I liked to wake up early and walk down to the Seine in the quiet dawn hours. The streets were mostly empty and the garbagemen, early commuters and I had the city to ourselves. On most mornings I headed along the riverbank to Notre Dame, to linger on the bridges, sit on the benches, and savor the cathedral. Notre Dame awakening to the sunrise with golden light spreading slowly down the towers and buttresses and reflecting off the smooth, silvery water was a very different place from Notre Dame at mid-morning, with noisy crowds shuffling counterclockwise through the interior and panhandlers stationed around the portals. One taste of the latter was enough, but I could not seem to get enough of the former.
Some mornings I headed off in other directions, browsing through the crooked streets of the Latin Quarter or exploring the Ile de la Citie, and usually something interesting would present itself. Early one Sunday morning I stumbled on a bird market, where bird fanciers gathered around stalls of brightly colored birdcages filled with big and little birds, parakeets and budgies and cockatoos. The customers were almost all men. They peered into the cages, held their pipes sagely while debating the merits of different breeds, and shopped for feed and bird accessories. I spent another morning watching the streets around our hotel wake up. Merchants mopped the sidewalks, waiters began setting out tables, more people walked or rode brisky by on their way to work, and as sunlight began to dry the awnings and shine off the wet cobblestones the first customers trickled in for pastries and small cups of strong dark coffee, taken standing at the bar with a newspaper and a cigarette. It wasn't hash browns and bacon and fresh-squeezed orange juice, but the coffee was eye-opening and and the ambience delightful. I usually treated myself to a hardboiled egg or two as a reward for resisting the temptation to add a beer to my morning repast, and walked out into the morning light feeling that my day in Paris was well-begun.
Mary and her niece Shelley wore out a lot of shoe leather hiking from museum to museum. They toured the Musee d'Orsay, the Louvre, the Musee Picasso, and L'Orangerie, and returned each afternoon tired but happy. I spent the days at my own versions of museums -- the used camera shops along the Boulevard Beaumarchais, where I was just as content examining old Nikons and Leicas as I would have been before Van Gogh's Sunflowers or the Mona Lisa, and the used bookstores around the Latin Quarter, where browsers were welcome and the selection eclectic. This seemed a rather superficial way to spend my time in Paris, but I was happy.
We teamed up some days for trips further afield from our hotel. One particularly interesting day was spent at the Marche aux Puces, the largest flea market in Paris, chock full of old books, antique furniture, Indonesian clothes, African handicrafts, army surplus, faded jeans, and general bric-a-brac.
Our obligatory visit to the Eiffel Tower was on a drizzly, foggy night, puddles lining the paths and the view from the top floor mostly obscured. We still enjoyed the visit. The Eiffel Tower's appeal, we decided, was its open. Erector-set quality. The rivets, trusses, and cross-bracing behind the graceful curves, the clockwork mechanism of the elevators, and all the other the details of the tower were as engrossing as its silhouette against the gray sky.
The next day Shelley led us on a search for Jim Morrison's grave in the Cimetiere Pere Lachaise. This was the most pleasant cemetery I had ever seen, with crumbling old headstones and elaborate family mausoleums, including the graves of Chopin, Oscar Wilde, and Sarah Bernhart, crowded together amid tall shady trees. We wandered around the quiet curving paths, enjoying the views, following the path of graffiti ("We Love You Jim" "Alive She Cried" "<=== This Way To Jim") scrawled on the headstones. As we neared the putative resting site of the Lizard King, the graffiti thickened until the names of the legitimate possessors of the tombs were all but obscured. In this dignified resting place for the Parisian departed, Jim Morrison must have been a most unwelcome resident. We imagined the other souls grousing about his wild parties and noisy groupies, the broken bottles and roaches littering their carefully tended graves. As the graffiti came to a climax, we arrived at an unmarked grave, decorated with "Mojo Risin" spelled out in bits of broken tiles and Corona beer bottles. But it turns out that all this attention -- unwelcome, no doubt -- had been lavished on someone unfortunate other than the Doors singer. Jim Morrison's actual grave was several rows away, largely untouched by graffiti and watched over by a suspicious guard whose job it was to shoo visitors away before they could guzzle any devotional beers or scrawl their affection on the headstone. Despite the guard's vigilance, the bust once mounted on the headstone is gone and the slab of marble once covering the grave have been filched (perhaps in an unsuccessful attempt at grave-robbery?)
We saw many other things in the City of Light: a chamber orchestra rehearsing in an medieval church the frenetic shopping district around Les Halles, the boutiques around Fabourg-St. Honore. But my favorite times in Paris were walking through the lively streets around the Boulevards St. Germain and St. Michel, a new find from the used bookstores in my hand, stopping at a brasserie for coffee and an egg, standing at the bar, looking around me, and enjoying being unscheduled and in Paris.
Traveling On a Budget
One doesn't have to pay a lot for a hotel room in Paris, but most of the inexpensive hotels we looked at were hardly loaded with amenities, or charm for that matter. The exceptions were fully booked, at least on the weekends. 580 FF for a triple room in a two-star hotel in the Latin Quarter was at about our minimal level of comfort -- which is rather minimal. In short, we never found a budget way to visit Paris while staying centrally located.
Staying Connected
Compuserve had several local nodes in Paris, but the cheaper sort of hotels often lacked modular telephones, sending us to the telephone booths again.
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© John Liu/Mary Sauve 1997. You may link to this page but you may not otherwise use, take, or republish this material.