We travelled down to London first class from Sheffield to St Pancras on the first cheap train of the day. We were sat behind a lively conversation between the four people on the seats next to us. It was mostly between a retirement age Australian man and a woman who worked for a wine company, and also seemed to dabble in the hotel trade teaching etiquette. They were all also heading for Paris, the woman for business of some kind, and the man and his wife as part of a European holiday. They had evidently been in the North of England for the past few weeks and the wine company woman quizzed them extensively on every detail of their trip, and frequently dropped in knowing references to many British stereotypes; how the north is much friendlier than the south, how there is much public drunkeness in England, how lovely York Minster is and so forth. She was one of those loquacious, excellently spoken people who can carry on conversation for hours and hours without actually saying anything remotely interesting. The man in turn dropped in many happily smug mentions of how comfortable and sunny life in Australia is. He had once been a teacher it seemed, and told a charming anecdote about his last day before retirement and how all the children at the school had been turned out to bid him farewell. From his various travels it seemed as though he and his wife were making the best of their retirement. It turned out the woman worked part time in Paris so was offering many tips on what to see there, although since the Australians were only there a few days this could consist only of saying that they should see the Eiffel Tower and maybe buy one of those Paris Pass things for the museums.
We had an hour and a half to pass at St Pancras before we could check into the Eurostar. At St Pancras the Eurostar platforms sit in the main train shed where the mainline trains once arrived and the check-in facilities are underneath in the old goods warehouse. I had wondered beforehand if the Eurostar had any security checks at all. As it turned out it had, but because the x ray checks and metal detectors only had to cope with three trains worth of passengers at a time compared to the tens of planes at an airport the security lines were far far shorter than at most airports. We had something to eat in the bistro at the end of the station, where, if my fading memories of the mid-1990s serve me correctly a WH Smith kiosk once stood. At this end of the station a huge sculpture of a departing couple sharing an embrace stands. It was attracting a fair few photos from passers by, yet the magnificent roof of the Victorian train shed and the handsome row of Eurostar trains was mostly ignored. It's funny how most people gravitate to the symbol of romance that the giant sculpture was providing, yet seemed to ignore the actual promise of adventure and romance sitting right behind them in the station.
The Eurostar is a big train; eighteen coaches long, and we had to walk down most of it to get to our coach. Still, I can't complain, it's very exciting to walk down the side of a train you know is about to head off at over 150mph with you aboard heading for France, and it's certainly has more of a feeling of glamour about it that crowding down the air corridor to get to a plane - no matter how big the plane is. I was a little disappointed to be sat behind one of the window pillar with only a small-ish view ahead, but not entirely surprised since we had booked some of the last available tickets on this train. Eurostar seems to be very popular these days and it doesn't surprise me - St Pancras is much easier to get to than Heathrow or Stanstead, and the Gare du Nord in Paris is a wee bit more central than Charles de Gaulle or Orly airports. The trains are showing it's age a little bit these days. Their interiors are a little square and plasticky compared to the newest of the Sheffield to London trains. They are undeniably smooth and comfortable, though, even if there isn't all that much to see on the journey to Paris. High Speed One in Kent speeds mostly though tunnels out of London (my ears were popping as we plunged in and out of them) and is hidden away in cuttings for the rest. After whizzing through the channel tunnel (the train manager came on to tell us that we were heading through, in such impeccable English and French it was impossible to tell which was their original tongue), it heads to Lille and then across the flat emptiness of Northern France and straight into the Northern suburbs of Paris.
It was raining hard when we stepped out of the Gare du Nord looking for a taxi to take us to our hotel. The lady driver could manage enough English to find the Hotel Eiffel Segur on her sat nav and took us on a brief tour of the north side of Paris. She pointed out a department store "verrree... expenseeve in zhere" she managed, and the Elysee Palace "vere ze President live", and across the river to, of course, "Eiffel Towerrr over 'ere". We had booked a place to have dinner on the tower that evening, booked well in advance of course as these days nothing as popular as a restaurant on the Eiffel Tower has tickets "on the door" any more. We found our hotel and were both pleased to see that it was smart and well kept. The lobby was being refurbished in a white painted modern fashion but behind the door marked "Chambres/Rooms" (nothing much in Paris is not subtitled in English any more, something I found a little disappointing - it didn't feel quite so exotic to see everything written in English too) there was an old wooden spiral staircase and walls done out in an interesting combination of mustard yellow and white, with red carpets. The man on the desk was from somewhere in Scandinavia and was able to answer our questions. The only one really was to do with the Metro line outside. I knew from my nerdy childhood days of reading anything and everything about cars, trains and planes that some bits of the Paris Metro ran on old elevated viaducts in the middle of the road and the hotel was evidently on a section like this. Very convenient, except that the whole shebang was covered in scaffolding;
"Is is shut?" we asked.
"Yes" came the answer, but fortunately there was another line and another station nearby. In only a few days were would become very familiar with the Segur station and in that time we would nearly be able to navigate back to the hotel from it. The problem was that with the big scaffolding covered train line in the way it was very difficult to remember which side of the road the hotel was on. And naturally both directions looked the same. The solution to the problem was the hulking Montparnasse Tower, the big 60s skyscraper in the distance - we knew the hotel was on the right side of the road when heading towards the Montparnasse Tower. It still took us a few tries to get this right.
The rain had slowed a little bit as we walked to the Eiffel Tower for our dinner date. We caught sight of it at the end of the long Champs du Mars boulevard. From this distance it looked quite small but that is because Paris had some very long and wide boulevards. I would say they reminded me of Washington DC but that would be the wrong way round as, of course, Paris's boulevards came first. The rain had made the grass in the middle a bit muddy so we crunched up the wet gravel towards to tower. This was the first time Becky had seen the tower and the first time I had seen it close up since a the school summer trip in 1994. That trip had been an tremendously fun experience, yet oddly only about twenty of us from school had been interested enough to go. We had seen loads - the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, the artists in Montmartre, Notre Dame, and yet most of my year at school had evidently not been interested. I've always felt a little embarrassed on behalf of my generation by that - when my brother's year had gone on the same trip, only a few years earlier, there had been over forty of them.
