We arrived in Paris early afternoon and lugged our large bags up five flights to the apartment. We took the metro straight to the Dior shop which was very elegant, including sweeping staircase, fresh flower arrangements and a wall of white dresses. There were shirts there costing $AUS 5,000 and I felt self-conscious in my cargo pants and small backpack, but the doorman was kind (‘You are welcome to come in you know!’). We also walked to Avenue de l’Université for the best views of the Eiffel Tower – one of many views we had during our visit – sparkling purple, sparkling gold, in daytime and at night.
Throughout the next five days, we met up with our friends Stacey and Madeline and explored the Galleries Lafayette, admiring its cupola; the Musée D’Orsay; our old Canal Saint Martin area; the Luxembourg Gardens and walked the Promenade Plantée with them in perfect early autumn weather. We did a lot of walking and Steve, Lara, Madeline and I took a Batobus along the Seine late one afternoon for a different perspective.
The Musée D’Orsay was choc full of tourists in the Impressionist rooms: we had all read the advice that this was a highlight of the museum. We also explored the historic documents preserved in the Richelieu library, including Victor Hugo’s heavily annotated Les Miserables and Beethoven’s much less edited Appasionata piano sonata. The library’s 19th century cupola was magnificent, reminiscent of the State library of Victoria.
We bought baguettes which the girls ate for breakfasts and the four of us visited or revisited our favourite or well-reviewed restaurants like Bofinger; the art deco Bouillon Julien; Willi’s Wine Bar (no beer); and Aux Lyonnaix where the waiter in taking our order asked ‘Qu’est-ce qui vous ferait plaisir? (‘What would give you pleasure?’). The bread was consistently good at these restaurants and they all had their own characteristics: the Bouillon Julien was very good value for its traditional, simple French food; Bofinger is a large Brasserie that specialises in fish and sausages; and Willi’s Wine Bar is an American tribute to good quality French food. Rhea often had onion soup; the girls tried and liked the snails in green garlic sauce; and Lara tried beef tartare. The girls sometimes shared a meal or a long baguette at the Louvre.
And the Louvre? Steve and I wandered around separately to the girls and later discovered they had been following us to the Louvre medieval remains and 19th century paintings for more than an hour, including a huge room of around 20 enormous canvasses by Rubens. The apartments of Napoleon III was a highlight for all of us. I enjoyed the 18th and 19th century French paintings in the Richelieu wing and the Egyptian jewellery and mummies in the Sully wing. The access was a bit disorganised and there were very many tourists at the Louvre too, more than last time we were there. I didn’t see the room of objets d’art but the girls did, including the dazzling emerald and diamond crown and the brooches that were stolen ten days ago. Rhea has photos of them.
I loved wandering around the different neighbourhoods like the Marais with Rhea one afternoon, where we saw fashion models out and about during Paris’s Fashion Week. I loved the gardens, like the Joseph Migneret garden that was almost hidden from the street but once inside, as Lara noted, wasn’t really secret as it had ‘a shit tonne of windows looking at it.’ I loved the gardens around the Musée Rodin and the Islamic architecture and garden around the Grande Mosquée do Paris, which I snuck to together with a visit to the Arènes de Lutèce (2nd century Roman amphitheater) while Steve and the girls were climbing the Arc de Triomphe and trying in vain to get close to Sacré Coeur on our last day. I loved the sparkling stain-glassed windows in Sainte Chapelle, and the Conciergerie which was a royal palace in the 14th century then became a prison, where you are now able to see the rooms as they would have been in different periods through the magic of CGI pointing at the room on an iPad.
The wealth evident in so many historic buildings, the sheer number of galleries and museums to see, and the care with dining and food make Paris a place to return to again and again. We saw and did a lot in the week we were there, and I felt I had a much better sense of the geography of the city compared to last time we were there 16 years ago. I noticed how much more pervasive the English language has become, coming with the increase in tourist numbers. As Rhea noted, although we weren’t in an English-speaking country for a month, we often heard English being spoken all around us and it was normalised through most French (and in Greece, Greek) people in the hospitality industry speaking, and expected to speak, English.
