From the wide riverside avenue Quay d’Orsay, Bus 69 turned left and plunged into alley-streets. On bus routes in the city, cars, vans, and delivery vehicles parked along and on top of the left curb in the alley-streets, leaving a path on the right just wide enough for a bus to squeeze through. The Rick Steves guidebook had counseled us to sit on the right, ostensibly to have the best view of the sites, but also to let us window-shop through storefronts that, from the bus in these alley-streets, we could almost touch.
We had a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, as the bus traversed a broad esplanade adjacent to Les Invalides, but we didn’t see it again until we were almost at it, and exiting the bus in the Parc du Champs de Mars, a three-block park, not very scenic, that extends from the tower to the Ecole Militaire. The park had been the scene of some event involving booth-sized white tents with pointed tops, that now, on a Monday, were being taken down.
The tower was a couple of city-block lengths away, and we were looking at it through winter-bare trees, that provided scale. The base of the tower – its four piers and the first terrace – was mammoth. “It looks like Godzilla,” Karen said, sizing up photos. One of my pre-trip gifts to her was a second 1-gigabyte photo card. I knew that, for her, one card would not be enough. In our first hours in Paris, she had been taking pictures of anything – lamp posts, store fronts, building plaques – but now her eye for grand compositions snapped into place, and she wanted a photo not of the whole tower, but of how big the thing was, through the bare trees.
We walked toward it through the park. At a narrow street at the tower’s base, we encountered temporary chain-link fencing, and mounded refuse, from the weekend event, that we had to step around. It underlined the plainness of the tower’s setting. It just sat there, across from us, on an unremarkable square of bare, un-landscaped earth and pavement. We came upon three young workers, having a smoke, part of the crew taking down the tents. Karen saw a photo and, of course, engaged. She smiled, gestured with the camera, spoke in English, and motioned them into position, took the picture. In it, of course, they are smiling.
The tower’s four monster feet, or piers, were labeled: North, West, South, East; and in fact the North Pier was oriented precisely to due north. Something American about the tower stuck in my mind, and the guidebook told me: the tower’s creator, Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, also designed and built the steel skeleton for the Statue of Liberty. Lines of people were queued at entries to the East and South piers, but we didn’t go in. There were a couple of curio shops we didn’t visit. It was lunchtime, and we had seen an inviting café near the bus stop.
This café was the Champs de Mars, all windows and red trim on a corner opposite the park and the Ecole Militaire, an upscale district, judging by the pedestrians and café patrons. Dogs are sacred creatures in Paris, and the café proprietor’s red setter ambled among the small tables, nosing for treats, obviously known to several regulars. It was our first Paris lunch, and the service seemed slow; in time, we would discover it is merely unhurried. Our waitress, a young, slender, somewhat indifferent, woman, arrived. Karen smiled and inquired, “Parlez-vous Anglais?” I don’t mean to harp on Karen’s smile, and manner of engaging, but they are the best French-English dictionary an American in Paris could ever hope for. The waitress engaged her, and us, instantly.
We had glasses of vin rouge, and Karen had a chef’s salad, I had a sausage, a boudin-blanc, with French fries and fried apples, and of course a basket of sliced baguette. For dessert, espresso, which was served with squares of foil-wrapped dark bitter chocolate. The setter strolled past, didn’t stop to visit the strangers, but if we lived in Paris, anywhere near the Champs de Mars, that dog would know us very well.
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