Today was my last full day in Paris. It was another beautiful day. I updated my blog while drinking a delicious cappuccino at a café around the corner from the Montparnasse cemetery.
Then I had a nice long wander through the cemetery, finding graves of people such as Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Bouvier, François Mitterand and Susan Sontag. There were so many different styles of gravestone markers and tombs. Some were quite new so I am guessing people can still get space in the cemetery – I have no idea how much that would cost. It was a lovely, peaceful place. I’ve added it to my growing list of places in Paris I want to return to.
My big outing for today was exploring the Catacombs. It was a fascinating tour! I hadn’t intended this to be a day focused on dead people, spending part of the morning at a cemetery and then the afternoon at the catacombs. I guess I wanted to commune with the dead of Paris?? To get to the Catacombs I took a long winding staircase down many meters under Paris and then a long walk through tunnels that showed what the stone quarries that had been there before they became storage for 6 million skeletons! They did a great job of not letting too many people in at once, I often felt like I was the only person walking through. It felt a little spooky, but it was part of the adventure. The last half of the tour is the catacombs themselves, and it was just fascinating seeing the way all of the bones were laid out and stacked up. I think of the millions of people who are laid to rest down here and how you can’t tell who anybody is by the way their skull or tibia, or any other bone looks. People were very respectfully quiet as they wandered through and looked at the bones and the inscriptions on the plaques. There were lots of different sayings about death. It was a fascinating way to learn a bit of French history.
After I came back up to the surface, I hopped on the metro to the Left Bank and spent time in a very different fashion – eating my lunch in front of Shakespeare and Co. watching the other tourists go past. I could see the reconstruction of Notre Dame happening across the Seine, and listened to a group of older American men trying to top each other with what they knew about French history. I had a lovely wander around Shakespeare and Co., what an absolutely delightful bookstore, not only in terms of the books that are there, but also the way it is decorated and the luscious reading room upstairs. I did wish that I had more time to spend there, though it did feel a bit strange to be in France and spending time in an English bookstore!
From there I wandered around the neighborhood a little bit, finding the Dalí sundial and going inside Saint Séverin Church and finding another altar dedicated to Saint Therese. Outside the church, I saw a priest in his brown robes having lunch.
I got shots of some of the beautiful tile in the Saint Michel Notre Dame station and one of a mural at the Luxembourg station. At the Cluny-La Sorbonne station I took tons of pictures of the beautiful mosaic artwork and signatures that are on the ceiling.
On my way home I encountered a guy out with his dog on a leash and cat in a backpack, and a trio of police officers on their bikes. I stopped to pick up my last baguette in Paris (sigh!) and also got a delicious pastry for dessert. The patisserie I went to had adorable chocolate chickens and bells. If I thought I could get one home without it melting in my backpack, I would’ve bought one.
