Monday in Paris: The tour

On Monday morning, 4 December 2007, we joined a bus tour group, to see the main historic places of Paris. The tour went something like this, starting off in the pouring rain, past the following places:

Academie Nationale de Musique.

The Paris Opera House (Academie Nationale de Musique) stands at the beginning of the Boulevard des Capucines, was designed by architect Charles Garnier and built between 1862 and 1875. It is the largest theatre for lyric opera in the world and can accommodate an audience of 2000 and 450 performers on stage.

The Galleries Lafayette – the huge, famous department store at the junction of Boulevard Hausmann and Rue Lafayette, just behind the Opera house.
When the old part of Paris was built - the "golden triangle" - the city planners decreed that all buildings should have the same height, five stories, with a similar appearance. All have balconies with wrought-iron railings all have the same pale stone cladding. This made for a very neat-looking city, as is evident from the photo above. Note the similarity between the buildings on either side of the Opera House.

Colonne de Vendôme

The Place Vendôme is a vast architectural complex dating from the time of Louis XIV, built between 1687 and 1720. The octagonal square is surrounded by buildings which have large arcades on the ground floor, housing mostly the famous jewellery houses like Boucheron, Van Cleef and Arpels, Mikimoto, Bulgari, Buccellati and many others. Today at number 15 is the famous Hotel Ritz and at number 12 is the house where Chopin died in 1847.
In the centre of the square is the column erected by Gondouin and Lepère between 1806 and 1810 in honour of Napoleon I. Inspired by the Column of Trajan in Rome, it is 43.5 metres high with, around its shaft, a spiraling series of bronze bas-reliefs cast from the 1,200 cannon captured at Austerlitz. On top of the column stands a copy of the original statue of the Emperor dressed as Ceasar, by Chaudet.

Place Vendôme

The Rue de la Paix extends from the Place Vendôme towards the Opera House. This street is equally famous for its shops, for example Cartier, the world's best-known jeweller, he who the English king Edward VII defined as 'the jeweller of kings, the king of jewellers'.

French Academy.

From there the bus travelled along the Avenue de l'Opera towards the Louvre and along the right bank of the Seine past the Louvre and the French Academy. The Academy is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Academy was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII.

Pont Neuf.

From there we crossed the river at the Pont Neuf (New Bridge), which is the oldest bridge still in use in Paris. It was the first bridge built in stone and not of wood. Standing by the western point of the Île de la Cité, the island in the middle of the river that was the heart of medieval Paris, it connects the left bank (Rive Gauche) of the River Seine with the right bank (Rive Droite). The decision to build the bridge was made by King Henri III, who laid its first stone in 1578. It was completed under the reign of Henri IV, who inaugurated it in 1607.

Sunday in Paris: The Louvre

The first royal "Castle of the Louvre" was founded in what was then the western edge of Paris by Philip Augustus in 1190, as a fortified royal palace to defend Paris on its west against Plantagenêt attacks. The first building in the existing Louvre was begun in 1535, after demolition of the old Castle. Subsequent kings of France added further wings to extend the Grande Louvre. From 1794 onwards, France's victorious revolutionary armies brought back increasing numbers of artworks from across Europe, thus establishing it as a major European museum.

On a Sunday access to the Louvre is free, with the result that it is terribly crowded, even outside the height of the tourist season. In any case, we were determined to see as much of the Louvre as we could in a day, so patiently waited in the queue to get inside. 

The Louvre.

We particuarly wanted to see the Monet and Renoir exhibitions, but learnt that those hall were closed on a Sunday. In any case, as we discovered, the main collections of Renoir, Monet, Manet, van Gogh, and so on, are housed in the Musee d'Orsay. No-one warned us that museums in Paris are closed on a Monday, so, since Sunday was devoted to the Louvre and we left again on Tuesday morning, we did not get to the Musee d'Orsay on this trip.

The Louvre being mostly a huge art gallery, we could not take pictures of our favourite paintings, but the statues were equally impressive. This photo is of a statue of a girl with a bee, focussing on the bee. 

The hall of beautifully restored Renaissance sculptures on the lower ground floor had us gaping in awe.

Our favourite artists amongst the painters were the 18^th century guys like Joseph Vernet (1714-1789) – we found his cityscapes of old Naples with Mount Vesuvius erupting in the background, panoramas of Venice, and so on, fascinating.

Of course we had to see Michaelangelo's Mona Lisa, but what a disappointment that was! Firstly it was a nightmare to get close enough to the painting to see it, pushing your way through the mass of humanity gathered there and, secondly, the painting itself is much smaller than anticipated so one cannot see it very well at all even from the closest vantage point allowed.

