In need of a few books

We need books.  Never mind the 10,000 books already in this apartment.  We need three books in particular, and we need them ASAP, for work. 

One is the Norton Critical Edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the 2nd edition (not the most recent one, which is the 3rd edition -- that we have). 

I did some searching and found that the American Library of Paris has that particular volume -- according to its online card catalog.  This private library re-opens following the holiday weekend tomorrow.  So that will be tomorrow's adventure.  Memberships in this library are expensive, so I am not sure how this will work out.

Saint Sulpice comes into view as we walk over
toward the 5th arrondissement.  We stopped inside
to see how the church is doing.  All is well.  People
were gathering for Mass.  There was no sign of the
fire that happened there (before the fire at
Notre Dame de Paris).

Tom also needs a copy of his own scholarly book, The Ivory Leg in the Ebony Cabinet.  He didn't bring one with him to France, and now he needs a piece of it for his current project.

Finally, we need a copy of Peter Beidler's Rafts and Other Rivercraft: In Huckleberry Finn.  We have the e-book, but we need a dead-tree book because of some ridiculous thing called DRM.  I and many other people strongly object to DRM.  If you buy an ebook, you should be able to copy pages just as you can copy pages of a dead-tree book, for your own purposes and use.  But DRM blocks you from doing this.

If anyone wants to FedEx any of these books to us, great!  But we certainly don't expect that to happen.

Even though yesterday was a national holiday and a Sunday, several English-language bookstores were open.  We hiked over to the 5th arrondissement to visit them:  San Francisco Books, Berkeley Books, and the Red Wheelbarrow. 

The managers of San Francisco Books and The Red Wheelbarrow were helpful, friendly, and interested in our quest.  The Berkeley Books manager just said, right off the cuff without even looking, that she didn't have these three books.  She said she would remember a title like The Ivory Leg in the Ebony Cabinet if she had it.  Everyone seems to like that title!

We were not surprised that she didn't have these books, but we were a little taken aback at how quickly she dismissed our request.

The Saint Sulpice fountain has water in it again!

The woman who manages The Red Wheelbarrow (9 rue de Médicis) was happy to have an author in her shop, and she wanted to be as helpful as possible.  We did buy a copy of the 3rd edition of the Norton Huck Finn from her, just so Tom could have a copy to mark up with his notes.  (The copy we have in the apartment belongs to the apartment's owner, who, like Tom, has taught courses and written about Mark Twain.)

By the time we left her shop, it was almost the dinner hour.  We had no time to visit the Shakespeare and Company bookstore across the river.  So we went in search for dinner instead.

We ended up at Botan on the Rue Grégoire de Tours in the 6th arrondissement.  This tiny restaurant is fairly new, and highly rated in Lafourchette.  Lafourchette identified the cuisine there as French, but it is actually French with a heavy Japanese influence.

Amuse bouche at Botan, on the Rue Grégoire de Tours.

And it was delightful.  We were seated at a table in the window, and soon each of us had an amuse bouche.  It was a creamy and savory dollop flavored with tuna, seaweed, and more.  Delicious!

Then Tom had a very expensive and very small main course of marinated steak, and I had the duckling filet.  Both were excitingly flavorful.

We had lovely desserts -- one that featured seasonal cherries for me, and a small millefeuille for Tom.  The chef came out to serve us the desserts, and to remove our plates, which were absolutely clean.  He liked that.  We had used bread bits on our forks to sop op every drop of sauce.

Steak at the Botan restaurant, in the 6th arrondissement.

We started to walk home, but we'd already walked far and we wanted to see the entire Concert de Paris before the holiday fireworks.  We thought that if the taxi got caught in bad traffic (people trying to reach the vicinity of the Champ de Mars for the fireworks), we'd just pay him and walk the rest of the way.

But evidently everyone planned ahead, and they already were in their places.  The taxi sailed through the streets of the 7th, and we were soon home.  The métro could not have been faster than that.

I moved the armchairs into the dining room, where the TV is affixed to the wall.  So we had our own little home theatre, and we thoroughly enjoyed the show -- fantastic music and fireworks -- until after midnight.

Duckling filets at Botan.

Earlier yesterday, I did have the TV on but muted for the military parade on the Champs Elysées.  Angela Merkel was the president's honored guest, and all seemed to go as planned.  Using the computer, I also had YouTube on, which showed me that yellow-vest protesters were noisily parading just a few blocks away, on the chic Rue Saint Honoré.  The police did not allow them to march down to the Champs Elysées.

Today I saw some video clips showing that a small group of protesters did make it onto the Champs Elysées after the military parade was over.  They tried to do some damage by setting fire to trash containers and tossing metal barricades about.  But the numbers of protesters participating in this violent vandalism were small.

The stately church of Saint Sulpice.

By the way, most of the yellow vests don't wear yellow vests anymore.  I think this is so that if real trouble erupts, they can just run off and blend into the throngs of normal pedestrians on the street.
 
If I hadn't gone looking for video coverage of protesters on the Quatorze Juillet, I would have been completely unaware that they were out and about.  Paris is a big city.

I sympathize with the plight of the people protesting, but I don't support their violence.  In fact, I think the violence (including property damage) hurts, and does not help, their cause.