Day 10 – Les Eglises de Paris

Wonderful fresh foods market around the corner from our hotel.  I'd become addicted to the figs by now and had to have some more.  Lyneah

Mark:  How do you catch all the highlights of a city as big and fabulous as Paris in one or two days?  Simple: you don't; it's a great incentive for a return visit, though.  Since we wandered fairly randomly our first day here, we decided to wander randomly with a theme today – seeing several of the city's great and not-so-great churches, along with whatever lay in between.  Many are within walking distance, and so we set off early, map and food bars in hand.  (If you ever come to Europe, bring food bars and / or jerky with you.  They're inexpensive if you bring them from the States, easy to carry, and have as much if not more protein than any meal you can get here before 10 am.)

Gravity is our friend today, as most places we want to visit are downhill, heading towards the Seine.

First stop is right back at the main corner near hour hotel, at St-Pierre de Montrouge, built during the 1860s, making it fairly recent by urban Parisian standards.  It is very much a neighborhood parish, from an era where church influence was nowhere as imposing as in earlier centuries.  Its dimensions are fairly people-friendly, and its simple design and artwork would look familiar in nearly any American city.

 From here, our stroll continues down Boul. General LeClerc (named for a Free French commander during World War II;  street names, and thousands of plaques and monuments throughout France, are a constant reminder of how much violent history has taken place in this and other European lands, and how relatively naïve most of us Americans are about war and its terrible consequences).  Today, however, is peaceful if drizzly, and the Luxembourg Garden (from the era of Louis XIII and XIV) and its fountains provide a graceful mile or more of formal gardens, trimmed trees, flowers, parks, walkways, and playgrounds leading up to fancy gateways which eventually lead to the old palace, which now houses the French Senate, a theatre and museum.

 

Our next objective is nearby: Saint-Sulpice, the cathedral recently made famous (or notorious) by Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.  Whether or not the claims of this and several other books are accurate, Saint-Sulpice has some highly unusual church architecture (including a gnomon, or solar observatory, built into the floor at an odd alignment to the rest of the structure), and a rather dark, foreboding atmosphere.  Frankly, we're both glad to walk out of it.

The exterior is under major reconstruction.  The interior is quite dark.  Many pictures did not turn out well inside.

Left original writing, right current face which has been defaced.   Why?  The reference which was removed was to King Louis XV so we're guessing the revolution defaced this object.

In 1727 Languet de Gergy, then priest of Saint-Sulpice, requested the construction of a gnomon in the church as part of its new construction, to help him determine the time of the equinoxes and hence of Easter .^[6] A meridian line of brass was inlaid across the floor and ascending a white marble obelisk, nearly eleven metres high, at the top of which is a sphere surmounted by a cross. The obelisk is dated 1743.
In the south transept window a small opening with a lens was set up, so that a ray of sunlight shines onto the brass line. At noon on the winter solstice (21 December), the ray of light touches the brass line on the obelisk. At noon on the equinoxes (21 March and 21 September), the ray touches an oval plate of copper in the floor near the altar.
Constructed by the English clock-maker and astronomer Henry Sully, the gnomon was also used for various scientific measurements: This rational use may have protected Saint-Sulpice from being destroyed during the French Revolution. From Wikipedia. 

A sidewalk cafe and two hot chocolates later, we walk the few blocks to Saint-Germain-des-Pres, (the French must be a very holy people; they've been the source of so many saints) and the weather and the mood both begin to brighten.  We're looking at Old – Really Old – here, as parts of the church date back to the 6th Century.  It's been built and partially destroyed and rebuilt and modified several times over more than a millennium, yet the different styles blend well, and it's a comfortable place to be in, especially in comparison to Saint-Sulpice.  Heading into the Latin Quarter, we walk down the street Alex and Lyneah called home on their first visit and enter the late-Gothic Saint-Severin Cathedral.  This is even livelier, with its unique combination of many architectural styled pillars from different periods with no attempt to blend them into a theme and classic medieval stained glass in its upper reaches sharply contrasted on the ground level with wildly modern windows installed in the 1960's (thanks to necessary post-World War II renovations).

Food bars and Starbucks (how does she find them?) suffice for le dejuner today; we have early dinner reservations, and a few places yet to reach in the daytime.  Crossing onto Ile de la Cite, we return to Notre-Dame, to find its interior much as we expected – full of space, full of light, and packed full of visitors, even on a weekday afternoon.  Even with all of the bustle, it was peaceful, and it seemed unexpectedly familiar.  Crossing to the other side of the island, the lines to enter Saint-Chapelle were longer than we're able to wait for, so it's time to return to the Metro, on our way to something completely different: La Madeleine.

Built on the site of a medieval synagogue converted (involuntarily) into a church, the present building, with its classical neo-Roman style, was commissioned by Napoleon as a war memorial, but was itself converted (again involuntarily) back into a church during the Restoration following his fall.  Its front steps, with the exception of an entrance walkway, are filled with a vast flower-box garden, designed to direct one's view to the Place de la Concorde down the street.  The church, despite its Benedictine affiliation, has a pre-Christian feel to it – a fascinating counterpoint to everywhere else we've been earlier. It is huge. 

 

It is by far the most feminine altar I've seen in an RC church.  

At this stage, we're pretty maxed out on touring.  Time to head back to the hotel for a quick clean and dress-up; with Lyneah's birthday around the corner, what more romantic way could we have to celebrate it than dinner in Paris?

Dinner in this case is at La Coupoule, a local mainstay for over 85 years.  Our reservation is unfashionably early, and we arrive to a large room filled with elegant, if mostly empty, tables.  The food is good, well-prepared if not excellent (their specialties are in the realm of raw seafood, which neither of us care for), but the service is impeccable, and the room begins to fill as we are ending our meal.

Refreshed, we decide it's time for one more treasure hunt – to find a little sorbet shop on Ile Saint-Louis that Lyneah and Ales had visited almost a decade ago (your ten year class reunion is coming up Alex!).  As we cross the bridge onto the island, there are several folks in the closed-off roadway offering chair massages, doing a brisk business.  We don't find the shop, but do land at a corner cafe for tea and mousse au chocolat.

It's now nightfall, the rain is starting to come in, and we're not really dressed for it.. But it's our last night in Paris, and there's no way we can simply finish now.  There's one last thing we want to see – the floodlit Eiffel Tower – and the best place to see it from is across the Seine.  We're the best-dressed couple on the Metro (Lyneah says that Parisian dress is much less formal than on her previous visit), and the train provides us with one final, unforgettable view while crossing the river.  Back to our hotel, and a final pack-up for Mark, as he heads back to NC in the morning.