La Closerie des Lilas – KEVIN CRAIG

Paris – Day 13 – September 21st – Emmanuel’s Hidden Gems! Musée du Luxembourg! La Closerie des Lilas! Montparnasse! Ciel de Paris!

We were close to the end. I could feel the inevitability of our flight as it loomed in the near future. But we still had so much to see and do!

We started this day with a walk to the Latin Quarter where we were to meet Emmanuel for his Hidden Gems tour of the Quarter. There was a light rain falling and it was early enough that the city seemed to be just awakening from its slumber.

It seemed we were always walking past the Bouquinistes of Paris. These little book stalls have a long history, first appearing in the 16th century.

You can read about the fascinating history of Paris’s famous bouguinistes here at WIKI.

Another landmark we were constantly walking past on our way to and from other places was Notre-Dame.

Notre-Dame on our rainy morning walk to the Latin Quarter…

We met Emmanuel at the Odeon Theatre in the edge of the Latin Quarter.

Not quite a part of our tour, but spotted nonetheless… Emily in Paris shooting locations! Yes, we have watched this series. For the location! Location is everything…

This was our fourth and final EMMANUEL’S HIDDEN GEMS TOUR. Emmanuel has a Facebook group you can join here: EMMANUEL’S HIDDEN GEMS. The best way to contact Emmanuel is through his Facebook PAGE HERE. On his Facebook page, just click on the MESSAGE button near the top to get in touch with Emmanuel directly. You can book months in advance and you pay on the day of the tour.

Like all his other tours, Emmanuel’s Latin Quarter Tour was incredible. We saw many hidden gems and famous iconic places.

The Pantheon, in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

Take Emmanuel’s Tour to learn all about all the secrets of the Latin Quarter that he’s curated for it. Despite the rain, we had a wonderful time!

After the tour, we had a time-slot booked for the new Gertrude Stein/Pablo Picasso exhibit at the Musée du Luxembourg. It was an excellent exhibit, but extremely short. It only took about twenty minutes to see all of it. I most loved the gender focused pieces.

Our day was to end in Montparnasse, at the top of the tower in the famous Ciel de Paris restaurant with the incredible views of the city. So, after Luxembourg, we slowly made our way in that direction.

We had not really planned on La Closerie de Lilas this trip, but it was always there… waiting. It was my 3rd trip to Paris and La Closerie still felt like a pilgrimage spot I had to visit at least once during every trip. We were walking right past it! It was at the doorstep of the Montparnasse neighbourhood… just waiting for us.

First, we walked up through Luxembourg Gardens.

The lovely tree-lined walkways found inside the Luxembourg Gardens…

What’s a little rain when you’re walking about in one of the most beautiful cities in the world?!

After the Gardens, there’s the big fountain…

The fountain then leads to the statue of Marechal Ney. Hemingway mentions this statue in A Moveable Feast, his not fully true (but maybe true in his eyes as seen through the passage of time and bias) biography of his 1920s time in Paris. The statue is one of the last things between the walker and La Closerie des Lilas.

A monument that has been a curiosity to me for decades, after reading **A Moveable Feast** as a teenager.

Now, when I think about La Closerie des Lilas… I always think of Hemingway sitting at one of its tables scribbling in a notebook while sipping something warm on a cold fall day. But this was a mega-literary hangout! Fitzgerald, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Beckett, Man Ray, Sartre, Baudelaire, Cezanne, Modigliani, Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola, André Gide… these are just a few of the many literary patrons who have sought refuge from the streets of Paris inside the comfort of La Closerie des Lilas. They carried on conversations there, wrote their opuses there, made plans there, flirted there, got drunk there, talked their revolutions there. It is a place with a long history with literature. It’s a mecca for the literary pilgrim.

Did we stop in for oysters and beer? You betcha!

In one of the photos above, you can see the brass nameplate that marks Hemingway’s seat at the bar. Our own table marked the seats of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

After our pit stop in Closerie des Lilas, we still had plenty of time to explore Montparnasse before supper in the tower.

I love the history of Parisian cemeteries! And I had never been to the one in Montparnasse!

We visited their seats at La Closerie des Lila…seemed only right to visit them in person!

We used Google Maps inside the cemetery walls to be directed from one grave to another. It’s such a great way to visit the tombstones on your list…

It would seem that La Closerie des Lilas was not the only pilgrimage sight we came upon on this day.

I read many a Guy de Maupassant stories in my teens. One of the greatest short story writers!

Selfies in cemeteries are weird, right? How about Usies?

After the cemetery, we were still rather early for our dinner reservation at Ciel de Paris…but we were in the neighbourhood. This is one of those blocks of time we landed in where we had to wait around because even though we booked a full jam-packed day, there were empty slots of time with nothing to do but wait.

We toured the Montparnasse neighbourhood and saw some of Paris’s most famous restaurants.