The Eiffel Tower is fabulous and you can't stop looking at it. Yes, partly this is because it's so famous, but mostly because it's so intricate and detailed, and the detail only increases getting closer. I remember being fascinated as a kid by the view up from directly underneath the tower. Of the four huge legs converging at the first level, and then continuing up to the second platform far above. With it's drab brown colour it looks like some kind of giant skeleton - an iron dinosaur - towering above your own puny self. It's the symmetry that is the most impressive feature, the way the incredible complexity repeats itself perfectly on all four sides. And it only gets better as the night rolls in and the whole thing is lit up in orange light. It's ironic really, for all the queues to see the view at the top, one of the best views in Paris is looking up at the thing from the bottom.
Dinner was at nine, we had to wait for a while in the lobby of the restaurant "58 Tour Eiffel" while they cleared away the previous sitting. But once we were in the service was impeccable and the food was - as to be expected - excellent. I had the Fois Gras simply because I had never had the stuff before, then the lamb. I don't even like lamb that much but it was delicious, and had some of the best "side salad" (for wont of a better phrase) I have ever tasted. The plate was also garnished with coriander and cumin paste, and chick peas, so I suppose I ate a very upmarket lamb curry. It was the dessert that was the best though; it was meringue, cream, and raspberries, but unlike any meringue I have had before it somehow wasn't dry. Well, the very outside was dry but the inside gradually got softer until reaching the wafer thin layer of fruit sauce in the middle. It was perfect, and I have seldom eaten more slowly and carefully, well aware that each forkful took me closer to eating the whole thing and having no more left.
The lift back down the the ground level was packed full so I took my chance and took to the stairs instead. It's always been a little goal of mine to one day walk the stairs all the way to top of the Eiffel Tower. It is impossible of course - the stairs to the very top are closed except as an emergency exit. So I took my chance to try a little bit of my dream. The rain was bucketing down now, and hundreds of drops dripped down from the tower as I gingerly picked down the stairs past the banks of spotlights beaming up and lighting the structure all around. All around the ground could be seen through the beams, and the sense of being very high up, even in the lowest section of the tower was strong. Maybe I wouldn't have the head for heights to try for the top after all. We met again at the bottom, hailed another taxi, and had a slightly embarrassing five minutes as neither of us could remember either the road the hotel was on or the (closed) metro station it was next to. I had left the convenient little tourist map out of my pocket for this evening, and neither of us had roaming internet so couldn't quickly look it up. For some reason this cab driver didn't have the sat nav his compatriot had had earlier in the day. Mercifully, and just as I was worrying that he might chuck us out for being slightly tipsy (the waiter had charged us for a glass of wine but had provided free refills because I had managed to address him in passable French rather than simply barking at him in English as is the standard practice of most visitors) and English, we passed a sign for "Cambronne" station and the penny dropped at last. I wish I had a better memory for names sometime, it was save some would save some embarrassing brain lapses.
In the morning we returned to the tower for a trip to the very top. The rain had abated but the daylight brought a new peril; hoards of street vendors - they carry the same wares, large rings of Eiffel Towers and other trinkets in their hands or slung over their shoulders. They aren't very persistent or intrusive but there are huge numbers of them. Standing back and estimating I would have said there was maybe one Senegalese street vendor for every three tourists. They were everywhere. Fortunately Becky had a neat trick her dad had told her. When asked if one could speak "ENGLISH???" by an vendor, simply reply "Nein, danke". Evidently pretending to be German works wonders - either they think you can't manage enough English to haggle with, or the German's have a poor reputation for generosity. Perhaps it's a bit of both, whatever it works a treat and is a well recommended tactic for a more enjoyable visit to Paris.
We had booked a "Skip the Line" tour on Expedia a few months earlier. This promised a guided tour of the second level of the tower but most usefully a way to skip the queues at the very base of the tower. I must admit, however, that the lines the previous night hadn't looked too bad - perhaps it was the rain - and this morning wondered idly if the tour was really going to be worth a small extra amount of euros simply to skip a brief bit of queuing. Though having seen the way the tat merchant sellers were trying to approach people queuing I could see one advantage in not having to wait. They didn't stay long - every so often a posse of Gendarmes would stroll purposefully past, their semi-automatic rifles sending a signal that while they were on the lookout for anyone trying to park a truck full of explosives next to the tower, rounding up a few merchandise vendors and checking whether they had visas and work permits would not be out of the question. As it was the tour was very good. Ironically after all these years of visiting a brother in America I come to France and get an American tour guide, but she was very good at her job. We started in the Trocadero, the grand late thirties balcony overlooking the tower, walked down over the bridge and the River Seine, under the tower, and up to the second level. I only spotted one slight error in her commentary - the tower is not made of steel it's wrought iron - a minor point, but as a Sheffielder I should know what's made of steel and what isn't.
The Skip the Line tour didn't entitle us to skip the line to the third level of the tower, but we didn't have to wait long. Our guide had told us that Monsieur Eiffel hadn't actually designed the famous shape of the tower, two of his employees had done that, but had worked out how to put it all together and had the political connections to get it built. In doing so he'd had to fight against much of the cultural elite of Paris who had decried his idea as an ugly abomination. Never mind that it was supposed to be centrepiece of a World Exposition to showcase France's position in the world, they thought it was vulgar and would ruin the skyline of Paris. And in France "ugly" and "vulgar" are not things that are usually very welcome. Fortunately the pressure from all the artists, poets and politicians meant that the Eiffel Tower was located away from the historic centre of Paris, so it now commands and excellent view of that centre and of the nearly all rest of the city. Or rather, it does on a clear day. The rain and mist was drawing in as we rode the little lift to the top, up through the spindly framework of the top half of the tower.
