La colonne

I forgot to tell you that, during drinks at Le Métro, we decided to have dinner at one of my favorite pizzerias in Paris. It's in the Marais district on the right bank. To get there, we would have a nice walk over the islands to the other side of the Seine. I steered us over to the Bastille before heading back into the Marais.

I don't know who this guy is. He just ended up in my photo.

I snapped this photo on the rue Saint-Antoine as we approached the Place de la Bastille. You can see the Colonne de Juillet in the background. The column sits in the middle of the place where the medieval Bastille prison once stood.

If you're like me, you might have thought that the column commemorates the French Revolution but, like me, you would have been wrong. The column was erected to commemorate three days in July 1830, known as les Trois Glorieuses (the Three Glorious Days), a mini-revolution that led to the downfall of King Charles X, who attempted to reverse the revolution and re-establish an absolute monarchy.