Tom & Lynn's Excellent Adventure

Paris’s famed Arc de Triomphe exhibited a very special display, just while we were here. The entire monument has been wrapped in silver cloth with blue highlights bound by red ropes, the last of the late artist Christo’s monumental works. The wrap consists of 25,000 square meters of recyclable polypropylene fabric and 3,000 meters of red rope. 

Christo died before the exhibit could be erected, but the French government insisted on doing it anyway in his honor. We caught it just in time, as the wrap will start to come down on Monday October 4.

It’s pretty amazing. And it drew big crowds on a cool, cloudy Saturday.

But the crowds were not so big that we couldn’t walk right up and join them. Security was tight (pass sanitaire required, even though it was outdoors), but we walked through without appreciable delay and joined the throngs surrounding the monument.

The Arc was fully open to the public, so we could walk up to the walls, touch the fabric, walk through the interior, and if you bought a ticket, you could go all the way to the top. Our Museum Passes normally would have given us access, but because of the special occasion, a separate ticket was required. We passed on the opportunity.

Our visit complete (what else can you do around the Arc if you don’t go up?), we joined the crowds of Parisians in a quintessentially Parisian practice, a stroll down Champs Elysee all the way to Place de La Concorde. Everyone should experience this at least once. For us, we try to do it every time we visit Paris. There is always something to see.

By the time we made it down to the Metro station at Place de la Concorde, we were getting hungry for lunch. After debating the alternatives among eating leftovers at home, picking up something to go and actually sitting down in a restaurant, we chose to pop into El Picaflor, the Peruvian restaurant virtually next door to our apartment that during the week sells empanadas for 5 euros.

The place was full of diners enjoying a late Saturday lunch, but they squeezed us into a tiny table in the middle of the tiny dining room. We ordered a empanada triple sampler and a plate of sizzling beef, sort of fajita style, washed down with some excellent Peruvian beer. It was plenty, and we were thankful not having to walk more than 50 feet to our apartment, where late afternoon naps awaited.

For dinner, we made late (for us) reservations at Terronia, the fine and tiny Italian restaurant that had been the topic of our discussions a few nights ago. Our 8 p.m., reservation hit right at their peak time between the early diners who arrived at 7:30 and the later ones (i.e. Europeans) who show up at 9 p.m. or later.

How busy was Terronia? Our chef, the one on the right in the multi-colored toque, was also our waiter. Between our shared broken English, Italian and French, we ordered a pichet of delicious Primitivo and two plates of pasta. Lynn had the veal bolognese and I had the amatriciana, both excellent and both filling.

All in all, a fine Saturday, as we transition from tourists to residents.

We had put off St. Chapelle earlier when we discovered timed tickets were required. The magnificent, though relatively small, church is situated in the middle of the working French Justice Department, so security is tight and plenty of it.

On Friday, with Museum Passes and a timed reservation in hand, we walked through the first security gate just past the flower market, then crossed the street to the huge ornate gates of the Palais de Justice and into the queue for St. Chapelle. Which on this day had virtually no visitors in the line.

The initial queue leads to more security then into the church itself, where the arrows send visitors upstairs first via a narrow, steep circular staircase, just the kind Lynn hates. But it’s a small price to pay for what is on the upper floor.

The church was built in the mid-13th century to house the relics of the passion of Christ, including the crown of thorns. This was both a political and religious effort, as ownership of the relics gave the king of France and the entire country added prestige in Europe.

After suffering a great deal of damage in successive French revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the church was extensively restored starting in 1846 to recreate its current appearance. In its early centuries, the upper chapel was reserved for the king and his family, while the lower chapel was used by the palace staff.

The upper chapel is the reason to see this place. It is all stained glass, five huge windows on either side and five around the altar. The effect is to bathe the interior with polychromed light.

The windows depict 1,113 biblical scenes that tell the story of mankind from Genesis to the Resurrection. Statues of the apostles line the floor level spaces between the monumental windows.

Normally the upper chapel is so full of visitors that you can’t move, as everyone points their phones and cameras upwards to capture photos of the windows. This day, there were not more than 100 people in the upper chapel, and that included one group tour. Once the group worked their way downstairs, the upper chapel was pretty much left to us.

Just for once, we stayed, sat, gazed at the wonder of stained glass before us. We even watched the video describing the restoration of the stained glass windows after centuries of dirt, pollution and even plaster had obscured the colors. Restored now, the windows glow, even on a cloudy day.

When you don’t fight crowds, you get through the place easily and quickly. Satiated with Gothic color, it was on to the next stop in our museum orgy.

Musee d’Orsay was next on our list of visits. As art museums go, it holds perhaps the world’s largest treasure trove of Impressionist paintings and sculptures, but the building is on a more human scale than the Louvre, since Musee d’Orsay was a train station in its original incarnation.

