Freeway Free in France: Back to the 7me Arrondissement
My favorite pied a terre in Paris is the Jardin D’Eiffel, just off the market street Rue Cler (see above) by one block. 15 years ago when I first stayed the decor was dominated by giant yellow Monet-esque flowers on Royal blue on drapes, pictures, and murals throughout (see below) , and the clientele favored busloads of Canadian and German students and tourists on a budget.
The old Jardin has undergone a 21st century revamp, and is now robed mostly in subtle shades of gray with some paisley drapes to brighten the feel (see above). The elevator, however, is no larger; it can accommodate two people and two suitcases on if you are on friendly terms, or you can stash the suitcases in the elevator, push the button,and race the elevator up the stairs. DB and I are sharing a room facing the street – not the best, as the next door neighbor is the police station and we expect to hear sirens all night. From the back rooms, if you lean out the window, you can glimpse the Eiffel Tower.
We arrived after an efficient breakfast at La Vielle Auberge, a lightning transit to the train station in Souillac, a bit of a hassle with ticket’s but we eventually got on the train and enjoyed four hours of French scenery, shading from Romanesque yellow sandstone with steep-pitched roofs and bell-towers in the Dordogne to white stucco with mansard roofs and steeples in the Touraine. Gare Austerlitz is large and bustling but well-signed, our Algerian taxi driver was friendly and expansive about what we should be sure to see in Paris, and the staff at the Jardin welcomed us like old friends.
We took the Metro to the Place de ‘l’Opera and picked up our museum passes for two days of urgent museum – going. This may be our last joint adventure for awhile, as we each have different plans for our stay in Paris. WB missed the Louvre on her previous visit and expects to spend two days there, but wants also to fit in the renovated Musee d’Orsay, the Rodin, the Pere LaChaise cemetery, and perhaps a tour of the opera. DM has a friend dating back to a working stint in London who came to meet her and is staying at the Jardin, and also has a cousin who wants to return the hospitality DM showed him in the states, so after tonight’s dinner she will not share evenings until Sunday. Dianne has not been in Paris in decades and has murky memories, so she may take the #69 bus tour around the city per Rick Steves’ recommendation and then follow her interests. 
I have in mind the renovated d’Orsay tomorrow together with l’Orangerie which houses Monet’s water lilies, then there is another exhibit at the Grand Palais I want to find out about, and I need to visit Notre Dame and the Holocaust victims memorial and of course Berthillon’s ice cream and the Art Deco atrium of La Samaritaine, and Le Pere LaChaise cemetery with WB on Sunday. Our walking tour will have been good prep for pounding all this Gothic pavement. Right now we are getting cleaned up in preparation for a celebration meal at l’Affriole, which it appears has developed enough of a reputation that Michele (who is French with family and friends in Lyon) had heard of it.
I am trembling at the potential cost. But we have economized greatly up until now, having scrounged for lunches at the hotel breakfast buffets and having dinner and breakfasts prepaid during our hiking tour.
We decided to walk back from L’Opera (which was undergoing a revamp of its own behind a Rene Magritte-inspired façade) and stopped at a street-side cafe on Rue Tour Maubourg for wine, tea, and people -watching. We saw Cinderella’s glass coach go by, pulled by a rather ordinary brown horse and with two dotty English tourists inside. Such is life in a tourist city.
Unfortunately l’Affriole did not live up to my memory. New management has revamped the decor here also, opening up the front of the place for sidewalk seating, which leaves one exposed to the curious glances of passers-by and other hazards. In our case, a large dog decided to deposit an equally large souvenir on the sidewalk just by our table, and the dog’s owner loftily prepared to ignore the awkward incident until the restaurateur bounded out and demand she clean up after her pet. She argued, gave in, and “cleaned up” by kicking the mess to the curb, then wiping her shoe carefully on the edge. Not the most appetizing of beginnings.
The food, instead of bringing on the sort of ecstasy seen in “When Harry Met Sally,” did not measure up to either my memory or the best of the food we had enjoyed while hiking. So much for my “local expertise”. But I still have a few 7me arrondissement aces up my sleeve.
