The city on foot in less than eight hours
by Jameson Currier
Le Tour de Paris
September 1, 2000, Paris, France
art by Jameson Currier 20180509001
After an eleven-city, eight-day self-directed tour of Holland, Belgium, and Normandy, I had only expected to spend a few hours in Paris, dropping off my rental car in the morning at the airport and leaving by train later in the day to make my return flight home from Brussels. I had been to Paris before, more than fifteen years ago, and found it unbearably romantic as a single man, vowing that I would not return to the “City of Light” until I had landed a “significant other.” Now, older and several relationships wiser, I found that notion foolish. Paris is Paris after all and it was to be a short and welcomed last leg of my European vacation.
Taking the RER train from the terminals of Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris (49 francs, second class), I arrived at Gare du Nord, the city’s northern train station, about 20 minutes later, close to 10 a.m. For 15 francs, I stored my luggage in one of the lockers on the bottom level of the train station and set out on foot to explore the city.
I am not someone who cherishes wandering through museums, so I was delighted it was a beautiful summer day. Ahead of me was a clear blue sky, little humidity, and a promise of temperatures reaching the mid-70s. I had neither an agenda nor a city map to guide me. Instead, I arrived with only a list of possibilities: wander through Montmartre, find a bookstore in the Marais, ride a boat along the Seine.
Setting out in what I deduced could be a southerly position (from the position of the station, the bright sunlight on my left side, a few street signs), I walked approximately fifteen minutes, stopping to use one of the sidewalk toilette sheds (2 francs) that sit at the curb on the wider streets. After an awkward period of trying to figure out how to keep the door closed, I was soon walking again and on the outskirts of the Centre Pompidou, the brightly-painted ducts and pipes of the building’s exterior coming into view as I reached a piazza. Centre Pompidou had been a stop on my last trip to Paris and the sight of it was like finding a familiar friend, my first recognized landmark in the city. Noticing on a street sign on the side of a building that I had reached the 4th arrondissement of the city, I also knew from reading a guide book the day before that I should be close to the Seine. But before I knew it I was wandering through the Marais.
Checking a notebook I carried in my knapsack, I looked up the street address for the bookstore I wanted to visit. My notation had said it was on the Rue St.-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie near the Hôtel de Ville Metro stop. The Metro stop was easy enough to find but I didn’t hold much promise for locating the store. For days I had encountered difficulty finding locations I had written down in my notebook prior to my trip (Amsterdam, at the outset, had proved particularly baffling). But I did know that I wanted to see what made the Marais so trendy and, instead of nervously searching unknown areas, I willingly let myself haphazardly follow the twisting streets, window-shopping through small art galleries, glancing into darkened bars, and studying the facades of the old mansions. I wandered close to a half-hour, making notes for a short story I was mulling writing when I returned to the States. I was distracted by a poster shop selling reproductions of belle époque and art nouveau posters, and I thought seriously about buying one, opting at the last moment against the idea, not wanting to carry it around in my hand the rest of the day. Walking back toward the Hôtel de Ville I located Les Mots à la Bouche and spent a half-hour inside browsing, looking through titles of American authors who had been translated from English into another language.
Back on the street, I decided I was hungry, even though it was only 11:30 a.m. and much earlier than I normally lunched. (I had only started the morning with a café au lait, dispensed for 10 francs into a small plastic cup from a vending machine at the airport.) Not wanting to linger at a café, I opted for a quicker bite from a local Patisserie. I ordered a Croque Monsieur (egg-dipped bread with cheese and ham) and a Coke Light (26 francs total) and sat at the inside counter. In less than 10 minutes I was on my way, rejuvenated. But while looking for the Seine, I ran into Notre-Dame.
On this trip I had seen a number of great European cathedrals (Antwerp, Ghent, Brugge, Caen, Rouen) and with their memory still fresh I thought it would interesting to compare that experience against viewing Notre-Dame. The exterior of the Paris cathedral is fascinating and much more spectacular, particularly the three west-facing sculpted portals, but inside, I found Notre-Dame darker and more gloomy. My circuit around the Nave took only a few minutes, and I was soon back outside in the bright sunshine, swerving around the long line of tourists waiting for admission to the towers and crypt. I stopped again, however, on a street of gift shops where I comparison shopped until I found a snow globe of Paris to add to my collection from other cities (12 francs).
A few steps away I followed the Seine instead of looking for the Metro stop which could carry me to the point where guided boat tours depart. And wanting to be in a different section of the city, I crossed a bridge over to the Left Bank and followed the green wooden stalls along the waterside which were filled with antique prints, old books, and postcards. Without a map to refer to I kept expecting to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower somewhere in the distance. But the walk was long and the sunshine was progressively getting brighter and hotter. Feeling dehydrated, I stopped outside the Musée d’Orsay and bought water from a vendor who kept the plastic bottles chilled in a small white bucket of ice water (10 francs and well worth it: cold and replenishing).