M. Eiffel kept an apartment at the top of his tower, and looking from the second level way up to the small platform at the top I was moved to wonder why. It looks so precarious up there, as well as a little hard to get to. But once up the top you can see the appeal. They have kept a corner of his apartment preserved as it once would have been and it was quite a nice looking place. A bit bigger than you might expect, and with one heck of a view. We didn't quite get to see the view in all it's glory. The rain was coming down harder again, and the mist was pulling in. Still, it was fun to be at one of the most famous and distinctive spots in the world - the top of the most visited tourist attraction in the world.
We went walking through the streets near the tower but thanks to the incessant rain We ended up taking shelter in the French Military museum in the huge Les Invalides buildings. When we found that one of us could get in for free on account of being 25 or under we had a look around. The main draw of the museum is the tomb of Napoleon, underneath the famous golden dome, but the much of the rest is very diverting too, with displays of the French royal armories in the large galleries. After looking around the armories the sun chose a timely moment to arrive as we walked round the base of the golden dome an into the chamber containing Napoleon's tomb. His extremely large tomb. it is impressive certainly, but so enormous that it doesn't really feel like the tomb of a person at all, but a giant impersonal monolith. A set of stairs led down to the crypt level underneath the main floor where a big statue of Napoleon sits looking at the tomb. We walked around the upper and lower levels, looking at the large golden altar that sits behind the tomb, the impressive painted ceiling in the dome, the other smaller tombs around the rotunda; two of Napoleon's brothers, his son, Marshall Foch the French commander in WW1, the military architect Vauban. No Josephine though - Mrs. Napoleon is buried in a church in a suburb of Paris.
The sun had come out in full force by the time we'd had lunch and walked up another wide boulevard to the Seine. We crossed a bridge with four large pillars on it's four corners, and golden statues glinting in the sun on top. A large metal plaque on the the balustrade told us it was the Pont Alexandre and it was finished in 1900 - I would have guessed it was older given the baroque style of the statues and the decoration, but that's the thing with the bridges in Paris; they are all rather similar looking to each other and it's quite hard to tell which is older than the other. The ironic thing is that the oldest one is the one called the "Pont Neuf" - the "New Bridge"! We attached a romantic padlock to one of the newer looking bridges on the riverbank - a footbridge that looked much like London's Millennium bridge. This practice of attaching padlocks to bridges is rather sweet and sentimental but it might not be around for too much longer - already one of the bridges on the Seine was being boarded over to prevent any more padlocks being attached. The weight of hundreds and hundreds of padlocks is too heavy for many of the older bridges so sadly, but inevitably, they have to go.
Across the Pont Alexandre was a large glass greenhouse-like building called the Grand Palais. This huge building looks a bit like London's famous Crystal Palace but with the crucial difference that it is still standing. Even from the top of the Eiffel Tower it looked big. We kept walking down the river bank to the Louvre palace. The Louvre museum itself was closed on Tuesdays so we had a look around the courtyard instead, posing in front of the great glass pyramid above the main entrance to the museum, and next the ornate Caroussel triumphal arch, with a distant view up the Champs Elysees to the much bigger Arc du Triomph. We walked through the courtyards of the Louvre palace, through a courtyard so large and surrounded by four almost identical facades as be a little uncanny. The outside world completely hidden by three storied walls with many many windows. The east end of the palace looks a bit like Buckingham Palace, except there aren't any armed sentries standing in little booths. Opposite the palace was a grand church that looked a little like a old cotton mill with a slightly industrial looking grand central spire flanked by two identical buildings.
Somewhere in our family photo albums is an photo from about 1988 of my brother and me climbing over a large disembodied stone head, laying on it's side in front of an old Parisian church. My guidebook had a picture of the head and said it was next to St Eustache church in Les Halles. On the little tourist map the church was shown a few blocks from the end of the Louvre palace. Interested to rediscover a moment from a family holiday from long ago I persuaded Becky to come with me on a detour away from our walk towards Notre Dame and up in Les Halles, slightly away from the main tourist areas in search of a very large head. Large maps on the street indicated that the Les Halles markets area was being developed in a dramatic looking and major way. A nice new city park named after Nelson Mandela had been built and we found the head on the edge of the park. It had evidently been moved in the redevelopments and wasn't in front of the church any more, but some things hadn't changed as there were still kids climbing over it and being photographed by their parents.
St. Eustache church must be described as one of the hidden gems of Paris. It is fabulous inside with a huge high nave and an enormous pipe organ hanging almost suspended at one end. Unlike Notre Dame there was no big queue to get inside, you could just wander in an admire the place. It surprisingly quiet for such a grand church, but perhaps that's because it's not very famous, and it's probably not very famous because although it has a very grand roof, organ, and windows, it has no huge towers, or a spire or dome. We carried on past the Pompidou Centre, the modern art museum with it's "inside out" design with all the building's pipes and innards on the outside. We went there with school and I remember it being a bit worn out and grubby with escalators that were broken and dirt streaked windows. It looked in a bit better shape now but it still had the big bare square in front of it. It would look great if it's surroundings were more interesting - it would look brilliant suspended above a artificial reflecting pool, like a modernist castle and moat, or surrounded by a row of trees cut into weird shapes. As it is it still looks a little too much like the builders forgot to take down the scaffolding when they finished.
We continued on past the forum Les Halles, a 1970s shopping arcade seemingly so disliked by Parisians they are sticking a big sweepy orange roof over it to make it look a bit more attractive. At last we came to the Ile des Citie, by far the oldest part of Paris, where the city began as a Roman camp on the river, and where it's most timeless landmark sits. Notre Dame cathedral doesn't look quite as big as you might expect, we both said this upon seeing it. But, as Becky said to me, it's not so much the sight of the building as the idea of the building and all of the history, both real and fictional, that has passed through and in front of it. Look at any map of the city from the past centuries and it's there in the middle of the river. Cathedrals like St Pauls in London, and the ginormous Duomo in Milan are much bigger, but they are also much, much more recent. St Paul's is over 300 years old. Notre Dame is nearly a thousand. In Britain - Westminster Abbey aside - we're used to seeing ancient medieval cathedrals in the middle of middling sized towns and cities; York, Lincoln, Canterbury, Winchester etc. Because of the industrial revolution the big Victorian cities tend to have a big town hall in the middle rather than an old cathedral. So Notre Dame is perhaps not so big as you might be expecting but in the summer sun it's a beautiful sight. Paris keeps it's public buildings in excellent condition and Notre Dame gleams with hardly a patch of weathering on it's cream stone. It looks like it could have been built ten years ago rather than ten centuries.
