Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots
The two great existentialist cafés face each other across the Boulevard Saint-Germain — Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots — and both are worth visiting exactly once for the atmosphere, the history, and the price of a coffee, which is considerably higher than any comparable establishment fifty metres away. The real interest lies in understanding what the neighbourhood was between the wars and in the 1940s and 1950s: the streets around the abbey church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés housed a density of publishers, critics, and writers that no other city quarter in the 20th century quite matched.
The Musée d'Orsay
The Musée d'Orsay, in the converted Beaux-Arts railway station on the Seine, holds the largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting in the world. The central hall, with its glass barrel vault and enormous clock faces, is remarkable; the art on the upper floor — Monet's series paintings, van Gogh's self-portraits, Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — is devastating. Advance booking is essential in season. The museum is closed on Mondays; Tuesday mornings are the quietest. The view from the café on the top level, through the clock face over the Seine and the Louvre opposite, is not to be missed.
The Food Shops of the Sixth
The streets around Rue du Bac and Rue de Buci contain the finest concentration of food specialists in Paris. Poilâne on Rue du Cherche-Midi bakes the miche sourdough that has defined Parisian bread for fifty years; arrive early or it will be gone. Barthélemy on Rue de Grenelle is one of the great cheese shops of France — aged Comté, raw-milk Camembert, Époisses wrapped in marc-soaked linen. The covered Marché Saint-Germain, a short walk from the boulevard, operates Tuesday through Sunday and supplies the neighbourhood with vegetables, fish, and charcuterie of a quality that the supermarkets of the outer arrondissements cannot approach.
The Luxembourg Gardens
The Jardin du Luxembourg, a ten-minute walk from the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, is the finest public park in Paris — formal French geometry on the southern half, informal gravel paths and beehives on the north, the Sénat palace at the centre. On a weekday afternoon, the garden is populated by students from the nearby Sorbonne, elderly men playing pétanque, and children sailing model boats on the octagonal pond. The orchard at the eastern edge, maintained by the Sénat, grows 600 varieties of apple and pear. The puppets at the Théâtre des Marionnettes perform on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons.
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