Ella’s already detailed our walk to Montmartre. Let me add that it was another fine day weather-wise. So far in our stay we haven’t had to use umbrellas. If there are clouds, they vanish by mid-day. The temperature has been in the low sixties which, for me, is great for strolling around.
The forecourt below the steps of the Sacré-Coeur has the famous view overlooking Paris. It is where the tourists agglomerate.
Ella has charted today’s path; I will capture the crowds at each point of interest. Even with the forever flow of tourists (it’s Monday—why aren’t the kids in school??), the Montmartre streets descending from the Sacré-Coeur had that Parisian café charm.
On our way down through the neighborhood I had us detour to the wrong Rue Pigalle, but more on that in another post. An ending point to our Montmartre ramble, full-flushed in red beneath the faux-windmill blades, was the renowned symbol of Parisian nightlife.
In the old Toulouse-Lautrec era photos of the nightclub, it looks more like a windmill jammed in between buildings. This was the Vegas version. (Recalling the Vegas-style boutiques lining the hallways of the Louvre.)
“Where next?” Ella asked. Where else? We still had time to take the metro and visit the Tomb of Parisian tombs.
Given the grandiosity of Napoleon’s tomb, the crowd was more spread out. (But the ticket line was long and slow with families of five or six negotiating the sales—the tour or the tomb, perhaps the tour and the tomb, no, no let’s just do the tomb…)
Of course it was just the tomb for us, or rather, for me since Ella couldn’t have cared less for the originator of the Napoleon complex. His enormous sarcophagus made of purple porphyry is in the center at the bottom of a circular open crypt beneath a towering dome.
Okay, he was an emperor after all. His notable achievements are displayed on panels between twelve pillars dividing the curved crypt wall. The tiled floor below the sarcophagus spells out in Roman fashion his notable battles. Waterloo isn’t mentioned.
For some reason I couldn’t get the photograph of Hitler in his absurdly oversized military hat gazing down at the sarcophagus out of my head. I was starting to feel my allergic reaction to dictators creeping up my spine.
Looking away from the crypt up at the dome only made it worse.
Leaving the entombed emperor surrounded by the throng looking down, I suggested we amble down to the Seine. We passed the French military museum and I couldn’t help thinking about their stalemated slaughter in WW I until the Yanks showed up, and their quick surrender to Hitler in WW II, and maybe how it might have behoved them to keep a lower profile when it came to heroics.
It wasn’t our intention to end up craning our necks at the Eiffel Tower, but it was hard to avoid in the area of the Seine we had reached.
The Eiffel Tower was more pleasurably viewed from the café where we had dinner.
Interesting.. seeing or feeling security presence in Paris ?
I am. More on the streets than one would normally expect. Regular police and also what looks like army in full camouflage with all the body armor and gear. Bags searched, xray machines at every museum.