Around the end of the island at the end of the cathedral is a small public park and we took a seat on a bench with possibly the best view from a park bench in the world. Looking almost end-on the the nave end of the building with it's flying buttresses flanked by two rows of trees. Underneath the trees was a small kids playground - swings, monkey bars, a little roundabout. There didn't seem to be too many adults about supervising them, except for a grandfather pushing what I presume was his granddaughter, although it may not have been. Had this been Britain there would have been a low fence round this whole set up and stern signs warning that the area was strictly for children between certain ages. At one point a twentysomething girl hopped up on the bars and posed for silly pictures for her partner, while trying not to flash her pants and thigh tattoos too much. I daresay doing such a thing over here, on a children's playground of all things, would swiftly attract suspicious looks from the community support officers. France seems remarkably unconcerned by child safety paranoia or Heath and Safety in general and certainly not with the details. I nearly brained myself walking down the riverbank on the bottom of a bridge - no signs to mind my head here. You can open the doors of the old Metro trains before they are stopped, and walk all the way to the end of the platform without a fence stopping you from getting to the dangerously narrow bit as there is in London these days.
Maybe were seeing Paris at it's best, on a summer's day in August, but the whole place seemed extraordinarily laid back. Everything is well kept, there's very little litter in the street, or casual graffiti or vandalism. The pavement cafes evidently don't worry too much about having their chairs or tables stolen, and neither do the the parks. We hear a lot about pavement cafe culture in France, and we try and emulate it here, but we have a long way to go; in Paris you start to wonder if anybody in a suit actually has a job, there are that many people sitting around in cafes chatting in the middle of a weekday afternoon. They aren't even eating or drinking much, just talking. On Wednesday, in a nice bistro back near the Eiffel Tower, we managed to eat tea and dessert, and get the bill, in the time it took two professional looking thirtysomething women at the table outside the window to have one glass of lager each. In the middle of a bridge over the river behind Notre Dame sat a pianist tinkling out tunes on an upright piano. The bridge had been closed for him and quite a few smitten young ladies sat on the kerb watching. I daresay they don't close bridges in the middle of Paris for any old busker and this chap was very impressive. He could even have been somebody famous in classical music circles for all I know. He certainly didn't need any sheet music and sounded like he was improvising in parts - whoever he was.
At the next bridge, the Pont Marie, we dropped down into the Metro for the first time, discovering with relief that these days the ticket machines have the option of English, and took the line up to the grand avenue of the Champs Elysees. We could have ridden all the way up to the Etoile - the giant roundabout round the Arc De Triomphe at the top of the avenue but decided to get off half way up so we could stroll up the hill. The Champs Elysees is pretty much the most famous shopping street in the world, and maybe even the most famous street, full stop. As they say "everybody who is everybody" is there, the seemingly endless parade of brands is a visual assault. Oxford Street and Knightsbridge can certainly match up for premium brands, and Broadway in New York is certainly as long, but neither is quite on the scale of this. Certainly there aren't that many actual car showrooms shoehorned into the shop fronts on Oxford Street. It's easy to look at it all with a cynical eye and think it's a bit too gaudy and tacky but here's the thing; all of the gaudiness and tackiness is collected here on the one street instead of being spread around Paris. And it's still in the city, not offloaded to some mall on the ring-road as we are so fond of doing here.
If there is one striking thing about Paris, and the thing that endeared me most to the city, it's how well laid out and pleasingly compartmentalised it is. Each district retains a distinctive unique character and they all have their own landmark to call their own. It's as if some great plan over time has conspired to spread all of Paris's great sights equally about the city and for each great building to be a perfect anchor for it's surroundings - the Eiffel Tower looking down the Champs du Mars and across to the Trocadero, Notre Dame and the old medieval city, the great basilica of Sacre Coeur up on the hill at Montematre, the Pompidou centre squatting among the department stores in Les Halles, even the often derided Montparnasse Tower sticking up on it's own - even when they think they made a mistake in Paris by sticking in a 1960s concrete tower, it's not the kind of planning mistake we make in the rest of the world. It all... works. Here on the Champs Elysees for example, you may be surrounded by the kind of chain stores you can see in any shopping mall - there's even a Marks and Spencers - but looking up the slight hill towards the great Arch made me forget all about that - it's a perfect shopping street, and frankly Oxford Street cannot remotely compare.
One thing that emphatically does not work, however, is the great roundabout round the Arc de Triomphe. It huge, wide, and completely chaotic. Cars, bikes, coaches, buses, vans, trucks, they are all fighting for the right to get there first. Standing there watching the it's hard to know where to look - up at the great arch, or at the traffic bedlam below. My particular favourites are the drivers who honk their horns at others, as if the person they tooted at can ever know who it was in the hoards of vehicles they cut up. Theoretically pedestrians are probably allowed to cross the road on foot (this is France after all, we have already established that they aren't too bothered about petty rules) but it would probably be quicker to find a jetpack and fly across than wait for a gap in the traffic. To get to the middle you need a subway, and wasn't immediately obvious where it was (Paris may be a lovely place but it could use a few more "This Way!" type signs sometimes). We found it eventually by going into the metro station and muddling round the right corridor.
Right underneath the Arch is France's tomb of unknown soldier. Unlike in Washington DC there isn't a sentry guarding it, although there were some police walking nearby. In America patrolling around the Unknown Soldier's tomb is apparently one of the highest honours for a regular rank and file soldier. In France they don't seem to bother at all. I think that says something about how much less they seem to care in France about the symbolic value of the military. In Britain we strike a compromise - there are armed guards but we give them great big fuzzy hats and let Japanese tourist pose for pictures next to them. Speaking of which there were a few people taking selfies of themselves in front of the tomb here. I suppose I'm not the sort to be offended by this sort of thing, these wars were fought so people could be free to act as they please, but I couldn't help but wonder if the selfie has become such an automatic habit these days that people don't stop and take in what they are posing in front of. "Look at me I'm pulling a face at the grave of a poor young man who was shot to pieces and died in a muddy battle field" It doesn't sit right sometimes.
