A bank succurcal

I refer to my post on Rue Fortuny last week. When leaving this place you arrive at a square, called Place du Général-Catroux (17th arrdt.), once called the place of the Three Dumas.

On this square you will find the statues of Alexandre Dumas, father/père (The Count of Monte Christo, The Three Musketeers…) and son/fils (The Lady of the Camelias…)*. There used also to be a statue of the grandfather, also called Alexandre, bastard son of a Tahitian slave and a noble Frenchman, who became a General in the French Army in 1793. This statue was destroyed by the Nazi occupants in 1942.

There is a remarkable building here, built as a private home (hôtel particulier / mansion) for Emile Gaillard in 1884, who was governor of the French National Bank (Banque de France) and a great art collector. Some years after his death, the building was bought by the French National Bank. Despite its size and prestigious style, this is however not the Bank’s official site and major building in Paris, just a succurcal.

The building is normally hidden by the trees, but as some of them had now lost their leaves; it was possible to get a more general view.

One small detail that you can find above some windows; a “G” for Gaillard. Some of these photos can be seen “in full” on my photo blog.
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*/ I have previously posted on the graves of Alexandre Dumas fils and of “The Lady of the Camelias” (Marie Duplessis), both at the Montmartre cemetery.

Other statues - Luxembourg Gardens

We don’t all have the same taste – fortunately! Some of you did not really like the sculptures I showed yesterday. I prefer to keep everybody happy, so here are a few other ones!

When you start to really walk around the Luxembourg Gardens, you will discover hundreds of sculptures. Here are a few examples. If you want more, I can go back!

Pigeons always seem to like to sit on the top of statues. What seems more surprising is that here you can also find seagulls in the same position. I believe this is the only park in Paris where you can regularly find seagulls. Why are they here?

One of these statues is the Statue of Liberty. I already had this statue in one of my posts. This one is not a copy; it’s rather one of the originals, preceding the making of the “real one” and about 15 years older. It was given to the city of Paris by its creator, Bartholdi.

I put only a small selection of these pictures on my photo blog – there were too many of them. If you feel that I made a bad choice, please tell me and I will add one or two more!

Zadkine

Just behind the Luxembourg Gardens there is a small, museum dedicated to Ossip Zadkine. This was also the house, surrounded by a garden, where he lived and worked most of his life. It would be better to know the address to this place if you wish to find it, as it’s more or less hidden behind tall buildings, so here it is: 101 bis, Rue d’Assas, 6th arrdt (Montparnasse).

Zadkine was born in Russia (today Belarus) in 1890, moved to Paris around 1910 (and to this house, in 1928) where he lived until his death in 1967. Of Jewish (and Scottish) extraction, he spent the years of World War II in the U.S..

Zadkine, who also painted (like his wife), wrote poems…, is of course known for his sculpturing, with influence basically from cubism and also from primitive art. The most famous may be the “Destroyed City” in Rotterdam (photo Google). He is represented in museums, parks… all around the world.


I took photos not only at the museum, but also of a statue in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Zadkine made several sculptures linked to van Gogh, which you now can find e.g. at Zundert where van Gogh was born, but also at Auvers-sur-Oise where Vincent ended his life and also is buried. Cergie kindly offered me this photo, taken at Auvers.

Although the museum may seem small, the collection is big, maybe some 100 sculptures, including in the garden. It’s clearly worth the visit.

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JoAnn kindly offered me a THANK YOU award. “This award I designed (c-jw) to nominate friendly blog-people. Why? Because I am very pleased by your BLOG-friendship and therefore I want to NOMINATE you with My own designed "THANK YOU" Award. Your friendship makes me smile, I am so happy to know you! Thank you, for your kind and sweet friendship! » So, a big THANK YOU to JoAnn !

Medicis Fountain

When visiting the Luxembourg Gardens (Jardin du Luxembourg) everybody may not necessarily pay attention to the Medicis Fountain (La Fontaine de Médicis) which you can find in one of the corners of the Gardens.

The fountain is named after Marie de Médicis (Maria de’Medici) who was married to Henry IV, widow in 1610, mother and regent to Louis XIII (and grandmother to Louis XIV) and also mother to a Spanish and an English Queen. Involved in different intrigues she was exiled in 1630 and died in Cologne in 1642.

