Europe Journal 1999
What We Did on Armistice Day
November 11
This morning we dragged ourselves out of bed at the ungodly hour of 8:15am – fifteen minutes later than the time I typically leave the house in Chicago. We got dressed and left, picking up breakfast at an industrial patisserie down the street, and high-tailed it through the cold November-morning weather to the Quai France Anatole to catch a tour boat. Paris Canal offers three-hour tours between the Musée D'Orsay on the Seine and the Parc de la Villette on the northeast edge of Paris, via the Seine and the remaining canal in Paris.
There were not a lot of people on the boat, so we all sat in the very front section of the boat. (All the guidebooks said that reservations were indispensable, but it didn't seem to be so – not everyone had reserved, and there was plenty of space, even though it was a holiday.) The trip began inauspiciously, as we trolled down the Seine listening to commentary in English and French (more French than English, Eric and I being the only anglophones there), straining our ears to hear because the other passengers had a tendency to chat, especially during the English commentary.
However, things began to get more interesting as we entered the canal. Neither of us had been in a lock before, and I especially found it interesting. There were about three sets of locks, all double locks except the first, a single lock. The river climbs, probably a good 15 yards in all, as you leave the Seine and head up the canal. The locks are not entirely watertight, and water spills over the top, around the edges, and through not-entirely-closed water-doors in them. Once in the lock, the water-doors opened – though not the same exact way in each lock. Sometimes one door with louvers over it would open first, and as the water level rose, the boat rising with it, the other doors would be opened to shoot water at the prow of the boat. In others, all doors would open simultaneously, but very slowly, letting just a little out at first, and again once the ship had risen to a certain point, opening more. It took about ten minutes for each section of the locks to fill appropriately, which is why the whole tour took three hours.
The first part of the canal, entering from the Seine, is a harbor, with motorboats, houseboats, and other smaller craft showing registrations from all over northern Europe. Then the canal goes underground starting at the Place de la Bastille, with the tall memorial column there looming dead ahead. The underground section goes for about 1½ miles, with tow-paths on either side which, according to the guide, were used only by men – no animals were allowed to pull boats through the canal.
The canal re-emerged, and went through a lock which brought the boat exactly to street level. This section of the canal is fairly narrow, and is a picturesque tree-lined residential area. The bridges over the canal are rotating bridges, pivoting from one side to rest flat against the bank, like a door. Later, as a hill approached, another lock brought us once again to street level.
By this time, I had figured out that we could go outside in front, where I could stand in front of the speaker to hear the commentary, and where I could watch the lock in operation. It was a little chilly to stay outside for a long time, and so I kept going outside for a little while, and then coming in again. Also, we had seen people going upstairs at one point, and I decided to go up and see what was there. Upstairs was where the captain and guide were, and there were two benches running alongside the room. A number of people were sitting there, getting the higher viewpoint and listening to the guide, who gave them additional commentary when the microphone was off. There was also a door leading to the upper outside deck, a nice place to walk around and then go back inside again. I liked sitting up there, but Eric didn't care for it, so we didn't stay up there. I went up occasionally, really enjoying moving from place to place on the boat to see everything.
While I was sitting up there listening intently to French commentary, the guide noticed that I understood French (though not as well as I would have liked to). Later he commented to me about it in French, and I said that I was learning French, and no I didn't really live in Paris, since it was only for one month. From that point on, there was no more English commentary. Anyway, the guide was very nice – he had kind eyes and a friendly smile. Earlier he had come out to the prow, when Eric and I had been standing out there, to ask us (in English) how everything had been going for us.
I learned a new French word: éguse – lock, in the nautical sense.
The guide had a dog with him, a big black and brown female of an intimidating-looking breed. However, she turned out to be a very sweet dog. Most of the time she stayed upstairs with him, and he petted her. But occasionally she roamed around – though she didn't come down the stairs often, because dogs don't like descending stairs. During a part of the tour when Eric and I had moved to the middle of the boat, behind the stairs, I'd see her at the top of the stairs looking down, wanting to be downstairs, but not wanting to go downstairs. She had a black face with brown on her muzzle, and two small circles of brown above her eyes, where the inner end of the eyebrows would be. These circles moved up, down, in, out, giving her face the full expressiveness of a full pair of eyebrows. She truly looked plaintive, standing there at the top of the stairs. Mostly though, she sat happily at her master's feet. She let me pet her. That was nice.
The streets rose around us and we went through a small tunnel, emerging at yet another set of locks. At our right side was a wall, in a neoclassical style, which was a small remaining section of the old fermier wall, a wall that had been erected (in the last century?) to extract tariffs from those bringing good into the city. It was a stone wall – limestone, I think – with at the top inscribed in Roman capitals the names of all the "portes" ("gates", literally "doors") of the city and the wall.
This new section of the canal was wider and more industrial. Looking behind us, as we progressed, was a large building associated with the wall, called the Rotunde, a big neoclassical yellow-stone rotunda. To the left was the branch of the canal and the lock from whence we'd come. At the center, the canal seemed to end at a fountain. To the right, what seemed to be the remains of another canal, terminating at the street which I imagine was built over it. Looking in front, there were on either side of the canal matching entrances to movieplexes which must have been underground.