If I had to offer a tip to any visitor to Paris then, after mentioning the speaking German to the hawkers thing, I would suggest going to the Montparnasse Tower. Not only does it give you a seat with a grand view of the Eiffel Tower at night, but it's very good value (13 euros, compare with the £30 they would like at the Shard in London), and they seem delighted to see you. The photographer at the top was practically dragging us out of the lift to take our picture. We had dinner first at the bottom of the tower - this was far more plebian than the night before, a regular chain serving commuters and locals round the Gare Montparnasse, but still the food was excellent. We had pizza and pasta respectively, Becky falling in love forever with France at the sight of a pizza with scallops on top. I was slightly distracted by the fantastically ugly edifice of the Gare Montparnasse out of the window. Whatever other interesting things they did with concrete in the 1960s, they never got the hang of train stations. It looked like the French had ordered something from a Soviet Russian catalogue by mistake and never noticed what an appalling hulk it was until it was finished.
Up the top of the tower were lots of big pictures of the tower and station being built and a birds eye view straight down onto it, and I had to reassess my opinion a bit; I could see what they were trying to do; create a nice rectangular plaza and lots of lovely new offices in the modern style without too much ornamentation. It's just it didn't quite work when looked at from ground level. To the left of the station was a large dark space where the Montparnasse cemetery sits, further round in the same direction, looking a little small, were the two towers of Notre Dame, and on the opposite side the Eiffel Tower lit up in it's full splendour, with a searchlight playing across the sky every few minutes. On each side were large interactive screens explaining the view in detail and pointing out some of the less obvious sights. For example I could see now that our hotel was slap bang next door to the big concrete and glass University campus-like HQ of UNESCO, and also a next door neighbour to the European Space Agency. Presumably employees of these were some of the people who formed the queues in the local patesseries we went in to buy treats every morning. Looked at from a height there seem to be a lot of big churches in Paris and the screens usefully pointed out which ones were which. The other striking thing was the boulevards, blazing with light in the darkness and streaking off into the distance at various angles like great laser beams.
Having crammed in so many things into one day we were a little indecisive as to what to see next. Should we brave the crowds of the Louvre now it was open? There was the Musee d'Orsay, where they keep Van Gogh and his impressionist friends though that had had a monumental queue outside it when we had passed as we walked down the Seine after leaving our padlock on the bridge across to it. An aside - we hadn't left one padlock but two interlocked, the smaller one for both of our late mothers, it seems appropriate to have attached it there as the Orsay was originally the Gare d'Orsay, and my mum's first job in the sixties was in the payroll department of British Rail in Victoria station in Manchester. Maybe it wasn't the bridge next to Notre Dame, but knowing her she'd probably have much preferred to look out upon a museum rather than some old Cathedral.
We could see Montmartre, go for a tour on the river, maybe go to Versailles? Looking on the hotel internet told two useful things; one, that there was more than one entrance to the Louvre museum, most tourists crowd into lines at the famous Pyramide entrance but those in the know stroll in by the side on the river front, or at the far end on the bit that looked like Buckingham Palace. Two; that Versailles was only a few euros and one needed to get and R.E.R. (or commuter) train ticket. We decided to go to Versailles. The Louvre was tempting but it's mostly old masters and historical artefacts and we do have a National Gallery and British Museum of our own full of the stuff. We don't have a unused royal palace, fabled with tales of legendary excess that eventually prompted the mob to charge the gates and take it's occupants off to have their heads chopped off though. Maybe one day, but not for now.
The train to Versailles was packed to the rafters with tourists like us. Even the ones who were speaking French and looked like local commuters turned out to be tourists. The train trundled gradually out the several miles to Versailles past the suburbs, first past lots of modern office blocks with the names of multinationals on the sides, then tower blocks, then slightly older looking streets of towns that must once have been separate from the city before being swallowed up by the suburbs, before rolling into a small station at the end of a branch line. A man outside the station directed us in across the street from the station too a place to buy tickets. Once again pretty good value given the size of the place, and if, like us, you exit the train promptly and walk rapidly you can skip any queue. Opposite the the little tourist ticket booth was a sandwich place selling a huge selection of baguettes for only a few euros. I had a large ham and pickle baguette and didn't feel particularly hungry again for much of the rest of the day. I've never quite understood the appeal of the Subway chain at the best of times - I have never thought that the appeal of being able to specify your own sandwich offsets the amount of time you have to queue while waiting. If it's a choice between waiting while somebody build a sandwich in front of me, and choosing something off the shelf without waiting, I'll go with the latter every time. Plus, in France they give you a baguette in a simple paper bag rather than wrapping it up in several kilos of paper and polythene. And their bread actually tastes of something. And unlike Americans they understand that sticking jalapeno peppers, heaps of onion and vinegar in a sandwich means you can't taste anything else that's in there. And usually makes it a bit soggy.
You approach the gates of Versailles down an ordinary tree lined boulevard such as can be found in thousands of French towns. We sat on a bench under the trees and ate our lunch, watching the crowds from our train come passing by us. As at Notre Dame it was a pleasant place to sit and watch the world go by for a while. The building opposite ran the entire length of the boulevard and a sign at the end said that these were the stable block for the palace. Eventually we picked ourselves back up again and walked on to the palace itself. Even to modern eyes used to stadiums, shopping malls and airports, it looks big. In the 17th century it must have looked unbelievably immense. In past centuries there wouldn't have such large crowds of casually dressed tourists in the foreground or tens of tour buses sat parked on the forecourt either, so the place must have looked even more grand and ethereal. The palace building itself is only three stories tall but it sits on a slight rise so it seems to loom over anyone approaching the great gates. When it was built the huge open space at the front was undoubtedly designed to give off a great air of power and to allow for grand parades and the like. These days the excessive size of the area at least provides plenty of space for the buses to park. Versailles easily wins the title for the most tour buses in one place you're likely to see in the world.
