Wandering and Noticing in Paris

Every time I visit Paris, a good amount of my time is taken in wandering, either on my way to somewhere, or just to see what I see, and record things that seem interesting, or seem as if they might be hinting at something more.

There are always plenty of opportunities for that—it’s a big city, and even in a dozen visits of a week or more over the years it is still ‘unexplored’—but there are corners I know well enough to see change. Sometimes, the change seems sad; when I returned last September after a longer-than-usual four years away I found that the small carousel at the Metro station in ‘my’ neighborhood had been swapped out for a flashier and somehow ‘wrong’ replacement.

But, a few days later, in the Square Louis-Michel, I noticed how nicely another carousel lines up with the Sacre-Coeur Basilica, almost as if the church were part of the decoration.

My visit to Notre Dame was quite a different affair from usual; it felt almost like visiting at a hospital, with construction fencing sitting in for the white curtains around the bed. An amazing number of people were taking a lot of time to study the posters and displays on the walls, including children’s artwork, a sort of get-well card for the Cathedral.

From further down the Left Bank, it was almost possible to believe the fire had never happened—unless you remember the towering spire that is gone.

The fire at Notre Dame in 2019 also gave a new temporary role to a church nearby on the Right Bank: Saint-Germaine-l’Auxerrois, opposite the Louvre. I’m sure I must have looked at it many times, but never really ‘seen’ it. This time I wandered in and was blown away by the 19th-century stained glass.

The church dates to the 12th century, but it’s been heavily ‘revised’ over the years, and only the bell tower is truly original. Not the one in this picture, though; this one was built in the Haussmann era, and stands between the church and the near-twin town hall or mairie that was built in the 1800s.

Here’s another Town Hall; this one belongs to the 18th arrondissement, and looks like a perfect movie set, complete with balcony for addressing the cheering crowds. Most of the cheering crowds I’ve seen there have been on Fridays, a popular day for civil weddings.

Something old becomes something new: the Bourse de Commerce, near Les Halles, now re-opened as a museum housing the Pinault collection of contemporary art. Revised and remodeled repeatedly, the building started as a grain trading pit in the 18th century, adjacent to the Les Halles markets. By the 1980s, the business was computerized and centralized and the building closed. Many plans later, it’s finally found a new life.

Another old, another new. Early evening seems to be the best light for the classic Guimard-designed entrance to the Abbesses Metro station, a lot more graceful by any scale than the Citroen Ami, a car so small and so underpowered it’s technically not a car, it’s a powered quadricycle. If you think that means little, you’re not a 14-year-old who can legally drive one! And hopefully not down one of Montmartre’s steeper streets…

Plaques remembering victims of World War II and of the deportations of Jews and others to Nazi camps are never far away. What’s different from the ones when I was first visiting Paris is the added note “with the complicity of the Vichy government.”

The pedestrian takeover of the former highways along the Right Bank now seems as permanent as possible despite many protests when it was first initiated.

A favorite lunch, always! Onion soup and a glass of beer at Le Pied de Cochon at Les Halles. For others, a garden gathering outside the Palais Luxembourg.

Lunchtime on the Champs-Elysees is a bit different from that, with more and more of the often-overpriced street restaurants becoming branches of various chains, American and otherwise. Even the fancy awnings don’t say ‘elegant,’ at least not in the way that a walk on the other end of the avenue does.

Here and there, there’s music in the air, sometimes with instruments not commonly seen away from the concert stage… and sometimes with an oomph and oompah you might associate with a beer garden. The band was playing just away from one of my favorite corners at Rue Galande, where two veterans of an earlier age survived a 19th century street-straightening project.

One unusual treat of this visit, never to happen again, was a series of visits to the Arc de Triomphe, watching the progress day-by-day as it was wrapped as a Christo art project. Not my kind of art, but the process and engineering was fascinating to watch.

While we’re on monumental structures, here’s the required picture of the Eiffel Tower; there has to be one, although this trip I went to the top of the Montparnasse Tower instead; the Eiffel Tower’s upper levels closed early because of wind. Below it, the Saint-Eustache church at Les Halles and a view down into Montparnasse Cemetery from the tower.

A quiet glade in Parc Monceaux as I passed through, and neighborhood residents voting on local budget items at a ballot cart

It’s easy to think of Haussmann’s role in reshaping Paris in the 19th century in terms of boulevards and radial avenues and long rows of similar buildings, but the image should also include the corners and squares like this that are also part of the picture. Below it, a couple of the more exuberant facades I passed.

And a pair of fountains: one must be almost the last of the curbside fuel pumps in Paris; I was startled to see one still in existence. The other, one of the hundreds of fountains commissioned in the 1870s by Sir Richard Wallace, an English expat in Paris to provide clean water and promote temperance.