It is summertime in the 6th

A strikingly handsome bust of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg appeared before us as we walked down Rue Mabillon toward the back of the Saint Sulpice church.  We'd not seen it before, even though it was installed in November 2017.  Strindberg is quoted on a plaque below the bust.  Tom was curious about that quote from Strindberg, referring to one of the murals by Eugene Delacroix inside the church.  Here's a translation:

"I often enter the church to strengthen myself in the contemplation of Jacob's struggle with the angel of Delacroix. And on leaving I remember the wrestler who stands despite his dislocated hip."

Mural by Eugene Delacroix, depicting Jacob's struggle with the angel.

I don't enter the church of Saint Sulpice to strengthen myself, but I treasure the opportunity to visit that place because I always have a sense of complete calm by the time I leave it.  I don't think I get quite the same feeling anyplace else that I've been.  I don't have to be there for very long; the feeling just washes over and through me.

My sister likes that church, too.  Perhaps it is in our DNA.

We'd entered the side door on the southern façade and made our way past the sacristy and back to the chapel of the virgin where I sat quietly for a while.

Moving on along the north side of the nave, we quickly passed by a tour guide who was whispering to his group about the pieces of the church that played roles in The DaVinci Code.  We don't care about that.

We paused to admire a large number of wooden chairs that were efficiently and elaborately stacked in the north aisle.  We speculate that these are here because the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral is out of commission, and the church of Saint Sulpice -- which is almost as large as Notre Dame, and not far away -- is now accommodating the worshipers who would otherwise be at Notre Dame.

Heliodorus driven from the temple, by Eugene Delacroix -- a mural in the church of Saint Sulpice.

At last we made our way over to the Delacroix murals.  Tom particularly likes to examine these when we go to Saint Sulpice.

We exited the main doors and looked over the Place Saint Sulpice.  The square was amazingly quiet and uncrowded.  The fountain was flowing with water again, and it is in top form now -- as clean as can be.

An uncrowded Place Saint Sulpice.

The magnificent fountain in the Place Saint Sulpice.

At the southeast corner of the Square, we walked down to the Rue de Ferou, past a newly expanded ice cream parlor and tea room at the corner of Rue Canivet (photo below).  If we still stayed on the Rue Canivet in September, this would be a hazard for Tom, who loves ice cream.

We entered the Luxembourg Gardens through the gate on Rue de Vaugirard, by the Angelina tea room.  Almost immediately, I was horrified to see an ugly building that has been erected in that part of the park.  I read the signs, which assured me that the building is only temporary.  It houses a daycare center while the center's real home is being renovated.  There is almost no vacant land in the 6th arrondissement, so this is where the temporary building has to be, I suppose.

But the rest of the garden was as lovely as ever.  We wandered slowly, pausing to rest on a couple of the ubiquitous green metal chairs, and pausing again to look at a sculpture by Zadkine that we'd forgotten (photo below).

We walked past some of the "old queens," statues representing Queens of France (as well as Saint Genevieve and other influential women) that were created and installed in the gardens in the 19th century.

Bathilde, my 40th great grandmother.  She was sold into slavery when she was
a child.  Later, Clovis II asked to marry her.  Even later, when acting as queen regent,
she abolished the trading of Christians as slaves, and she tried to buy and free children from slavery.

My 36th great grandmother, Bertrade, who died on July 12, 783,
in Choisy, Haute-Savoie, Rhone-Alpes, France, at about age 63 -- my age now.

After walking alongside the Medici Fountain, which was lined with dozens of people in green metal chairs, we exited the park and walked down the Boulevard St. Michel, past the Place de la Sorbonne, and turned left on the Boulevard Saint Germain.

The side of the lovely Medici fountain.

Tom was ready for coffee and ice cream, so I suggested that we go to Les Editeurs -- a place where I once met a friend for a drink, but Tom had not yet seen.

Les Editeurs is a classic brasserie with one dining room that is lined with books, and the other area is decorated with colorful prints.  We sat out on the sidewalk, which was decidedly quieter and roomier than the crowded Danton brasserie across the street, facing the Carrefour de l'Odéon.

Bee hives in wooden boxes in the pavilion on the left
in the Luxembourg Gardens.

When we walked past it, Danton was full of tourists.  Tourists also crowded the sidewalks on the boulevards of the 6th.  I can see why Parisians feel overwhelmed by tourists in that part of town, just as we feel overwhelmed by tourists in south Florida in the winter and early spring.

In Paris, we don't see ourselves as tourists.  Paris is just where we live (and write) in the summer.  We agree with many Parisians, that it is easier to live in the 15th and 16th arrondissements because those places don't feel like Disneyland because they aren't loaded with tourists.

Tom had his Berthillon ice cream and espresso, we shared a bottle of sparkling water, and I had a glass of wine, as we admired the Carrefour de l'Odéon.  Here's a video of our view from our table:

As we paid the tab, I checked the fitness app; we'd met our 5-mile walking goal for the day.  So we took a taxi from the taxi stand around the corner and we were home in no time.

We'd taken the metro to go over to the 6th earlier in the afternoon, when my knees and Tom's hip were still in fine form.  But after 5 miles of walking, we don't wish to suffer from going down all the steps to the metro platform underground.  We've learned that taking taxis to go home after walking is just a great way to extend our sightseeing time on street level.

Inside the brasserie called A La Tour Eiffel, 96 Rue du Commerce.

After resting in the apartment for a while, we dressed casually for dinner down the street at the brasserie called A La Tour Eiffel, across from the Saint John the Baptist church that was once the centerpiece of the town of Grenelle.  We had our first dinner in Paris at A La Tour Eiffel in August 1998.

This brasserie is handsome, has a reasonably priced menu, and serves a delicious beef carpaccio and fries (for Tom) and duck breast with mushroom sauce and asparagus (for me).

Here are more scenes from the day:

Display at A La Tour Eiffel.

Beef carpaccio (above) an duck breast with mushroom sauce (below)
at the brasserie called A La Tour Eiffel.

Old façade on Rue de Ferou.

Looking at Saint Sulpice from the Rue de Ferou.

The fountain in Place Saint Sulpice (above and below).

THANK FOR FOR RESPECTING  THE SILENCE in the church.  I can't emphasize this enough.

Detail in one of the Delacroix murals in Saint Sulpice.

Extra chairs stacked in the north aisle.

The chapel of the Virgin in Saint Sulpice.

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.