We took the RER train (regional) to the station that opens up right into the museum’s courtyard and walked into a nearly empty queue. Normally the courtyard in front of the museum would be teeming with people lining up to enter through three different portals–A for single ticket holders, B for groups and C for Museum Pass holders. That’s when the Museum Pass is worth whatever you pay, because you simply show your pass, walk past the long lines to the side and enter through portal C, which usually has a small line.

On this day, however, there was no C, there was no B, just the A and virtually no one in that line. We showed our pass sanitaire, walked through the door and into security, scanned our Museum passes and entered Musee d’Orsay in less than five minutes.

In addition to the difference in scale, the Louvre and Musee D’Orsay also contrast in one important measure. As large as the Louvre is, there is a lot to ignore if you aren’t interested in Etruscan relics or medieval armor. The Louvre is a repository of hundreds of thousands of art and artifacts from ancient history around the world, but the truth is most people go there to see the rock stars, the Mona Lisa and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

Musee D’Orsay, on the other hand, is more to human scale as a building, but every single, solitary work in the place is a masterpiece. The effect is overwhelming. The central hallway forms an open sculpture display, with the paintings assembled by artist and period in galleries that line both sides. Our approach was to go through the galleries on one side, then circle back and do the same, before ascending to the second level and more galleries organized the same way.

Nearly three hours later, we were thoroughly saturated with masterpieces. We even skipped the Art Nouveau section, where furniture by Gaudi is on display. We figured we can see plenty of that in Barcelona in a couple of weeks.

Dinner was at home in the evening, as Lynn outdid herself preparing two pieces of dorade (dorado) she had picked out in the morning from the Monge market a block down the street. She sautéed the fish without flour in butter, so it came out crispy on one side but moist and extremely flavorful on the inside. Most restaurants in Paris want to merely steam fish, which doesn’t do much for flavor. New Orleanians know better.

We reserved a timed ticket for 10:30 a.m. at the Louvre, because they tell you to do so in order to control the usual hordes of crowds. The Metro ran quickly, so we actually arrived at 10:00 a.m. and were allowed in without so much as a single minute of wait.

Pass sanitaire passed, we walked right through security and into the vast vestibule of the Louvre, whereupon I walked us in the wrong direction. We wanted the Denon wing but went up the Richelieu wing, which would eventually require us to walk all the way around the huge palace to get to the prime display–the Mona Lisa.

By Louvre standards, there was no crowd. In fact, by any standards, there was no crowd. The Louvre was as empty as we have ever seen.

We worked our way around from the Richelieu wing to the Denon wing for everyone’s must-see, the Mona Lisa. The gallery where the Mona Lisa hangs now has a long queue installed to control the hordes of visitors. It was virtually empty. I counted no more than 30 people ahead of us, including the ones gazing and photographing the painting at the head of the line.

Her room includes two kiosks that explain the features of the Mona Lisa, including who she was and noting the unfinished parts of the painting. Leonardo carried it around with him for years from Florence to Milan to Amboise, France where he died, as legend has it, in the arms of King Francois I. Which is how the French government came to own the Florentine master’s work.

But Mona Lisa is not the only painting in its gallery. Far from it. The walls are lined with dozens of works by the Venetian greats–Veronese, Titian and Tintoretto. I spent as much time gazing at them as their most famous roommate. Very few others bothered.

We spent more time in more galleries, concentrating on the European Renaissance masters. To give you the scale of the Louvre, we covered only one wing of one floor of one side of the main building. After nearly three hours just in that wing (including some time spent trying to get elsewhere), we repaired for a quick but tasty baguette lunch, a short opportunity to doff our masks and breathe fresh air. The seats in the little lunch counter are slanted, so customers can’t get comfortable and sit around; you slide right out. That’s their way of making sure you eat expeditiously, get your mask back on and get back to viewing art.

After a morning of old masters, we were ready to take the walk through the Tuileries once again down to Place de la Concorde and my second-favorite museum in Paris, Monet’s Musee L’Orangerie. But first a stop for a beer at one of the four restaurants in the royal park. Then on to L’Orangerie.

The origin of L’Orangerie is rooted in love of country and history. Monet dedicated a series of paintings for a special museum to the French government, which then dedicated Napoleoin III’s 1852 Orangerie building intended to house orange trees (duh, hence the name) growing in the Tuileries.

Each of the two elliptical rooms in the museum contains four huge canvases of Monet’s masterpieces. Skylights above each room create just the perfect lighting to view the paintings, so L’Orangerie will never open at night. Here’s a bit of trivia: the building’s east-west orientation exactly parallels the path of the sun that transits from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre.

Inaugurated in 1927 a few months after Monet’s death, the museum was incorporated into the Louvre in 1930. In the 50s and 60s, the museum acquired a number of works by major Impressionists from private collectors. The result is that the lower floor under Monet showcases a fairly compact but most significant series of masterpieces by Renoir, Picasso, Degas, Manet, Matisse, Derain, Cezanne, Utrillo, Rousseau and Modigliani.

