First trip to France (unknown date)

First trip to France

Paris. Neither of us had been there more than once, and that once was back in the 1950s before we had even met. And here US Airways was offering a bargain vacation: airfare, bus into town, five days in Paris with hotel included. It sounded very good. But as long as we were going to be there, we decided to extend our trip and tour a bit more of France, bravely on our own, and that worked too.

We landed at Orly and managed to find the bus that was to take us to Les Invalides. The bus trip was on roads that strongly resembled the Schuylkill Expressway at rush hour, so we were glad not to be driving it. We had thought we’d take the Métro from the end of the bus route at Les Invalides, but our bags were heavy and we were worn out, so we found a cab. The nice driver managed to point out to us on a sign at the taxi stand that there was a surcharge from that point, which we agreed to, and he drove us off. Between our minimal French (we hadn’t yet taken our lessons at the Alliance Française, which helped some) and his minimal English, we communicated fairly well. Mostly he told us not to take cabs while we were there: use the Métro or walk, he said. Considering the traffic we were stuck in, we agreed.

The hotel was almost invisible, its entrance a mere storefront, but inside and past the desk it was bigger. Our room, on the second floor, was to the right, and the left, and the right, and down, and around: the result of several houses having been turned into a single hotel. The room was on the corner, with windows in both directions, and was large and really marvelous. We had a view of the main street plus one of the tiny side street with its fruit market. We were in the Montmartre sector, but not on the hill, and I’d probably never find the hotel again. But it was a Great Western, so maybe with the web I could.

We had a nap and then found a stand-up luncheonette up the street for a very minimalist sandwich. Then we decided to walk to the canal that our good friend Santo had told us about. He had been very impressed by it, but we were not so much so. Still, it was a good walk on a nice day when we weren’t up to anything cultural. That night we consulted our Cheap Eats book and walked up a couple of rather dark streets to find a little, uncrowded restaurant, very plain but fine. We had sausages, as I recall, and a wonderful apple tart. Don ordered a cognac and somehow we asked the waitress/owner/wife of chef what was the difference between armagnac and cognac. So what did she do but bring me a glass of armagnac, free, so we could taste the difference. What a very nice introduction to the “unfriendly” Parisians.

I’m very hazy after all this time about what order we saw things in, but it doesn’t matter anyway. We went to the Louvre, of course. We had trouble getting out of the Louvre, as a matter of fact, because it seemed that half the stairways were undergoing renovations, and we wandered around for a good half-hour trying to leave the museum. I think the most mind-boggling thing we saw was the Rubens room full of huge paintings all about how great Marie de Medici and her son, le roi whatever, were. It was the most amazing ego trip I’ve ever seen.

We went to the Pompidou Centre and were chiefly struck by how dusty it was. All those brutalist industrial pipes were covered with grime and bird poop. We saw the silly little shopping center that has replaced Les Halles and felt a great loss. We had wonderful chocolat chaud nearby, with a cheerful waiter sympathizing with our chilled, damp state.

We went to Notre Dame and were awed again. We saw a wonderful flower market across the plaza from it and took pictures. Then we went to the nearby Conciergerie, which neither of us had seen before. It is part of the Palais de Justice, and Marie Antoinette was imprisoned there. It had a marvelous Gothic hall, renovated during the 19^th century, and an intricate little circular stairway that Don got a good photo of. We explored Saint-Chapelle and were struck with how you come into it underneath and have to climb very tight stairs to get to the main chapel.

We got very good at the Métro. A station on the grand boulevard at the head of our street was only a block and a half from the hotel, so we used it every day. Once we went in the wrong direction, but we just got off, climbed over the underground bridge, and backtracked. Needless to say, our first purchases had been our carnets.

We walked along the Seine for miles. We saw the Eiffel Tower, as a necessity, and the Trocadero across the Seine from it, with its incredible fountains like water cannons and young people lounging around taking the sun. We saw a terrific exhibit on bugs at le Petit Palais, which had giant bugs crawling around on its columns and façade as an advertisement.

