Oct 14, Part 6 - Place Maubert and breakfast

As we came down the Rue Maitre Albert from our hotel, we entered Place Maubert with this group of Asian markets and restaurants on our left. Sunken below the main street level, they formed an inviting enclave of fresh fruits and vegetables you could buy on the spot or order up cooked in one of the restaurants. The one outside the photo on the left is a market only. The others seemed to serve food. In the morning, they were bringing in the produce, and in the evening there were people sitting at the small tables that filled the terrace. It seemed like a nice quiet place to eat, but we were always doing something else at meal time.

Place Maubert has several faces. It's almost like two squares in one, with this smaller, quiet side, and then the traffic, markets, and cafes you'll see in a minute on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The stripes on the street come from Rue Maitre Albert, which you can see below as the tiny street almost shaped like an "L." In the distance (above) you can see Notre Dame by looking straight down the Rue Frederick Sauton. If you click on the Map or Hybrid views below, the street names become visible (like magic, I love it!). And you can look at photos taken by various people. If you scroll outside this area, there won't be any additional photos. It's how these mini-Panoramios work, but you can also go to Panoramio.com and find more pictures. Some of mine may appear before long.

After our long flight and the trip into Paris, we had one thing on our minds - coffee and breakfast! We'd come to the right place, because Tuesday was market day in Place Maubert, and in addition, there were several nice cafes around the perimeter. The trees you see in the picture above are the largest group in the Panoramio map view.

In addition to the markets under the tenting, there were several stores selling fresh food - seafood, cheese, salads, preserved meats, and more. Yeah, it really did smell like fish, alright.

We opted for the cafe at the back of the market, where we could eat in comfort and watch the goings-on in the square. That's Lee's arm, above. I had a cheese omelette and a decaf cappuccino. Lee thought maybe they didn't serve decaf, but since I didn't want to bonk on our first morning in Paris, I tried out the word "decaffine," and the waiter knew what I meant. He was also completely civil about it. I'd wondered if I'd be booted out for not having real coffee. Lee had a real cappuccino and a croisant.

This was our view out the cafe window, the clothing and purse/bag section.

After breakfast, I was looking at the fruit. Having recently had mainly airplane food and the Dunkin' Donut, it seemed like just the thing to have on hand. They had some big, luscious-looking figs, and I tried to buy two or three, but they sold them only by the half kilo, and you had to take about 8, 9 or nothing, so I didn't get any. I could imagine my backpack a couple of hours down the line. But we actually did go back to our room for a bit and . . . it's not the most exciting thing to do on your first morning in Paris, but we fell asleep.

Go to Part 7

Oct 14, Part 7 - Rue Monge and St-Nicholas-du-Chardonnet

We slept for about 4 hours, or at least I did. Lee may have gone for a second coffee, but I was dead to the world. Early in the afternoon, which would have been about 8:00 in the morning Oregon time, we went back into Place Maubert to start our explorations. Lee asked if there was anything on my walking tour list that included this area, and there was. It was the perfect question, because it turned out to be just the right thing for a day already half spent and us still groggy and jet-lagged. The tour started with Place Maubert, exactly where we were, and led out of the square via Rue Monge (below).

The first thing we came to was a church: Eglise St-Nicholas-du-Chardonnet. It had begun as a chapel in a field of thistles, hence its name, but it's hard to imagine that now. It's nice to be reminded about how the city grew and what it was like in earlier times. It was hard to imagine a field of thistles here now.

This church is mostly Renaissance - it's kind of blobby-looking and also hard to photograph from most of its angles, unless maybe you cross the street, which we didn't do.

Here's another view from the side, with the front being on the right. It's hard to see from this picture, but the thing near the right of the photo with the big vents in it is actually a tower built in 1625. It took until 1934 to finish the church. Here are some links that show the outside better. On Wikimedia Commons you can clearly see that this is a tower. And here's another view from the front, and a nice image of the famous door on the Rue des Bernardins designed by Charles Le Brun, who lived nearby and may have been the most famous Parisian artist of his time.

One thing I like about walking in the old parts of Paris is that the city has these informational placards everywhere there's something they want you to know about. They're shaped like the oar of a boat (a symbol of the city) and they are, of course, in French. Lee did a good job of deciphering most of them, and I took photos to try and read the info later with a dictionary. I wasn't the only one taking pictures of them. Sometimes I had to take a pic from the side, because someone, or more than one person, was already in front, reading or just as often taking a photo. Sometimes people snapped photos of them over my shoulder. I wasn't the only geek. There must be thousands of these photos on peoples' hard drives or CD collections by now. There was one I did not take a picture of, because a homeless guy was camped under it and I didn't really want to lean over the guy, but that was later on the Right Bank. I guess I could have backed up and used a long lens, but I was exhausted from walking at that time, and ten more steps felt like a marathon. But, back to St. Nicholas.