On my travels in June I met a modern-day visionary. His name is Zachary Brown, he wears rumpled plaid shirts and jeans and hiking boots, and he is the co-founder, executive director, and so far the sole employee of the 
Then it was down through dappled shade and dappled sun in a woodsy canyon, then down further through more dappled shade and dappled sun as we crossed a series of walnut orchards with beautifully shaped and spaced trees, then down further into the tacky outskirts of Souillac, then down past the cemetery. We got confused, asked a passerby if he knew our hotel, and he pointed to it across the street. Winifred and Dianne had just arrived.
Unfortunately WB has developed some problems with her knee and has not been able to hike for the last couple of days, but she has gotten a free ride in the luggage van and enjoyed some leisure. The other three have enjoyed walking through the countryside on back roads and grassy trails, sampling wild blackberries, feral figs, late-season asparagus sprouts, and sunflower seeds.
By noon we were looking for luncheon options, and happily came upon a small shop in a small village which had, to DM’s delight, cold Coca-Cola available. We purchased a few other snacks and continued until we found a convenient stone to serve as both stools and table. We enjoyed the sun, sipping and munching, then snuck through a gap in the wall for a view of the Chateau de Montfort (privately held, unfortunately) 
Domme is a medieval island perched on top of a bluff, too remote from normal four-lane roads to have been changed much by the advent of the automobile. As we trudged up the winding road, we were wishing for a donkey cart!
I have been doing what amounts to an archaeological dig at the home my parents occupied for 60 years. It seems as though every drawer I open, every closet shelf I clear holds traces of the life my parents led starting long before the time I began to exist. I am learning a lot about the people who raised me and how they became who they are. And I am also learning how much I can never know.
When my sister was putting together a slide show to display at our mother’s memorial, she discovered that there were almost no pictures of her or our younger brother after the ages of seven and five, respectively. She figured out the problem – at that point in the late 50’s or early 60’s, my father switched to slide film. Stored in the hall closet are at least a dozen slide carousels, each holding 100 slide transparencies. But who has the technology or the patience to sort through over a thousand slides in this digital age? Even the one shop on the Peninsula which once offered a service of switching analog slides to digital has closed its doors.
This day was the scenic highlight of our walking – we stayed the previous night at Beynac, beneath the cliff topped by the medieval fortress which we had wandered through the afternoon before. After our breakfast of croissants, cafe au lait, and local yogurt and strawberries, and after wrestling our luggage down three flights of narrow stairs, DM, DB, and I set out along the “grassy track” by the Dordogne River. (W has developed a painful knee after too many ups and downs and decided to cop a ride in the van.). The path led along the river through woodsy patches – lots of bird calls, some families of ducks on the water, the occasional fisherman, the occasional egret. We stayed mostly level through a series of acricultural meadows and fields (DM sampled the sunflower seeds, I sampled the fresh asparagus spears pushing up from the ground) and took turns pointing out the yellow sandstone castles on the successive cliffs – Beynac behind us, its hated rival Castelroud across the river on the English side.
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Having figured out the advantage of attracting tourists to their market on Saturday morning, the city fathers of Sarlat have lost no time in figuring out ways to keep those walking cash dispensers in town as long as possible. On the Saturday of our stay we were tempted back onto the streets long after the market closed with 
At about the halfway point of our first day of hiking (9km) we felt raindrops. Drizzle turned to gentle rain, enough to rate dragging out our rain gear – all except DB, who had left her poncho behind to save weight. (DB has some curvature of the spine and her backpack is not very comfortable, so she chose to leave some basic stuff, including sufficient water. Fortunately both W and I tend to err in the opposite direction, and were able to keep her hydrated with our extra bottles, and fairly dry with my little polka-dot umbrella.). The ponchos added an unnecessary extra layer of warmth, so we kept trying to do without every time we felt the rain slacken, and then had to re-don when we got out of the sheltering woods or the rain renewed its attack.
We oohed and ached over a chateau whose ruined towers loomed above the woods on the left (it was burned by the Nazis in WWII) and exclaimed over weird fungi growing on logs and near the edges of the path. We noted pear orchards, apple trees heavy with fruit, an occasional vineyard lush with grapes awaiting harvest. We sampled wild blackberries at the side of the road, and tried to open chestnut husks to get at the chestnuts inside. (Chestnuts are stickery!” And we were counting down the remaining KM by tenths.
Allyson Johnson 