Because it's hard to leave things unsaid.

I'm on a special trip to Paris and want to post pictures but haven't posted any from my trip last summer. I don't want to neglect poor last-summer's-trip and hurt its feelings so I will show its highlights... in no particular order because that would take too much time. I've already wasted enough time figuring out how to add big picture of rainbow over the Seine at top of blog.

I'm not going to spend time fact-checking. So that my statements won't be inaccurate, my descriptions will be vague.

Map of Saint Germain des Prés where I stay

Mémorial de la Shoah

Paris Holocaust museum

* a card catalog full of WWII records kept on Jewish French citizens, only released in the not too distant past.

The Women's Courtyard at the Conciergerie where female prisoners took the air and gathered to talk during the time they awaited their fate at the "national razor".

My room at my favorite, Hôtel Academie.

Taken from the Women's Courtyard as the French military practiced their Bastille Day air show. Seemed an appropriate vantage point.

Vigée le Brun's, Marie Antoinette's favorite portraitist,  self-portrait of herself and her daughter at Le Louvre.

Marie Antoinette's clothing at the Conciergerie

La Samaritaine has re-opened. Infinitely more impressive than this photo implies.

A concentration camp door preserved in the Shoah Museum.

I did the new "virtual tour" at the building that housed the French Resistance during WWII with 3-D goggles in a bunker down a hundred concrete steps.

In Musée Carnavalet, I took this picture of a mock-up section of pre-Haussmann Paris, for Leonard Pitt who wrote the fascinating book, Walks Through Lost Paris (among others). I have used his book many times and  exchanged a few emails with him before my trip last summer. I neglected to send him the picture.

The vast section of the Conciergerie in which those who couldn't afford a cell waited for their execution is used for special art exhibits. This is part of the one I saw last time - one of two long troughs of water which were surrounded by boulders - generally speaking. When Michele and I went a few years ago, there was a small house made of crow feathers.

Saint Germain des Prés church, the site of one of the most horrific events of the September Massacres, has been restored. It's around the corner and I went to Mass there.

Bastille Day was the last day before I left. I watched the fireworks from the Tuileries Gardens surrounded by people singing La Marseillaise. Walking back at midnight, I got drenched when a car sped through a big puddle in the gutter next to my sidewalk. The situation was made even more comical when I described it to a Frenchman who blurted out, "Motherfuckers!"

The End