Extracting Rent from Condemned Prisoners

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Our hotel is huge and impersonal, and feels like a giant boarding house. They don't seem to have nearly enough lifts for the number of rooms and it doesn't help that one of them seems to be permanently out of service. People get in lifts that are going up even if they want to go down, just so they can get themselves into the system.

We're feeling brave, so we catch the metro to the Arc de Triomphe. It's in the middle of a gigantic roundabout, with twelve streets leading off it, including the Champs Elysees. I try to imagine our GPS trying to cope with this. I'd like to hear it say "in 200 metres cross the roundabout and take the eleventh exit". I then remember what it did to us and decide that I would actually prefer not to hear it say anything. Someone told me once that if you hire a car in Paris they won't insure you if you drive around this roundabout. They apparently don't trust pedestrians to cross it either, which probably isn't too surprising; I think you'd need to be suicidal to try. We go through a tunnel under the road to the Arc's base and then climb it via a long spiral staircase. The views from the top are spectacular, particularly of the nearby Eiffel Tower. A platform has been specifically positioned so that visitors can take pictures of their companions so that they look like they're holding the Eiffel Tower between their fingers, or putting their hands on top of it, or kissing it, or doing anything else to it that their imaginations can come up with. This feels like Pisa all over again. Troy wouldn't like this, and he'll be pleased to know that we didn't take any cliched pictures, although I've got a nasty suspicion that this might only be because Issy didn't notice the platform. I certainly wasn't going to point it out.

We climb down and spend some time looking around the Eternal Flame, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and other impressive carvings and statues around the base of the Arc.

We stroll a short way down the Champs Elysees, and Issy walks into a Peugeot showroom. I'm not sure why; she's not usually too fussed about cars. It's not like car showrooms I'm used to seeing back home; it looks more like a stand at the motor show, and there's a similar style Mercedes showroom next door. We suspect that the Champs Elysees might attract some very upmarket shoppers.

We head towards the Pantheon on the hop on hop off bus. We pass a Japanese restaurant. Issy's been hanging out for Japanese food since we left home, and it would be decades since she last went for six weeks without a plate of sashimi. She lingers outside drooling over the menu, and I think I can sense what we'll be having for lunch.

The Pantheon was built in the late 18th century as a church, but is now a secular mausoleum. Its main upper section contains frescoes and statues that "celebrate France". I'm not quite sure exactly which aspect of France, but it's very impressive nonetheless. Many famous French people have been interred in rooms in the crypt include Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and Louis Braille. Marie Curie's also buried here. I thought she was Polish but the French seem to have claimed her as their own.

We return to the Japanese restaurant for lunch as predicted. Next stop is the large and very formal Luxembourg Gardens, which include the standard French offering of lawn which you're not allowed to walk on. It's Saturday, and the gardens are packed with picnickers. We see some silver beet planted in amongst the flowers. I wonder if anyone ever bothers to eat it.

We catch the metro to the Ile de la Cite, where we've booked a walking tour. Our guide introduces herself as Katerina and she's an art historian from Lithuania. She tells us that she came to Paris five years ago because there was no art to know the history of in her homeland. She tells us that Ile de la Cite is a natural island. A small tribe lived here in ancient times, but there was nothing resembling an urban area until the Romans established the settlement that eventually became Paris sometime around 50 BC. We pass Pont Neuf which she tells us means "New Bridge", although it's actually the oldest bridge in Paris. I suppose it was new when it was built.

Katerina points out some beach umbrellas and sand on a wide footpath along the opposite bank of the river. She says that this is where Parisians who are too poor to go to a real beach come in summer. She says that the main downside of this is that it's illegal to swim in the Seine, so none of the people who come here can take a dip to cool off. She says that the law is for the protection of the beachgoers. She says that the Seine's really filthy, and you'd be almost guaranteed to catch a disease if you swum in it. She says she seriously doubts the truth of a rumour she heard recently that someone found a fish living in the river, although that said apparently the rumour was silent on how many heads it had.

Katerina points out the Justice Department building. This was apparently a jail during the French Revolution, and is where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned before she was executed. Although people were imprisoned here, presumably against their will, they still had to pay rent. Marie Antoinette was rich so she could afford a single room on the top floor, but if you didn't have that much money you got a shared room on the next floor down. If you were really poor you ended up in basement, which was flooded with sewage most of the time. Katerina tells us that a lot of the prisoners in the basement died before they could get them to the guillotine. Rent was payable monthly in advance, but most prisoners were executed within a week of arriving, so a lot of the guards became very rich on unused rent.

Next stop is the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral. It's ceiling is barely visible in the distance. Katerina tells us that it was constructed during a period when it was fashionable to make church ceilings high to get them closer to God. A Mass starts unexpectedly so our tour's cut a bit short. We start to climb one of the Cathedral's towers via a long spiral staircase. The middle level is adorned with numerous creepy looking gargoyles for which Notre Dame is apparently famous. I leave Issy resting and continue on up to the belfry. They apparently arrange visits so that the gigantic bells don't ring while anyone's here. I suspect this is probably a very good thing. Judging by their size I suspect their clamour would vibrate your brain for several days if you experienced it at close quarters.

We head across the river onto the left bank and into the Latin Quarter. Katerina told us earlier that it's so-named because it was the site of the Sorbonne University, and in past centuries the students were taught in Latin so that's what they spoke. I'm not sure that this would have done a lot to narrow class divisions in Paris.

We eat at a Turkish restaurant. The food's superb. We're in Paris, yet the only food we've eaten today's been Japanese and Turkish; we might as well be at home getting takeaway.

We arrive back at our lodgings just in time to see the spectacular nightly flashing light show on the Eiffel Tower.

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