And--to continue first off with the letter 'd'--our dimanche, Sunday, started in earnest with déjeuner, lunch. When planning the trip, we put together days of one or sometimes two big things with lots of space around and between for wandering, sight-seeing, and refueling / resting ... all of which work just as well in reverse order! So after a leisurely morning of putting ourselves together with patisseries and café au lait, and then powering up with noodles at Délices Lepic, we:
1) considered how best to surmount the monts of 'martre (since we couldn't, and still can't, tunnel under via the strike-beset métro):
2) walked from there--through a neighborhood, Pigalle, one could describe as 'colorful' not wrongly, since there are indeed many colors, but incompletely, since they're used to advertise shops like 'Sexodrome,' cheek by ... uh, jowl with splendid 19th-century apartment buildings--to Gare du Nord, to collect our Paris Museum Passes and to admire the building itself. The station is a high point of Second-Empire architecture, designed by Jacques Hittorf and in the spirit of Napoleon III's and his prefect Haussmann's decimative revamp of the city: although a planned major avenue to the station never came to fruition--the area is notorious for congestion--the facade is topped with statues representing European cities, the trains' destinations, as neo-classical women; and presiding over all, of course, is Paris herself:
... as for the hollow, heart-colored demon bear, I haven't looked him up.
From there, we went nearly due south to a technically smaller but in-all-other-ways--artistically to spiritually--bigger attraction, one of two 'big things' of the day: knowing that we wouldn't have time to explore the city's two river islands in a single outing, we focused on Île de la Cite's Sainte-Chappelle. To call it a 'high point' is to aim, I'd say, far too low: constructed over ten years and consecrated in 1248, it's absolutely one of the single most overwhelmingly beautiful things I've seen and, I think, that people have done. My photos can't do it justice, but I hope they haven't done it harm:
(part of the exterior to consider alongside Gare du Nord's and to see the famous windows from without)
( ... and from within. 'Extraordinary' doesn't seem extraordinary enough.)
From Sainte-Chappelle, we walked: south across the Seine to la rive gauche, the Left Bank, and then generally west through St.-Germain-des-Prés, with a final big destination for the end of the day but with time along the way to enjoy the mixture--emblematic of the city, and emphasized by our day--of modern and medieval. Small details like stonework and the lines of streets, and standout vistas of old churches framed by more recent buildings:
As sunset approached, we reached our goal: perfect timing for unparalleled views of la ville lumière, 'the city of light': although historically it's important to note that, first of all, that famous phrase refers to 'enlightenment,' to reason, of course the meaning has been taken over by electric illumination, above all thanks to a monument that almost wasn't ... and our exploration of which I'll detail in a next post. For now, la ville continues to beckon!
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