Chocolat Chaud at the End of the Rainbow

One day Tenzig told me he needed new guitar strings so we had to go to Pigalle, a neighborhood up the hill from the Marais, known for its music stores and even more for its strip clubs and seedy characters. The area is featured in the film Paris Je T'aime, in the segment called "Pigalle" with Bob Hoskins and Fanny Forestier. That movie highlights the low-down night-time characteristics but what I encountered during the day was very different. I have to admit I wasn't thrilled about the idea of going on an errand, after all I was on vacation and in Paris, at most I should have been shopping or deciding between two types of meringues for desert. After some cajoling I gritted my teeth and agreed to the trip to Pigalle, and then, once I was there ... I found my favorite favorite favorite street in all of Paris! Before I left for Paris I polled various friends on their favorite Parisian spots and one friend and kindred traveler sent me an article about the Rue des Martyrs. Once I realized I had a chance to hijack the outing (once the guitar strings had been gotten out of the way), my attitude changed completely. Tenzig was skeptical but I was vindicated when the Rue des Martyrs turned out to be a street of wonders, lined with tasty treats from top to bottom.


We passed pastry shops with windows laden with mini-quiches, the kind you dream about here in New York and then settle for Balthazar or something else knowing that it is second best. You tell yourself it's good enough but when you are reminded of the real thing you can't go back. Cheese shops put forth delectable hockey pucks in 50 varieties, their pungent smells wafting down the block to the fishmonger in his apron filleting fish while shrimp and scallops lounged on beds of ice. A few more steps brought us to sellers of fruits and vegetables where the boundaries between varieties have no meanings. The chanterelles mushrooms burst with buttery color, holding their own against ripe, succulent grapes.


When we started our walk we were at the top of the hill, having exited the Metro at the Pigalle station, and so our progress along Rue des Martyrs was downhill. When we reached the bottom, at Rue Lamartine, we needed a rest and refreshment so we parked ourselves at a table on the sun drenched sidewalk and indulged in some warm and delicious Cafe au Lait and Chocolat Chaud.

Dem Bones

I had a lot of plans when I was preparing for Paris but sometimes the coolest things are the ones that aren't planned. One of Tenzig's colleagues from the show mentioned that he wanted to go see the Paris catacombs and invited us along. Death rituals have never scared me and ever since I was a kid I have had a fascination with looking at piles of bones (some good bone piles of my youth: Toraja (Indonesia), Capuchin Catacombs (Sicily)). I wasn't sure what to expect from the catacombs in Paris but I was ready to find out. We hopped on the Metro at Chatelet and made our way to Denfert-Rochereau across the river in the 14th Arrondissement. The entrance is a little hard to find and only marked by a small sign. The fee is only 7 euros and it's pretty low key inside, after going down a stone spiral staircase you arrive unceremoniously in the tunnels lined with piles and piles and piles of bones.


Only a small section of the tunnels are open to the public (I guess people sneak into the restricted areas too though), and as we walked through I caught glimpses of blocked off tunnels branching away into murky blackness. The tunnels are dark and dank and initially a little creepy. The floors in parts are lumpy with tool marks and water drips from the ceiling as you duck though low doorways, I remember thinking that the arrangement of the bones was pretty utilitarian. At one time many of the bones had been moved en masse from a crypt in Les Halles, so efficient use of space seemed to be the primary concern. As we wandered around the corridors, I was looking for flourishes of creativity in the stacks, the kind found in Capuchin churches or saints' reliquaries, without much success. Taking pictures in the dimness made for a lot of blurry shots but one or two would make good album art for a death metal album. I think the most memorable thing about the catacombs is not the volume of bones but the tunnels themselves: a massive network carved out of the bedrock limestone of Paris, it's the kind of thing you dream about discovering as a kid.

Ou Est Mon Entourage?

As I have mentioned before, while I was in Paris I was reading Queen of Fashion, a biography of Marie Antoinette, and because of that I was driven to see some of the sites that featured prominently in her life. My favorite of these was the Palais Royal, a beautiful courtyard garden surrounded by an arcade that had housed the shop of Rose Bertin, MA's notorious dressmaker and personal stylist. MA would occasionally visit Bertin's shop to buy clothes, angering her royal relatives since the Palais Royal was also the stomping grounds of prostitutes and gamblers. Nowadays, the shops that ring the garden are pretty upscale clothing boutiques and antiques dealers, and there are no shady characters hanging about in the shadows. The gardens are a mix of wildflowers penned in by intensely manicured hedges. It's a nice quiet place to sit and read or stroll under trees that have been cut into box shapes (I was fascinated and perplexed by these trees, they look cool but square trees are just plain weird).


I visited Palais Royal by myself and I felt very relaxed and peaceful there. A couple of days later I dragged Tenzig and some friends there to see it but they didn't have the same intense reaction that I did, they we like "It's a garden." And I said "it's not just ANY garden," I tried to explain about Marie Antoinette and the calm feeling I got from the place but it seemed lost on them. We sat by the fountain for a while before we went to find some lunch, I was sad to leave it behind.