On this day of our visit, a large part of the lower floor had been closed off for some construction, so the Impressionist collection was squeezed into fewer rooms, which made for quicker viewing. Not that there were that many people anyway. The part of the lower floor that was closed off usually showcases a very interesting wooded model of the building with sections cut away to illustrate the design and construction. Perhaps it will return next time we return.

As beautiful and brilliant as L’Orangerie is, it is actually pretty small, so we needed only a hour to get through the entire place, including the De Kooning temporary exhibit, which was not at all to Lynn’s liking. But it would not be hard to spend most of a day seated in the two rooms contemplating Monet’s Nympheas (the technically correct name) from Giverny, marveling at not only the scale but the exquisite beauty of his gift to France.

But now it was time for a rest and to get ready for dinner tonight. More than five hours of walking through museums and parks takes it out of our poor aging legs and hips. We took the Metro back for a nap before dinner.

Our afternoon interlude turned out to be quite the adventure. The battery in my phone was dying and fast. It couldn’t last more than the morning before discharging to dangerously low levels. That would jeopardize my ability to produce my pass sanitaire when obligated.

So I walked around the corner of rue Monge to Mr. Phony, a single door phone repair shop run by a Middle Eastern proprietor who spoke English probably as his first language. He replaced the dying battery with a new one for 69.90 euros, probably more than I wold have spent in the U.S. But can you say any port in a storm?

As we planned dinner, Lynn suggested an Italian restaurant near our old apartment. I suggested the same near our old apartment. Only trouble was, over the years in Paris we had rented more than one old apartment. I was referring to our very first apartment, because we wanted to go “around the corner” to Pomme d’Eve, our old late night bar. Lynn was referring to Terronia, an excellent Italian restaurant across the street from a different old apartment.

Our miscommunication lasted unknowingly until we walked out to our reservation, when Lynn wanted to walk down the hill and I wanted to walk up. From that point own, hell broke loose involving discussions of communications between people who have been married for 42 years. Luckily the escalope de Milanese at La Capannina was excellent, right around the corner from Pomme d’Eve. We will get to Terronia in a couple of days.

Luckily, after dinner Pomme d’Eve was open, uncharacteristically early. We reacquainted with George, met his current staff and shared pandemic stories. His experience was pretty bad–no, actually dreadful–but typical of most bars in Europe and the U.S. Yet Pomme d’Eve is still there, open sometimes at 2 a.m. but still kicking. We plan to return for NFL football on Sunday, assuming he opens before 10 p.m. You just can’t keep a good South African down, but you can’t keep two old Americans up too late.

My cousin Irene planned to visit Vincennes, the castle of French kings until it was abandoned by Louis XIV for Versailles. Her genealogy research discovered that our ninth great grandfather had served as a king’s guard at Vincennes, so we were visiting family turf.

Today Vincennes is on the Paris Museum Pass, so we chose to initiate our passes there. It was a fairly quick Metro ride out the end of the M 1 line east of central Paris. We met up with the Harrisons, along with two Kathy’s, other relatives on their first trip to Paris, plus a couple of their friends who were not actually related.

Vincennes is a big place, although visitors can only enter two of the buildings, the large keep, which looks just like what it is–a medieval castle built for a king. It was constructed quickly by ancient standards from 1361 to 1369 and at 50 meters high is the tallest of its kind in France.

The adjacent chapel, known as St. Chapelle (not to be confused with the much more elaborate one in the middle of Paris, which formed the model for this one), was built some ten years later by Charles V.

The site has served as a royal residence since Louis VII in 1178. Kings used to enjoy hunting in the royal forest that surrounded the fortified area and eventually came to live there full-time after the keep was completed. Once Louis XIV abandoned Vincennes for Versailles, the old compound was used as a factory, a military base and a prison. Some of its more famous prisoners included the Marquis de Sade and much later, Mata Hari, who was executed as a spy in 1917 in the area where the old moat had been.

Today the keep and the chapel are the only buildings open to visitors. We could not discern what the old king’s and queen’s pavilions are being used for, but it seems like some are perhaps military offices, which would be consistent with the complex’s past.

We had to show our pass sanitaire no fewer than three times to gain full entry, first at the front gate, then at the ticket office, then again just past the ticket office in the shop before we walked out into the vast courtyard.

The keep or dungeon is quite a walk up a winding stairway that leads to mostly empty rooms that are devoid of ornamentation, furniture or any sort of decoration. Some helpful kiosks offer historical explanation of the function of many of the rooms, including a latrine, an old well and the king’s treasury room where he kept his gold. But for the most part, the keep consists of a lot of bare stone walls with scratched graffiti and large unadorned spaces waiting for a major restoration to create a more engaging, interactive visitor experience.

The chapel likewise is basically an empty space, obviously no longer functional as a church. The stained glass windows surrounding what used to be the altar are very attractive but very few, compared to the real St. Chapelle on Ile de la Cite.

