Jour Deux – Montmartre, Tuileries and Yum!

The mix of seedy and sacred that is Montmartre is very vital and at the same time has idiosyncrasies that we will learn. At 8:00 am Dennis had a hard time finding an open store to purchase our breakfast croissants. Ultimately a pastry and pizza place sold him warm and crusty and fluffy and melt-in-our-mouths crescents of Paris love. With fresh orange juice, they were the perfect Petit Dejeuner.

Today would be Montmartre’s. We learn from our guidebook that this hill initially outside the city of Paris was at one time dedicated to the Roman God Mercury then became the home of Benedictine Monks in the Middle Ages. The artists arrived later when the suburbs were invented and this was far enough away from the downtown action to be cheap to live – and perhaps less stuffy?

We begin to purposefully walk streets that conjure up artist’s whose work I love. Streetscapes painted by Utrillo; the windmill that had been a dancehall in the days of Renoir and inspired his La Bal du Moulin de la Galette; the statue of The Walker Through Walls that has a face so moving it seems real; the last remaining working vineyard in Montmartre that sells it’s wine for exorbitant prices once a year and gives the money to charity; and, Le Lapin Agile a cabaret/bar – whose sign displays a rabbit jumping from a cooking pot, hence the name The Agile Rabbit – that was frequented by artists including Picasso and Renoir. We walk by a house at 54 Rue Lepic where Van Gogh lived for a period, and pause in a garden that has an impressive children’s playground and only one statue of a standing man in clerical robes, decapitated and holding his head, complete with mitre in front of him. Turns out, this is an image of St- Denis for whom the Mount of Martyrs (that contracted to Montmartre) was named. My Dennis was kind of chuffed even though we don’t know what he was martyred for; the Saint was kind of handsome too ;-)

So now being a religious state of mind we climb the rest of the hill to Sacre Coeur. Literally, OMG. As we turn one corner on Rue St Rustique that runs along the back of the colossal basilica the sky fills with carved and curved whiteness. It is hard to describe the grandeur, or the immense scale. Sacre Coeur was built after a run of bad luck by the French called the Franco-Prussian war, to persuade God to forgive them for anything bad they had ever done. Since 1885 prayers have been chanted continually for all humanity. Nice.

Beside Sacre Coeur, musicians of professional quality busk with violin and harp. As we curve to the front of the basilica, the view of all of Paris opens up. An amazing young singer is performing his version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah to an enthralled crowd on the lower steps. It was one of those perfect moments that you are so glad to experience, and to be present enough to realize you are experiencing it.

We are tired, so decide to come back to do the basilica itself another day. There is a cool funicular that takes you down the hill, which is very good because the +30° C weather has our feet swollen and conscious of our jet lag. We return to the apartment at 16 Rue Clichy and are starting to feel at home in its petit espace.

NOTE: Despite my desire to keep these posts to under a page, I can’t. Hey, it’s PARIS! So the above is only one half of yesterday…there is more to come as the post name denotes.

And, to all my writer and communications professional friends: I know that I changed tenses from past to present. It’s more fun to write that way, because I get to relive it. I also know that construction is sometimes not as a grammar checker would like. Get over it; I am in the city of do your own thing.

Finally, I have loaded some pictures into the computer and will try to add them tonight to illustrate things.

A bientot -- oh, and sorry about no accents...that's beyond my Mac knowledge right now