on a saucepan because of his humble origins, working in the kitchen.

When the weather is good (which unfortunately it wasn’t) it’s really pleasant in the garden, and the way the palais is set up, you can easily exit from a number of places.

The Palais is right off the Champs Elysées and the Avenue Montaigne, which is a beautiful street to walk on just to see all the designer shops, the Plaza Athenée Hotel and L’Avenue Restaurant, which is the place to see and be seen….

If you’re into the history of Paris, then the Carnavalet museum, originally a mansion from the 1700’s in Le Marais district, is the place for you, especially if you’re interested in the French Revolution.

If those look like real statues and columns below, then you’re experiencing trompe l’oeil (fool the eye). It’s actually a painting and with the staircase, it was the only thing left of a historic hotel that closed, and is preserved in the Musee Carnavalet.

Also historic in Le Marais is a 16th century mansion, the oldest in Paris, that houses the Historical Library of the City of Paris. Not only is the courtyard lovely to sit in but inside is a pleasant place to relax and read some magazines and newspapers in French and English.

Le Marais today, an upscale area with expensive shops, is also home of the Place des Vosges, the oldest arranged park in Paris, incorporated in the early 17th century. Before the Revolution, it was a place where nobility came to meet and chat. Today you can visit Victor Hugo’s house on the square. The second photo is what it usually looks like when it’s warm and sunny. In other parks like Luxembourg or the Tuileries, you’re not allowed to lie on the grass.

Nearby you can join the line at L’As Du Fallafel, the original falafel place. Note the dog in the cyclist’s basket.

Le Marais is also the traditionally Jewish quarter. We visited the memorial of the Shoah (holocaust memorial).  This room of wall pictures of the over 11,000 children taken to concentration camps is indeed haunting.

The museum also contains a room of thousands of index cards filed away, individual and family files kept by the French Vichy government on Jewish citizens.

A common sign on many schools in Paris recalls the children that were taken away to concentration camps, and condemns the collaborative role of Vichy.

Le Marais is where we did a couple of language courses last time we were in Paris and spent a month. I thought in the class surely we would talk a little about ourselves and why we were in Paris and get some good everyday language for shopping and getting around.  Instead, the 7 or 8 of us from the U.S., U.K., Poland and Germany were handed a paper with proverbs in French like “quand le chat n’est pas la, les souris dansent” (when the cat’s away the mice will play) and asked to tell a little story to illustrate the saying! I was reminded of “souris” again on this trip because in reviewing with duolingo, I found an incredible number of sentences about mice:  that they’re large, they eat a lot, that they’re in the garden… What great conversation openers!

About the language, more important than getting things right is politeness. “Bonjour madame/ monsieur” is most important of all. And trying to speak the language is appreciated even if you mangle it a bit!

While Le Marais is beautiful, we’re partial to the left bank, to the 5^th & 6^th arrondissements.

A bride and groom sitting at Les Deux Magots, one of the famous cafes across from the church of Saint German des Près, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and all the Existentialists used to “hang out” (along with Cafe de Flore).

Left or right bank, the Seine flows through the center of Paris and forms the Parisian scene (as compared to New York where the rivers are peripheral, on the east and west sides, and you might never even know you’re on an island). Here it’s an integral part of the city with the bateaux mouches, the boats and the bridges.

Not to mention the booksellers alongside the river, the bouquinistes, with their 1900 newspaper front pages, drawings from Babar books, posters of the Beatles’ 1st concert in Paris, a picture of Jim Morrison right before he died, plus all the watercolors of Paris scenes.

Many of the watercolors of Paris are of Montmartre, the area that still has a “village” feel to it, though it’s usually very touristy.

But the day we went It was snowing and just a bit desolate. A few American tourists were taking food tours along Rue des Abbsesses stopping at mouth-watering fromageries.

From the butte (hill) of Montmartre, Sacre Coeur, one of the iconic monuments of the city, was built in the late 19th century to commemorate those lost in the 1870 franco Prussian war. It’s a really unusual style, romano-byzantine. Inside, a recording tells you “shhhhhh!” every few minutes and it seems to work, you don’t hear a peep inside the church. You can see the white dome from all over the Montmartre streets. It’s a quiet day, some artists with sketch pads are halfheartedly asking to do your portrait. Snow and sleet hitting your face makes it a little hard to walk around. Don’t miss the “Musée Montmartre” —it’s a must with history of the area.

After warming up with some chocolat, we decide to walk slowly back down, first along Boulevard de Clichy to Pigalle. There is a curious combination of sex shops mingled with street food. So, on one block was: sex shop/tacos/sex shop/crepes/sex toys/burgers (!)

The snow kept stopping and starting. At the lookout roof at Galeries Lafyette, the Eiffel Tower was practically lost in the mist.

After the gorgeous Opera House, also a Haussmann project, and reaching the back of the Louvre, we head back to Blvd. Montparnasse.

You can never run out of things to see and do in Paris, but one day just for something different, we take the train an hour southwest to Chartres, famous for its early 13th century Gothic cathedral Notre Dame de Chartres, one of the largest in France. Unlike Notre Dame de Paris, which suffered damage during the French Revolution and was pretty much rebuilt in the 1800’s, Chartres was left untouched, so you see all the original stained glass and carved figures on the portals, and the miniature figures in the round showing Christ’s birth and life. The cathedral was a major medieval pilgrimage site.

A group of school kids posed in the cathedral square. Another school trip!

Besides the cathedral, the medieval town on the Eure River is really pleasant to walk around (though this was the coldest day of all).

The siesta is strictly observed! At exactly 1:30 the Marché aux Légumes folded up all their tables and chairs, put away their leftover produce in lightning speed, shoved everything into their trucks within minutes and drove off. When the stores close for midday, Chartres takes on the look of a ghost town, but when the shops open around 4, the streets spring to life. In the main square of the modern town, there was a small anti vax demonstration with music of Queen and dancing. (In general, France is much more lax than in Greece — no certificates are asked in museums for example and except for the train and metro, there are no restrictions indoors on wearing a mask)

I couldn’t resist putting this photo of the unusual (to say the least!) Maison Piccassiette, a popular attraction of Chartres (but way outside the town and we didn’t have time to go) With something like a million pieces of broken glass and bottle caps, the owner spent years and years building his house…. (Note the Chartres cathedral on the hill in the background.)

And now our journey has come to an end. I think we satisfied our therapy for the eyes. Au revoir Paris. Bonne journée! A la prochaine!

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Sherri Moshman Paganos is a writer and former educator, inspired by her life in Athens, where she and her husband are happily retired and enjoying their travels in Greece and abroad. You can check out her writing — fiction, non-fiction, poetry and articles here.