I slept until 6:45, a distinct improvement; rose about eight, and made coffee. The streets were wet, with low scudding clouds overhead, and people were dressed for inclement weather. We left the apartment about nine, took the metro to Bastille, bought viennoisserie at Paul Bugat, and started munching them as we headed down rue de Charenton. It seemed as if it was about to rain any minute; we had our three umbrellas with us, but they wouldn't be adequate for five. Walking through narrow streets with even narrower sidewalks, we came upon the Marche d'Aligre, and walked through first the open fruit and vegetable section out front, and then through the covered market with boucheries and cheese being delivered on the straw mats used for ripening. The most unusual thing we saw was fresh almonds, looking like tiny oblong smooth-skinned avocados.
A short walk south brought us to the Promenade Plantee, the former railway tracks on a viaduct along and above rue Daumesnil which had been turned into a park. K had walked in this area a few years previous and saw nothing unusual; now the arches were filled in with posh shops, and trees, bushes, and flowers filled the top. We walked along the pavement until we found an elevator to the top. I had expected a straight path with more or less even greenery up top, but to my surprise the path kept meandering and changing, now widening into a long rectangular circulating pond, now detouring around a new apartment building, some architect's calling card. The rain finally came, but it was mild, and the kids took turns with our umbrellas as they laughed and chased each other.
We had missed perhaps half a kilometre of the Promenade (which started close to the Opera Bastille), but we walked the rest of the length of it, past the Jardin d' Neuilly (with a wide round garden, a playground, an arching bridge over rue de Charenton, along Allee Vivaldi at street level, and on the continuation below ground in the old railway cutting, where we found a maze for the kids.
We stopped a half-kilometre short of the Boulevard Peripherique, though we could have continued in a green space under it all the way to the Bois de Vincennes. Instead, we walked down to avenue Daunesnil, and west a short distance to a Prisunic, where we bought umbrellas for the kids. These were oversized double-folding umbrellas, and of course though it was barely drizzling, they insisted on using them, and threatened pedestrian traffic all the way to the Daumesnil metro stop, where we caught the subway to Oberkampf.
We walked west on rue J-P Timbaud, and crossed the wide boulevard Richard-Lenoir at the north end of the periodic market, still in progress. K spotted the building at number 132 where Simenon's detective Maigret was supposed to live.
Our destination was the restaurant Astier, at which we had eaten on every visit since our first one together in 1992. Dinner is typically booked out at this restaurant, but at 12:15 we could walk in and be seated at a corner table on main floor. The restaurant was mostly empty at this point but filled up as we sat. We decided to order a full menu for the kids as well as for us (3 courses, 115F, a new option; previously 4 courses were offered, and we could still choose this for 140F, but the additional course is a superb cheese platter which, knowing where we were going later on, we could afford to skip).
With K along we could order a full bottle of wine: I chose a modest Saint-Veran. The server, unusually friendly, brought small forks and knives and dishes for sharing, unasked.
Starters: saumon cru marine a l'aneth (marinated salmon with dill, for the kids as well as K), fricassee des champignons de bois (sautee of wild mushrooms, for me), terrine de poireaux et queue de boeuf (leek and oxtail, for N). The kids were mad for the mushrooms, porcini and chanterelles sauteed in butter with garlic, and A liked the oxtail as well.
Mains: lapin a la moutarde (rabbit in mustard sauce, a classic) for the kids, matelote d'anguille (eel cooked "sailor style" in red wine) for K and N, lotte au safran (monkfish in saffron) for me. As is typical, the kids liked our dishes better than theirs. Having just learned to love eel, they waited patiently for bits cut off the bone. Zuki tried some of my monkfish and rice, and then said, "The rice tastes like saffron rice." For that, she earned her own dessert.
Desserts: gratin de framboises for me, cherries cooked in red wine with vanilla ice cream for A, warm apricots with honey ice cream for Z, mousse au cafe mascarpone for N and K. All in all, it was a great meal, and we were glad to be able to share it with K, and to know that there was something we could still count on, when so much seems to fade or decay.
Out into a day that didn't seem to have changed, and a short walk to the Parmentier stop (including a museum-quality poster display on the history of the potato, to read as we waited on the platform), across to St-Philippe-de-Roule, and a short walk through the massive buildings and boulevards of the 17th to the Musee Jacquemart-Andre.
This pocket museum is housed in a fancy chateau tucked away in the middle of the 8th arrondissement, which belonged to the couple who amassed the collection. It is as much a museum about fin-de-siecle life as it is of primarily Italian Renaissance and Baroque art. We were all issued audioguides, like stylized telephone handsets. Z abandoned hers after a room or two, and listened to my condensed version of the commentary; A hung on to about the halfway mark. I myself gave up on the audioguide when we reached the start of the main Italian collection and artists with whom I was familar - Mantegna, Bellini, Uccello, Carpaccio. The Tiepolo frescos from the Villa Contarini prompted a cry of "Contarini-Bovolo!" from Z, who remembered the double exterior spiral staircase in their Venetian palazzo.
We passed through the museum shop on the way out, and were seduced by a huge print of the street plan of Paris in perspective from just before the Revolution, done by Turgot, and measuring more than a metre by a metre and a half. I didn't know how we were going to get it home, but it would go well with the similar treatment of Venice by de Barbari (a smaller-scale reproduction) already hanging in our dining room.
From the museum, we walked west through the flower vendors of Place des Ternes and to the market street rue Poncelet. I bought cheese at Alleosse, the best cheese shop in the city, from which I had brought back a dozen cheeses on my brief visit in 96. Its quality is not at all obvious on sight; in fact, there is a fromagerie a few doors down with a more attractive display. But they are one of the few cheese shops in the city that has their own caves d'affinage, and the care they take is obvious to the palate.
While I made my selection, N bought a strudel at Le Stubli next door. Coffee at Brulerie des Ternes (coffee on trips is more an annoying addiction than a pleasure for me, but I could at least make it as painless as possible), bread at Paul, and we were on our way. But we noticed a FNAC sign, decided to buy tickets for the special Monet exhibition at the Orangerie (which only admitted advance ticket holders from 10 to 1 each day), and then spent some time browsing in the bookstore section.
At about six o'clock, we walked down to the Arc du Triomphe and the Charles de Gaulle Etoile stop. The subway home was crowded (fortunately we got on at the first stop) and Z fell asleep briefly in the heat and airlessness. She revived enough to climb up to the apartment.
I dashed out to the supermarket, picked up a few things, and then we had a late dinner (that is, almost as late as it would have been in most restaurants). Cheeses from Alleosse, all raw milk, and delicious: Cabechou de Poitou goat cheese, a beautifully aged Veritable Camembert de Normandie, a Saint-Marcellin so ripe that it was oozing, and a Langres. An endive salad and bottle of Chiroubles to accompany it all. "This is amazing," K said of the Camembert, though he was even more impressed with the Langres when he tried it. I remember that sensation: it is as if one has never tasted real cheese before. The contrast with the merely competent cheeses from the Fromagerie Cler was marked.
The kids, being tired and grumpy, refused to try more than a morsel of some of the cheeses, and found none to their tastes. They were content with Rondele on their bread, though A promised to eat some brebis the next day. We gave them slices of strudel and hastened them to bed.
I stayed up late doing laundry in the hotel's small token-operated machines, just up the hall from us, and talked to a woman from Ottawa who had gotten drenched in a downpour by the Arc du Triomphe just about the time we were in the nearby FNAC. I would have done better financially at a laverie outside the hotel, but the convenience of being able to carry a load of just-dried laundry down the hall and dump it on the bed to fold it was worth it.