The inside was nice, but it didn't seem that spectacular. My notes were incomplete, so I wasn't sure which bay to look in for the most famous art. Charles Le Brun had decorated his mother's tomb with a painting, and in turn he had been buried here and a sculpture by the ultra-famous Parisian artist Coysevox decorated his tomb. All this made sense to me when I realized that Le Brun's house was only a block or so from here, and this was the church he attended. Later we saw paintings by Delacroix in a church that was in his neighborhood. You know, when you read the guidebooks or art books, it sometimes seems that the artists just went about salting their art throughout everywhere, and I'm sure sometimes this is true, but when you put the pieces of the puzzle together geographically or chronologically, it shows a picture you don't see from the loose fragments.

This organ casing is supposed to be notable. I tried to get a photo of the flying angel on the right with the trumpet, but it came out blurry.

This photo of St-Nicholas is from the rear (apse end) on the Boulevard St-Germain and Rue des Bernardins. I think it's the nicest view of the church from up close, and shows its "Baroqueness" to its best effect.

Go to Part 8

Oct 14, Part 10 - Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, Rue Monge, Paris

The cafe Le Cardinal at 5 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. I didn't realize this part of the city was so complex or interesting until I got home and started trying to organize a few photos from these two streets. Then I got out the maps, started checking Google Earth and Panoramio, the guidebooks, and various web sites. It's like an onion with a lot of layers. In hindsight, I'd be more than happy to go back and take a few more photos :) The top one is just a nice cafe at the corner of Rue du Cardinal Lemoine and the Boulevard Saint Germain. I'm sure that it, too, has hundreds of years of history, but I didn't even try to research it.

This picture is most amazing for what I left out. I can't believe I did this. I didn't notice the famous cabaret on the left, and homed right in on the plaque, which says that this building used to be part of the College du Cardinal Lemoine. Now click here to see what's on the left. Was it closed up or something? And since we were walking near the wall, maybe I missed the huge marquee overhanging the sidewalk. ????? One web site says, "The Paradis Latin, built by Gustave Eiffel, is a national landmark and the most Parisian of the great cabarets." On the other side of the door is one of the oar-shaped plaques that talks about the history of the neighborhood, the Bievre River, and pieces of the ancient wall of Philippe-Auguste that show up in various parts of Paris, including here - sometimes hidden inside of buildings.

I don't know what the building is in the picture above, but I liked it enough to take a photo. It's located at about 32 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. It's the only one in the neighborhood that's set back from the street, giving it a more aristocratic or diplomatic air, but I haven't found out what it is - probably just some rich person's home.

At the intersection of Rue du Cardinal Lemoine and Rue Monge was the doorway above. Now a suite of doctors' offices, it had been the home of Andre-Marie Ampere from 1818 until he died in 1836. (See the plaque below.) Wikipedia says Ampere "was a French physicist and mathematician who is generally credited as one of the main discoverers of electromagnetism." The word ampere, or amp comes from his name. This part of town is deep in the heart of the science quarter and very close to the Sorbonne and connected buildings. In fact, I'm not sure where the Sorbonne ends and other science academies begin. We're still in the Latin Quarter, which was named for the Latin-speaking students of earlier years.

The photo above is the boulangerie, or bakery, on the corner of Rue Monge and Cardinal Lemoine. Below is a better picture of the bakery itself. There are five streets that make up this intersection, and two of them come together in such a way as to leave only a narrow space for the end of the building. Rue des Boulangers (Street of the Bakers), goes off to the left (below).

Now we're standing in front of the bakery, and looking down Rue Monge approximately back toward the river. The trees are at the edge of the Square Paul Langevin, and the brown building just before the trees is the end of the very famous Ecole Polytechnique, the Polytechnic School, ranked among the most prestigious engineering schools in the world. Thanks to Napoleon, students also had to take a year of military training and wore elaborate uniforms in public parades. Apparently the exam to get in was quite gruelling. The school existed in this building from 1794 until 1976, when it moved to the southern part of Paris. Here is a view on Flickr from an earlier date. Nice photo. Rue Monge was named after Gaspard Monge, who helped found the school and taught descriptive geometry there. His varied career included expeditions for Napoleon in Italy, Syria, and Egypt.

This building is 46 Rue des Boulangers, still at the same intersection. I may have taken the picture because I was looking for a building where there had been a house shared by the Pleaide poets Ronsard and de Baif, and where Rabelais was a frequent visitor. This is what was in my notes. But notice there's a paddle-shaped plaque in the center of the photo? It talks about the lightning rod invented by Benjamin Franklin and about a writer named Sebastien Mercier who saw one here in 1782 and thought that such a large apparatus was an unusual site in the capital city.

Here's a nice blue doorway on Rue Monge just past the location of the lightning rod.

And a shop window, also on Rue Monge. With all of the classy preserves and wines they are selling, much of the window is take up by a Coke ad. It says something like, "Show that you have good taste with lunch." Coke, huh? I thought this was Paris, where classy food is inbred. But we have infiltrated.

And here. As if the sign on the window for "soupe a l'oignon maison and escargots bourgogne" is not enough, I guess we must be told in English that they serve French food.

Go to Part 11