🇫🇷 The Great France Art Tour of 2017

There are times when I feel I have a pretty good handle on where I am in Paris and others when I admit that I have no clue. It’s the places in-between that prove the most difficult. Where I am neither confident that I know, but believe I have some vague idea that can’t be too far off, but which may ultimately prove to be delusional. The afternoon of our longest day was like that.

The afternoon was waning when we found a Metro stop at the bottom of the mont. We popped out as intended on the Left Bank at St. Germain Des Pres. Here Boulevard St. Germain skirts along a few blocks from the Seine. We walked North in search of a café or bistro where we could catch a late lunch.

I had on a previous trip explored the Boulevard St. Germain for a few blocks behind Musée D’Orsay, and found the area a delight—full of small cheese shops, patisseries, and such. I also harbored the vague notion that many of the famous cafés were either nearby or situated on Boulevard St. Germain. Early that same morning, while still on our coach, we had zoomed past one of these “famous” cafes, the ones mentioned too frequently in Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast”. Was it the La Closerie d’Lilas? Or Les Deux Magots? Or some other? Who knows? Honestly, I don’t. (By the way, the Magots? What a name. What does it mean? It means, “The two stocky figures from the Far East“. I know. Weird. It’s about these two statues that are still inside. You read about it.) I read about them, I flash by in a bus, and of course I think, “Cool! Wouldn’t it be great to sit there where Hemingway did, watching while some minor literary acquaintance blithely and foolishly cuts Aleister Crowley, ‘the most evil diabolist in all of Paris’.” Well, maybe. But the guidebooks say these places are overpriced due to their fascinating histories, not for the quality of their fare. And in the end, it’s never the right time or convenient situation to sit “there”, and so I settle for something or somewhere else.

My memories of Paris when I first visited as a teen are so dim. I wish I had written a journal of that trip! Blogs didn’t exist then. Nor did personal computers or cell phones. It would have been a paper journal. Nevertheless, some images remain—old ladies sweeping the sidewalks of the Champs’d’Elyses with wooden brooms the brush ends of which consisted of tightly bound twigs. Men stood, unself-consciously relieving themselves at open public urinals built into the street-facing sides of buildings. Luxembourg Garden, which in my memory, that July, did not have any flowers to make it seem like a “garden”. At that tender age, in my mind, this was clearly more a “park” than a garden, and should have been called “Luxembourg Park”. Or maybe it was? In memory the street names remain—two especially, Boulevard St. Michel and Boulevard St. Germain, both of which must have been quite close to the hostel where we lodged for those final nights at the end of our Grand Scandinavian Tour. (Yes, I know, France is not part of Scandinavia. The tour started in England. We traveled by ship from Newcastle to Bergen, Norway, and a month later ended up in Paris.)

Looking at the Paris map now I wonder—did we stay at some residence in or near the Sorbonne? If nothing else I must have walked past it, the grand traditional Paris Art school, home of the Academy, that so many times rejected the brilliant innovations of Paul Cezanne. Unlike Van Gogh, he lived long enough to see some success and recognition from the traditional arts community. But without the sponsorship of his friend, the writer, Emile Zola, he might have never survived. Certainly not as an artist.

In any case, you may observe that I was wandering down Blvd. St. Germaine with Deb, guided roughly West and North as if in a dream, one touched slightly by pain, one consisting of Paris memories separated as they were by years and decades and all the life in between, with the purpose of finding some decent and possibly memorable place to sit, relax, and consume a meal. Boulevard St. Germaine ended and we moved unexpectedly onto the Quai d’Orsay, next to the Seine again. We intended to walk over to the other bank afterwards, where we would take the sunset boat tour, highly recommended by our French guide Christine, who had armed us that morning with the necessary passes. But before that we still needed to find a place to eat. It was a long march.

Walking away from the Seine, we turned onto boulevard la Tour Maubourg and settled at last at “Le Recrutement”, a pleasant, if not historical, café at the intersection of Rue Saint-Dominique. We recovered there with a couple of beers and the perhaps cliché, but definitely fortifying tourist fare of French Onion Soup for Deb and Croque Monsieur for me. We sat facing the street in the black and tan weaved pseudo-wicker plastic chairs apparently required by law, or tradition, or both, at every small Paris eatery.

The travel and sleep deprivation headache dissolved as we chatted, my eyes slightly glazed by alcohol and jet lag, reviewing our amazing long Paris day and the plans we had for the rest of it. The street grew dark and groups of women, young, and French issued forth from offices and apartments, sometimes alone, sometimes followed by young men, presumably on their way to evening social activities of some French nature that I could not discern. It occurred to me that these were three powerful image-conjuring words, worthy of a story, novel, or film, “Women, Young, French”. But it wouldn’t be my story, novel, or film. Not that evening anyway.

We finished our drinks and made the long walk across the Seine, and then along the Quai in search of the loading ramp for our particular tour. Which we located, and where we discovered that although several large and noisy tour groups were queued at certain points, for us, there was no wait.

Yes, still to come, more of that one day.

—Christo