Saturday in Paris

Early on the morning of Saturday 2 December 2006 we hopped on the train from Zug to Zurich, and there we changed to the train that would take us all the way to Paris. From Zurich the railway line winds its way south-west to Neuchatel and along the edge of the huge Lake Neuchatel before crossing the border between Switzerland and France just before reaching Pontarlier. Officials came and checked our passports as we travelled along.

We reached Portalier just before 10:00 am, a thick fog blanketing the countryside and trees eerily looming up out of the mist. The route continued in the same general direction through Frasne and Andelot, then changing to a north-westerly direction to Dijon, the historical capital of the province of Burgundy.

For the next two hours the train sped through open, flat countryside, passing farmlands and the occasional very small village. The villages were all assembled along the same pattern: a small cluster of buildings with a steepled church as the centrepiece. Each village had a very neat graveyard with trimmed cypresses, neat paving between the graves, gravestones in excellent repair and flowers on every grave.

And so we arrived in the bustling city of Paris shortly after an early lunch on the train. After checking in at the four-star Hotel de Castaglione on the famous rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, we walked the short distance to the Place de la Concorde.

Cleopatra's Needle at the Place de la Concorde.

The Place was designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel in 1755 as a moat-skirted octagon between the Champs-Élysées to the west and the Tuileries Gardens to the east. The center of the Place is occupied by a giant Egyptian obelisk decorated with hieroglyphics exalting the reign of the pharaoh Ramses II. It is one of three Cleopatra's Needles, the other two residing in New York and London.

The obelisk once marked the entrance to the Luxor Temple. The viceroy of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, offered the 3,300-year-old Luxor Obelisk to France in 1831. Three years later King Louis-Philippe had it placed in the centre of Place de la Concorde, where a guillotine used to stand during the Revolution.

The red granite column rises 23 metres high, including the base, and weighs over 250 tonnes. Given the technical limitations of the day, transporting it was no easy feat. On the pedestal are drawn diagrams explaining the machinery that were used for the transportation.

Fountain at Place de la Concorde.

The obelisk is flanked on both sides by fountains constructed at the time of its erection on the Place.

Lamp standard.

Everything around us was just fascinating – even the lamp standards are splendid!

Fame.

From the Place de la Concorde we entered the Tuileries Garden (French Jardin des Tuileries), which stretches for 1 km to the Place du Carrousel. Entrance is through an imposing gate with pillars bearing the equestrian statues of Mercury (on the right) and Fame (on the left), both by Coysevox. This statue is Fame, photographed from the inside of the gate, looking out towards the Place de la Concorde.

Tuileries Garden

When the large empty space between the northern and southern wings of the Louvre now familiar to modern visitors was revealed in 1883, for the first time the Louvre courtyard opened into an unbroken Axe Historique. The Tuileries Garden is surrounded by the Louvre (to the east), the Seine (to the south), the Place de la Concorde (to the west) and the Rue de Rivoli (to the north). Further to the north lies the Place Vendôme. The Tuileries Garden covers about 25 hectares and still closely follows a design laid out by landscape architect Andre Le Notre in 1664. His spacious formal garden plan drew out the perspective from the reflecting pools one to the other in an unbroken vista along a central axis.

Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel

Entrance to the Place du Carrousel is through the magnificent Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel. Designed by Charles Percier and Pierre Léonard Fontaine, the arch was made between 1806-1808 by the Emperor Napoleon I on the model of the Arch of Septimius Severus in Rome. It was commissioned to commemorate France's military victories in 1805. It was originally surmounted by the famous horses of Saint Mark's Cathedral in Venice, captured by Napoleon, but these were returned there in 1815. They were replaced by a quadriga sculpted by Baron François Joseph Bosio, depicting Peace riding in a triumphal chariot, led by gilded Victories on either side; the composition commemorates the Restoration of the Bourbons following Napoleon's downfall.

The Louvre is situated next to the Jardin des Tuileries, but since it was already late in the day we decided to return on Sunday for an extended visit to the museum and art galleries.

Joan of Arc.

On the way back to the hotel we walked via the rue de Rivoli to the Place des Pyramides, where there is a gilded statue of Joan of Arc situated close to where she was wounded at the Saint-Honoré Gate in her unsuccessful attack on the English-held Paris on 8 September 1429.

That night we had dinner at our hotel – nice, but expensive. In fact, everything at this hotel was rather expensive. In Italy we could get internet access for 1.50 Euros per hour. At the Hotel Castaglione it cost 14 Euros per hour.