Paris, the end

This will be the last of this series of photos from my weekend in Paris in late April. I was able to stretch three days worth of photos into two months' worth of blog posts. So... when I left the restaurant where I had eaten lunch, I walked over to the Orsay museum to meet my friends. It was spitting rain, so I didn't take the camera out of my backpack, so, no photos.

Having a glass of wine with my friends L, J, and P, at a café near the Père Lachaise cemetery. Those potato chips really hit the spot!

I got to the museum early, and the rain was becoming more steady, so I decided to duck into a café for drink. I saw a place on the corner of the rue de Lille and the rue de Bellechasse, just across from the museum's main entrance. The line to get into the museum snaked back and forth, filling up the plaza in front and stretched around the corner and down the rue de Lille. And it was getting longer, and it was raining. I'm glad I wasn't waiting in line.

My friend L wanted a copy of this photo, and asked if I could remove the woman between J and P, so I gave it a shot.
It's not perfect, but it's not bad, either.

The café/brasserie was called Les Deux Musées and it was stuffed full of people finishing lunch. They weren't letting anyone sit down who wasn't going to order lunch, the outside tables were wet with rain, and there was a line out the door. Still, there was room at the bar for drinkers and I went in. French bars are not like American bars. There are no stools, so bar patrons stand. I ordered a glass of white wine and watched all the activity. The bartender was busy making drinks and coffee for the diners and loading and unloading glasses into and out of the little dishwasher under the bar.

I had a second glass of wine (I was that early) and was really enjoying watching all the hustle and bustle around me. People came and went, and the rain continued. When I finished, I went out and found my friends, or they found me, and off we went on another adventure. We took the subway over to the Père Lachaise cemetery to see the graves of famous people like Colette, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, and Honoré de Balzac, to name a few. After our walk, we ducked into a nearby café for a drink.

Toward the end of the day we took a short walk through the Parc Monceau before heading back to our respective hotels to get ready for dinner. We had reservations at eight at a Left Bank restaurant I've known for many years, Le Petit Prince de Paris. Dinner was great fun and I said good-bye to my friends who would be leaving early Monday morning for their tour of Normandy.

Monday turned out to be cold, wet, and windy, and I tried to go for a walk but it was no fun at all in that weather. I took refuge inside a department store for a while, then got the idea to have lunch in a Thai restaurant I knew of. I think it's the same place that a bunch of us (including Ken) ate in back in 1982. It had been updated since then. Lunch was delicious and a real treat for me since we don't have many Thai restaurants out here in the countryside. When I was through, I went back to the hotel to check out, then went back across town to get my late afternoon train home.

Le Recrutement

Ken and I found two good brasseries one year (sometime in the '90s) while staying in this neighborhood not far from the Eiffel Tower. This one is called le Recrutement and was, at the time, kind of a sports bar/café. While eating there one year, Ken recognized a member of France's parliament walking by, stopping to say hello to friends or colleagues. She was Michèle Alliot-Marie and would later become Minister of Defense under Chirac and Secretary of State under Sarkozy.

This is where I ate lunch on a rainy Sunday afternoon in April.

The other place, called le Centenaire, is diagonally across the street. The first time we ate there I had one of the most memorable meals of my life: a simple roasted chicken with French fries. It was the best roasted chicken I had ever tasted, at least up to that point in time.

Back to last April. As I headed toward the restaurant, it started to rain. It pretty much rained during my whole lunch, but I was indoors so I didn't mind. Le Recrutement has been taken over by new management with a much younger staff and a new open kitchen. They had a chicken Caesar salad on the menu (admittedly not a very French dish) and it sounded good, so that's what I ordered, along with a small carafe of red wine. I was not disappointed.

After a coffee, I headed toward the Orsay museum where I was to meet up with my friends, but not before turning and snapping this photo.

Concorde

Last Saturday I posted a photo of the place de la Concorde as seen looking down the rue Royale. Here's another shot from edge of the place itself. I walked around the western edge of the place, past the Hôtel de Crillon (a fancy-schmancy high-end hotel) and the American Embassy (lots of guards with guns), across the avenue des Champs-Elysées, and to the river.

The place de la Concorde sits between the Tuileries garden and the avenue des Champs-Elysées.

I was forming an idea for lunch. I know of two brasseries/cafés over in the 7th arrondissement on the boulevard de la Tour-Maubourg, so I headed downstream along the river and crossed the pont Alexandre III toward the esplanade des Invalides. The thought of a good lunch spurred me on.

A glimpse of Saint-Augustin

Directly up the boulevard Malesherbes from the Madeleine church is the imposing church of Saint-Augustin. Built in the late 19th century, the church blends elements of the romanesque and byzantian styles. It's not a church I know, except as a landmark.

Standing near the southwest corner of the Madeleine church looking up the boulevard Malesherbes.

It turns out that my hotel was not far from the church, but I was more focused toward the other direction during my Parisian weekend back in April.

Bits and pieces

That's what could fall on your head if this part of the Madeleine church was not covered in netting. Time and pollution take their toll on stone buildings and they can begin to crumble. Renovation is necessary, but it's time-consuming and expensive. In the meantime, some temporary protection is warranted.

This is the netting that's intended to catch any falling pieces of stone.

The view above is part of the back (north) façade of the Madeleine church. It's quite plain. The gates that surround the building were closed here, so my only access was by way of the colonnade on the podium level or through a small gate on the eastern side at street level. I read that restoration is under way and that the city is putting up a good sum, but they continue looking for donations and other private funds to complete the work.

Saint Denis (Dionysius in Latin) was the first bishop of Paris in the 3rd century.

Some of the statues that adorn the eastern and western façades also need some work. I took this photo of Saint Denis for no particular reason, except as an example of the statues in their niches. It's also much cleaner than the others, so I assume its restoration was part of the first phase of exterior work.

Columnar

The floor of the Madeleine church is high above street level. The building sits on a podium, its roof supported by a Corinthian colonnade that runs around all four sides. I took these photos on the western side of the church, looking both southward and northward.

Looking south toward the front of the building and the rue Royale.

The building's architectural style is, as I've mentioned, neoclassical. But it's more than that. The building is a 19th century replica of the classic greco-roman temple. The podium, the rectangular plan, the columns, the front portico, and the triangular pediment are all elements of the Roman temple style.

Looking north toward the back of the building along the western colonnade.

Examples of this building type survive antiquity. One of the more well-known of them in France is the Maison Carrée in the southern city of Nimes, built in the second century AD. Perhaps the most famous of the ancient temples is the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, completed over 400 years earlier.

Inside la Madeleine

I certainly wasn't the only tourist to enter the church of la Madeleine on that Sunday morning. I was surprised to find a service going on inside. I'm not Catholic, but it didn't seem like a mass to me. Just a priest (I assume) standing at a lectern off to the side of the main altar. And he was speaking in French, not Latin, with many references to Jesus, of course. The sound wasn't great and I didn't really focus on what he was saying. Maybe it was just a general, non-denominational service. Do they do that kind of thing?

You can see the priest under the angel statue on the right side of the altar.

I was also not the only tourist taking photos while the service was going on. I hope I was among the more discreet. The interior is vast, but the Madeleine is not a cathedral, nor is it a soaring gothic construction. It's just a church, but it's a big one. The building's neoclassical architecture is on full display inside, notably in the corinthian and ionic columns, the ornate entablatures, and the triangular pediments.

A woman lit a candle and, I assume, said a prayer. I imagine that's a statue of Mary, the church's namesake, in front of the purple screen.

I finished my snapshots quickly and went back outside. I decided to walk around the terraces of the church and see what the exterior looked like up close.