After climbing around the keep and visiting the chapel, our group split up, and we joined the Harrisons to go off to Montmartre for a visit to the church up the funicular and a lunch. The latter goal was successful, because it started to rain while we enjoyed a huge meal in an excellent restaurant operated by an expatriate Cuban. Mel speaks fluent Spanish, so he was able to communicate for our foursome. He and I had the lunch special of roasted veal over mashed potatoes, while Lynn enjoyed the fish in a mild curry sauce and Irene had a flattened grilled chicken breast. Three of the four in our group ordered desserts that were way too rich for the middle of the day.

The rain had come, gone and come back as we left the restaurant, so we all agreed to leave the Montmartre funicular for another day. Lynn and I ducked into the Metro for the ride home and found blue sky a half hour later when we emerged into Place Monge.

After a short rest, we were back on the monument trail, this time to the nearby Pantheon, perhaps my favorite single site in Paris.

Today’s Pantheon was originally designed and built to be the church of St. Genevieve, patron saint of Paris, but its timing was off–the French Revolution broke out. So it was declared to be non-religious and dedicated as a Pantheon to the great French heroes of the last couple of hundred years. During various times in the 19th century it was converted back to a church more than once, but became the permanent Pantheon in 1881.

One of the Pantheon’s first residents was Victor Hugo, who died in 1885 and was immediately interred there. Voltaire and Rousseau are honored across from each other in the crypt; in fact, Voltaire was the very first French hero to find permanent digs at the Pantheon. He has a statue in front of his tomb. Rousseau does not.

At the center of the huge vaulted ground floor is Foucault’s pendulum, suspended from the top of the dome overhead, rotating clockwise approximately 11.3° per hour at Paris’s latitude of 48 degrees North. It’s a simple device based on some complicated mathematics to demonstrate the Earth’s rotation at any point on the planet. Trust me.

Surrounding the mammoth open space on the surrounding walls is a series of paintings depicting great moments in the history of early France, including St. Genevieve calming the residents against the invasion of Attila; Clovis’s victory in battle to unite the Frankish tribes into a single country and of course Joan of Arc.

In the crypt underneath, only 8o people are interred, including the most recent, Josephine Baker, who was added just a year ago. There are plenty of empty spaces for future generations of French heroes. But it literally does take an act of the French congress to be awarded a permanent residence down there.

Following our visit to the past, we crossed the street to a British bar named Le Bombardier so I could have my first Bloody Mary in more than two weeks. This was a major issue for me, as I had missed out on two consecutive Sundays. The Bombardier version is typically European, but with the flair of a bit of stout drawn over the top. The bartender, obviously a native English speaker, helpfully placed Worchestershire sauce, celery salt and Tabasco next to our glasses when he finished the initial mixture. He knew two afficionados when he saw them.

It wasn’t Milk in Barcelona, where we plan to be in a couple of weeks, and it wasn’t 85 Egret Street, but any port in a storm, n’est pas?

Lynn had picked out Carnavalet as a target, a major museum that we had never visited. It is conveniently located across the river on the Right Bank, just a couple of stops in the trendy Marais on the Metro 7 from rue Monge.

We had no trouble finding the place, just a few minute walk from the Metro 7 station on rue St. Paul in the Marais (did I mention trendy?). Carnavalet is huge, encompassing two large large buildings, former homes that had been donated to the state. In fact, Carnavalet is considered Paris’s oldest museum, dating back to 1880, even though the Louvre was turned over by royalty to be a museum hundreds of years earlier.

Whatever its age, Carnavalet is a huge museum in two connecting buildings covering the history of Paris from pre-historic times through the Romans right up to the present day. Many rooms are reproduced and furnished in the style of the period featured, from the 15th century up to the 20th.

After more than three hours of wandering from room to room to room on multiple floors, we learned that Paris (and therefore the rest of France) was ungovernable for most of the post-Napoleon 19th century, much as Italy was for most of the 20th century and the U.S. is currently in the early 21st century. Political chaos feeds on itself.

We took a break for lunch in the spacious courtyard of the building and encountered what is truly one of the weirdest museum restaurants ever. Patrons line up at the food counter to order inside an area that looks like a wedding tent. The menu is fully vegetarian, and the food is served in aluminum pots.

Two orders are stacked into metal pots one over the other, then sealed to a top with hooks so that you can walk to the table holding the pot. Across the courtyard is the bar, where customers line up to order drinks. But if you want water, you are directed to a counter where the glasses and full tap water bottles are sitting on top for the taking. This is also where you pick up your utensils to eat the veggies in the layered pots.

Lynn ordered the veggies jaune, literally yellow slices of zucchini in some sort of un- identifiable dressing. I had the eggplant with onions in some sort of semi-curry sauce or dressing. Of the two, mine was superior in taste, but both were strange, served in their even stranger implements.