Marie decided to create her own “Medici Palace”, which thus is the today’s Luxembourg Palace, slightly modified since. She could move in around 1625, but for a rather short period as she had to leave France five years later. The palace was of course magnificent and included e.g. 24 Rubens paintings (now at the Louvre). After different uses (prison during the Revolution, Luftwaffe headquarters during World War II…), it’s today the house of the French Senate, but the gardens, the biggest in Paris, are open for public and there is much to see and do. I may revert to this another day.

The Fountain was obviously just ready when Marie had to leave. It was modeled on what she had known during her childhood in Florence. It had to be slightly moved when the adjacent street was widened by Haussmann. At the same time, in 1862, the statue group you can see in the centre was added.

You can find some of these photos on my photo blog.

Time to again wish you a nice weekend! Back with a new post on Monday!

The metric system

In full revolution, the French National Assembly accepted during the 1790’s the proposal by the French Academy of Sciences that the definition of a metre should be one ten-millionth length of the Earth’s meridian, the distance from the equator to the North Pole. The metre as a universal measurement was internationally agreed by the end of the 19th century and as a “compensation” the French agreed to abandon “Prime Meridian”, which passed through Paris, to the benefit of Greenwich. (See my post Sept. 10th.)

I visited the Luxembourg Gardens yesterday and when I left, just across the street, I happened to see the above “metre” in an arcade of a building occupied by the French Agency for Weights and Measurements (l’Agence des Poids et Mesures). (The address is 36 rue Vaugirard, 6th arrdt.) I learnt that this is the only remaining “metre” still in place out of the 16 that were placed around Paris in 1796-97 in order to make the population acquainted with this new way of measuring.

The metre is still basically the same, but is today defined as equal to the distance traveled by light in vacuum during 1/299792458 of a second!!

One issue is still whether I shall write metre (UK) or meter (US)?

Another more important issue is obviously that the metric system is not yet generally applied! Imagine that in all my posts about e.g. altitudes and distances, I feel obliged to translate all measures to yards, feet, miles…!!

In 1960, at last, the metric system was officially recognized by almost all countries and this decimal based agreement covers not only length measurements, but also mass, temperature… When will it ever be really implemented, not only by scientists? I imagine that some of you feel “guilty”!

… and if I now proposed a specific "international agreement" between bloggers to communicate in metres, kilograms, centigrades… ? As not only the metre, but also the kilogram are French inventions and the centigrade (Celsius) a Swedish invention, I feel of course particularly concerned!

Rue Fortuny

I don’t know how well Nespresso is spread over the world. At least it’s a great success in France and I must admit that I’m a fervent Nespresso drinker since a few years, I believe even before George Clooney.

It’s doubtful if, ecologically speaking, this is the best coffee preparation method, but anyhow… So I went to the closest Nespresso shop to get my monthly dose. This shop is in an old former one-family private house (“hôtel particulier”) some ten minutes walk from where I live.

Leaving the place, I could turn to the left and find the Swedish Church of Paris or to the right and find the Parc Monceau…, but I went straight on via a small street called rue Fortuny (17th arrdt), which you can see on the top picture.

This part of Paris was scarcely inhabited until the middle of the 19th century, but Paris grew and it then became fashionable for fortuned people to own a “hôtel particulier” in this area. Only in this small street, maybe 200 meters (220 yards) long, there are a number of them, some really nice. Today they are mostly used as offices, but some quite well-known people used to live here.

Edmond Rostand lived and wrote Cyrano de Bergerac at no. 2. At no. 13 (a street number mostly avoided) lived Marcel Pagnol - very popular French author and film director; "Topaze" is perhaps the internationally most well-known of his works, starring John Barrymore and later Peter Sellers in different Anglo-American film versions. Some actors and actresses also lived here, the most famous being Sarah Bernhardt at no. 35, and also e.g. the dancer, actress and courtesan Caroline Otero (“La Belle Otero”), at no. 27. Less “official” is perhaps that Nicolas Sarkozy was born and spent his first 18 years at no. 46, together with grandparents, a later divorced mother and two brothers.
Some autumn leaves from the way home to taste my coffee.

I put a few of these photos on my photo blog.

The oldest house in Paris

This is the oldest still existing building in Paris, from 1407. More ore less impossible to take a “decent” photo, the street is narrow. The address is 51, rue de Montmorency, 3rd arrdt. There is a restaurant on the ground floor.

