Paris, Day 4 - Napoleon!

When I lived in Paris way way back (I can't believe its "way way back"), my first apartment was in the 7th. I lived in a chambre de bonne which is like the maid's quarters. My flat was on floor six with a walk up staircase. I used to practice my numbers when walking up the stairs. It was a tiny little room and an even tinier little bed, but what sold me was the view.

When my parents and Mema visited way way back, they toured Les Invalides, but I never went in. Every morning I was woken with sunlight hitting the top of that sparkling gold dome. It flooded my room with pink and gold light.

So today, thirteen years later, I finally went to visit Napoleon.

We spent a Very Long Time in the armoury, and this is how it happened. We walked into the Armoury Museum and viewed the large open space filled with medieval knights swords and horse body armour. After about 10 minutes, I think Rachel was done, but I happened to peek my head around a silver plated horse head and I noticed a very small door. This door opened up into a large hallway filled with guns. And that hallway led to an even larger space full of more armour, which emptied into another hallway of guns. All told, I believe we were in the armoury for over an hour.

After Napoleon and the guns, we exited Les Invalides to the east and walked down la Tour Maubourg towards AUP. I vaguely remembered landmarks and streets, like the market on Rue Cler and the patisserie that sold wonderful pain au chocolate. We stopped to get some croissants.

As has happened many times before, Joren managed to upset a homeless person. There is something about Jor that allows for the crazy people to strike up conversations with him. Whatever the case in this particular instance, Joren 1) did not speak French and 2) the man did not want to talk, he only wanted to yell. He followed us down the street and when we retreated into the patisserie, he stood outside and yelled. The bakers were amused...perhaps this man yells at many passersby? In any regard, we bought our breads and continued on towards my old alma mater.

After just a few moments at AUP, we left to go out to the Catacombs. We got to the Metro stop pretty late, and it was very difficult to find the Catacomb entrance. We actually split up looks for it and doggonit, lost Rachel again!

She actually found the tiny doorway, and we ventured down the hallway.  The stairs were metal. We walked for about fifteen minutes on a dirt floor with old lantern lights on the earth walls. I wondered what we'd actually journeyed out to see when suddenly the lights went out. We walked in darkness for another ten minutes using the lights from our cell phones. Finally, the pathway turned a corner...

We were the last people to tour the Catacombs that evening, so the security guard sort of hustled us out.  As we came to the end and exited up the stairs towards the street, one of the guards at the end looked at me and said, "No, I can tell you didn't steal anything." I was affronted! How could he tell I wasn't a criminal? So he demonstrated how I might walk or furtively shuffle towards the exit should I have had the audacity to steal a bone. I agreed with him; I had not stolen anything human.

Once out on the street, we realized that the hour long underground walk had actually taken us very far away from our Metro stop. With no map to orient us,  I decided to pick a direction and walk till we found a landmark. Happily, we chose to walk down the Boulevard du Montparnasse, right next to the Cimitière du Montparnasse where Baudelaire and Simone du Beauvoire are buried.

As we walked around Montparnasse, Rachel realized we were very near an old Hemingway haunt. So we backtracked up Boulevard du Raspail and into La Closerie de Lilas. I would have liked to have dinner there but the menu was a bit out of our range. So we just had a drink and admired our settings.