We spent the night in Laval and on our way to Lamballe, found Vitré (would be a great base for visiting the area as well). In Lamballe we stayed 4 nights at a beautiful B&B called le Manoir de Villeneuve. Nathalie, the owner, is welcoming AND she has a Lacanche in her kitchen!

Each day we drove along the coastline and walked some of the seaside trails.  I would like to go back with a bike on the car!  I discovered that I like cider and that the Bretagne’s make a very good version of calvados called “Fine Bretagne”.

We visited:  Rennes, Lamballe, Val André, Roscoff, Dinan, Dinard, St. Malo, Cap Fréhil, Mont Saint Michel.  We also stumbled upon this amazing Chateau in the middle of nowhere – Chateau de la Ballue.

People were exceptionally nice and it was much less expensive than Paris.  We stopped in Normandy on our way back to visit Omaha Beach and I spent my entire visit in the museum.  I continue to be fascinated by WWII and it’s impact on France.  We visited a memorial in Brittany as well – near St. Malo, a town that was completely destroyed and rebuilt.

I’ve kept lots of notes so if you’re planning to go, let me know and I’ll share.

True Compass

Au Vieux d'Arcole

Donna has been reading Paris and Her Remarkable Women by Lorraine Liscio and has just finished the story of Heloise and Abelard. Heloise was a well-educated young woman in 12th century Paris, and the famous philosopher Abelard, so the story goes, was her teacher. They fell in love and Heloise became pregnant. They married secretly, but soon Heloise went to live in a convent. Her furious uncle Canon Fulbert had Abelard castrated; he then became a monk. They never saw each other again, although they corresponded throughout their lives. (The story is much more complicated than I’ve given it here, but at least you get the idea.)

The book indicates that one of the oldest restaurants in Paris now sits on the Ile de la Cité in the area where Heloise and Abelard lived. With Donna’s friend Annette, we tracked it down: Au Vieux Paris d’Arcole. Their sign says they’ve been an inn since 1594. We arrived early; the kitchen staff were still eating their dinners, but the waiters waved us inside and let us tromp through the building, taking pictures. I don’t know if they’ve really been in business since 1594, but the building is rickety enough to have been standing that long. Upstairs, all the walls and ceilings have been covered over in red brocade – astonishingly dust-free, we noted. The furnishings look like they’ve been around at least a couple of centuries.

We returned later for dinner. With wine and a little dessert, it came to €47 each. But the food was tasty and came accompanied with lots of vegetables, always a winner in my book. I can’t say we felt the presence of Heloise and Abelard, but we at least remembered them as we dined.

In the early 1800s, covered shopping arcades sprang up around the city, eventually over a hundred in all. They were the precursors of today’s shopping malls, where women could walk from store to store without getting splashed by passing horses and carriages.

Some of those arcades, called passages, still exist today. My favorite is Passage Vivienne, located a block or two behind the Palais Royale. This arcade was opened in 1826. Its mosaic floors and huge fanlight windows even today evoke the feeling of a past time. Here you can shop for objets d’art, rugs, fine fabrics, jewelry, art, shoes and women’s designer clothing. I almost always stop in at Catherine André, a store with handmade clothes in stunning colors and patterns.

Passage Vivienne

On my last visit to Passage Vivienne, Donna and I had lunch at LeGrand Filles et Fils, a wine store that has been in this same location well over a hundred years. (I was delighted to notice that the name puts daughters before sons.) The store began as a grocery, and much of the shop retains the original interior. Today LeGrand specializes in very fine wines, and they’ve created a beautiful wine-tasting bar, surrounded by cases of wine. It’s open Monday through Saturday from noon to 7pm.

You can simply sit and sip glasses of white or red wines or champagnes, or have lunch from the tasting menu.  The menu changes by the season, and of course a wine is recommended for each plate. The lunches are light and tend toward cold plates. On the menu were sausages, sardines, tuna, foie gras, dried beef, and smoked salmon. I had a lentil salad with smoked trout, paired with a 2005 Cuvée Claude Denogent, a white burgundy. Prices aren’t particularly a bargain; my plate of lentils and trout was €19, but it was worth it just to enjoy the space. You can sit at the bar itself, or at a couple of small tables with high wicker stools.

Legrand

Bar at Legrand

The service here is leisurely; this is no place to grab a quick bite and go. Instead, you’ll want to linger in the space, perhaps adding a green salad or bit of cheese with another glass of wine. The room where we ate was quiet; the only background music we heard was the clinking of glasses and low hum of conversation.

LeGrand occasionally has evening jazz concerts in the tasting bar; you might want to stop by and check out the schedule.

LeGrand Filles et Fils
Passage Vivienne (entrances at 5, rue de la Banque; 6, rue Vivienne; and 4, rue des Petits-Champs. Metro Bourse.