It was built for Nicolas Flamel (1330? – 1417), an interesting personality. He was a very successful scrivener, manuscript maker and seller. (This was before Gutenberg.)

He incidentally got hold of a book which he then thought to be the Codex, the “Book of Abraham”, and he spent some 20 years to together with his wife to decode the contents, according to what was thought, sufficiently well to recreate the recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone, producing gold and the elixir for eternal life. Anyhow, he became very rich… and when his grave was later opened it was empty…

He was certainly a great alchemist and his works in this area were taken seriously, studied by scientists during centuries, including by Isaac Newton, whose main “hobby” seems to have been alchemy. Flamel is also mentioned as one of the Grand Masters of the obviously imaginary “Priory of Sion” and as such is of course referred to in the Da Vinci Code. He was also pretended to be a friend of Albus Dumbledore and to be the inventor of the Philosophers’ (or Sorcerer’s) Stone in the first Harry Potter book. He has been forgotten neither by Victor Hugo, nor by Umberto Eco.

It is believed that if he got rich, it’s rather thanks to labour and good, possibly more or less morally correct, investments. He was a generous person – spent most of his money on building hospices, repairing churches and helping the poor. The house we can see was opened to needing persons.

The inscription (“Nous homes et femes laboureurs…”) which still can be seen on the front of the house says more or less in a free and abbreviated translation: “The men and women who live in this house will have the right to a daily Paternoster and Ave Maria….”

"India Town"

We have at least two “China Towns” in Paris and some 400 Chinese restaurants (+ Vietnamese, etc…). There are fewer restaurants serving Indian or Pakistanis food, but anyhow some 150-200 – suburbs excluded. It should of course be taken into consideration that the Indian population in France is far less important than e.g. in UK.

I was not aware of this, but the other day I discovered what you may call an “India Town” in the 10th arrondissement (see map). Here you can find a great concentration of Indian and Pakistanis restaurants, but also of bars, food shops, barber shops, CD/DVD (“Bollywood”) shops, call centres…

You may be surprised by the comparatively low prices, not only for eating, but a haircut would e.g. cost you five times less here than in a “normal” salon. I will certainly go back for eating – hoping that some bloggers will recommend what would be the best dishes to order. I’m not sure about the haircut; I’m so faithful to my present hairdresser.

An old cemetery

In July I made a post about the small church behind Sacré Cœur, Saint-Pierre-de-Montmartre, and mentioned the small graveyard connected to the church, the oldest in Paris and called Cimitière du Calvaire. I also mentioned that it’s open for visitors only once a year, November 1st, and I more or less promised to visit it then. I kept my promise. The gate was open.



This small cemetery is on the very top of Montmartre and was once a place where you could find pagan and Roman temples. The few remaining graves are mostly from the beginning of the 19th century and basically you find only local Montmartre people buried here, hardly anybody really widely known. One exception is perhaps L-A de Bougainville (1729-1811), who started the first settlement on the Falkland Islands, led a voyage around the world, fought in the American war of Independence, was a great mathematician… and has got islands, mountains and plants named after him*.

There is another grave that is worth some attention, that of the Debray family: I talked also about this in a previous post, but it may be good to repeat a few details:









The family owned a windmill on top of Montmartre, later to be known as the “Moulin de la Galette” - the only real mill still remaining on Montmartre (difficult to see as on private ground and hidden by trees).

The four Debray sons got killed during a fight with Russians which took place on Montmartre in 1814. (One was cut in pieces, with which the mill wings were “decorated”). They were all buried here and the mother put a small red painted miniature windmill on the top of the grave. The miniature is still there, has lost its colour, but it was the origin of the name “Moulin Rouge”.

Most of the graves are today of course abandoned, are covered with moss (see top picture) and - due to the season - a lot of leaves… In some cases you find a small symbolic flower. The surrounding walls are covered by wild vine.

On the way back home, I passed by the Montmartre vineyard, which I also have posted about, and could not avoid taking some photos of the vine plants (the grapes are gone) and also some other wild vine I found on my way.

*/Actually he got a state funeral and his ashes are now at the Pantheon together with those of many other French heroes, but his heart is still in the cave.

I wish you a nice weekend! Back on Monday!