🇫🇷 💌 The Paris Love Letter #154

THIS WEEK IN PARIS
Gold Domes and Pigeon Chasers

We took the dog to Buttes-Chaumont earlier in the week. He loves chasing pigeons, which sounds charming until you're the one holding the leash. If you haven't been to Buttes-Chaumont, it's worth knowing it exists, with its rocky cliffs, a lake, trees that go on forever, and the city skyline just peeking through behind it all. It's in the 19th, and it's genuinely local.

Later in the week, the tours picked up along with the warmer weather. I had a group of students on a bike tour along the river. We went past Les Invalides (photo above), and I pointed out that the dome has about 13 kilos of gold leaf on it, which people always find hard to believe when they're looking at it.

Fun fact: The dome of Les Invalides inspired the redesign of the US Capitol building.

Then someone asked if they could see the most Instagrammed view of the Eiffel Tower, so I took them off route to Rue de l'Université, a side street where the tower appears at the end of the block between two buildings. I took photos of them there, as well as the featured photo above.

We ended the week with a visit to Paname Brewing Company on Canal de l'Ourcq. We biked over, sat outside, and watched everyone else be outside too. Then we meandered home. A nice way to close out a week.

Linking You to Paris

➡️ Eternelle Notre-Dame: the historical immersive experience: Sortiraparis covers a 45-minute virtual reality experience at the foot of Notre-Dame cathedral that takes visitors through 850 years of the building's history.

➡️ How to avoid a terrible restaurant in Paris: The Washington Post asked food tour operators and guidebook writers for their tips on eating well in Paris, with cookbook author David Lebovitz noting that it is entirely possible to eat badly in the city if you don't know where to look.

➡️ Montparnasse Tower: Paris's most unpopular landmark gets a facelift: This YouTube video covers the 600 million euro renovation of the Montparnasse Tower, long nicknamed "the wart" by Parisians, with plans to make it brighter, greener, and taller than before.

➡️ My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy review: The Guardian reviews Deborah Levy's new book about Gertrude Stein, a genre-defying mix of biography and fiction that follows three female friends in Paris and imagines the avant-garde writer's inner world through digression, fantasy, and a lost cat named "it."

VISITING PARIS
Napoleon's Last Address

Most people I take on tour have never heard of Les Invalides. They know the Eiffel Tower, they know the Louvre, and then there's this enormous gold-domed complex in the 7th that they've walked past without knowing what it is. So let me give you the quick version.

Louis XIV built it in the 1670s as a hospital and home for disabled war veterans. The soldiers who'd fought his wars and had nowhere to go. At its peak it housed thousands of them. The dome you see today, with about 13 kilos of gold leaf on it, was finished in 1706 and was the tallest building in Paris for nearly two centuries, until the Eiffel Tower showed up in 1889. It also, incidentally, inspired the redesign of the US Capitol dome. Paris got there first.

Napoleon comes into the picture after his death. He died in exile on the island of Saint Helena in 1821, and his remains weren't brought back to France until 1840. He was eventually entombed here in 1861 in a massive red quartzite sarcophagus, placed in a sunken circular crypt directly beneath the dome. The design means that anyone standing at the railing and looking down at Napoleon is, whether they realize it or not, bowing. Whether that was intentional genius or a happy coincidence, it feels very on-brand.

By all accounts, the Army Museum inside is fantastic. I keep hearing positive reviews from people who've visited, and the collection covers French military history from medieval armor through the 20th century. Worth an afternoon if you're in the 7th.

FRENCH PHRASE OF THE WEEK
"Profiter de la vie"

The Phrase: "Profiter de la vie" Phonetic: [pro-fee-tay duh lah vee]

Literally: "To profit from life." To make the most of it. To enjoy it fully while it's there.

The Context: The French relationship to leisure is not, as some visitors like to tell me on tour, laziness. It's a philosophy. Profiter de la vie captures something the French take seriously in a way that English doesn't quite have a word for. "Enjoy life" is close, but too casual. "Seize the day" is too dramatic. Profiter sits somewhere in between: present, intentional, unhurried. You hear it constantly here, and after a while, you start to understand why.

How to use it:

• The Canal Evening: You bike over to a brewery on the canal, sit outside, watch the whole city do the same thing, and meander home under the trees. That's profiter de la vie.

• The Park Morning: You take the dog to Buttes-Chaumont on a warm day, let him chase pigeons, sit on the grass, do nothing in particular. Also profiter de la vie.

• The Café Table: You order a coffee, and it comes with no urgency attached. No one is waiting for your table. The afternoon is yours. The French invented this.

How I Found This Phrase: Spring arrived in Paris this week in a real way. Warm enough for outdoor tables, blue sky over the Invalides, the canal full of people just sitting and being alive. At some point during all of it I realized there's a phrase for what everyone around me was doing. Of course there is.

FRENCH SONG OF THE WEEK
Cora Vaucaire - La complainte de la Butte

Cora Vaucaire is one of those names most people outside France won't recognize, which is a shame, because if you love Édith Piaf, you would almost certainly love her too. Same era, same smoky emotional register, same ability to make a song feel like a small heartbreak.

"La Complainte de la Butte" is a waltz about Montmartre, melancholy and beautiful, and every time I hear it, I feel like I've been transported to a Paris of another era.