Paris Journal 2009 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
Sign
my guestbook. View
my guestbook. ← Previous Next → Back to the beginning
|
Meryl Streep was recently in
Paris because she had to be in France anyway for a film festival in Deauville
this month. She told the newspaper
interviewer that she likes the rue Mouffetard because it has the ambiance of
a little village but it is in the big city.
She especially likes it on market days when she can buy fresh
vegetables there. We walked to the rue Mouffetard
yesterday, starting by cutting across the Luxembourg Gardens, then taking
quaint little streets like rue Le Goff, rue Malebranche, rue des Fosses St.
Jacques, rue de l’Estrapede, and rue Blainville. First, at the Luxembourg
Gardens, we stopped in the Orangerie to view the current exhibition of the
photographs of Albert
Monier. One of the photos featured
a couple of unusual stairways at 72 rue Mouffetard. I made a mental note to find them. We were really ambling, taking
our time, pausing to look into shop windows and examine posted restaurant
menus, and admiring quaint storefronts.
So it took us a while to reach our goal. When we arrived at the Place de la Contrescarpe,
Tom wanted to get an ice cream cone at Häagen-Dazs, but he tried to make it
seem as though I was the one that wanted ice cream. That never works, because ice cream is too
sweet for me and I just don’t like it that much. But I encouraged him to go
ahead and get one for himself. He
decided not to, but as soon as we left the Place, there was an Italian gelato
shop on our right. He could not
resist. He went in and bought a cone
while I read a historical marker and photographed a couple of features on a
building across the street. When he came out of the shop,
he had the most beautiful ice cream cone I’ve ever seen. It was almost too beautiful to eat. The shopkeeper made the ice cream look like
a rose, not a scoop. I tasted it. It was light and airy, and not as
sickeningly sweet as Häagen-Dazs. Tom happily ate his ice cream
cone as we slowly meandered down the hill that is the rue Mouffetard. The numbers up by the Place de la
Contrescarpe were very low – the twenties and thirties – so by the time we
reached 72, I’d forgotten all about the photograph of the two stairways. It was only when we’d nearly
reached the bottom of the hill that I remembered. So we turned around and went uphill. The exercise is good for us, I reasoned. Number 72 is one of those doors
with a decorative grill over its window.
I could not photograph the stairways, but we could peek through the
grill and see them. It almost looked
as though there was a street behind them, but when I checked the map book,
there was no street indicated. We walked back down and went
around the corner at the rue Jean Calvin.
There was a school, and what looked like it may have once been a
street closed off by a tall, locked gate. We went on down the hill to the
pleasant intersection in front of the St. Médard church. The street widens there, before you reach
the fountain at the foot of the hill, and there are some trees in the middle
of the street. The enterprising café
across from the church has tables set up under the trees there, which I
thought looked very inviting. So we
sat down to have “tea.” The young patronne came out to take our order: a glass of white wine, a coffee, and a
salad with little squares of toast and ham to share. Wasps were annoying us a little bit, but la patronne had wisely put wasp traps
in paper bags on a little table under the trees. The wine and coffee arrived in
the most unusual cups. We enjoyed our
little rest there and then decided to go on to the Jardin des Plantes. We’ve done this from that same starting point
before, a couple of times, taking the rue Censier which I do not particularly
like. So I used the map book to find
a different way. I selected the rue de
l’Épée de Bois, the rue Pestalozzi, and then the rue du Puits de l’Ermite
(the street of the hermit’s wells) which ends at a charming Place of the same
name, right in front of the Paris Mosque, which is right across from the end
of the Jardin des Plantes. We went up to the mosque’s open
doorway. Churches in Paris are almost
all open to visits by tourists just about every day, and no entry fee is
required although the churches appreciate little donations very much. The mosque makes it very clear that an
entry fee is required. That put us
off. The mosque, while attractive,
is not as historic as many of the churches, and something about its garden, which
we could see from the doorway, was unappealing. We decided not to visit the mosque. We went on to the Jardin des
Plants. We only wandered and rested in
the southwest corner of the Jardin before deciding to make our way home. I wanted to see the rue des Boulangers,
which I don’t think we’ve walked along before. So we did, and it was charming. We walked on up the hill that is the home
of the Panthéon, the Montagne Ste. Genevieve, staying on the rue Clovis,
passing the remnant of the old Philippe
Auguste wall that once enclosed Paris, and then the rue Cujas until we
reached the boulevard St. Michel, where we turned right to buy newspapers. Then we were at the Place de la
Sorbonne, facing the beginning or end of the long rue Vaugirard, across the
boulevard. The rue Vaugirard took us
directly home to the rue Servandoni and the rue du Canivet. After resting for an hour after
our four-hour walk, we decided to go to the Brasserie St. Benoit on the
street of the same name, where we dined on luscious vegetable soup, lamb
chops, carrot mousse, filet mignon de
porc in a rich, dark mustard sauce, and chocolate cake. The manager or owner is now a
man of Asian origin, whose English was quite good. We spoke French, of course, but it was fun
to listen to him use his English to explain the various types of fish to a
Russian woman and the various types of steak to an American couple. The manager looks precisely
like an older, paler version of the person being shot in this famous Vietnam war photo. He uses his hands a lot while describing
food. He runs a taught ship. The moment potential customers pause to
examine the menu out on the sidewalk, he orders one of his handsome young
French waiters to go out and greet them immediately. A friendly young woman who could be his
daughter or granddaughter expertly runs the bar. The place is clean, attractive,
and welcoming. The food was very
good. The vegetable soup was a purée
than made me yearn for my Cuisinart, with which I can make equally good
soup. The big pile of vegetables that
came with Tom’s lamb chops were cut in wavy, super thin slices by someone
with a very sharp knife and a good hand.
These were cut in Asian style; no French chef cuts vegetables like
this. They were beautiful. Wine on the menu was listed in
bottles only. There was no wine by the
small pitcher, and no wines advertised by the glass. But this was a brasserie, so I knew I could
order just one glass even if it wasn’t listed that way on the menu. The test would be how much would they
charge me? I was given a decent-sized
glass of chardonnay and charged 5 euros.
That was fair. I was also delighted by the
carrot mousse that accompanied my filet
mignon de porc. My only regret was
that there wasn’t a little more pork.
The sauce would have made Julia Child proud. Speaking of Julia, the movie
that everyone in the U.S. has been talking about will arrive in Paris on
September 16. We will try to go to see
it, although Tom isn’t much of a movie-goer.
This one, though, like Ratatouille, I think he is interested in
seeing. Watching it here gives us the
advantage of seeing the French subtitles.
I always like to see how the experts translate idiomatic language. Well, it is time to go to the
market now. A la prochaine. |
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
The
Senate hosts art exhibitions in the Orangerie of the Luxembourg Gardens.
Cute
restaurant on the way from the Luxembourg Gardens to the rue Mouffetard.
Cute
restaurant on the corner of the rue Mouffetard and the rue du Pot de Fer.
At
23 rue Mouffetard, there was once a “Caberet of the Ragman.” Later, Felix de
Bujadoux created a town hall for the communities of Mouffetard, Contrescarpe,
and Montagne Sainte Genevieve here.
Odd
cups for coffee and wine at La Salle a Manger, 138 rue Mouffetard, across
from the St. Médard church. |
