Paris with Laura: Day One

Laura in the Luxembourg Gardens.

In the middle of her week with us, we went with Laura into Paris for the better part of two days. We took a morning train from Rennes, arriving in Paris around 11. Because it looked rather rainy outside, we decided to eat our picnic lunch inside the train station and then we headed by Metro and by foot to the Luxembourg Gardens. Fortunately, it wasn't raining there so we could enjoy being outside. The gardens are located behind the Luxembourg Palace, built in the 17th century for the mother of King Louis XIII, but now housing the French Senate. The gardens are the second-largest park in Paris and they contain numerous fountains, pools, and statuary. It's also famous as a location for Parisian children to sail model boats (we didn't see any when we were there) and it has a puppet theater, too (no shows were on while we were there).

Saint-Sulpice Church.

After walking through the gardens, we headed to the church of Saint-Sulpice, a large 17th- and 18th-century church. It was very stark inside, with lots of plain grey stone which (for some reason) reminded me a 19th-century train station. The church was featured in the book and the movie of The Da Vinci Code, in which Dan Brown makes all kinds of ridiculous and historically inaccurate claims about it. In fact, there's even a small sign in one corner of the church which alludes to "a recent best-selling novel" and corrects the mistakes that novel made about the church. (I've never read the book or seen the movie so I had no idea about any of this until I read the sign informing me about all this!)

We continued up the street looking for the market of Saint-Germain, which turned out to be a big covered mall with a Gap store in it, not the open-air market Lisa expected to find based on her reading of medieval literature! Fortunately, all was not lost because we walked over the church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres (although on the way there, the sky opened up and we got drenched). Saint-Germain-des-Pres was originally a monastery founded in the sixth century and broken up following the French Revolution. The 12th- to 13th-century church still stands and is used as a parish church. The interior is almost entirely painted in greens and blues and probably gives one a good idea of what a medieval church would have been like.

The Thinker by Rodin.

We then took the Metro to our hotel, way up on the north side of the city and, while far from the city center, directly above a Metro stop. After dropping off our bags, we headed back out to the Rodin Museum. It's undergoing renovations right now so not everything was on display, but all the major works, like The Thinker, were out. I was surprised to learn that The Thinker was originally part of a much larger work, The Gates of Hell, based on Dante's Inferno and The Thinker was supposed to represent Dante himself. Then again, I don't know much about Rodin's work, so I shouldn't be that surprised, I guess. Unfortunately, we thought we couldn't take pictures inside the museum, so we can only show you the gardens outside, which we got kicked out of at 6 when the museum closed.

The Gates of Hell by Rodin.

While waiting in line to get in to the museum, two pairs of Americans behind us in line struck up a conversation. Two were middle-aged women from Texas and the other two were newlyweds from Chicago on their honeymoon. They were rather annoying, playing the kind one-upsmanship game that the woman we met in the Tuileries with Chris played: "Have you been to this site? No? Oh, we did, and it's fantastic!" I'm not sure if I found them annoying because I'm not used to dealing with Americans in France or if I would find them annoying if I met them on the street in the US!

Anyway, after Rodin, we went back to Notre-Dame. There was a mass going on inside, so we didn't walk around much, just stood and watched the mass. As soon as it was over, the cathedral closed and they were serious about getting everyone out - they started turning off the lights on us!

Us with Paris in the background.

Following that, we took the Metro to the Montmartre neighborhood (famous, among other things, as being the home of the Moulin Rouge) and had dinner a nice little restaurant. We left around 9:30, threaded our way through pushy street vendors, and climbed all the way up the hill (lots of steps - more than the hills of Rome!) to see Sacre-Coeur.

Sacré-Coeur.

Sacre-Coeur is a Catholic basilica built, with state funding, between 1875 and 1914 as a monument to national unity following the French defeat by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War but, more importantly, as a kind of national penance for the killing of thousands of French citizens during the Paris Commune uprising of 1870-1871. Many of the communards were trapped in old gypsum mines in the hill of Montmartre and killed by French government forces. In retaliation, the communards killed many of the hostages they held, including the Archbishop of Paris. The basilica is a huge neo-Byzantine domed building and no pictures are allowed inside. There was a mass going on when we there and it was by far the quietest church I've been in here in France. There are some big mosaics on the ceiling, but really what stands out for me is the strangeness of the architectural plan - all squares and domes and half-domes, with few of the long straight lines of Gothic cathedrals.

Mass finished at 10:30 and they closed the church so after getting a few pictures of Paris at night from the top of Montmartre, we climbed down the stairs (much easier than going up!) to the Metro, the hotel, and bed.

Bonus picture: Fight Club Jesus.