Refreshed if not full, we finished our tour of Carnavalet, then walked out just two blocks to Place des Vosges, another former royal park ordered up by a Medici queen and the former home of Victor Hugo and his porn collection. Place des Vosges is the oldest planned square in Paris and is truly a square. If Baronness Pontalba had been able to get rid of the Cabildo and the Presbytere and build two more apartment buildings, New Orleans would have had its own version. But the one in Paris is magical and worth a visit all by itself. (To the Baronesss’s credit, she was modeling her square after Playa Mayor in Madrid, which is older than Place des Vosges.)

We walked out to find our Metro stop but realized that we had become somewhat (no, totally) lost from where we had alighted hours before. And then it started to rain. So we did the smart thing this time and ducked into the nearest Metro station we could find, just a few yards away. Once inside and safe from the elements, I could figure out how to get back to our apartment.

The solution was to take the M 1 a few stops to the Palais Royal, then take the M 7 back home. Remember, we had taken the M 7 only two stops from our apartment to arrive at Carnavalet. Now we had to take the M 1 back to five stops farther away, then transfer to the M 7 via a nearly mile long passage and ride it seven stops back home. All because we were three blocks away from our original stop that took us there. Lesson learned–remember where you came from.

But no big deal to we intrepid travelers, experts in European metro commuting. We stayed dry, and we enjoyed the ride. The walk through the transfer station just added to our pedi-mileage for the day.

Back in the apartment, we rested. More precisely, we napped.

Then the idea hit me late in the afternoon to walk over to the Pantheon to purchase our Paris Museum Passes. It was the closest place to buy, just a few blocks away, and stayed open until at least 6 p.m. So I marched onward to the Pantheon while Lynn continued resting in preparation for our dinner at Lilane, just a couple of blocks away around Place Monge.

The couple we met while dining with the Harrisons Sunday at Le Petit Pontoise had recommended Lilane highly, so we walked up sans reservation and asked if we could dine. They were most accommodating and seated us right away, the first or second table of North Americans in the place shortly after 7 p.m.

Within a half an hour, our side of the dining room filled with Americans. We chatted with the couple next to us who were here from Napa. They were just happy to be somewhere not burning up.

Lilane is not your average Parisian bistro. In fact, it is not really a bistro at all. The decor is quite contemporary, and the menu is quite the same. They use the same ingredients as bistros but prepared in different ways,

I ordered the beef chuck, which turned out to be chunks of roast beef (chuck, right?) picked apart, packed into a form, then lightly seared to create a crusty edge. Lynn chose the roasted duck breast accompanied by an equally sized and shaped slice of eggplant. Both were over the top.

Accompanied by a delicious bottle of Languedoc-Roussillon, our dinner was memorable enough to send a review to Trip Advisor. The wine was about $36 US. The total bill was 98 euros. We waddled home, thankfully only a few blocks away.

On Saturday, we received a surprise text from our cousin Irene Harrison and her husband Mel, informing us that they were in Paris and inviting us to join them for lunch Sunday at Le Petit Pontoise, a bistro near the Seine. We eagerly accepted.

As we walked in front of the restaurant, Lynn recognized it and noted we had eaten there before, likely on the recommendation of Mel and Irene. We were a few minutes early, so we killed time down by the river until the stroke of noon, when we ambled back to the Pontoise to meet our cousins.

Lunch was a delicious roasted lamb (for me) and an equally tasty but skinny roasted quail for Lynn. The four of us caught up, as the Harrisons explained the purpose and itinerary of their trip, which will eventually take them across Normandy in search of our ancestors, then down to Provence and Nice before returning home to The Villages in Florida.

As we chatted, a distinguished looking couple at the table right next to us leaned over to ask about our stay. They too were Americans, and they spend two months a year in Paris–in an apartment right in our own neighborhood. We traded restaurant recommendations and Mel gave them his card to order his books about Alex Boyd, his fictional diplomatic service character based on his own actual career.

Mel and Irene had just arrived in Paris the day before to spend a week here in advance of taking off on their ancestor discovery trip to Normandy, sponsored by Stephen Ambrose T. Irene has been researching family genealogy for years, and has discovered some fascinating ancestors. One of them came to Louisiana about the time of the founding of New Orleans, shipped there by her father for being too “loose.” Essentially, she was abandoned. She eventually married three husbands and died in late 18th century in Point Coupee Parish.

We planned to walk over to Eglise St. Germain–l’Auxerrois, where our great-great-great-great-great grandmother had been baptized. The church is located across the street from the back door of the Louvre.

Incredibly, we had been to the church before, waiting on a tour bus at the French Tourism Office next door. The church is not huge by Gothic standards, but impressive nonetheless. Knowing we had family there some 300 years ago, gave us a measure of connection to the ghosts of this church, which dates back to 524.

As we departed the front door of the church, a light rain started to fall. No problem for us, we figured, even though our apartment was a long way off. We have been in Paris rain before, and it’s generally light, not the downpours we are accustomed to on the Gulf Coast. We popped into the huge newly renovated and re-opened La Samaritaine department store for a pit stop. As the weather turned out, we should have stayed longer in pit row gazing at LVMH’s wares.

