“Listen to many, speak to a few.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Sites/Topics covered in this post:
• Galarie Lafayette
• Rodin Museum
• Les Jardin area
• Palais du Luxembourg
• St. Paul – St. Louis
• Rues de Paris
Go-Date: Day 145, Sunday, June 16
Lesson Learned: French food can be hit or miss, just like everywhere else. We’ve had very good meals here, and we’ve had food we sent back to the kitchen. The Greeks do fabulous pork and lamb, Croatians great lamb, bacon and sausages, French snails, pastries, and sauces are wonderful. We enjoyed the Croatian wines as much as anything we had in France.
Traditional French sausage is like kissing a pig’s ass. Its awful. It’s made out of tripe, I knew that, and I’ve had tripe many times, but I thought the chef would at least wash it out before they put it in the sausage. I don’t think they did, they must consider it extra aroma and flavor. I consider it shit.
When you order meat here in France be sure you are aware they do a lot of raw meats and when you order medium, its more like what you’d expect medium rare to be in the States. If you order something rare…….make sure its dead before you tuck in.
All in all, I think the food in Italy was better than what we’ve found in France. I will be the first to admit, we’ve not gone to a Michelin star restaurant, but do we have to? Eating in Paris is already as expensive as New York City or San Francisco, so I really don’t want to pay for that level of experience. I also don’t want to wear a tie to dinner.
If you come to France, you’ve got to do the snails. Other than that, the buyer beware.
Galarie Lafayette
The Galeries Lafayette is an upmarket French department store chain. Its flagship store is on Boulevard Haussmann in the 9th arrondissement. You won’t find a People of Galeries Lafayette website like you have People of Walmart. The photos wouldn’t be nearly as much fun, but the building is stunning. If they did have a site like that, it would probably have photos of Jessica Alba, Paris Hilton, or Johnny Depp browsing through the clothes racks. How boring is that?
The Galeries began in 1895. Théophile Bader and his cousin Alphonse Kahn opened a fashion store in a small haberdasher’s shop at the corner of rue La Fayette and the Chaussée d’Antin (across the street from the Opera House). It must have done well, for in 1896, their company purchased the entire building. Bader commissioned the architect Georges Chedanne to design the store at the Haussmann location, where a glass and steel dome and Art Nouveau staircases were finished in 1912.
Rodin Museum
The Musée Rodin in Paris, France, is a museum that was opened in 1919, primarily dedicated to the works of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Just outside Paris at Rodin’s old home, the Villa des Brillants at Meudon (Hauts-de-Seine) there is a second museum (which we didn’t visit). The collection includes 6,600 sculptures, 8,000 drawings, 8,000 old photographs, and 7,000 objets d’art. The museum gets about 700,000 visitors annually, so the crowds are far less daunting than those at many of the other museums in Paris (such as the Louvre).
While living in the Villa des Brillants, Rodin used the Hôtel Biron as his workshop from 1908, and subsequently donated his entire collection of sculptures – along with paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir that he had acquired – to the French State on the condition that they turn the buildings into a museum dedicated to his works.
If you want to get up close and personal with a Van Gogh or a Renoir this is the venue to visit, never have I been within arm’s reach of an original Van Gogh. Hell, I’m not sure if I’ve been within arm’s reach of an original Dogs Playing Poker painting.
The Musée Rodin contains most of Rodin’s significant creations, including The Thinker, The Kiss, and The Gates of Hell. Many of his sculptures are displayed in the museum’s extensive garden. If you don’t have time to cruise the halls of the museum, the garden is a must-see encounter. Its beautiful, peaceful, extensive and the café serves surprisingly good food at a reasonable rate. The museum includes a room dedicated to the works of Camille Claudel, and includes one of the two castings of The Mature Age.
The museum is very accessible museums. It is located near a Metro stop, Varenne, there are numerous other sites in the neighborhood (including the Eiffel Tower), and a lot of green space if you are tired of all the concrete in Paris.
Les Jardin Area
The Jardin des plantes, also known as the jardin des plantes de Paris (the French call all their botanical gardens and a lot of parks jardin des plants) when distinguished from other jardins des plantes in other cities, is the main botanical garden in France. Originally the park was known as Jardin royal des plantes médicinales (‘Royal Garden of the Medicinal Plants’, which is related to the original purpose of the garden, back in the 17th century). The French National Museum of Natural History is here, along with numerous other libraries, and geology/biology museums
Since March 24, 1993, the entire garden and its contained buildings, archives, libraries, greenhouses, ménagerie (zoo), works of art and specimens’ collection are classified as a national historical landmark in France (labelled monument historique). The many paths through the park make it a wonderful place to stroll or just sit and enjoy a Parisian afternoon. We didn’t go into the zoo, but just walking by the fence we came across a Red Panda perched up high on a scaffold of bamboo enjoying watching the crowds as much as they enjoyed gazing up at him/her.
This park is next door to the National Mosque, and down the street from the Pantheon. Out the south gate you find yourself on the Seine, and you are up the street from the Sorbonne Université if you find you need an academic atmosphere to get you right.
