France: Paris in 2025 Is Still Marvelous

 

The base of the Eiffel Tower, with the Montparnasse Tower in the distance.

 Paris is the most celebrated and the most iconic city in the world. The City of Light. The Eiffel Tower. The Arc de Triomphe. The Seine. The history. The Mona Lisa. Rodin. Picasso. The food. The wine.

    So Paris was a definte focus when Jane and I started planning a spring 2025 trip to Europe. We began our three-country odyssey (France, Belgium, the Netherlands) with 10 days in Paris, where I lived for a year and a half in the early 1990s. We arrived in Paris on Thursday, May 1, and quickly made our way to  this Airbnb apartment in Montmartre, which we had planned to share with friends from Colorado. They had to cancel and we had the two-bedroom apartment to ourselves. I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the neighborhood (Rue des Martyrs just north of Boulevard de Clichy) is with loads of inviting bistros and brasseries with more locals than tourists. 

     Nearby Metro stations made it easy to get to the city's many museums, which occupied much of our time here. During a much shorter 2014 visit, Jane and I took in the Rodin museum (which we repeated this time) but skipped all the others. This time we also took in the Louvre, the Musee  d'Orsay, the Picasso and close by in Monmartre, the Dali. The Picasso museum's collection is mostly made up of works that the artist himself kept rather than selling. The Dali shows mostly works from his last years, many of them repeating ideas from earlier in his career. All were purchsed directly from the artist by the museum's owner who also bought reproduction rights, meaning that the museum shop can let you take home copies of the sculptures and other works on display. We also toured the Pantheon. All require tickets, which can be purchased online in advance. We had tickets to the Louvre, but we had to wait a day or two to get into the Musee d'Orsay. Smaller museums are easier, but if your time is tight and there's something you really, really want to see, get tickets ahead of time. We waited more than an hour to buy tickets to get into the Pantheon. 

     At the Louvre we made no attempt to fight the crowds to see the "Mona Lisa" ("La Jaconde," as it's called here), but we did get to the "Winged Victory," the Venus de Milo and the "Raft of the Medusa." And quite a few other works. New to me were the historical rooms in the Richelieu wing, which was not open when I lived in Paris decades ago. The Louvre's origin as a royal palace is most evident in the Richelieu. 

          Besides museums and general sight-seeing, we paid a lot of attention to food, enjoying both simple bistro fare as well as the Michelin-star dishes at Le Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower (lobster with vanilla foam, sweetbreads, shrimp with beetroot, among others in our lengthy and delightful seven-course lunch). 

     For dinners, we often searched for "restaurant near me" on Google Maps and then read reviews. Our Airbnb host also made recommendations. In Montmartre, we ate twice at BiBiche, a recommended brasserie near Place des Abbesses, and I thought the flank steak in a shallot sauce could not have been better. Bulot Bulot was a seafood place across the street from our apartment where we enjoyed bulots (sea snails) along with oysters and crab. Near Rue des Martyrs but on the other side of the Boulvard de Clichy was Classique, a cocktail laboratory operating in what was a 19th-century apothocary where we had octopus sashimi, crab salad and, most deliciously, a "Kingston" negroni. 

      Also just off Rue des Martyrs south of the Boulevard de Clichy was Le Pantruche, a Michelin-mentioned bistro. Here we had crab in buckwheat ravioli, fried cuttlefish, monkfish and pistaschio babka with orange blossom ice cream. Food can be both exotic and extremely good.

    Tradition was on the menu just a few steps uphill (north) of our apartment. We ate twice at Titi Graille, a tiny bistro serving relatively simple bistro fare: steak, duck confit, etc., all very good.  Dessert? Creme brulee (always great everywhere) and poached pears in chocolate sauce, which was wonderful. One evening we went to dinner at Lazare, the brasserie in the Gare St.-Lazare, which the New York Times has praised. We were disappointed. A plate of oysters were served on the half-shell with the oysters still strongly attached to the bottom shells. I pointed that out to the waiter and he brought over the maitre-d' who implied I was unfamiliar with raw oysters and very tersely (and incorrectly) said oysters were always served that way. The rest of the meal was OK, I guess, but the interaction with the maitre d' spoiled the dinner. 

     We had thought we might take day trips out of Paris to Chartres (for its cathedral) and Giverney (for Monet's garden and its lily ponds), but we were having such a good time exploring Paris that we never left town. Instead of Giverney, we strolled the Tuileries and the Jardin de Luxembourg. We got our cathedral experience at the newly restored Notre-Dame, which I think seemed too clean, like an antique that has lost its patina. And, for the first time ever, I went inside Sacre Couer atop Montmartre, which is not nearly as interesting as the view of Paris from its steps.

     Here are some photos from 2025 Paris:

The Wall of Love was near our Airbnb apartment in Montmartre. It was created in 2000
by artists Frederic Baron and Claire Kito. The phrase "I love you" appears 311 times in 
250 languages, including Navajo and Inuit. It's a destination for selfies as well as
engagement and wedding photos. It's in a tiny garden just off the Rue des Abbesses.

Even with a timed adminssion ticket, getting into the Louvre involves a long line.

