Stewarts' Ramble: 2006-06-11

Rouen and Paris, June 4-7

We stopped in Rouen en route to Paris to see the cathedral. Monet painted magical scenes of its façade, but he must have been very fortunate to work in one of the rare periods during the cathedral’s 1000-year history when it was not under reconstruction. We were not so fortunate, for half the façade was encased in scaffolding. The site where Joan of Arc was martyred is not far from the cathedral, but it has been converted into a modern market—not too great a sacrilege, perhaps, for the English burned Joan in what was the Old Market Square, where the vendors were surely delighted by the crowds her martyrdom brought.

Site of Joan's stake (Rouen)

Paris shone in all her glory, thanks to some magnificent spring weather. We had a top-floor room at the Hotel Perreyve, a small family-run establishment on a quiet street near the Luxembourg Gardens, where Todd had often stayed in the 1980s when he attended OECD meetings. Although the area is within easy walking distance of St. Germain-des-Prés, its atmosphere is entirely different—as we discovered in the nearby Restaurant de Luxembourg, where the owner-waiter showed us the yearbook from his mother-in-law’s high school in New Orleans, where she had grown up.

Hotel Perreyve

Restaurant de Luxembourg with our host

We devoted one morning to locating a wi-fi hot-spot where we could post an account of our adventures in Normandy. Again, this quest proved more difficult than we had envisioned as one café’s signal kept fading, and the waiter in another café, which advertised a wi-fi connection, nonchalantly confessed after our breakfast arrived that their transmitter was not working. Obviously requiring divine assistance, we went to the American Cathedral, where the Rev. Jonathan Huyck, the son of good friends, hooked us into the cathedral’s network. It did operate, need you have asked.

Wi-fi hotspot (aka American Cathedral courtyard)

Highlights of our time in Paris were the reunions with old friends. We visited the studio of Natalia Bikir, our favorite artist in Moldova (as many of you know from her paintings in our home), who has been living and working for some time in France, where she has built an enviable reputation. We also had dinner with Irene Kohlhaas, the German ambassador and our next-door neighbor in Chisinau, who is now serving in Paris with the German embassy.

Natalia Bikir in her studio

With Irene and Susanna Kohlhaas

And yes, we did do a number of touristy things as the following pictures attest. Perhaps the best day included a long walk to the Place des Vosges, thought by some to be the most beautiful square in Paris, and the Père Lachaise Cemetery, where many notable Frenchmen and foreigners are buried in ornately decorated graves and mausoleums. (Despite our failure to buy a map—which we would strongly advise other visitors to do--we managed to find Oscar Wilde’s gravestone, which was covered with lipstick marks.) The recently reopened L’Orangrie had attracted a line of prospective visitors stretching down the Seine so we got our art fix at the Musée d’Orsay. It seemed appropriate to see the movie “Marie Antoinette” before leaving Paris as we had walked several times through the Place de la Concorde where Marie and Louis lost their heads. The movie, however, ended with their departure from Versailles rather than with their demise.