After salivating, sighing, and generally acting like lovesick swains, we continued to the Metro, with a destination of the Panthéon.
En route, we accidentally stumbled upon a former residence of one of my collegiate archenemies:
Seriously, who needs Electrical Science, anyway? Certainly not I... though it took me three attempts before I stopped trying to pretend I might someday understand it, or at least competently fake understanding.
We also passed one of the ancient walls of Paris, built by Philippe Auguste in the 1300s.
This is cool enough in and of itself, but that coolness was only amplified by one of my ongoing reading projects recently. I read a review of Paris: A Secret History some time ago, and went out and bought a copy when my mother told me about this trip. I'm normally quite a fast reader, but this book is so fact-dense and narrative-intensive that it has taken me several months to get halfway through it. I find it immensely readable, very interesting and accessible, just not a quick-skim sort of experience. So by the time of our journey, I had read up to the Revolution of 1789, and therefore was considerably more aware of ancient, medieval and pre-Revolutionary events than of recent stuff. It's just delightful to have read about a landmark and then say, "Hey! I know about that! I read that such-and-such, and so-and-so..."
(Give me a break, I'm a stay-home mom with a limited social life, after several years of working comparatively high-level sorts of jobs. It's fun to feel smart and informed again.)
Sarah performed an impromptu experiment, in which she determined that, yes, the wall was, indeed, a formidable defense.
The Panthéon was originally built as a cathedral for Ste. Genvieve, patron saint of Paris (and someone about whom I also read, in my trusty history book). After the Revolution, France went all anti-religion for a while - going so far as to start their calendar over from Year I and rename all the months after non-religious references - and the Panthéon was messed with in various ways, finally being dedicated as a final resting place for a smattering of famous people, religious and otherwise, under the heading of "Hall of Great Men."
The architecture makes the word "impressive" seem inadequate, and the sheer scale of it all, plus the dimmed lighting, make decent photography difficult. But I was up for the challenge, and I'm pleased with my results. (And I do so love that we live in the age of digital photography; I took approximately 250 photos in one day - yes, really - and only kept the ones I liked. And I still have too many, but at least I didn't spend a ton on film developing to sort it all out...)
A few favorites:
And as for the famous dead people...
Pictured are Voltaire, Alexandre Dumas and Louis Braille. (I have great appreciation for the fact that Braille's grave does, indeed, contain Braille characters... but I find it a little cruel that there's no Braille elsewhere in the building, and the tomb is quite deeply buried within the crypt. It's nice to reward a blind person for finding the grave, but how's about we make it a little less impossible for them to get there in the first place?) Victor Hugo, both chemist Curies, and a number of others are in there, but the photographic oomph is low... the graves are all very similar, and only visible at oblique angles from doorways.
There was also, over the entrance/exit, a mystery: click to enlarge.
How do you suppose that got there? Not just got there, but got so firmly wound up. Not a ladder or scaffold in sight...
From there, we had lunch at a crêperie, which was arguably the best French meal we had all weekend. (We also had really good food the last night there, but it was at a little Italian place.)
And, of course, since we could see it, we had to take a picture or three:
Then it was back to the hotel, to rest and recharge a bit... because the day started out with grand intentions, but three days seems to be the maximum amount of high-intensity travel and sightseeing I can handle under any circumstances, much less pregnant and jet-lagged and with back problems. But no complaints about that, even some of the Metro stations are picturesque...
Cluny La Sorbonne
Now, a better - or at least, more conscientious - blog author would end this post here, because the evening's entertainment was so vastly different from the morning that it really felt more like two separate days. But for one thing, I took great delight in the fact that our cultural, um, exposure was so varied within one day, and for another, I'm typing this from JFK airport while awaiting my last flight back to Boston, and it's already taking me forever to do all this copy-and-pasting and formatting without a mouse.
So... after some down-time, we got dressed nicely and headed out. To the sex district. Our hotel was only a few blocks from Pigalle, which bears quite the reputation - and deservedly so - but we were in the right direction and distance such that things stayed quiet and not terribly shocking near us. But if you were looking for shock, it was only a short walk away... and I would wager that no matter how worldly you are, you could find something to shock you there.
We had reservations for the 9:00 show at the Moulin Rouge. I haven't seen the movie with Nicole Kidman and Ewan MacGregor, so I have no idea how it might compare... but I can tell you that the in-person experience is pretty wild. Overpriced, sure, and it's a bit of a mystery exactly why there's so much toplessness (and why the men in the show are wearing so much more than the women), but generally a sensory experience that I can't regret forking over for. I estimated that, given the number of dancers, I paid about $10 per nipple, with more exposure to some than others. My mother's eyes were very big throughout the show. (No photography allowed past the coat check, which is probably better for the moral fortitude of my camera, but I do have one group photo taken by the Moulin Rouge staff... eventually, I'll scan it in.)
Afterward, it was a strange dinner at a BBQ place across the street (not to be confused with the type of bar-be-cue we had discussed at the Pere Lachaise cemetery the day before!) and then back to the hotel, to collapse and attempt to recharge for one more day in Paris...
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