Ahead of us was the park and the end of the tour – none too soon for Eric, though I could have gone on longer. I was hungry though. When we got off the boat, we began to wander through the park, to see what was there and vaguely hoping to find food.
I'd read that the park had a number of restaurants, though I didn't know where. The drop off point was at the point where another canal branched off the exit the city northward. In between the two canals was the Géode, a geodesic dome with the largest movie screen in the world inside, as well as other futuristic sights. The food must have been that way, because we went the other way. (The other way was heading out from the side of the canal where we'd been dropped off.) We walked by the large exhibition building, la Grande Halle, the former market place of the meatmarket which had been there when the park was stockyards. Walls had been built for the halle, all glass windows and doors. This more modern style fit in perfectly with the old steel support of the halle, which looked very much like the sort of old steel pavilion at county fairgrounds in the US. It did nothing to hid the structural quality of the steel beams, but embellished them with sturdy Arabesque tips and frills.
We exited the park, passing up lunch at the delicious-looking but pricey Café de Musique inside the park's music hall, and trying our luck along Rue Jaurès. It turned out that most of the restaurants were on the section of the street right across from the park. As we walked away from the park down the street, restaurants were few and far between. Those we found were uninteresting brasseries, which I have discovered is the French version of a diner. Finally, we gave in at a metro stop and headed toward out next destination: Montmartre.
I'd seen Montmartre, or at least the basilica of Sacré-Cœur, when I came three years ago with Eric and Susanne, but I had not seen the section where the artists are. This section was what I wanted to see.
We got out at Place des Abbesses, a nice simple square and after some indecision, settled on the brasserie on the corner. While many brasseries are uninteresting and often not great, this one turned out to be an excellent choice. The food was simple, but rather good, and the waiter was amusingly friendly.
I had spaghetti alla carbonara, and Eric had French onion soup and a salad. The spaghetti was too oily – it seemed to have been made with butter – but this was only a problem at the end. It came with an egg yolk in a half eggshell presented on the top like a garnish. I mixed in the egg yolk and ate, and it was very good. At the end it was swimming in a pile of grease, and also the cheese I was offered to put on it was the standard not-very-good restaurant-style grate parmesan. Eric's soup was (apparently) what the soup is supposed to be like: lots of onions, with a taste and texture reminiscent of gravy. And there wasn't look much cheese on top. It was good. The salad, however, was less so: overdressed with a dressing that was too sharp to begin with. However, we were satisfied with it and set out on our way.
We meandered up the hill, and it was easy to see when we arrived. It's almost heartbreaking to see that many tourists, to see what once was a sincere little hilltop village-turned-neighborhood overrun by the tourist industry. The artists who are set up in the square in a virtual market sell mostly crap. They emulate the same styles to produce what people expect. It's a bit hard to explain exactly what the styles are, since there's more than one, but they look like a lot of postcard you find here. These artists are graduates of the matchbook school of art. Occasionally one would see an artist with greater talent and individuality, but there were no visionaries there to speak of. And then there are the portrait artists. Not all of them are terrible. Some manage, with pastels, a kind of rough-and-ready-looking almost impressionist style – similar to the work of my great-grandmother Clara Cahill Park. But the others produced that kind of over-polished, glinting-highlight-bedecked tripe that can be commissioned everywhere from sunset point, Key West, to Faneuil Hall in Boston. I could have gone for a portrait, one of the good ones, but it was raining, and what would I have done with it, and most importantly, I was too embarrassed at the thought of spending any money at this morass of tourism gone to seed.
We headed up to the basilica, which I've always thought was rather an odd-looking building. It has an odd dome, a bit too narrow and tall. On the inside, however, it in beautiful. It was completed at the end of World War II, and the styles shown inside reflect their era. The stained-glass windows show a more avant-garde approach to religious art, whereas the mosaics show an almost Renaissance-like exactness in portraying bodies. One is struck here, similarly to St. Peter's in Rome, with the religion there. As you walk through, following the "sense de la visite" signs, one passes people at kneelers in front of shrines to saints. In front of other saints' shrines there are slotted boxes, like suggestion boxes, for prayers. A sign explains the significance of the candles: so your prayer stays on after you leave. You cannot forget that, tourist sight though it be, the primary function of the basilica is religious.
Wandering away from the Basilica, we decided to head out of Montmartre. Then Eric asked if there was anything else I wanted to do in Montmartre, because we wouldn't have time to go back on this trip. So I though to myself, is there anything more? I looked at the Paris par arrondissement map-book and the book of walks through Paris, and decided to take a look at a couple of things. We looked at one of the two remaining windmills on the hill – there used to be thirty – and we looked at the oldest house in Montmartre, because I misread the guidebook and thought it was the oldest house in Paris. It was nice though. The windmill was interesting, too, because it looked so out of place in the city. Montmartre doesn't look like the rest of Paris because there no broad boulevards. There can't be. The old houses and buildings stack against each other like books leading up and down the hills. Still, the windmill was out of place, though not as much as it would have been anywhere else in Paris.
Eventually we did leave, and came home to relax a while before dinner.