All of the above restaurants were popular places among the famous of the 1920s and beyond.

Ciel de Paris was one of the things we were looking most forward to. The food promised to be incredible, yes, but it was the view we were dying to see. We reserved a window seat with a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower.

After MUCH loitering in the neighbourhood, it was finally time for us to go!

I understand the bittersweet feeling Parisians have toward Tour Montparnasse. It’s a gorgeous highrise, but an eyesore in a city that prides itself on being low to the ground.

And here was our promised view!

Magical to begin with, but the evening only promised to make it more and more magical as darkness fell across the city…

The lobster bisque was to die for! The best ever!

Everything was exceptional! So worth it! So glad we did this!

If you can’t decide what dessert to choose, you can literally choose them ALL! Tastes of each!

Somewhere between our first glass of wine and our dessert, the city came to life in the darkness…

The holiday was almost over. Two glorious weeks in Paris and its environs! So spectacular. And what a way to see the city, all lit up and from above it. If you’re able to book a spot at Ciel de Paris, it is SO worth it! The food is excellent, and the view is to die for! Pro Tip: Always choose a view OF the Eiffel Tower over a view FROM the Eiffel Tower.

So ends another glorious day in the City of Light. The Metro took us back to the hotel in no time. The next day was a free day and our last day! We had plans to see Montmartre on our own, and to wander the streets to say goodbye to it all!

Link to previous day.

Link to next day

Our Day of the Dead in the City of Light

Whoever said you can’t walk everywhere in Paris hasn’t met Michael and I. Last October we proved all naysayers wrong by the power of our own four feet. One of the best days of our week was the one we named our DAY OF THE DEAD.

No, we didn’t die that day. Trust me, it was a thematic name choice.

In Paris, we stayed in the 9th at an unassuming little hotel called Hôtel de Paris Saint Georges. We don’t go big on hotels, because they’re only for sleeping in when your goal is to take in every inch of every city you visit. The hotel is not important, as long as it’s clean.

Our first goal on the Day of the Dead was to make our way to Père Lachaise Cemetery all the way over in the 20th arrondissement. Google Maps told us it was a mere 5.2km away. A walk in the park that would take us 1 hour and 8 minutes, according to Google. Google also doesn’t know us. We knew we could cut that number down to an hour.

My first time in Paris was action packed with Left Bank Writers Retreat stuff, so I didn’t get to see Père Lachaise. The days were too fully planned out to sneak away, and the cemetery was closed at night. Who closes a cemetery at night?! The nerve!

I had several graves on my visiting wish-list, and we booked a walking tour at the cemetery to make things easy for us. It’s a huge cemetery!

Unfortunately, our Day of the Dead was going to begin with a fail. Not surprising, since we were still dead in the middle of the pandemic. The tour didn’t sell enough tickets, so it was cancelled. The worst part was that the tour company didn’t tell us it was cancelled. Michael and I stood by the designated Metro stop waiting for the guide to appear for far too long. After doing several somersaults and finally contacting the tour guide people, we discovered we had been waiting in vain. We were on our own.

Even though we didn’t see everyone on the list, we did manage to see a few of the famous people I wanted to visit. Having waited decades to see this historic cemetery, I was not disappointed. Sure, it would have been a hundred percent better with the accompaniment of a guide, but it was still an amazing morning!

We saw Wilde, Piaf, Proust, Moliere, Balzac, Chopin, and Morrison, among others. Then we accepted our defeat and put Père Lachaise onto the bingo card for our next visit to Paris. Next time, hopefully, we will have a guide. There’s still quite a few people on my wish-list that we missed. Take my word for it, if you’re going to visit Père Lachaise, get a guided tour. You may think you can do it alone, but it is really overwhelming once you’re there. Even with a paper map or Google Maps. I was just too overwhelmed to remember half the names I wanted to visit. And we did some crisscrossing we could have avoided. GET. A. GUIDE.

With our mad dash throughout the cemetery over, we were off to our next stop! Did somebody say Panthéon?! And how does the Panthéon work into our Day of the Dead, you might ask if you’re not familiar with the building in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Off to the 5th arrondissement we go!

Panthéon, temple to all the gods. Sitting atop Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, the Panthéon (Built from 1758-1790), once a church, is now a mausoleum for the remains of France’s most distinguished citizens. This incarnation of a mausoleum could very well be the building’s last and eternal purpose.

Once we made the brisk 4.1km walk from Père Lachaise, with a quick stop at a yummy Indian restaurant we stumbled upon along the way, we were ready to meet more of history’s illustrious dead.

We visited almost everyone resting there. From Voltaire to Zola.

A highlight of the visit, for me as a writer and reader, was Emile Zola, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo.

