If the third part of this magnum opus was the longest, that's because we enjoyed Bordeaux the most. In fact, we were heartily sorry to have to leave on Thursday to head back to Paris, but as Maureen said, better to wish you'd stayed longer, than to wish you could have left earlier!
We dropped the car off at the Hertz office in Bordeaux, having suffered no accidents or issues in five days of driving, something I was rather proud of. (OK, in Nimes we did think we'd gone down a street the wrong way, but I think we just mistook the no-parking sign for the wrong-way sign. Even if we'd been wrong, there was no one on the street, anyway). The train ride back to Paris was uneventful, and as I mentioned in my first post, once we got back to our hotel we found ourselves ensconced in the lovely red-draped room on the 8th floor, looking out over the Paris rooftops toward the ungainly bulk of the Pompidou Centre, and in the distance, the Eiffel tower. Carla had arranged to come by the hotel at 4pm, so it was only an hour or so after we got back that she arrived. I had only realized recently that it had been an entire year since I'd seen her, during the great stress-fiasco that was our Rome trip. It didn't feel that long, certainly.
The weather had finally gotten a bit warmer, so I was able to change into a dress and sandals and we took off to walk around the city. Our path took us by the Canal St Martin, where we watched the lock system lowering a tour boat, and then through the covered shopping arcades called things like Passage du Panoramas and Passage Jouffroy. Their 19th-century steel-and-glass architecture reminded me scenes from Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, where Amy Adams and Frances McDormand are shopping in the (far grander and more ornate) Royal Arcade in London. From there we went to Monmartre, where just leaving the subway required seemingly a dozen flights of stairs. Carla and I are lazy SOBs, so naturally we chose to take the funicular to the top, while Sean jogged up the stairs. By the time Carla and I were taking a photo of ourselves with Sacre Coeur in the background, he was already standing up by the church, calmly surveying the city below. We popped our heads into the church itself, but there was a Mass going on, and...it's 19th century church architecture, I can pass. We had a drink in an outdoor cafe instead, until it was time to head to dinner--at Le Felteu, of course!
Carla can't actually speak much French, but her opera training means that her pronunciation is perfect. Therefore, Sean and I were more than happy to let her do any and all communication with French people. We got the same gruff-but-nice treatment from the proprietor this time as we had on our last visit, and the same quality food--not as heavenly or refined as La Poudette, but certainly better than the tourist-trap fare we had with Delphine and Herve (which was itself, I should say, not bad; just not very distinguishable in memory). Carla has actually gone vegan and gluten-free, which quite honestly boggles the mind, but luckily she's flexible, because there was literally no option on the menu that didn't feature meat, even the salads. I can't believe she doesn't eat cheese anymore either! What a loss, to live in Italy and not eat pasta and cheese! Still, she tucked into the potatoes gratin with gusto, and had earlier inhaled some fries, so I knew my friend had not gone entirely mad. After dinner, we walked to the Pont Neuf, watched the hourly light show of the Eiffel Tower, and then separated; Carla took the metro back to her hotel, and we walked.
Our last full day in Paris was fairly subdued. After breakfast, we headed in the direction of the Pere Lachaise cemetery, which turned out to be quite a lengthy walk. The most famous inhabitant here for Americans is Jim Morrison (we couldn't find his grave on our way out; Carla and I didn't care, but Sean wanted a picture for his brother, so we sat while Sean hunted him down), but it's absolutely chock-full of famous names: Oscar Wilde (whose monument was covered in lipstick kisses, making me wonder if these women were aware Wilde would not have returned their affections), Delacroix, Nadar, Proust (whose tomb had several notes reading "Merci" and "grazie", but no madeleines) Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, and even some recent academic names for me: Pierre Bourdieu and Fernand Braudel. The cemetery was impressive, but it was sprawling, with little of the piquant charm that I love about the tiny Protestant cemetery in Rome.
The most moving part, however, was in the rear right corner, where at least a dozen separate large Holocaust monuments commemorated French victims at the many camps. I'm often brought to the verge of tears by reminders like these. In the war museum in the Invalides, for example, I wanted to cry looking at a display case of all the items carried by a infantry soldier; I suppose it reminded me of all those who went, whether out of duty or desire for glory, and never returned home. The same was true for the Holocaust memorials, they called the mind the awful destruction of all those lives. Many of these featured relatively abstract sculptural representations, or stylized depictions of skeletal, abused bodies. One featured a 10-foot-tall pair of hands, crossed at the wrist and chained, inscribed DACHAU. But the one which really brought tears to my eyes was a smaller monument, on top of which was reproduced graffiti reading, in a slanting script "Nous sommes 900 Francais." The plaque below said that the graffiti was found in one of the way-stations from which French Jews vanished to the concentration camps in the east, written by a member of "Convoy 73", which left France on May 15th 1944. Of the 878 Jews in that convoy, only 22 returned in 1945. I was incredibly moved by this monument, at the demand implicit in that graffiti to be recognized, to be remembered, and not as Jews, but as Frenchmen. It didn't even hit me until looking at the picture again that they were deported three weeks before D-Day. True, Paris wasn't liberated until August, but to think how close they came to salvation feels particularly awful.