The grounds of the Jardin des plantes include four museums:
- The grande galerie de l’Évolution (‘Gallery of Evolution’) was inaugurated in 1889 and its exhibited specimens are oriented by the common thread of the evolution of life on Earth. So, if you don’t believe in evolution, you might go to the Creation Museum in Petersburg Kentucky instead and find out why the T-Rex and Unicorn didn’t make it onto the Arc and the cockroach did.
- The galerie de Minéralogie et de Géologie (‘Gallery of Mineralogy and Geology’), a mineralogy museum, inaugurated in 1837.
- The galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie comparée (‘Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy’), a comparative anatomy museum in the ground floor and a paleontology museum in the first and second floors. The building was inaugurated in 1898.
- The galerie de Botanique (‘Gallery of Botany’), inaugurated in 1935 thanks to funds provided by the Rockefeller Foundation (go USA), contains botany laboratories and the French Muséum’s National Herbarium (the biggest in the world with a collection of almost 8 million samples of plants).
Palais du Luxembourg
The Luxembourg Palace, located in the 6th district of Paris in the north of the Luxembourg Gardens, is the seat of the French Senate, which was installed in 1799 in the palace built at the beginning of the 17th century.
It was originally built (1615–1645 which is a long time, but this place is huge) to the designs of the French architect Salomon de Brosse to be the royal residence of the regent Marie de’ Medici, mother of Louis XIII of France. After the Revolution it was refashioned (1799–1805) by Jean Chalgrin into a legislative building. Since 1958 it has been the seat of the Senate of the Fifth Republic.
On the south side of the palace, the formal Luxembourg Garden presents a 25-hectare (about 60 acres) green parterre of gravel and lawn populated with statues and large basins of water where children sail model boats. There is a tall fence around the building (with armed guards), but you would never see people lounging, sunbathing and laying on picnic blankets next to the US capitol. It’s a totally different atmosphere here.
Marie wasn’t happy with her accommodations in Paris so she decided to build a new palace for herself, adjacent to an old hôtel particulier owned by François de Luxembourg, Duc de Piney, which is now called the Petit Luxembourg and is the residence of the president of the French Senate.
She decided to make a building similar to her native Florence’s Palazzo Pitti (yes, she was one of those Medicis). She bought the Hôtel de Luxembourg and its fairly extensive domain in 1612 and commissioned the new building, which she referred to as her Palais Médicis, in 1615.
In 1715, the Luxembourg Palace became the residence of Marie Louise Élisabeth d’Orléans, Duchess of Berry. The widowed Duchess was notoriously promiscuous, having the reputation of a French Messalina (the third wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, the paternal cousin of Emperor Nero, a second-cousin of Emperor Caligula, and a great-grandniece of Emperor Augustus. She was a powerful and influential woman with a reputation for promiscuity), relentlessly driven by her unquenchable thirst for all pleasures of the flesh.
The palace and its gardens thus became stages where the princess acted out her ambitions, enthroned like a queen surrounded by her court. In some of her more exclusive parties, Madame du Berry also played the leading part in elaborate “tableaux-vivants” (a silent and motionless group of people arranged to represent a scene or incident) that represented mythological scenes and in which she displayed her person impersonating Venus or Diana. According to rumor “the Lady of the Luxembourg” hid several pregnancies, shutting herself up from society when about to give birth. Her taste for strong liquors and her sheer gluttony also scandalized the court. Man, how interesting. The most controversial thing any of my neighbors has ever done was to rip out their grass and replace it with white gravel so their townhouse looked like a South Florida single wide trailer park.
Those fun days are long gone though, in 1750, the palace became a museum, the forerunner of the Louvre, until 1779. In 1778, the Luxembourg Palace was given to the comte de Provence by Louis XVI. During the French Revolution, it was briefly a prison, then the seat of the French Directory, and in 1799, the home of the Sénat conservateur and the first residence of Napoleon Bonaparte, as First Consul of the French Republic.
St. Paul – St. Louis
Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis is a church on rue Saint-Antoine in the Marais quarter of Paris. The present building was constructed from 1627 to 1641 by the Jesuit architects Étienne Martellange and François Derand, on the orders of Louis XIII. The first church on the site was dedicated around 1125 to Paul the Hermit, who had been buried in the Egyptian desert by Anthony the Great (a Christian monk from Egypt), revered since his death as a saint); it was in effect the cemetery chapel to the monastery of Saint-Éloi, founded by monks of saint Eloi of Noyon and Dagobert I.
This monastery was on the site of what is now the parvise (enclosed area in front of a cathedral or church) of the Palais de Justice. Madame de Sévigné (a French aristocrat, remembered for her letter-writing. Most of her letters, celebrated for their wit and vividness, were addressed to her daughter. She is revered in France as one of the great icons of French 17th-century literature) was baptised in this building in 1626, in the first chapel of Saint-Louis. The monastic cemetery was later forgotten, though the church retained a dedication to a Saint Paul.
Rues de Paris
This is our last day in Paris before we leave for the World Cup game between the US and Sweden in Le Havre on June 20. We’ll be back for one night before we leave for England, but won’t spend much time here. These are just a few pictures of our walks on the streets of Paris.