By 1:30 p.m. I had reached the Eiffel Tower and walked down the steps to the banks of the river. By now the heat and the walk were overwhelming. The next boat tour was not until 2 p.m. and the extra time allowed me a respite to buy a chocolate ice cream cone (14 francs) and relax in the shade of a bridge. My boat tour of the Seine (50 francs), on an uncovered deck, lasted one hour and circled the Seine and the Île de la Cité where I had just walked. The guide, badly miked, described the bridges in German, French, Italian, and English as a group of pre-school children collectively yelled to hear their voices echoing off the stones and steel surfaces as the boat made its way underneath them. But the day was still beautiful, Paris was Paris, and I had shed the sweatshirt I wore, letting the damp T-shirt I still had on dry out in the breeze.
Back on land, I snapped a few photos of the Tower and the Champ de Mars from plateau of the Palais de Chaillot. A map on the sidewalk at the Place du Trocadéro-et-du-11-Novembre showed that I was close to the Arc de Triomphe. Again I decided to walk instead of looking for a Metro stop. Somewhere along my approach to the Place Charles-de-Gaulle I decided that I could do a complete walking circuit of the city before I returned to the train station. At the Arc and the Champs-Élysées I glanced down the street toward the giant Ferris wheel and continued on. It was 3:45 p.m. and I finally had a destination: Montmartre.
Easier said than done.
After consulting another sidewalk map (they are posted by the bus shelters), I decided to make a sweeping arc toward Montmartre, thinking I could make a slow climb up the Butte instead of the abrupt steep one. But by now I was tired; I had been on my feet almost five out of six hours and my right foot was cramping and the cold I felt I had been pushing away for days was scratching at my throat. As the streets grew longer in the 17th arrondissement and the maps more confusing, I thought it might be hours before I found the district. From my knapsack I began to use the cough drops I had brought with me from home just in case something like this happened.
As the lanes became more residential I studied the city more: dusty red and white flowers were in bloom everywhere, hanging in baskets from street poles, overflowing from window troughs, circling the black iron gates of local parks. People were now on their way home from work, plastic bags in their hands, walking small dogs. Paris was also oddly absent of the student backpackers I had noticed in the other European cities on my trip, perhaps because of its notoriety of being an expensive place to visit. And though I saw a few Razor pedal scooters in Paris, they were all used by children, not aspiring actors or eccentric executives. But this was exactly what I wanted to find on my trip: the flavor of the city. And Paris was no longer just romantic and enchanting. It was a challenge. A game to complete: connecting my dots into a loop.
At the Boulevard Pierre I followed the train tracks, wiping off my sweat with the sleeve of my sweatshirt and looking for something else to eat or drink. Around 4:30 p.m. on the Avenue des Bagtinolles the white domes of Sacré-Coeur came into view. In the crush of people I followed a tall, pony-tailed artist carrying four canvases under his left arm and a cell phone at his right ear up the Rue Caulaincourt, over the Montmartre cemetery where Degas, Stendhal, and Offenbach, among others, are buried. And then I finally reached a shady street where I found a cool breeze, but I still had steps to climb, eighty of them, in fact, up the steep hill of Rue du Mont Cenis to another incline which led to the top of the Butte.
This was also the most touristy place of anywhere I visited in Paris: Here, along with the Lapin Agile cabaret, lanes of gift shops, camera-snapping foreigners, and the panoramic vista of the rooftops of Paris was also a sleek, modern funicular (ski lift) and the Le Petit Train de Montmartre, not a train at all but a link of small passenger cabs for sightseers pulled by an engine car no bigger than a golf cart. I stopped for another ice cream cone (vanilla, 19 francs) and wandered through the stalls of paintings at the Place du Tertre, avoiding the buck-hungry artists carrying sketch pads ready to draw your portrait for a hefty fee, before taking the steps (212 plus) down the steep bluff and hoping to head south again.
At Rue du Steinkerque, a narrow shopping street, it was now 5:30 p.m. From Gare du Nord trains for Brussels leave at 55 minutes past the hour and it seemed at this point impossible for me to make the next one. But when I reached the Boulevard de Magenta I realized I was closer to the station than I expected. By 5:45 p.m. I was standing in line to buy a train ticket on the high speed Thalys train from Paris to Brussels (355 francs, second class). Retrieving my luggage was a breeze: insert a numerical code and the locker door pops open. I was back upstairs and inside my train compartment with five minutes to spare. Paris was history to me again. And my total cost, excluding train transportation in and out of the city, was 158 francs (approximately $21.80).