In the decorative arts section of the Richelieu 
wing of the Louvre we found a dining room
worthy of a king.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace has been exhibited in the same spot at the Louvre
since 1884. It dates from the beginning of the second century B.C.E.  It was discovered
broken into many pieces in 1863 on the Aegean island of Samothrace and restored
 in Paris, though headless and without arms.. Its hands, however, 
 were found and are desplayed nearby. 

"The Thinker," perhaps Rodin's most famous work, seems
quite simple, but it actually isn't. Rodin twisted the torso
and has the figure's right elbow and left hand both resting
on the left knee, not a natural way for someone to sit, but
the posture intensifies the figure's contemplation. "The
Thinker" also appears in Rodin's monumental "The Gates
of Hell," which also incorporates "The Kiss" and
 some of his other iconic works. All are at Paris's
splendid Musee Rodin.

"The Burghers of Calais" has long been my favorite Rodin work. Each figure is a masterpiece.
Commissioned by the city of Calais in 1884 and completed in 1889, it depicts a scene from
the Hundred Years' War when England's Edward III took Calais and said he would spare
its citzens if six of its leaders would surrender to be executed. The six, all once weathy but
now gaunt after starving during England's long siege of the city, walked out as
 instructed with nooses around their necks.  They were eventually spared
due to the intervention of Edward's queen but their bravery is still 
 a point  of pride for Calais. 

Meanwhile, in Montmartre at the Dali Paris museum, the "Telephone Homard" ("Lobster
Telephone") strikes a much lighter tone. The iconic work was conceived in 1936; the version
 here was created 1n 1977. It illustrates the Surrealist idea that juxtaposing unrelated
everyday objects can reveal secret and unrealized desires. Both
lobsters and telephones had erotic associations for Dali. 

 

"La Persistance de la Memoire" (The Persistance of 
Memory") is a bronze cast from 1980 that creates
in three dimensions the central image of Dali's 
famous 1931 painting of the same name.

"Deux femmes courant sur la plage (La Course)" translates as "Two women running on the
beach (The Race)."  Picasso painted it in 1922 and it is among works from all parts
of his lengthy career on display at the Musee National Picasso-Paris, a museum small
enough that one can actually see everything in one visit. You can't do that at the
Louvre or the Musee d'Orsay. 

"Femme au boa noir" ("Woman with a black boa")
is an 1892 work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
 at the Musee d'Orsay, which is most famous
 for its late 19th-century French paintings. In 
my experience, it's a museum that Americans
often revisit when they're in Paris, but for a lot
of people one trip to the Louvre is enough. 

"The National Convention," a nearly 10-meter-long work by Francois  Sicard was completed
in 1920 after eight years of work. It dominates the main hall of the Pantheon, which was built
in the late 1700s to be a church, but the Revolution intervened and it became a mausoleum for
distinguished French citizens. In the lower level visitors can see the tombs of luminaries
including Victor Hugo and Josephine Baker. The Pantheon is home to Foucault's Pendulum,
which swings beneath the building's huge dome and demonstrates that the earth does rotate.

We used the Metro, Paris's excellent subway system, when places
 like the Pantheon were farther away than we wanted to walk. On almost
every Metro ride we ended up changing trains at the Concorde station.
 Taxis are another option, but we took a taxi only once, to get us and
 our luggage to Gare Montpanasse when we were leaving. The G7 app
 makes getting a taxi in Paris as easy as using Uber and I'd 
rcommend downloading it so you always have the option
of simply hopping into a taxi.

Niki de Saint Phalle's wondrous sculptures from 1983
still animate the Stravinsky Fountain outside the 
Centre Pompidou, which was just starting a five-year
renovation project when we were there. At least part 
of the iconic building appeared open, but we didn't
venture inside. 

We made reservations long before leaving home to have lunch at Le Jules Verne, a restaurant as
noteworthy for its food as for its location, more than 400 feet high in the Eiffel Tower. If you're
going to spend a fortune on one meal, I can't think of a better place to do it. 

The view from Le Jules Verne. We skipped going to the top of
the tower. It's not included with dining at Jules Verne and it
would have meant buying a ticket and waiting in a long line. 

Statuary inside Notre Dame that was once darkened
from decades of exposure to candle smoke and other
pollutants have been cleaned. Some of the cathedral's
art had already been removed prior to the 2019 fire,
which occurred during a renovation project.

Notre Dame's famous facade soars over Place Jean-Paul II on the Ile de la Cite.
The crane on the right is involved in the continuing renovation of the 
cathedral, which has reopened but it not yet compete. Much art work
has yet to be reinstalled, and the spire that drew so much attention in photos
of the fire was not yet back in place when we were there in May 2025.

A busy street near Sacre Coeur many steep steps up from our Airbnb apartment on
Rue des Martyrs. Staying in Montmartre means dealing with a lot of steps,
especially if you chose to exit the very deep Abbesses Metro station on the
spiral stairway rather than do the smart thing and take the elevator.

Sea snails (bulots) at Bulot Bulot on Rue des
Martyrs just opposite our apartment. 

We ate more than once at several places in Montmartre, including
twice at Titi Graille. The is the sort of bistro that keeps people
coming back to Paris.