Day 16 – Marche de Puces, Walking Montmartre again…yum.

It is Saturday and one of the big market days. We take the Metro to the end of the line at Clignancourt and walk into suburbs of the market where people are selling everything from jeans to jewellery from their hands, or mats on the ground. It feels very hang-on-to-your-wallet seedy and is a little off putting. Soon the mats and hands give way to stalls and then buildings filled with stalls that are a potpourri of Paris. There is everything. Want an eight-foot tall chandelier a la Versailles – it’s here. Want a stuffed zebra, ditto. Top hat, WW1 flying helmet, table made from an airplane nose, giant portrait of one of the Louies – it’s all here!

Some things are spectacular. I see two porcelain vessels that I would have bought in a New York minute if the lottery people had called. The glaze on them is so spectacular I would dream about it that night. It was layers of what looked like raku glaze in that it had a metallic finish, but in colours like the inside of a clam shell and unlike most raku that is abstract because it is very difficult to control the glaze, this has subtle geometric patterns that are very controlled. Love it! The proprietor let me take pictures, but they don’t do them justice.

We wander the market for hours. It is a visual feast. After sitting for a drink in one of the cafes, we decide to return to Montmartre because it is close and we never did get inside Sacre Coeur.

We leave the metro and walk to Sacre Coeur at the top of the butte, commenting on how fit we feel after more than two weeks of walking. This hill would have left me puffing and dizzy on day one, now it is a relative breeze.

Sacre Coeur in her whiteness is so lovely. Did I mention that the basilica is made of some kind of white stone that sort of repaints itself when it rains? So it glows white in all the exposed areas and shows it age in sheltered spots.

Although there is a huge crowd, it is easy to enter and tour the interior. The interior of the dome is breathtaking with a huge scene of the resurrected Christ surrounded by adoring disciples at night, done in mosaic tiles that are primarily gold and midnight blue. The side chapels are filled with equally beautiful sculptures and carvings. So many have offered prayers and lit candles that the whole interior twinkles in candlelight. I wish I could take pictures, but they have asked us not to and I respect the request.

A banner tells us that this is the 125^th year that prayers have been said night and day without ceasing.

Outside we wander an area near the basilica where we hadn’t been and run into a small church in the shadow of Sacre Coeur that is also open. It is small and intimate by comparison. And dedicated to Our Lady of Montmartre patron saint of Artists. I like this!

Outside it is a circus in a very touristy area called Place du Tertre where it seems every portrait, sketch artist in Paris is trying to sell their wares. And, we see our first mime! Not that we really wanted to see mimes, they kind of bug us both, but we expected them here.

We find a small gallery dedicated to Salvador Dali complete with brass melting clocks, kind of cool. Then we go in search of a path away from the crowds and travel new streets down the hill.

Soon we are in familiar territory and the lively “Saturday nightness” of the crowd is engaging. We pick a brasserie across from the Moulin Rouge and have a large dinner watching the crowd coming to the Moulin’s show, the security guards, the stumbling gawking tourists, the locals, the posers, and the lovers stroll by.

We recognize that we have slowed down to a simple pace, no longer trying to “bag” all the sites, but content to simply savour each direction we are pulled. This, we decide, is the difference between two and three-week vacations at our age and we are glad we opted for three!