We walked for miles through residential districts and shopping areas. Sometimes this was because we were looking for lunch, our biggest problem. Every place we could usually find was a restaurant that wanted you to eat a real French meal, three courses plus wine, and we didn’t want to do that in the middle of the day. Our Cheap Eats book had clued us in to the fact that tablecloths meant serious food; no tablecloths meant light lunch. We managed to find a few sandwich places, but it wasn’t easy.

Dinners were strictly Cheap Eats, and we did very well. Chez Marius was one of our favorites, on the left bank, well away from the river and past the university. The owner was delightful: she was interested in learning a little English and kept asking us what things were. I cherish the memory of her pointing to a cornichon and asking the English for it. When we said “pickle” she loved the word and went off muttering “pickle, pickle, pickle.” We ate in a nice place on the Ile de la Cité on a back street. We ate at one place that was quite a distance on two Métros and looked as if it would be expensive but wasn’t. Don accidentally dripped a little red wine on the tablecloth and was pretending to hide it from the waiter, who grinned and said, “Non, non, c’est moi, c’est moi!”

We visited the Musée D’Orsay, which has an incredible collection. The most fun thing there was in a sort of cavern off the restrooms, where there was a model of Paris, quite large, under glass so you could walk around on top of it. Nearby was a huge cutaway model of the Opéra, with all its stairs and backstage exposed. Fascinating. We wanted to eat lunch in the dining room on top of the museum, but so did everybody else, so we found a little place nearby.

Don bought some strawberries at the little market across the alley from the hotel and said they were the best he’d had in his whole life. He kept rejecting buying strawberries when we got home because “they wouldn’t be as good as the ones in Paris,” until I pointed out that he could spend the rest of his life not eating strawberries because they would never be as good. We had hot chocolate outdoors at the café below our hotel window; the waiter did a whole hilarious mime show after a woman charging down the sidewalk knocked into him and made him spill his tray. He imitated her mincing along obliviously and cracked us all up.

We explored the Place des Vosges and loved it. We took the Métro way out near the Bois de Boulogne to the Musée Marmottan, which has the most incredible collection of Monets in the world, plus a lot of other really nice things. It’s on the edge of a large park in a very posh neighborhood, so we sat on a bench and watched the kids on the merry-go-round and their trikes and bikes.

After our five days it was time to leave, so we went to pick up the car. They gave us directions to the periphérique, and we managed to get lost finding it. Then we got on it, sandwiched between huge trucks, and missed the turnoff to Chartres. We got off at the next exit and spent two hours wandering through lovely countryside that was filled with picturesque tiny villages that weren’t in our atlas. We had no idea where we were, except that we were south of Paris—that much we were pretty sure of. Finally I saw a sign for one little town that was actually on our map, and we were found. By this time we were starving, so of necessity we stopped at a large restaurant off the highway and had to have a real French luncheon. Then on to Chartres.

The tourist information center was actually on a main street in plain view—highly unusual—so after leaving our car in an underground parking garage and getting thoroughly confused by the machine you were supposed to pay, we stopped in and asked about hotels. They pointed out one in our price range (low) and called to get a room for us. Very nice service. So we retrieved the car, because the hotel was really like a motel: someone’s house with a row of rooms built in back of it in the yard. It was fine, until the next morning when we had to call the house and tell them “Nous n’avons pas de l’électricité.”

We decided to save the cathedral till the next day, so we wandered around the completely deserted town. It seems to be a big day trip, but not an overnight stop. We looked all over for a light dinner, finding many places closed, and finally ending up on a big square where a huge place with multiple outdoor tables (too chilly) had little individual quiches.

