Paris
Thursday, September 7
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In our “front yard,” the Place Saint Sulpice, is a fountain named for
four bishops. Each of the bishops has
a statue of himself on one side of the fountain. I especially like the big cats.
The entrance to Mis en Demeure, and elegant but not outrageously
expensive home furnishing and décor store.
The very, very famous (especially after Dan
Brown’s totally fictitious Da Vinci
Code) is in our “front yard.”
Around the corner from Mis en Demeure is a jewelry shop called Madam and
her Bulldog. We’ve been intrigued a number
of occasions with this French spelling of bulldog. Bulldogs seem to be popular here. |
We’ve been
having a very good time walking all around the greater neighborhood here in
the 6th arrondissement.
There are some fantastically lively streets packed with restaurants
just to the north of the Place Saint Sulpice.
We ate in one of them last night, La Boussole (12 rue Guisarde, tel.
01 56 24 82 20) and it was very good.
We shared a ravioli appetizer that was delightful and spicy. It was not in a tomato sauce, but rather in
a white creamy sauce that packed more flavor than French sauces normally
do. Tom had a lamb chop in one of
those good, grainy mustard sauces, and I had a tender-as-can-be filet mignon
de porc in a mild, spinach sauce. The
garniture, a purrée of potatos, was homemade, and quite good. The chairs are uncomfortable, however. We noted that the bulk of the restaurant, toward
the back, was designated as the smoking area.
The front room, where we were seated, is the nonsmoking area. Of course the nonsmoking area filled up
first. Why don’t they designate
smaller areas for smoking? It is clear
that the demand for nonsmoking is greater. There are a
number of wonderful furniture and décor stores near us. We’ve been wandering through them on our
walks. One of them,
Mis en Demeure, has a web site that you have to log onto at www.misendemeure.com . The card we picked up in this lovely store
says the username/identifiant is ihtneutre and the password/mot de passe is Another such
store that we enjoyed was Maison de Famille,
at 29 rue Saint Sulpice. Not so much
for furniture here, but for other decorative items. Cool stuff. Another store for cool stuff of a more mundane
but useful sort is Muji. Actually it is two stores, both located on
the rue Saint Sulpice. Everything in
the place is made in Remember the photo of the soldiers
riding horses and playing band instruments through the streets of the Marais? Well, it seems that these gendarmes don’t
clean up after the horses, and one of the elected officials here by the name
of Yves Contassot is very angry about their slovenliness. He is now threatening to fine them! They are the highly regarded Republican
Guard, the gendarmes that everyone seems to respect! Yves says they can hang a sack on the rear
end of each horse to collect the you-know-what. But General Christian Poupeau (no, I
didn’t make up that name) who commands the Guard, says that to do such a
thing to a horse would be traumatizing for the animal. To which Yves responds, “But many cities
have adopted this! Perhaps the rumps of
the horses of the Republican Guard don’t work in the same manner as the other
European horses?” Yes, and dog shit is still a problem on the
streets of Well, it
finally happened. I have walked so
many hundreds of miles in
But I don’t
hold it against Naturalizer. These
were attractive, fun, and comfortable shoes to wear all over |
