Au revoir, Paris

A week ago in Paris, blue skies, green leaves, and a few flowers were just beginning to appear...

These are on our balcony!

Parisians flocked to the parks to sit and chat, smoke a cigarette, and sometimes (in the case of these small people) to learn to fence!

In the Place des Vosges, where Victor Hugo lived.

Obviously this was all far too idyllic for us. So we've left Paris and headed farther north, where it's still cold and grey.

We didn't plan it like that on purpose. But I had finished most of what I hoped to accomplish at the Bibliothèque nationale and our lease was running out, so at the end of March, we packed our bags and headed off into the great unknown--in this case, Normandy. For the next three months, we'll be traveling all over in pursuit of archives and adventure. Well, mostly archives.

Still, we leave with many good memories of our tiny, tiny apartment; the assortment of nearby bakeries which we have strictly ranked by quality, proximity, and pastry type; and a lot of good walks through the city...

We found this plaque inside Sainte Trinité church commemorating the composer Olivier Messiaen who was titular organist here on one such walk.

On one last trip to the Louvre, we ran across a heretofore-undiscovered medieval gallery...

On the left is a deposition from the cross that I found really peaceful. On the right, the angel is weighing the souls of the dead in judgment, which is a fairly common motif in medieval art: what's unusual is that here the Virgin Mary is tipping the balance in favor of this pious soul!

I already mentioned the pastries. Here's the evidence of one marzipan pig filled with dense, dark chocolate cake from the nearby market street, and one trip to a Lenôtre, which we had wanted to visit because T's best man in our wedding is the grandson of the founder of this pastry brand. We just window-shopped there, but this was impressive enough because it was already decked out with elaborate chocolates for Easter. The French phrase for window-shopping literally translates as "window-licking," did you know?

Of course, mostly we will miss the little bits of a normal life that we eventually established here: our neighborhood church, our daily routine, quick walks to anywhere in the central city any afternoon we felt like it. Au revoir, Paris. À bientôt!