So often a short stay in a European city devolves into a box-checking exercise. Versailles felt like one such exercise. Perhaps Schönbrunn in Wiener World, with its splendid palace and richer and lovelier gardens--even though smaller than those of Versailles--has jaded us to imperial grandeur. We more enjoyed strolling through the Marais area, with its narrow, winding cobblestone streets, still in their medieval pattern, and Père Lachaise cemetery, with its quiet, sunny, dusty rock history. And one of the smaller, quieter art galleries, the Marmottan, had more appeal for us than the crowded Louvre. The Marmottan, famous for its wall of Monet paintings, is in a sleepy neighborhood, distant from the city center, and never crowded. There we looked at the water lilies and let our minds do the work the painter left for us: assembling the figures and blending the dots and dashes into light and shadow and color. All rather like the way our impressions of Paris coalesced after four days.
L'Environs
We loved our quiet little hotel in the Rue Cler area, a neighborhood of restaurants, small shops, bakeries, and fruit stands, not far from the Eiffel Tower and the Musee d'Orsay. Made to seem more spacious by decorator artifice, the walls and low ceiling sections were covered in mirrors--perhaps to put us in mind of Versailles--and with so many spotlights that we could have played doctor or even performed surgery. Some portions of the ceiling were remarkably low, allowing me to add a Paris notch on my poor bald head, which is already a scar travelogue of my encounters with European doorways, arches, and ceilings. (The oldest is from a hotel in Reading, England; the largest from a hotel in Pitlochry, Scotland; the set of five is from apartment building entrances in Rome; and, prior to this, the most recent came from the doorway at a border station that sold Hungarian highway tax stickers.) We met no rudeness. The afternoon we arrived, we stopped first for lunch, and the waitress returned my "Bon jour" with "Good afternoon." She smiled and said "I knew from your accent that you speak English."
The Paris Metro is to me a marvel of underground caverns. With great acoustics, they are tiled like bathrooms, which they are sometimes used for; more, though, they are like well-lit catacombs with the bones still covered in flesh and in motion. Crowds flow like notes in a symphony through the tunnels from one train to another, and the rush never seems to let up--down a corridor, up a flight of stairs, around a corner, down a flight of stairs, abruptly shifting direction while glancing at signs pointing to the various train lines and exit options. Itinerant musicians sometimes sit, squat, or stand in the passages, instrument cases open to receive contributions. At one point we saw a string orchestra--more than a dozen violins.
L'Environs
We loved our quiet little hotel in the Rue Cler area, a neighborhood of restaurants, small shops, bakeries, and fruit stands, not far from the Eiffel Tower and the Musee d'Orsay. Made to seem more spacious by decorator artifice, the walls and low ceiling sections were covered in mirrors--perhaps to put us in mind of Versailles--and with so many spotlights that we could have played doctor or even performed surgery. Some portions of the ceiling were remarkably low, allowing me to add a Paris notch on my poor bald head, which is already a scar travelogue of my encounters with European doorways, arches, and ceilings. (The oldest is from a hotel in Reading, England; the largest from a hotel in Pitlochry, Scotland; the set of five is from apartment building entrances in Rome; and, prior to this, the most recent came from the doorway at a border station that sold Hungarian highway tax stickers.) We met no rudeness. The afternoon we arrived, we stopped first for lunch, and the waitress returned my "Bon jour" with "Good afternoon." She smiled and said "I knew from your accent that you speak English."
The Paris Metro is to me a marvel of underground caverns. With great acoustics, they are tiled like bathrooms, which they are sometimes used for; more, though, they are like well-lit catacombs with the bones still covered in flesh and in motion. Crowds flow like notes in a symphony through the tunnels from one train to another, and the rush never seems to let up--down a corridor, up a flight of stairs, around a corner, down a flight of stairs, abruptly shifting direction while glancing at signs pointing to the various train lines and exit options. Itinerant musicians sometimes sit, squat, or stand in the passages, instrument cases open to receive contributions. At one point we saw a string orchestra--more than a dozen violins.
Most of our dining experiences were unremarkable. And only one of them was humiliating. There is something about a snail's brief existence that makes me want to sit and meditate: its womb is eventually its tomb--and sometimes its baking chamber. The other few times that I have ordered snails in Paris, they came partially peeking out from shells almost the size of golf balls, steeped in red wine, delectable as filet mignon, and easily extracted. This order, however, arrived in six shells half that size. Rather than being partially emerged from their individual, home-grown caves and accessible to a pointy surgical implement, these meaty delicacies, bathed in oil and pesto, had shrunk deep into the shadows. At first I had only a table fork to get them out, and as I tried, the tines hit the shell surface, metal clicking on rock, without touching the tiny bodies. However, moments after my initial, frustrated efforts, the waitress reappeared with snail-eating implements: a pair of tongs with a spring grip (squeeze to open) and a tiny, two-pronged fork. She unhelpfully disappeared as quickly as she had come, like a comet leaving a trail of ice crystals and probably gas in its wake. I stared--she might as well have handed me a screwdriver and told me to floss my teeth. A waiter walked slowly by, pausing to watch me, brow furrowed in concern. I picked up a shell with the tongs, and it slipped around until the shell hole with the hidden morsel was blocked by the metal; I squeezed the tongs to tighten my grip on the shell--a maneuver that simply opened them wider--and the snail clinked to my plate. I tried again. And again. The click of tine on shell and then the clink of shell hitting plate took on a musical rhythm. I looked up to see whether a crowd was gathering, thinking I might put out a dish to collect coins, yet aware the whole time that my image in front of my lovely spouse as a sophisticated international traveler was cooked, my ego shrinking rapidly into the dark shell of my mind. Linda took the plate from me and patiently, delicately, using surgical skill, teased out each of the succulent brown balls in oily green, smiled sweetly, and set the plate back before me. I love her so.
Light My Fire: Secular Saints
Far from the city center, the 200-hundred-year-old Père Lachaise cemetery holds some 70,000 residents and stretches over several acres. The grounds hold a number of famous writers and artists, along with modern sculptures memorializing World Wars I and II, particularly the victims of Nazi concentration camps. The one to Mauthausen, the large camp in Austria that we visited last winter, depicts the staircase from the quarry, from which prisoners were made to carry loads of stone and were beaten to death or shot when they stumbled. We saw, among others, the graves of Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Gertrude Stein, and the playwright Molière. And the most popular of all: Jim Morrison. Tucked in a cluttered corner behind other graves, Morrison's memorial had half a dozen people standing near it, none of whom looked old enough to have been alive when Morrison was. Wilting flowers and an empty bottle of Jack Daniels sat on the top of the memorial stone. Next to it a young woman sat in the lotus position on the ground in the shade, eyes closed in meditation.
Chez-Nous Again
As our return flight approached Vienna, the Air France pilot struggled with saying "Schwechat Airport," tripping three times over the words and finally getting out "Sayvaysha Airpohr." How I loved hearing his phonetic struggle. I wished he had said to me "Good afternoon." I would have replied "Bon jour. Je savais dès votre accent que vous parlez français."
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