An Evening Stroll on the Left Bank, Paris

Dear Mark and Amy,

Since the warm weather has continued, I decided to try photographing in the early evening on the final day of May.  Once again, Janice asked, "Do you know where you're going?" and I confessed I hadn't a clue.  But while on the métro, I decided to see find Le Petit Pont (The Little Bridge), so I headed toward the Îsle de la Cité, the island surrounded by the rapidly-flowing River Seine.  You will remember this is where Notre-Dame Cathedral was built.  These days, there are many bridges connecting the island to both the right bank (former business district) and left bank (formerly low lands for fields and monasteries, where most people spoke Latin, hence the Latin Quarter).  In next week's concert, our final song is Voulez ouyr les cris de Paris often simply called, 'The Cries of Paris', meaning the vendors' street cries.  There has been a bridge here since antiquity.  I think it was carried away by floods some 30 times and burnt once.  The present one is a single stone span connecting to the left bank.

But when Jannequin wrote our 22-page song (which moves very quickly indeed), the bridge was covered with houses on both sides of the bridge, with vendors selling goods from open windows (no glass).  They sold everything imaginable.  So we have 'cries' advertising white wine, sauerkraut, turnips, chimney sweeps, heavy bundles of wood, cherries, strawberries, onions, old long stockings, beans, almonds, peaches, etc., and if you want to hear more cries (the song says), go a Paris sur petit pont.  I was interested in hearing more cries, so I went, trying to imagine what it might have been like on that much smaller and less sturdy bridge.  Of course I knew that all one hears these days is traffic noise.

Names of streets are forever being changed in France, and it seems that this is also true of this ancient bridge (location).  Now, le Petit Pont is also named after a recent long-serving Cardinal, who was a Jew who survived the Nazi occupation and converted to Christianity against his parents' wishes.  As a church official, he was so authoritarian that he was known as the Bulldozer.

This view shows that the distance between the Îsle and Left Bank is not great at this point in the river, which is surely why the ancients built a bridge there in the first place.  The other thing I notice is that the bridge is now many feet higher than in antiquity.  Slowly the city's ground level has risen, possibly a foot a century, so flooding no longer threatens the bridge.

That evening, I crossed various other bridges and strolled among some of the cafés on the Left Bank.  First, some shots taken from bridges.  There were so many young people enjoying the evening breezes down by the water, some eating carryout food for supper, some just talking, and some on phones.

Here is a close up showing one small group from the above photo.  You can almost see what they are eating.  The stone pavement was still warm from the hot sun that afternoon.

This young woman was content to stand for some time and contemplate the city's outline as the sun got lower.  Everybody around her was walking toward another goal, but I liked the way she was happy enjoying what was at hand.  She stood, without moving, long enough for me to get close enough to shoot.

Hopefully, one occasionally gets to enjoy something other than beautiful views in Paris.

People also find solitude on the enormous stone steps that lead from the street level to the much lower river.  Notice that the building code of the time did not require railings anywhere along the river.  Railings certainly would clutter the look of the stairs and river banks (bridges obviously have sturdy railings).

This photo was taken facing west shortly after 8:00 p.m., near the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) métro stop.   

 

These young people were part of a tour group, and were still excitedly talking with each other while waiting to be picked up.

I think that Vancouver's bus drivers might find some of these narrow streets challenging, but these drivers (both men and women) take things in stride.

It's nice writing these 'postcards' because it means I don't have to paw through the many that are for sale throughout the city.

That's all for today.  Thanks for your nice comment.  I can see it but cannot post it.  Several years ago Google required me to change my password for Postcards from St Maurice, but several were rejected.  Then I apparently lost the one that was accepted, so email likely works best when responding.  I can sign on with Janice's code, but since I never made her one of the moderators, she can't accept/post the blog's comments either.  So it goes.

With love from us both,
Evan