Once in a while, a Facebook suggestion in my timeline is actually useful, and today was one of those days. A few days ago, it surfaced a post from the Les Frenchies group which suggested going to Hotel de la Mârine to enjoy seeing opulence without schlepping out to Versailles and fighting the crowds there.

We followed the advice and walked there this morning; it was grey and dreary, but even a grey day in Paris offers delights.

The building itself is enormous and glorious; the French Navy used it as their headquarters for more than two centuries and preserved things very well. We toured the apartments of the Intendants of the Garde-Meuble de la Couronned and we quite enjoyed it. They give you a headset which offers (sometimes amusing) commentary as you go through the apartments (much opulence, though not up to Versailles’ level); you also get to explore the State Rooms. The building also played a role in the Revolution.

The views of the Place de la Concorde are terrific (I can only imagine what they’d look like on a sunny day).

After lunch, we decided to follow Rick Steves’ Historic Paris Walk, beginning at Notre Dame. They expect to reopen the cathedral in December; right now, there are bleachers opposite the main entrance to let you see the façade and the progress that’s being made – it’s actually easier to see the entrance than it was before the fire.

The next stop on the tour was the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation, in a little park across from the rear of Notre Dame. It was sobering, especially considering the stakes of the Presidential election today.

We spent a long time at the Memorial before resuming the tour; our next visit was to Église Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, a Mekite Greek Catholic church on the Left Bank. It’s older than Notre Dame (and much smaller).

Our next stop was at Shakespeare and Company, another place I’d heard of but had never visited. We left empty-handed.

We passed by the Church of St. Séverin and the Fountain of Saint Michael.

And that was it for today; we’ll have to finish the walk tomorrow.

We had a smooth flight from Reykjavik to Paris last night. When we arrived, there were signs all over CDG warning that there was limited service on the RER B line and “we invite you to take a different means of transportation”. We took the hint and took a taxi, which brought us to the door of our AirBnB, the same one we’d stayed at in October at the beginning of our adventure. It almost felt like coming home!

This morning, we enjoyed the street scene while we ate breakfast at Taverne de l’Arbre Sec near the apartment.

We’ve been to Paris many times and have seen lots of the “must-see” places, some several times, so we decided to give ourselves the gift of unstructured time in Paris for this leg of the trip. This morning, we wandered over to Galeries Lafayette.

Galeries Lafayette is worth spending some time exploring; it’s 130 years old and glories in its history and beauty. It even provides stunning views of Paris and of its dome…for free (although you do have to reserve a timeslot if you want to stroll the Glasswalk inside the dome).

On the way back to the apartment for lunch, we passed a place that brought back fond memories of my ten weeks in Manhattan in 1980 when I attended the IBM Systems Research Institute. They’ve been gone from Manhattan (well, the entire US) for a long time, but there’s still a Brentano’s in Paris!

We’ve wanted to visit Saint-Chapelle again but couldn’t get tickets the last two times we were here, so I did book ahead and we went there this afternoon. It’s inside the security perimeter of the Palais du Justice, so there were gendarmes with machine guns everywhere! Once we got inside, though, we were back in the Middle Ages, enjoying Louis IX’s work.

The exit took us through the courtyard of the Palais of Justice – I guess we could have gone into the building, but there was no real reason to do so.

Our ticket included admission to the Conciergerie, where the Revolutionary Court sentenced Louis XIV and Marie-Antoinette to death and where Marie-Antoinette spent her final weeks. The building itself is normally pretty empty, but they give you a tablet that shows AR versions of the rooms which depict them at various times in history. Currently, there’s also an exhibition of contemporary art from Benin in the Salle des Gens d’Armes (the huge hall of the soldiers occupying most of the area of the building).

We took a meandering route back to the apartment.

We had an unfashionably early dinner at Crêperie Saint-Honoré, walked around a bit more, and called it a night.