Surprisingly the irritating souvenir vendors had made it this far out of town and were busy hustling their way through the crowd. Fortunately they couldn't make it past the first gates so once everybody had got into the main courtyard we free to pose for pictures in peace. Although, like most of these places if you hang around too long you will be asked to take somebody's photo. In the case of the great golden main gates it seems as though each person then takes the next person's photo in turn. Much like in central Paris everything was very well kept; the golden gates and trim on the roof and balconies gleamed like new. The black and white mosaic courtyard floor looked dazzlingly modern; both in it's preservation and it's modernist design. They could use something like it outside the Pompidou centre instead of plain concrete. The palace and it's grounds may have been built by some slightly (to put it mildly) out of touch, pampered royals, but from the outside it does look almost understated and tasteful.
Inside "tasteful" and "understated" aren't quite the words that come to mind. We looked round the Mesdames’ apartments on the ground floor. These were once the apartments where the ladies of the royal family stayed when visiting the palace and each room was quite ridiculously plush and gaudy; one had a huge chaise longue that looked like a giant marshmallow. Another had a wall of golden trimmed bookcases, another a striking golden harpsichord. Unfortunately the royal men's apartments were closed for restoration so we couldn't see what the royal dauphin and his relatives had in their private rooms. Upstairs we passed the royal chapel (also semi-closed, we could look in but only from behind a rope), passed along a very long corridor lined with statues all engaged in various poses. Some were doing heroic things in war, others clearly were architects building things, others biblical characters, some medieval kings and queens. Just about anyone who was once anyone was represented here somewhere.
Upstairs are where the King and Queen's rooms were and also where most of the crowds were too. I gave silent thanks that we weren't on a guided tour - you would have to be much more interested in French royal history, or 17th century interior design to be able to handle standing still and listening to a guide while hundreds of people crowd around. It's undoubtedly dazzling to behold the interiors of each room, and quite thought provoking to think of all the history that once happened here - this was after all, where the actual Louis XIV slept in a golden room, and the actual bedroom Marie Antoinette fled from when the mob came storming into the palace in 1789. But it is a little exhausting to shuffle through it all, waiting patiently to get through each doorway. Thank goodness then for the giant hall of mirrors. It's huge; big enough to stand without being jostled by others, and so big it looks more like a modern building than a centuries old palace. The mirrors aren't quite as perfect and polished as the kind we can make these days, but it must have been something else to those rarefied few who saw it when it was new. In the day time the mirrors would have reflected the kind of natural sunlight that would have been unprecedented for a room in that era, and in the evening the hundreds of candles in the chandeliers would have been magnified in a way that nobody back then could have imagined was possible, and their flickering would have brought the ceiling paintings to life in a spooky way (Ironically given it's name the room's ceiling is perhaps even more dazzling than the mirrors).
It's not possible to imagine what it must have been like to visit Versailles when it was a palace as a member of the French royal court on the inside of the palace - there are too many visitors brandishing cameras - but the gardens are so huge and sprawling that the thousands of people in them dissipate like ants. The gardens may have been built for powdered bigwigs to prance about in, far from the unwashed massed in the city, but nowadays the gardens clearly belong to the people. No, we can't drive carriages down them like royalty - although there were golf carts to hire, and some mini train things for those who wanted a whistle-stop tour - but the scale meant everybody had lots of space to themselves. From a distance the great reflecting reflecting lake, a giant cross in the middle of the gardens, looked empty but a closer look revealed lots of rowing boats criss-crossing it. I imagine the various different King's Louis would be less than amused to see the plebs messing about on their lake.
The size of the gardens made it a little difficult to judge scale - from the facade of the palace to the great fountain (being refurbished, with a crane and lots of boxes of paving stones) was a short walk. From the fountain down the slight sloping lawn, bordered by statuary, to the great lake was a slightly longer walk. Looking at the map showed that the distance to halfway along the lake was the same as the distance back to the palace. And naturally the lake being a cross shape meant that the far end was doubly far. From the foot of the lake it was half a mile to the east to get to the Petit Trianon, the 'little' farm Marie Antionette built for herself to play at being a rural peasant in. The look of the gardens in Versailles has been copied many times around the world by theme parks, and in car parks and shopping malls, but here what look like chintzy fake statues are in fact genuine old masterworks. Even the side grove leading to the toilets was guarded by a wise looking Greek figure draped in robes. Every junction led off into a maze of 20 foot high avenues of dead straight foliage. I can imagine people who work in garden centres coming to wonder at the rows of trellises disappearing off into infinity. We didn't fancy spending the rest of the day gawping at shrubbery so we sat and had a drink before walking back to the station, passing the city hall on the way, in another town it would probably be the most extravagant building but here it was a little overshadowed.
Confusingly the train back to the city was heading in a great big loop back via the city to the other station in Versailles. So to get back to the city we had to get on board the train to Versailles - but, look carefully tourists, Versailles-Chantiers not Versailles-Chateau. The French seem to given up on using the little television screens on their stations to say where the train currently sat at the platform is going so Becky double checked with one of the cleaners on the station before we got on. Thanks to the double-Versailles problem I imagine the patient fellows of the station must answer the same question from bemused tourists tens of times a day. They didn't seem to mind.
Lots of people were sat around on the steps looking down at the view of the city. A street artist-type was "directing" traffic on the road at the top of the steps, and generally amusing the crowd by hassling passersby. He didn't seem to be making any money funnily enough, and was very bravely trying to walk out in front of some French drivers. A rich looking middle aged group climbed out of Toyota cab before they could be interfered with by the busker. This seemed a bit like cheating; hiring a cab and driving to the top of the hill rather than slogging up the steps, or even riding the little funiculare. But if you can afford a taxi it's a quick way to get around. In front of the church itself a young Korean or Japanese bride and groom were being briefed by a photographer on their wedding photos. The crowd around politely made way for them to pose for the many photos and at one point the photographers assistant made up for the lack of a breeze by picking up the bride's train and fluttering it artificially.