We no sooner walked out the store when the rain started to fall more heavily, then really pouring. Retreat was too late. We were soaked. There was no real choice but to keep putting one foot in front of the other for more than a mile in the driving rain to get back to our apartment. Every Metro station we tried to enter was locked off, closed for the weekend. We trudged home, Lynn glaring darts as if I had caused the skies to fall on us.

Back in the apartment, we shed our soaked clothes and started to dry out. One little problem I had was that I had only packed one pair of shoes, planning to buy another either in Paris or Barcelona. Clearly, now was the time to to do so.

Using a hair dryer, I was able to get my one wet pair of shoes functional wearing socks to soak up most of the moisture, so by the evening, we ere ready to head back out. Our goal this Sunday evening was Pomme d’Eve, the South African bar at the end of the street where our first apartment was located.

Pomme d’Eve is owned and run by George, a South African himself who came to Paris for his MBA, until he stumbled into the opportunity to open a bar in what had used to be the 13th century wine cellar of one of the oldest churches in Paris just behind the Pantheon. St. Genevieve de Montagne church is still there (she is the patron saint of Paris), and so is George and his bar. In fact, he told us the last time we visited that he was planning to buy the floor beneath the main bar. So we were excited to catch up on his progress.

George’s bar normally opens at 9 p.m. and closes at 5 a.m. That’s a bit late for us “mature folks,” but on Sundays, he used to open at 7 p.m. because he had a subscription to the Red Zone, the NFL compendium of scoring plays. Remember, 7 p.m. in Paris is noon at home for us, so we could walk over to Pomme d’Eve and watch a bunch of NFL football, including our Saints.

But not tonight. Pomme d’Eve was most certainly closed at 7 p.m. George explained to Lynn later by e-mail that he had delayed opening until 2 a.m. because he had the Sunday night NFL game on live. A bit late for us.

So we walked over to Le Petit restaurant on the opposite corner, where the entire crowd of young people was sitting outside, maskless and smoking. We chose the lone interior table and had a quick dinner of French onion soup for Lynn and a massive Italian salad for me.

We called it an early evening and walked back in my squishy shoes so I could disassemble them and perch them on the drying rack until I could buy another pair Monday. Luckily, they are boat shoes so are meant to get wet if not soaked. And they dry out fairly quickly.

Not to diminish in any way Jardin des Plantes, the grand park just a few yards right down our own street, but the two most famous parks in central Paris are Luxembourg Garden, where Hemingway took his oldest son to play a century ago, and the Tuileries, where French kings played until two centuries ago. On a beautiful early autumn Saturday, we walked them both. Plus the length of the Louvre.

Altogether, Lynn figured out it was about 5 kilometers, although I think it was closer to five miles, considering we walked the entire length of the Louvre and the Tuileries.

Luxembourg Garden was built starting in 1612 by Marie de Medici, widow of Henri IV, to remind her of the green spaces she had grown up with in Florence. The original palace, now Petit Luxembourg and a small museum, was temporary quarters until she could finish the larger Luxembourg palace, which now serves as the French Senate.

Nothing had much changed since we were last there. It’s a wondrous place. The grounds and flowers are still beautiful, despite the advanced season; the children love to sail their petites bateaus, moving them with a long bamboo stick when they are not wailing in the water at the fish and the ducks; adults sit along the Grand Bassin catching the last sunshine before the cold, gray, wet Parisian winter comes in not too far ahead.

Somewhere, the ghost of Hemingway is catching a pigeon with Bumby to take home and eat. Or at least that was his story.

Our plan was to walk down from Luxembourg to the Batobus stop at St. Germain des Pres, then boat around to the Louvre. Well, that was the plan, anyway. By the time we reached the Seine, we had gone almost to the Louvre, so we simply walked down rue Dauphine past the two hotels where we once stayed, crossed the Pont Neuf and over to the back door of the Louvre.

We turned down rue de Rivoli, the shopping street that parallels the Louvre, in search of a new retail center that Phannette had described. We never found that, and we never really found much of anything new. The souvenir shops still offer scarves for 4 euros (three for 10), berets (7 euros), aprons, umbrellas, postcards, Eiffel Tower statuettes, t-shirts, sweatshirts, trays and other assorted items that bear the name and images of Paris. But this year there were no customers. The arcaded street was virtually empty.

Once we passed the Louvre, we gave up on rue de Rivoli and walked across the street to the dappled sunlight of the Tuileries, the spectacular elongated garden that was home to French kings until it was burned in the riots of 1870. (Imagine that–it survived the French Revolution but not the Commune!) Like Luxembourg, the Tuileries was built by a Medici, this one Catherine de Medici in 1564. She commissioned a Florentine landscape architect to create an Italian Renaissance garden. Funny how those Florentine queens longed for their home in Italy and did what they could to recreate it in France.