It was D-Day's 70th anniversary as we walked through the cemetery. I wish we could have seen Normandy, but it was just too far to fit it into our itinerary. Instead, as we ate lunch in a cafe near the cemetery, we watched live coverage of the arrival of dignitaries at the site of the memorial, trying to guess the identities of various heads of state from flags, since the muted TV had no captions. Of all of them, only the Queen of England and Italian president Napolitano were alive during the war. We tried to imagine how awkward it must be for Angela Merkel to go down the row of Allied veterans thanking them for their service, and watched Hollande's solemn inspection of the French troops. Funny, we never would have bothered to spend two hours watching these ceremonies in the US, where they'd have aired at 9am, but there we were, Americans in France, unable to look away from a TV we couldn't even hear.
From there, we headed to Ile-St.-Louis for ice cream from Berthillon's, a place well-worth its fame. Carla remembered coming here on her first trip to Paris, which was a 16th birthday present from Claudia (they even flew first class!), and has stopped here ever since. Best vanilla I think I've ever had. For dinner, we'd asked the receptionist to find us a place that wasn't too formal, and not ridiculously overpriced. I think she misheard, because when we finally found Cafe Marly, which was inside the Louvre, on a balcony looking at the pyramid, it was very chi-chi, full of nattily-dressed French people, many of whom were smoking al fresco. We sat for about two seconds, wedged into the people next to us, before I made an executive decision and called for a retreat. Sean can't stand cigarette smoke when he's eating, and I also refused to spend my last night in France feeling awkward in a pretentious restaurant (the waiters were in black tie), to say the least of paying through the nose for the privilege. We walked away from the Louvre, found a likely-looking spot, and went in; as luck would have it, our waiter turned out to be from Rimini, so he and Carla were fast friends, giving us a relaxed and quiet spot to share a final meal together. Parfait. (When Sean looked online later, Cafe Marly was described as a favorite hangout of French movie stars. I don't know what the receptionist was smoking, but then again, she also called that first room "an upgrade"!)
Our plane left at 1pm from CDG, so Carla came over in the morning so that she and I could go on a coffee-and-croissants run. The fabulous bakery that I had seen recommended in guidebooks, which bears the rather uninspiring name 134 RTD Boulangerie, was closed again. Merde! Five mornings total in Paris, and they were only open for two of them. Their croissants were so buttery, they left big grease stains on the paper bags. So worth it. (Carla thought we were kidding about how good they were, relative even to other French croissants, till she actually got to try one).
And then it was over! We had a fantastic trip overall, despite the slow start on the first round in Paris. Our of favorite day was the first day with the car, because it was the most adventurous. Bordeaux won for best scenery, even if there wasn't as much brilliant sunlight as Provence. For food, Sean claims the onion pie over toasted foie gras at Le Chat Touilleur wins best app, while my entrecote at La Poudette definitely has best entree. We never had a bad bottle of wine, though the bottle we had with dinner in St. Emilion was probably our least favorite. I wish French wineglasses weren't so tiny; you're constantly having to refill them! Sean liked Paris, but I wasn't really that charmed; the 19th-century architecture, with the grey mansard roofs and black wrought-iron balconies, is definitely charming at first, but it's all in that style. I also found Paris quite loud, a fault it shares with Rome and other European cities, because of those goddamned motorbikes and scooters--when New York City streets sound calm in comparison, you know you've got an issue. Sean, on the other hand, wasn't bothered by the bikes at all, and thought Paris was one of his favorite cities, with Madrid.
I was more impressed by what I learned about Paris from some of my train-ride reading material, a book called How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City, the main argument of which was that while we tend to give Napoleon III and Haussmann all the credit for making the Paris of today, they merely built upon and enlarged projects and ideas begun in the late 16th and 17th centuries. Much of this early modernization came under the lengthy reign of Louis XIV. Among the innovations which appeared in Paris for the first time in history during his rule: public transportation, mail delivery, street lights, a city police force, park benches, and sidewalks. Not all of these lasted; for example, the mail and public transit services were actually run by private investors, and when they stumbled after a few decades, the services vanished, not to be seen again for a couple of centuries.
Haussmann didn't invent the boulevards, either; Louis XIV did, by ordering the destruction of Paris' medieval ring wall. He declared them no longer necessary in his newly-secure realm, protected by its outer band of Vauban-designed fortresses; this destruction not only allowed the creation of a massive greenway constructed expressly for the recreation of the populace, it also limited the possibilities of another protracted siege of the city--which he had personally experienced as a child, during the Fronde uprising against royal authority. The very term "boulevard" intially referred to a single bastion (think of the connection to our word "bulwark") that was among the first to be flattened; the wide area that resulted later became an interchangeable term for all wide streets. The Fronde itself also gave us the beginnings of the newspaper industry and the concept of "headline news", some of spread by making up factual lyrics to go with popular songs; these compositions were called, quite literally, "goes around the city": vau-de-ville, or vaudeville. The path between a Frondeur news report and Cary Grant doing pratfalls must be a long and interesting one, indeed.
To conclude: the French may not have been the most welcoming nation we've ever encountered, but we certainly did more, learned more, and ate and drank better than we have anywhere else in the world. Or, I should say, anywhere else in the world so far!
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