Don woke up with what felt like the start of a bad cold, so we sought a pharmacie. “Quelque chose pour un rhume,” we requested, and were given an interesting container of powder. The pharmacist asked us what was the English word for this—it resembled nothing so much as an envelope of Nutra-Sweet—and we could think of nothing but “packet.” He seemed happy with that and wished us well. Either the French have found a cure for the cold or Don simply had a reaction to the beautiful mustard fields we had been driving through, because he was fine within an hour or so.

The cathedral was, of course, still glorious and crumbling from age. Malcolm Miller was conducting a tour, but we elected not to join it, though I was tempted. Don feels Miller concentrates on windows at the expense of the architecture, and he wanted to concentrate on the architecture. So we did, for at least an hour. I did eavesdrop on Mr. Miller once in a while as we wandered. And we both heard his gentle pitch for payment on the north porch (that is, after all, the way he makes his living), while we were sitting below on the plaza having some chocolat chaud. I bought his book the next winter, and truly it is all about the windows. Someday I would like to take his tour.

The gardens behind the cathedral were a pleasant surprise, with a spectacular wisteria arbor in full bloom and an unexpected view over the town and countryside from a parapet we didn’t know was there. Also a terrific view of the apse.

We left with some reluctance and headed south again, to Blois. Found the château with surprisingly little trouble after winding up through the town. The château was the official royal residence until Henri IV moved himself and retinue to Paris, so it’s pretty impressive. The François I staircase, a spiral in an exterior tower, looked familiar because it was copied for Biltmore, the Vanderbilt home in North Carolina. The gargoyle downspouts were marvelous; we took a picture. And the artwork is great, although the very graphic portrayal of the murder of the Duc de Guise in 1588 was a bit much.

Luckily, outside the château was its own little lunch place, so we sat in the sun overlooking the town and ate. Then on to Chambord. Our Karen Brown book recommended the Hôtel St. Michel right in the lap of the château, so we booked a room there. Quite nice, and cheap. Then we walked down the drive to the château. What a pile! The guidebook says 440 rooms, and I believe it. The double spiral staircase, designed by Leonardo—who worked for François I—is amazing, and I can’t figure out how it works. People going up don’t meet people going down. The roof is the most stunning part of the château: spires and turrets and ventilator shafts and chimneys by the hundreds, it seems, and you can just walk around among them.

We ate dinner in the hotel, and it was delicious. Cheap Eats had taught us to order one of the “Le Menu” choices at restaurants, much less expensive than a la carte even though it is three or four courses.

Next morning we set off for Chenonceau, which is the most beautiful of all. I fell in love with it. You walk down a long allée of plane trees and there it is, with a tower in front of the bridge and the chapel windows facing you. And on either side are the rival gardens: Catherine de Medici’s and Diane de Poitiers—the wife and the mistress of Henri II. The rooms are still furnished, and someone arranges incredible bouquets of flowers for the halls. Diane was the one who built the bridge across the Cher River; Catherine evicted her after Henri died and turned the bridge into the gallery you see today. We walked across, admiring a swan near the far shore. Then we went back and looked at the gardens and the greenhouses.

From there we headed to Azay-le-Rideau, which is just plain cute. It was strictly a pleasure palace: the turrets and moat are just decorative. It is beautifully re-furnished and restored. We found a nice crèpérie in the village for lunch.

That was about enough châteaux, although as we drove along a little river we saw a huge one across the water that wasn’t even mentioned in the guidebooks. I guess they are thick upon the ground. We were headed in the general direction of the Dordogne.

It started to rain. We fumbled in vain with various buttons and levers on the dashboard, trying to find what would turn the windshield wiper on. (There was only one, very large, to cover the whole windshield.) I resorted to the manual, which was, of course, in French. Neither of us knew how to say windshield wiper in French, and the manual was thick and not very well illustrated. I finally found something that looked promising, and indeed it turned it on. (The next day we got very adventurous and tried washing the windshield. The spray worked, all right: it shot right over the roof of the car.)