Like Luxembourg, the Tuileries hosts a large grand bassin, where parents rent little sailboats for the kids, and dozens of statues stand guard all along the shaded walks. Unlike Luxembourg, the Tuileries offers four separate concession stands, really outdoor restaurants, and we chose one of them that offered table service. As in the past, we ordered the charcuterie plate, which was plenty enough for the both of us, washed down with cold, tasty, 1664 beer.

Properly fed and watered, we walked down to the end of the park and the Place de la Concorde, perhaps one of the most stunning intersections in the world. But now we wanted our Batobus, and Lynn spied both the boat and the stop from the bridge. We hustled to make sure we made the boat on time. Once I saw that the line of passengers was fairly long, I knew we would make it, as we only had to show our pass sanitaire to board.

Donning our obligatory masks, we took our seats on what we hoped would be the shady side of the boat. But in mid-afternoon, there is no shady side of the boat. Our masks were suffocating in the sun, warmed further by the plexiglass canopy above us. We watched wistfully at the other excursion boats steaming up and down the Seine full with unmasked and comfortable passengers, many of who were packed like sardines on the upper open-air decks waving at us with their bare faces in the sun.

This boat trip was much more crowded, since it was Saturday and families were out with their small children to give them a view of Paris and a chance to torture adults by banging the folding chairs in the center to their delight and our audible misery. Jardin de Plantes stop could not come soon enough.

Desembarking our Batobus, we did not waste time wandering through a third park this day but made straight for our apartment and well deserved naps. Dinner would be pizza and more delicious French wine. We may spend as much as 5 euros on the next bottle.

We slept late on Friday with the intention of catching the first Batobus on the Seine nearest our apartment at the Jardin des Plantes. Batobus hours are reduced to basically midday to 6 p.m. and only Wednesday-Sunday at this time of the year. All the ticket kiosks are closed except for Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. This gives you an idea of how reduced tourism is here in Paris.

The boat was nearly empty when we boarded and never filled.

I had to explain my way on to the boat, because my phone decided not to download the PDF of the ticket file, even though it had worked just fine the night before. No problem to them since we had to exchange tickets at the Eiffel Tower stop anyway, where they were able to track my PDF and issue old-fashioned paper ducats for subsequent rides.

We ascended the stone steps from the Batobus landing to the Eiffel Tower and the desecration of security fencing surrounding it. As we rounded the corner past the souvenir hawkers (few though they may be these days), we saw the line to enter the grounds and just out of curiosity, joined in.

Well, lo and behold, the Eiffel Tower is open! That is, the grounds are open and free to visit; tickets are needed only to ascend to the upper floors, either by elevator (long lines) or stairs (no lines).

Visitors must first show the pass sanitaire to enter, then go through security, but that only takes a few minutes, since there are so few tourists. You can tell that tourism is way down by the dramatically reduced numbers of shit-sellers on the surrounding streets and sidewalks. They hardly even bother to hawk their wares at the few people passing by.

The Eiffel Tower itself is now surrounded by an attractive park inside the ugly, disgusting security fencing. Further marring the scene is a series of stacked containers, living quarters for the dozens of workers who are repainting the entire structure for the first time in 40 years. These are the same boxes that are placed around Notre Dame, housing the hundreds who operate the cranes, assemble the wood frames supporting the buttresses and carefully cataloguing the burned pieces of stone and wood.

But it was such a relief and a joy to wander on the grounds beneath the giant steel erector set we know and love. We reveled in the sights and took time for a baguette lunch at the little outdoor cafe, where there again was no line.

Now that we know the drill, we will return. But for this afternoon, it was time to head back to our apartment via Batobus. The Eiffel Tower is the first of nine stops along the river, and a group of two women and a man boarded at the next stop, all three maskless. That is a no-no in Paris.

The boat attendant made the obligatory announcement that everyone on the ship, inside or outside, was required to wear a mask, but the threesome ignored him. Then the attendant walked to the back to talk to them personally, and they continued to ignore the rule, especially a plump blonde squeezed into stretch pants a size or two too small. (And why do they insist on carrying their phone in an outside pocket?) She was wearing no mask at all, much less the under-the-chin option. And none of them obviously intended to comply with the rules.

Within minutes, four black-clad police showed up in a black RIB alongside our boat. Three of the gendarmes climbed aboard our boat, while the RIB driver hovered adjacent to us. The three police walked purposefully to the rear of the Batobus, singled out the offending passengers, chatted with them for a minute, then escorted them politely but firmly off the boat at the next stop. (I don’t think Paris police operate under any sort of consent decree, so careful what you say.)

The blond seemed most militant of the three, and she argued from the stern to the dock, presumably why this rule did not apply to her. She must have been French, because she carried on an animated if one-sided discussion with the cop as he herded her off the boat and on to the dock. And then sent her on her way but not on our boat.

Lesson learned–Wear. Your. Mask. I hate it too.

Last time we were in Paris was just two weeks after Notre Dame had burned. The old scaffolding was still smoldering and temporary chain link fencing had been hastily erected, so we could walk around the back and get a close-up view of the damage. At that time, we were also able to walk up to the front to see the pieces being carried out of the ancient cathedral to the front courtyard, where they were identified, labeled and stored away on site.

