Paris

We left for Paris on Friday at noon, and made the roughly 5 hour drive all packed into a very small, very French car. Post-Sheep-Head Grace was too tired to make conversation, and elected instead to stare out the window at the French countryside and listen to some quality, Slavic-brass-inspiredtravel music. Between naps, Margaux, her friend Pierre-Louis (who was staying with us for the week preceding the trip), and I munched on soft, junk-foody pains au chocolat and flicked through a few pages of our reading until the car careened around a corner and we all had to put down out books.

We arrived in the city after dark, and dropped Pierre-Louis off near his metro station, then made our way to the largest and most luxurious apartment I have ever been in. It was glorious. 

No wonder the Jacobins revolted.

Too tired to go out on the town, we spent the evening at home with a friend of the family who owned the flat, and awaited the arrival of Margaux's friend Zita, who took the train in to spend the weekend with us. The family skyped Alice, their other daughter living in New York, who was baffled by the popularity of the greatest holiday of them all Halloween. It's not a widely celebrated holiday in Europe (to my chagrin), but we did get the whole weekend and half of the week off for Toussaints, so a girl can deal.

The next morning we headed off to see the sights in a city that had largely been deserted by native Parisians, fleeing for the holiday weekend. The huge, wide avenues were still packed with people, but it became very apparent, very quickly that in Paris, one is more likely to hear English than French.

They just don't make 'em like they used to, kids.

After descending the tiny, dizzying spiral staircase, we made our way down the Champs-Elysées. Perpetually hungry, the girls stopped for chocolat chaud and croissants at Brioche-Dorée (think French Dunkin Donuts) Somehow, in a city of cafes, this is our chosen venue. What would Jean-Paul Sartre think (not that I actually care at all what that man thinks. Get a job! Stop being a Soviet apologist! Be nicer to your wife! She's way cooler than you!). Satisfied, we continued our stroll down the road to the Place Vendôme, hopped onto the metro, and headed back home, where the girls rounded out the night with a fierce game of Mario Kart.

The Opera

Day three. Sunday. We went to mass at the Église de la Trinité and jogged over to the Musée Nissim de Camondo, the home of a Turkish family of Jews who settled in Paris and have one of the greatest collections of 18^th century furniture and art I've ever seen outside of like, Versailles. There was a Japanese cabinet that I had some serious envy for. After the museum, we skipped over to the Jardin des Tuileries, and looked at some statues (one of which looked like it was dabbing. Tragically I did not take a picture. Next time folks.)

 At this point, it was way too late to even think about tackling the Louvre, but we did make time for the gift shop. The number of historically inspired perfumes I had to keep myself from buying was astounding. 

Notre Dame

After the Louvre, that behemoth, we popped on over to Notre Dame, and then to my favorite place in the entire city

“What is Shakespeare and Company? We've never heard of this.”

This is the question I faced from every single Frenchman when I told them what I wanted to see in Paris. Apparently, as wildly popular as it is with Americans and Brits, Shakespeare & Co. is virtually unknown to the French. A quick jog over the Seine, this two story, cramped bookstore is the re-iteration of a bookstore founded by Sylvia Beach in Paris in 1919, where authors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot (to name, like, a few) flocked in the years following the First World War. By far, my favorite spot in the city, although this isn't the original location. In 1962, after the death of Beach, George Whitman's store Le Mistral (then the hottest place in Paris for literary figures to hang out) was renamed in honor of her. Very, very, very cool.

I feel, ya, Ern.

Wary at first of this weird, tiny Anglophone bookstore that I was VERY enthusiastic about visiting, the girls eventually understood its appeal when they saw the piano and the typewriters and the beds and cots and couches for reading and writing poetry. It's magical. Even if the picture I took of it is less than stellar. After a huge dinner at a very dinky Greek restaurant, we turned in for the night. I was too excited to wait until I got home to read my new books, so I flicked through the pages of T.S. Eliot on teh metro. I didn't realize how lovely the English language could sound until my family said that the opening lines of Prufrock were beautiful, even if they were nonsense to them.

 “Let us read and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”  ~Voltaire

                            

You have to get your book stamped. Its the RULES.

Day Four. Monday. LOUVRE DAY. So much has been said about this museum. It's big, it's cool, it's an old palace. I can't really add to any of these descriptions. Instead, look at some of these low quality pictures of high quality paintings.

The Louvre

BEHEMOTH

Gainsborough, aka my dude.

Seriously, Jacobins. I hear you,

Wow, I am really bad at cropping pictures,

Turner, my other dude.

After the Louvre, which we somehow sped through, we hit up Sainte Chapelle, private cathedral of the French royal family. It recently underwent an 8 year long renovation because the windows were so covered in pollution and grime that the light couldn't shine through them. It's almost a completely different cathedral now than it was the last time I visited 8 years ago.

I didn't take any pictures. I'm sorry. I'm a bad traveler. But honestly, that space is so overwhelming, and my measly little iPhone camera can't handle the kind of definition needed to do it justice. So I've linked to some actual, nice, quality photos for you to enjoy. We ended the day by strolling on the quais of the Seine. The next morning, mass again for Toussaints, this time at Notre Dame, a visit to the home of Victor Hugo, and a return trip to Tassin-la-Demi-Lune. I'll return in the Spring to hit up some cafes on my own time. Until then.

Notre Dame