I think that must have been the night we ended up in Châtellerault. We found a hotel listed in Lynne’s old Michelin Guide right on the main drag, with parking even, so it was a good place. We decided, as it was fairly early, to go out on the architectural walking tour we had seen signs for, and the nice lady at the desk insisted on lending us des parapluies, as it still looked very threatening. The tour was quite nice, including an ancient bridge across the river with flood markings on it dating as early as the 1600s, and a church with an extremely strange façade. We enjoyed ourselves, and as I recall it only drizzled. I don’t remember dinner at all.

Off to the Dordogne the next day. We were learning that we liked the D roads, the little ones. The Autoroutes were very expensive and mostly unscenic; the N roads were filled with trucks and other traffic avoiding the expense. The Ds were quiet and very lovely, but they did lead to getting lost. We got lost a lot. Sometimes we even got lost on the N roads, because the French road signs are certainly not like ours. In the first place, it would never occur to them to encourage you by putting a route marker on the first leg of the road you have (you think) just turned on to—I think in the U.S. they are called “pickup signs.” As a result you can go quite some distance on the wrong road before you know it’s wrong. In the second place, they will point the way to Sarlat once, and you keep going many miles through intersections and traffic circles with no mention of Sarlat again, so that you are sure you are on the wrong road and have missed the turn. Then suddenly a sign points the way to Sarlat. This means that even when you aren’t lost you think you are, which is just as unsettling. And in the third place, their directional signs with arrows aren’t like ours: the arrow for straight ahead doesn’t point skyward but left at a 60-degree angle. The left-at-60-degrees looks very much like left at 90 degrees, so sometimes until we caught on we’d skip the straight-ahead road and take the left one. You can’t imagine how many places in France we have seen by accident. Of course we occasionally get lost in Italy, too, and Spain is much worse than France.

Anyway, we muddled our way to Sarlat, passing the Lascaux Caves on the way, and Les Eyzies, and followed the river road to Beynac. It was a lovely drive, particularly Laroque-Gageac, built right along the river with the buildings on one side and the water on the other. We found the Hotel Bonnet in Beynac, listed in Karen Brown’s book, and they had a room. We walked into it, put down our bags, and looked out the window and up, up, up—and there was a castle looming above us. Most exciting. On the other side of the hotel was the river, just beyond the road. Rick Steve’s guidebook to France praises the hotel but says its management is “impersonal,” or some such word. I can’t imagine what he means—they couldn’t have been nicer and friendlier. Mme. Bonnet only does the flower arrangements (magnificent!) now; her niece and nephew run the place; they both speak English beautifully and when we asked if we could stay an extra night they wiggled things around until we could. (We had to move from Room One to Room Two: the young manager said “If you keep coming we can put you in all the rooms in sequence!”) And the next year when we wrote for reservations on the Thursday before Easter the young woman called us long distance to say that they actually didn’t open for the season until Good Friday, but that they would be happy to let us stay overnight. We’d just have to eat dinner in the village because their restaurant wouldn’t be open. When we arrived they were laughing with us about having all the dining room chairs on drop cloths in the hall, getting a new coat of shellac, and they gave us a key to the outside door when we left for dinner in case they were in bed when we got back. This is impersonal?

We spent our in-between day driving to Don’s favorite town, Monpazier, where we sat in the sun in the plaza and did a sketch or two. Then we went to Villeneuve sur Lot, which is much larger, for lunch. They are both bastide towns, fort towns, built in the 13^th century by both the English and the French in southern France before the Hundred Years War, and they all have the basic central square with market, arcaded all around, with the church in one corner. Monpazier is wonderful because it has never grown and is still all within its original walls. It still looked just like Don’s slides from the 50s. When we told our young host at dinner where we had been he told us that if we liked bastides we should visit Domme, just across the river.

So the next morning, after a brief trip up to look at Château Beynac from the outside, we did. Domme was spectacular, up on a steep hill with walls all around, and still the same bastide plan within. The views over the whole Dordogne valley were gorgeous. History says that despite its seemingly impregnable defenses, the Huguenots captured it by scaling the cliffs at night and opening the gates.