Inside the church signs asked visitors not to take photos and to maintain quiet. It was gloomy and moody interior, with high soaring symmetrical arches up to the dome. The dome looked smaller than the one in Invalides and was not painted inside. It had an exotic air about it, a church with the slight feel of a Russian orthodox church, or even a mosque. Outside we stopped for a while to look at the view over Paris. To the left we could see down to the dark shed of the Gare du Nord, and further behind up to another hilltop with a park at the top. Behind that another further hill with a larger green space on the side of it. To the right the more familiar sights of the centre; the river and the towers of Notre Dame, with the Montparnasse Tower in the distance. Behind Notre Dame sat a large building with a large white cap on it.
We carried on down the north side of the Montmartre hill past some beautifully picturesque little streets, past a large tower that looks a bit like a lighthouse, past a small museum in the house where the painter Renoir once lived, past a building wrapped in ivy, a small pink coloured cafe, a small vineyard behind the Renoir house, and a little salmon coloured cottage surrounded by trees, actually a nightspot called "Au Lapin Agile" (The Nimble Rabbit). The streets were a lovely place to stroll, without too many crowds even though were were a few hundred yards from the tourist hot spots where the street artists and souvenir shops are. We polished off ice creams and crepes we had bought on one of the bustling streets. The girl behind the crepe counter possibly the only person in Paris who did not figure out that I wasn't French, because she did not suddenly break into English as every other server did when my limited French ran out.
It was about four in the afternoon by this time and were indecisive what to do next. I tentatively suggested something from the guidebook. We could take the metro from the station just on the next street and ride around to the large Pere Lachaise cemetery, where many famous Parisien residents are buried. The book had an entire two pages devoted to the cemetery and it looked like an interesting place for a stroll in the afternoon sunshine. Two names stood out; the grave of Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors who died in Paris in 1971, and Oscar Wilde, the great Irish wit who was buried at the very top end of the cemetery. As it turned out the place turned out to be very large indeed, and laid out like a city district, up the the side of a hill and across more acres. This was the second large green hill we could see from Sacre Coeur. We entered through a small corner entrance and walked up a cobbled hill surrounded by trees and hundreds of little chapels. Each one was just about the size for one person to stand inside. Some were in a good condition, others were deteriorating and blacked by grime and dirt. It was quite a striking sight, and something I had never seen before; rows and rows of neat chapels nearly all of a similar style.
Becky took a seat on a bench in the middle of a veranda at the top of a staircase and invited me to carry on at my own speed round the rest of the cemetery. She would rest her legs while I would carry on up the hill to look for some of the famous names. I carried on heading for where the book said Jim Morrison's tomb was. Past a large rotunda, with an eerie looking hill of pollution blackened tombs lined up behind it, and down a side path I found it. It wasn't hard to miss, there was a small group of people in the area, a large tree covered in chewing gum, and a metal fence to keep people from climbing over the stones. The actual stone was off the path and behind two large tombs in a narrow space. It was well decorated in flowers and various photos and other paraphernalia. Two people next to me were wondering what the inscription said (it was something Greek I have later discovered). There was a slight smell of a certain... recreational substance in the air. I carried on up the hill, trying valiantly to follow the map in the guidebook. I walked up a looping path up a hill among trees and onto a large straight street. Gradually I realised I wasn't heading up to the top of the cemetery as I thought, but across the cemetery at a 90 degrees angle to where I thought I was. As is the habit when slightly muddled none of the little signs matched anything on the map. Finally I found one that matched and found where I was. I'd gone past Oscar Wilde and turned back in the right direction. I found a few people standing round the grave of the French writer Marcel Proust, he was covered in metro tickets weighed down with small stones. A few minutes walk away I came to the large stone at Wilde's grave. I was a great rectangular rectangle, with a modern looking winged figure jutting out of one end. It was surrounded by plexiglass to prevent vandalism but there were many lipstick marks on the stone where people had been lifted up to kiss the stone.
We went back into town and found our way around the Eiffel Tower district looking for a restaurant. There were a lot of small bistros and cafes, all with the usual arrangement of chairs and tables outside, occupied by patrons seemingly doing nothing, but not many actual restaurants. We were both pretty much out on our feet by this point and getting a little impatient to actually find somewhere to sit down. Each street was either empty or had a few cafes or a patisserie or two, but no restaurants. Finally we stumbled upon a street with about five of them and thankfully plonked ourselves down and had tea.
For our last day in Paris we made our way back to the banks of the Seine and visited the Musee d'Orsay. We sat outside the front and had something to eat, noticing the complete lack of a queue outside - it was a few hours earlier in the day than it had been when we had walked past two days before. The museum used to be train station and had been turned into an art gallery in the mid-80s. The main concourse had become the admission desk (another place where under-25s could get in for free) and the shop. Above the shop was a series of catwalks at the end the large single-vaulted glass train shed; visitors could walk across the catwalks and peer out of open windows across the museum. There was a huge art-nouveau clock at this end of the station looking out where trains once stood. It was an exceptional space and the actual artworks in the main hall were rather overshadowed by the building itself. Like a cross between the stark utilitarian roof of St Pancras and the ornate detailling of the London Natural History Museum. To the sides of the hall were small galleries holding the older paintings in the collections. The museum was intended to fit in between the classical old masters in the Louvre an the contemporary art in the Pompidou Centre. It contained art from the 19th century and early 20th century, the most celebrated period in French art, when the impressionists came to prominence. At the far end of the hall was a staircase up to a viewpoint up in the rafters looking back down the museum, the staircase was decorated with pictures and paintings of the Great Exposition of 1889 that created the Eiffel Tower.