Our visit to Serviers was also lovely and a change of key. We enjoyed spending time with Jenny and her no-nonsense sense of humour and stories of her professional life and early impressions of the villagers when she bought the house almost thirty years ago. I love the old, thick-walled stone houses in the village, most like Jenny’s with pale aqua shutters. Jenny’s house looks out onto the village and the rolling farmland hills in the background.
As we did in Skopelos, Steve and I both found it nerve-wracking to drive on the narrow roads in our large hire car and on the wrong side of the road. We deployed a high level of concentration and it was a team effort. It enabled us to visit Nîmes’s colosseum and Square House; Arles’s old streets (including enjoying a perfect leaf and smoked salmon lunch in one of them), colosseum and Roman theatre remains and Saint-Trophime cloisters (though we missed the Aboriginal photographic exhibition by a couple of days); the lovely Pond du Gard aqueduct and its narrow river that the girls skimmed stones across; and the nearby gorgeous hilltop village of Lussan in full autumnal glory, with its red ornamental grape vines adorning the golden stone walls and tower still in use as a library. In Lussan Steve and I had the nicest meal of my time in France: scallops (coquilles Saint Jacques) in a seafood bisque sauce and a perfectly cooked lobster tail also in a delicious seafood soup. Rhea ate pumpkin soup with foie gras ravioli and Lara tackled a steak. Sadly we had no room for desert.
Though they didn’t have the opportunity to speak much French given how much time we spent a museums and galleries and doing walks, the girls enjoyed the tour of the Uzès castle that is still in use (the Uzès Duchy), where the tour guide told them they were pretty and intelligent and he was impressed by their French. The views from the tower were magnificent, worth the climb up 100 steps.
While Steve and the girls were exploring the vastness of Versailles whose gardens featured a water fountain that rose and fell to baroque music accompanying it; and had a third visit to the Seine to buy posters and one original artwork of a Paris street scene; I had spent the day visiting the old town after dropping the three of them at the train station in Avignon. I saw its Musée Calvet in a magnificent mansion displaying thought-provoking archaeologic remains and 18th century paintings; Musée Angladon’s impressionist paintings including some Modiglianis and a temporary exhibition of Jacques Emile Blanche that I enjoyed, reminiscent of his near contemporary in Australia, Hugh Ramsay; the 14th century former palace and now library Médiathèque Ceccano opposite; and the restored art deco public baths Les Bains Pommer that opened three months ago.
I was proud of myself for having successfully parked the car in the top story of the narrow three-storey car park beside Les Halles and of driving myself back to Serviers alone. I was also chuffed that I got myself to Uzès for Saturday’s market day the next day and did the self-guided walk of the old town; though I couldn’t find the roman aqueduct in the nearby Eure valley. I ended my time in Uzès in the compact, finely curated restored medieval garden in the old town before tidying the house at Serviers, eating as much food as I could fit in to clean out the fridge and leaving early the next morning for my Very Fast Train to Paris.
Like the girls, I didn’t speak much French either on the trip, but I did have a good chat to our taxi driver who took us to the airport early on our final morning after a last dinner together at a good restaurant that Rhea found, ‘La Grille Montorgueil,’ where the waitress was attentive throughout as to whether we had enjoyed our meal (we had). Our taxi driver was originally from Morocco and was measured in her assessment that people in France continue to expect a high standard of living which isn’t necessarily sustainable for the country economically, and that is fuelling the current political unrest.
The flight was good, I enjoyed watching Conclave and a series dramatizing the story of the Mitford siblings called Outrageous, and I slept a bit as well so my jet lag wasn’t too bad.
There were challenges with our trip, and it worked out well that we met with several different people during our holiday and had breaks from each other. The girls slept in the same room, and often the same bed, for the whole month, yet returned still on speaking terms with each other. The trip renewed their motivation for learning and speaking French. The girls also now know what it is to be a tourist, what can go wrong and what joys and pleasures can be had. Together we experienced some of the treasures of our planet and connected with each other and with dear friends in places far away. It was a precious time.