We had heard that the Lot Valley nearby was beautiful, so we headed there. It was a really nice drive once we got to it: getting there required an N road, but the valley had a D road. We had been dimly aware of a big storm the night before, although it was sunny now, and we found evidence: one cliff with a house built into its side along the road had several veritable waterspouts coming out of the rock. The road was also full of puddles.

We saw a marvelous little town, St. Cirque Lapopie, on a hill across the river, but we didn’t feel we could spare the time on this trip (we had lunch there on a later trip). We needed to start heading north again. We took the road up toward Figeac, splashing through puddles, and to our horror found barriers blocking the road into town with signs warning of roads closed due to flooding. We had no idea how to go around the town, and the road we wanted was on the other side. The white van in front of us simply went around the barriers, and we followed. It wasn’t bad at all—like Mobile on a wet day. We followed the van to the centre and found our road without incident.

The rest of the trip was largely, as I recall, filled with hotel misadventures. I can’t remember any scenery or destinations except the basic one of getting back to Orly in time. We tracked down one tiny town off the main highway that had a small hotel listed in Lynne’s Michelin. We found the town square; the house-like hotel was on it, but it was locked despite lawn furniture, toys scattered around, and flowers in the window boxes. We pounded on the door to no avail. Finally we gave up and went back about fifty yards to a much less prepossessing little hotel. The proprietress let us in with some reluctance and locked the door after us. She was obviously suffering from un grand rhume, barely able to function. The room had two cots at right angles to each other, a shower tucked in a closet, and a toilet down the hall with a hall light on such a short timer that you had to sprint.

We were hungry, and the hotel’s dinner wasn’t to be till 8:30, so we wandered into the village to the tiny general store. No one but the owner was there when we went in, but with suspicious alacrity the entire population seemed to find the need to buy something. I guess they hadn’t seen an American since the autoroute was built. We picked out some crackers and cookies, and Don offered her a franc note that was about like a five-dollar bill. “Oh! Du papier!” she exclaimed. She didn’t have change for it. We had nothing smaller—in fact there is nothing smaller except coins. Within a moment the entire village was involved, and somehow by pooling all their resources they managed to come up with the dollar or so in French change. It was amazingly complicated, but very friendly. As we left, Don turned back, grinning, and said “Je regrette!” and they all roared.

Dinner at our hotel was probably provided only because a large family group had reserved a big table for a birthday party. They were very convivial. Our hostess snuffled her way around the tables in her bedroom slippers, eyes and nose streaming. The choice on the menu was steak, period, and when it came it was what the French refer to as bleu, which is what my mother used to describe as “walk the cow by the fire and cut a slice off.” We managed to get some of it down by using a lot of bread. Then bed.

We picked a town near Orly for our last night—Corbeil-Essonnes. Michelin said it had a nice hotel in the middle of town. Trouble was, Michelin’s tiny map was very inadequate, and we went around and around for at least 45 minutes trying to find the street. Finally we found it, and the hotel. It was boarded up. Obviously, we felt, this was because nobody else had been able to find it either.

Michelin also listed a larger and more expensive hotel out on the highway, but we couldn’t find it at all. We stopped for gas, and they couldn’t tell us where it was either. We were wandering back through town, wondering if this time we really would have to sleep in the car, when we got on a residential street and passed a huge hospital with a large park around it. And there, on the edge of the park, was a plain, brand-new, garden-variety motel. It looked very good. It looked even better when they had a room for us.

We got to Orly through rush-hour traffic and looked for the place to leave the rental car. You’d think that when you know the words for car—voiture—and rent—louer—you’d be able to find the rental car lot, wouldn’t you? We went round and round, much to the irritation of drivers behind us who knew where they were going. Finally we found what seemed to be the appropriate place, although there was no one in the little office. We eventually managed to locate someone to rid us of the thing, and found the place where they concealed U.S. Airways planes. And so home.