From the outside the old station building has two clock towers at each end. Walking down one flight of stairs from the view point and round a corner we found ourselves on the inside of the large clock faces. There was a sitting area with large round sofas and a view of the city from behind the giant clock. It looked like it might be just for show but looking closely I could see that they did indeed work. Down the front of the building at the top level was a large gallery of impressionist landscape paintings and we walked down that taking in all the names and views of France in the late 19th century. Down a few floors was a smaller gallery containing still lifes and portraits by Van Gogh, Renoir, Seurat and the like.
We carried on down to the Ile de la Citie and searched for a river tour boat so we could have a ride round the sights from the river. There are several competing tour boat companies in Paris, we could see their various boats sailing past on the river, but could not find any of their docks. We passed by the second hand book sellers on the river bank, they sell books out of large green stands attached to walls. They add to the cultured ambiance of the river as they are actually selling genuine antique books rather than the usual cheap tourist trinkets, but the stands also can get in the way of seeing anything on the river, especially if you are on the short side. We crossed the Pont Neuf, walked down the island for a way, came past the queue for the Sainte Chapelle, a small chapel on the island with a famously ornate interior, and across the river again before finding, down a flight of steps to the river, the dock of the Bateux Parisiens. They offered an hour round trip for about thirteen euros. It started to spot with light rain as we came on board the tour boat, we initially sat back from the front under the edge of the top deck in case the rain came down harder, but then took a chance to sit right at the front, drying the seats and keeping fingers crossed that the rain would stop. The dock was under a bridge and water dripping under the bridge had made the seats wet. By the time the boat pulled away the rain had stopped and we had the best seats in the house (or boat). The British knack of knowing when the rain "isn't going to last" had paid dividends. We could put our feet up on the railing at the front and enjoy the view.
The boat sailed east down the river, past the south side of Notre Dame, before turning round and heading west up to the Eiffel Tower, turning round again and heading back to where it had begun. We passed by many of the sights we had seen in the past two days - the Louvre, the Grand Palais, the Orsay, the many bridges, but with a much clearer and and uninterrupted view. The sky was a little overcast but the sun began to peek out as we neared the end of the tour. The rain came down again little later as we sat outside eating lunch at a nice pavement bistro ("Le Petit Cardinal") but we were safely ensconced under an awning and in no danger of getting wet. I had the duck burger just to see what it tasted like (very nice) and finally some French fries in France. The road was halfway between the university and the river and seemed a bit more like the "real" Paris, rather than the tourist bit or the modern shopping streets. There were handsome old apartment buildings opposite, up to four and five stories, with shutters and a row a balconies on the second floor, and they looked as if they were all occupied. Cars and push bikes came past, and the people looked a little more purposeful and busy, as if they were actually getting on with their real day to day lives. It felt like a very agreeable place to live, the bit of Paris I would buy an apartment in if I had the means and the choice.
Further along the street the guidebook promised the remains of a Roman amphitheatre, the "Arenes de Lutece". Before there was Paris there was the Roman town of Lutetia and this had been it's main arena, at the edge of the town. Sure enough a sign pointed the way down an alleyway under a building and into a large round courtyard. On one side a small section of stone terraced seats underneath a higher grass bank, and the other side more trees behind what looked like some foundation stones. The circle had been cut into slightly by the row of newer buildings but the general shape remained. The main entrance corridor to the arena remained too, including a small lintel on the side where a sign said a statue or lanterns may have once stood. Some small boys were playing kickaround with a football on the sandy floor of the arena and the area was a park, with no restrictions on where to sit or move about. A couple of workers were removing weeds on the terrace. It was a wonderfully unexpected little surprise, and an arresting thought that this was the remains of a building twice the age of Notre Dame, as ancient to the Medieval stone masons as Notre Dame is to us.
We carried on walking through a market square, slightly grubby looking with market stalls being taken down, down some narrow streets lined with cafes, and past the huge mass of the Pantheon, the huge church built by Louis 15th in the 18 century now a national mausoleum. (I had been amused when young why all the French kings had been called "Louis", and had wondered whether it had caused confusion. Could even they remember which one was Louis XV and which Louis IV, which was Madame de Pompadour's King, which one had fought which war and so forth. At least English and Scots kings took different names from time to time). The great dome looks much like St Paul's in London but was for the moment covered in a huge white cap hiding renovation work, as if someone had placed a giant paper cone on the building- mystery solved; this was the curious white edifice that could be seen from Montmartre. There was some kind of reception going on in a building opposite. A Maserati stopped outside and disembarked a passenger before driving away round the corner. The TV news the night before had carried news of the French equivalent of a cabinet reshuffle. Lots of people in suits walking into the Elysee Palace and then walking out again a bit later. Maybe this was something to do with that? There were French flags flying from the building and lots of well dressed people and some photographers. Or it could have been a wedding.
The Pantheon is very impressive but the guidebooks don't mention how impressive it's location is. It's surrounded by very posh looking palace like buildings and a wide boulevard heading down towards the Jardins du Luxembourg. This, you may think, is what St Paul's might look like if London had been rebuilt with great avenues and new building in the 18th and 19th centuries as Paris was. We carried on down the street and stopped for an ice cream in a glamourous ice cream parlour. Further down the road we crossed the road into the Jardins du Luxembourg, the gardens of yet another old royal palace. This one was positively teeny compared to Versailles, just one building of three stories. The sun was out in full force by now and a band was playing on the bandstand. We couldn't linger for long as we had to get back to the hotel for our bags, and then get back to the station for the train home, but it was a delightful spot. There were chairs left out everywhere to sit down on at the end of one of the large lawns bordered by flowers.
Eventually we prised ourselves away and headed back to the nearest metro station, our little Parisien adventure nearly at an end. Back at the Gare du Nord I spent my last few euros on a little Eiffel tower, and we sat and waited for our train looking out over the station from the Eurostar lounge on the first floor with a view of the inside of the station. Becky went for a look around the shops and I sat and watched the trains for a while. It was tantalising; all these high speed trains heading off all over Europe, I would have loved for us to have climbed aboard one and to take off somewhere. Brussels, Lyon, Munich maybe. We had to wait an hour for our call, seeing off two Eurostars ahead of us, and several other trains slid out of the station, off to some other big European city. Next time maybe!
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