Now, some two and a half years later, the work has progressed from salvage to restoration. A large solid metal barrier has been erected from the front of the cathedral all the way around the side street across from the souvenir sellers. The barrier displays an impressive story of the restoration work with large scale photography and a descriptive narrative. And behind the eight-foot metal wall, we could see the new wooden braces that support the buttresses.

Overall, it is an impressive, if sad, display, and the restoration work seems to be moving ahead. However, none of the narrative speaks to the goal of having the cathedral restored by 2024 and the Paris Olympics. Perhaps they have given up on that ambitious target.

The street alongside Notre Dame is all but empty of souvenir sellers and their tourist patrons. Paris is virtually empty of tourists, and we hear very few American voices.

We walked reverentially past the cathedral and toward the Palais de Justice and the world’s greatest repository of stained glass windows in one setting, the church of St. Chappelle. But times have changed. A reserved, timed ticket is required to pass through the barricades, which are guarded by uninformed police checking for the ubiquitous pass sanitaire.

We decided to wait on our Museum Pass, which will no longer get us right through lines but will provide a timed, reserved entry. I later checked the entry times for St. Chappelle and saw that that the same entire day was open, another indication of how few tourists are visiting Paris these days.

Traffic was as heavy as usual on the streets around the Palais de Justice, however, so we picked our way between cars, police vans and ambulances to start our walk back home. We took the route around the hill to the end of rue Monge and near the Marie & Pierre Curie campus of the Sorbonne, which is the French MIT.

We needed wine, so we made our way to rue Mouffetard and the Cave, where the store featured a Cabernet Franc, a Cote du Rhone and a Gamay–all for 20 euros.

Dinner that night was at one of our all-time Parisian favorites, La Forge down near Montparnasse. The little restaurant is warm, rustic and welcoming. The couple who own it greeted us like old friends, and gave us our choice of tables. They feature a Morgon wine, which I instantly recognized from the last time we dined there. It was delicious, all 32 euros of it. We chatted about their Covid experience, and he explained they had been closed for a full year during the worst of the pandemic.

Lynn chose the steamed cod in vegetables, and I couldn’t resist the entrecôte with pepper sauce and buttery, crispy potato slices. As good as ever, although I looked with envy at the duck confit served to the table next to ours. You can only have one plat per sitting, I suppose, but I may have their cassoulet next time. Or the duck. And we couldn’t resist a creme brulet for dessert before waddling up the hill to home and off to bed too early for a good night’s sleep.

We are still acclimating to the time, but we are almost there.

We did not want to wander too far on our first full, non-jet lagged day, as the cable guy was scheduled to arrive midday. So we spent the day re-aquainting ourselves with the surrounding neighborhood. The magic had not left.

First on our list was a visit to the butcher on rue Monge for sausage to make Lynn’s famous sausage and peppers dish at the apartment, our first home-cooked meal in 11 days. Then it was off to the vegetable market two doors down for peppers, onions, and garlic. After depositing the groceries in the apartment, we were ready for a stroll around the ‘hood, starting with the huge Jardin de Plantes at the end of rue Lacepede.

The Jardin des Plantes was clearly past its prime season. The botanical gardens were overgrown, weedy and mostly brown. The rose gardens, so solid with color in the spring, were for the most part going bare, with few blooms left. But it is also maintenance season, as we watched the workers trim the huge sycamore trees like shrubs.

After a baguette lunch and the cable box replaced, we walked over to our original neighborhood near the Pantheon to check out Pomme d’Eve, which seems to be active, although not open during the day. We will visit George soon–if we can stay awake that late.

Farther down rue Laplace, we confirmed that one of our favorite restaurants, Chantairelle, is gone, replaced by a prix fixe restaurant offering 3, 5, 7 and 9(!) course dinners. We also located The Bombardier, an authentic British pub that should be able to make a passable Bloody Mary come Sunday. They are hard to find in Paris, and I am not up to paying 24 euros each at the Ritz for a Bloody Mary.

From rue Laplace, we walked back down and around the hill to Jussieu and the university area where we had found an apartment a few years ago. We realized that we had forgotten to buy pasta for the peppers, so stopped in a Carrefours City, a tiny urban supermarket that offers everything the bigger ones do except in much smaller shelf space.

In Paris, you are never far from a patisserie or a grocery store. Between the hyper-markets like Monoprix and conventional stores like Carrefours, there are all sorts of smaller versions, including Franprix and the everything-frozen Picard, which is a true foodie wonder itself.

The fashion statement of the day is to wear a mask completely under the chin, ready to be deployed when entering any sort of establishment. I’m not going there.

France also requires showing your “pass sanitaire,” digital proof of your vaccination, whenever entering a restaurant or a museum. It’s the same as LA Wallet. We applied for ours several weeks ago and received them online in only about 12 hours for each of us, and I had been shamelessly showing off mine all over New Orleans and Newport.