Judith chose a wine for us (she’s good at this, so when you go, just let her do her thing).  A lovely rosé from Cahors!  Notice the bottle is empty.  We ordered a small plate of charcuterie and cheese and all was good in the world.

Note while at Les Caves du Prague: if you happen to see the shop across the street with it’s doors open – check it out too – Chemin de Bretagne – specializing in products from Britanny. They have a KILLER beurre salé crème liqueur in tiny bottles that fit nicely in small freezers .

Afterwards, we went around the corner to rue de Cotte – many restaurants here.  We dined at Cotte Rôti next to Le Temps Modernes where we had dinner a few months ago.  Both are quite good, have outdoor seating and thoughtful wine lists.

Les Caves du Prague
8 rue de Prague
01 72 68 07 36

Le Temps Modernes
91 rue de Charenton (corner Cottes/Charenton)
01 43 46 81 94

Cotti Rôti
1, rue de Cotte
01 43 45 06 37

If you don’t have a similar museum where you come from, it’s worth a visit – especially with children.  It’s an excuse anyway to visit the Jardin des Plantes which is a wonderful treasure for Paris in and of itself.

There is a special room where all the extinct or endangered species are displayed – don’t miss this room – it’s on the 2nd floor.  It’s amazing to me that we humans can actually hunt something to it’s extinction.

The whole place reminded me of Deyrolle (which you can visit for free – it’s on rue de Bac in the 7th).  At Deyrolle you can get really up close and personal.  It’s a little bizarre but is what it is.

The baker surprised me the most.  I had casually asked him if we could “stop by” and take a peek at the ovens.  Well, being the proud Frenchman he is, he spent at least 1/2 hour with us and not only showed us the ovens but showed us how to make the baguette that goes in them.  Croissants too (I’ve never seen so much butter folded into dough in my life).  I have a whole new respect for the art of bread-making and the man who’s baking the bread!  He’s in the shop at 3:00 in the morning and leaves around 2:00 in the afternoon.  He HAND makes 180 “traditions” per day and makes an additional 100 baguettes.  And then there’s all the other bread he makes too.  It was a great tour – as much for the adults as the children.

There are memorials to the victims of Nazi atrocities and to the communists and resistance fighters who were sent to the same concentration camps or killed in the various parks around Paris.  Quite something to see.

From Friday to Sunday, we visited or saw by bus, métro and many, many footsteps, the Opera, Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde, Tuileries Gardens, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Pont Neuf, Isle de la Cité, Isle Saint-Louis, St. Sulpice, shopping on Cherche-Midi, Bon Marché, Deyrolle, Printemps, Galeries Lafayette, Bastille Market, rue des Rosiers, the river Seine “beaches” and the Hotel de Ville.

Whew!  She’s on her way back to London and I’m going to soak my feet and take a nap….

Two new books about Paris will whet your appetite for another trip to France in different ways.

Paris Patisseries: History, Shops, Recipes is not, despite its name, a cookbook. Instead, it’s a luscious picture book of the work of twenty of Paris’s most celebrated pastry chefs. Yes, there’s a recipe here and there (a total of about 25 or so), but what you’ll really drool over are the photographs: page after page of macarons, baba au rum, éclairs, meringues, gateaux and many other sweets, plus croissants and brioches. The book tells you what to order at each of the many famous patisseries and tea rooms featured.

The photographs by Christian Sarramon will make you want to book a flight today. Chef Pierre Hermé, reputed to make the best macarons in Paris, wrote the forward, and throughout the book you get a history of sweet shops in the city, with emphasis on the most recent and well-known pastry chefs and chocolatiers. At the back is an address book of all the shops featured, so you can plan your next trip around them (or have Donna plan you an itinerary around them!).

Paris Pastry Shop/Xiaozhuli

Photo by Anonymous, Canada

Another recent book, Paris and Her Remarkable Women by Lorraine Liscio, presents sixteen mini-biographies of women whose lives influenced Paris. They begin with Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, and end with Simone de Beauvoir. Along the way you get new insights into the lives of women you probably already know about, like Sarah Bernhardt and Coco Chanel, as well as some women perhaps not so familiar, like 18th century Madame du Chatelet, an early physicist; Madame de Maintenon who was married to Louis XIV at Versailles; Camille Claudel, mistress of Auguste Rodin and often thought to be as great a sculptor as he was; and Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun, whose paintings of women and children hang in the Louvre.

What makes this book particularly useful is that the author links the biographies to specific places in Paris associated with each woman. You can pick the woman and her time period and walk (well, almost) in her footsteps (or have Donna create an itinerary for you to walk!).

Sarah Barnhardt

I’m back, showered and sipping some cold rosé left over from yesterday’s wine tasting tour.  I had a nice couple who had read about me in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (the original article appeared in the Charlotte Observer and they brought the newsprint which was fun to see) take the tour.

And now the couch across the room is looking pretty inviting….