Since we were in the neighbourhood (the Latin Quarter in the 5th arrondissement), we also visited Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, which is just behind the Panthéon. This church was made newly famous after appearing in the movie Midnight in Paris. I had visited the church back in 2014 when the Panthéon was closed for some restorative work. We took an iconic (to us) photo of ourselves on the church steps where Gil sat in Midnight in Paris, right before he was whisked away into the Paris of the 1920s.

The 2014 Left-Bank Writers Retreat. Look it up, it’s an amazing retreat for writers. Takes place in Paris every year.

And here’s the facade of the church. The steps made famous in the movie are on the left hand side of the photo below.

After visiting the greatest of France’s late citizens, we were off to visit the bones of some of Paris’s late great cemeteries. Say that ten times fast. Anyway, Catacombes de Paris in the 14th arrondissement were the next stop on our Day of the Dead.

If you can, always get your tickets online in advance. You will avoid a headache, or even the possibility of being turned away at the door.

The Catacombes were another place I missed on my last visit to Paris, and, therefore, a must see during this visit. We made the 2.7km walk in no time, even with the quick detour through the Jardin du Luxembourg in the 6th arrondissement! We couldn’t walk by this treasure when we could almost as easily walk through it!

The very modern entrance to a very gothic dungeon-like attraction.

Getting down to the dark underbelly was a feat in itself. The spiral staircase brought back memories of climbing the never-ending staircase to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, or the just-as-deadly staircase to the top of the Basilica of Sacré Coeur de Montmartre. Paris sure does love the spiral staircase!

Climb down into the underbelly of Paris, via the endless spiral staircase…

The Catacombes were everything we hoped they would be. Death made creepy by darkness and dirt, with a little dripping wetness thrown in for good measure. We were under Paris, surrounded by the bones of millions of long-dead displaced Parisiennes.

Watch your head!

After the staircase comes a very narrow passageway with a low ceiling and damp darkness…

The Catacombes holds the remains of over 6 million people. It is something to see. If you’re visiting Paris and have no problems with mobility issues or claustrophobia, I highly recommend it. I will say, however, that it is probably a one and done. There are many places in Paris I will visit again and again. The Catacombes, incredible as it was to experience, probably isn’t one of them.

You really do become overwhelmed with the sheer volume of bones you see. And what is open to the public is merely the tip of the iceberg.

The parts of the Catacombes open to public are roughly 1km in length. You’ll never guess where one arrives after climbing the almost identical spiral staircase up out of the dungeons of Paris. That’s right! A gift shop! All of the world’s attractions and rides now deposits its adventurers off into the coveted gift shop. A sure sign of Commerce Above All Else!

After our tour of dead things, we capped off our day at my restaurant of choice in the hopes of having a chance encounter with a ghost from Paris’s glorious literary past. Between the Catacombes and the Jardin du Luxembourg, you will come to one of Paris’s most famous literary restaurants. That’s saying a lot, as quite a few of Paris’s restaurants were made famous by the patronage of many of its literary elite from the time of the Lost Generation.

The one I chose was La Closerie des Lilas, which was a mere 850m from the Catacombes.

We had a lovely (if overpriced) meal outside on the patio while I imagined Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald tucked away in a corner making literary chatter and writing away in their battered journals while drinking light aperitifs.

And just like my son Jacob used to do whenever we visited a new restaurant when he was a little boy, I made the excuse to use the facilities so I could snoop around some.

At the bar, if you look closely enough, you will see a tiny brass nameplate screwed into the bar top at one of the available chairs. It says ERNEST HEMINGWAY. This is where Ernest sat at times.

With dinner over, so too was our day at its end. Almost. In Paris, the day is always only almost over…

La Closerie des Lilas, near the end of the daylight…

Now, we only had to walk home! And you bet we made some stops along the way. The dead things may have been behind us, but there was still a lot to see!

The Pantheon at sunset is quite stunning. So majestic.

After stopping to visit the Seine, we decided to make a little side-trip to Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île on the island, where I stayed during my first visit to Paris. Here’s to another 2.5km!

Can one even walk across the famous bridges of Paris without stopping to pay homage to the river that runs through it. Her majesty…

We had our meal at Closerie, but it was time for dessert! Where else but Amorino Saint Louis?! What else, but gelato?!

Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île will always be one of my favourite places in Paris. When I stayed there in 2014, I loved to wake up early and get out into the tiny street and watch it come to life! Such simple magic!

Next! 750m to The Lady. Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. I mean, it was right there! We couldn’t NOT visit. I know it’s closed, but just to walk by it…

This concluded our Day of the Dead. After another 3.8km of walking through the nighttime streets of Paris, we were back at our hotel. It was time to sleep, to recoup and prepare for our next day of conquering the streets of Paris one footstep at a time!

My step counter for this day showed 35,173 steps, or 27.6km. Just a stroll in the big scheme of things. How often do you get to wander around the streets of Paris seeking out dead things?!