LES AVENTURES DE KATIE ET JANE . . .

At Les Editeurs

Tom has finally gone back to fill in some of the gaps in our Parisian narrative, and it’s a good thing he did, because I have been way too busy to write!  And why?  Because je marchais dans Paris avec Jane!  Yes, my best buddy decided to make the trip to Paris, and we managed to pack her six days full of adventures large and small.

She arrived on my last day of the intensive French class, so Tom went out to Charles de Gaulle airport to meet her plane and travel back on the Metro with her.  When they got off at our local Ségur stop, Jane got her first taste of what has been our daily experience for two months: rounding the corner and having the Eiffel Tower directly in front of us! 

Le Tour Eiffel

And the Tower became part of our daily ritual—each morning (except one, when we needed to get an early start at the Musée d’Orsay) we went for a run (or a fast walk) down the road to the Place des Invalides, waved to Napoleon in his grave, ran back towards École Militaire and then on to the Champs de Mars.  We would run down one side of the Champs, around the Eiffel Tower, back up the other side, and then home—about two and a half miles in all.  What a way to start the day!

All that running meant that Jane and I upped the ante for how many steps we covered each day—and we averaged over ten miles a day!  In fact, Jane bought 10 single-fare Metro tickets and used only 8 because we just walked everywhere.  That way, we were able to see the beauty of ordinary Paris and to take in major monuments just because we walked by them on the way to something else.

"Mona Lisa" men have named her . . .

We tried to do just one or two major things each day.  Tom and I had loved the Chagall exhibit, and Jane is also a big Chagall fan, so she and I spent part of one day at the Musée du Luxembourg for that powerful exhibit. We also passed several very leisurely hours another day in the permanent collections of the d’Orsay—Tom and I had visited there too, but you could never get tired of that museum. 

I had saved one other museum for Jane’s visit: the Musée Nissim de Camondo.  Moïse de Camondo was a wealthy banker who built a mansion on the Parc Monceau to house his extraordinary collection of 18^th century decorative arts.  His son Nissim was killed in WWI, and Moïse named the house after him and willed it to the state of France when he died in the 1930s.  His daughter and her family lived in Paris, but they were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and died there in 1945.  The family line completely disappeared.  But the museum tells their compelling story and remains one of the finest collections of decorative arts anywhere.

We went up to the Camondo museum on Sunday afternoon, after our run and a glorious morning walk through the Luxembourg gardens.  We headed first to the Pantheon, where we could gaze upon all the “great men of France” and eat some crêpes in their shadows on the rue Soufflot.  We met our Irish friend Eavan there, and Jane was so sweet to talk at length with her about the different kinds of psychology she might be interested in exploring.  Eavan actually said, “Is everyone from Boston as nice as all of ye?”  Eavan then joined us for the afternoon at the Camondo, and we all agreed later that night that our legs were on strike from all the walking!

Casting shadows on the Pont de l'Archevêché

La Crêperie near the Pantheon is one of our favorite places for Sunday bunch, and we tried to take Jane out to eat at several other spots we have come to enjoy dining in here.  On her first day, I marched her across the entire city (the Alliance Française, Boulevard St. Germain, Place de la Concorde, Place du Louvre, Notre Dame)—I obviously wanted to be sure she knew she was in Paris!  But we also took her out to Les Editeurs, a restaurant/café in the Carrefour de l’Odeon that we have been to a few times now.  We had a wonderful dinner there and then got Jane back to the apartment for a good night’s sleep. 

Jardin de Luxembourg

A few days later we were shopping in the Marais, and after we met Tom for a drink at Les Philosophes in the rue Vielle du Temple, we discovered a new spot for dinner: Au Bouquet St. Paul.  It’s always fun to try new places.  Jane and I also found the crêperie Le Molière on the rue de Buci for lunch one day as well.  Obviously, we ate out a few times, but we cooked at home several days as well.  I wanted Jane to have the experience of our local market, and we went there on her second day.  We picked up lots of goodies to eat during our daily “happy hours” and we also got the supplies for a few nice dinners here at home. 

Every day we made a trip to the local boulangerie for bread—and sometimes for a sweet for breakfast or a snack.  Le Moulin de la Vierge was founded in 1356, and the bread still comes out of a wood-fired oven.  If I didn’t already know that I spent a lot of time there, Jane’s visit would have reminded me: sometimes she simply announced “Boulangerie!” because she liked to say the word!

“Boulangerie!”

Obviously, daily runs, museums, and eating played large for us in Jane’s time in Paris, but we also just enjoyed many of the sights and monuments of the city; I already mentioned some of them, but I’ll add: Montmartre and Sacre Coeur, the Place de Vosges (in the Marais), the Hôtel de Ville, and shopping in Saint-Germain des Pres.  One day, when Jane and I were walking behind Notre Dame to cross to the Île Saint-Louis, she saw a sign that said “Deportation Memorial.”  We walked through the gate and found an amazing memorial to those tens of thousands of victims, primarily Jews, deported by the French (in cooperation with the Germans) between 1942 and 1945.  Only 3% ever returned.  Jane and I found this so powerful that I took Tom there after we got Jane on the train to the airport for her return trip.

Mostly, it was just wonderful to share our daily life with Jane: our walks, our efforts in French, our visits to places of cultural significance and our time simply visiting with each other in cafés and around our dinner table were reminders of how much Jane is part of our life!  For me, she is une amie très chère, and her visit was a time to treasure!