It wasn't long after we hit town in September that we started looking for neighborhoods with good spaces to walk dogs. Turns out, Paris parks are pretty dog-unfriendly. One exception is the Jardin du Luxembourg in the 6th Arrondissement. Marie de Medici, widow of Henri IV and mother of Louis XIII, added these gardens to her Palais du Luxembourg in 1612--part of which is now given over to dogs and their walkers (tourists and other Parisiens appear to be welcome as well). Le Palais du Luxembourg. Fit for a dog. Disturbingly, like at Ranelagh , the garden depicts yet another act of classical savagery. At la fontaine Médicis, a sculpture shows the giant cyclops Polyphemus moments before descending on lovers Acis and Galatea and crushing the former with a rock. Polyphemus, hanging junk and all, moments before his jealous rampage. Not fit for a dog. It's actually a grand and beautiful sculpture in bronze, stone, and marble. And if you bear any resentment against Polyphemus for destr...
We don't consciously seek out places that look like Castle Dracula. Well, actually we do. And compared to places like the Cathar castles in Queribus and Peyrpeteuse that we visited down south years ago, Strasbourg's cathedral really delivered. Château de Quéribus, Cucugnan Château de Peyrepetuse, Rouffiac-des-Corbières But that was not why we took a side trip to Strasbourg, in the Grand-Est region (formerly Alsace), just across the Rhine River from Germany. We had hoped to visit the famous Christkindelsmärik (Christmas Market) last winter, but got organized too late to get an affordable hotel room. So we contented ourselves with a post-May Day trip, principally to enjoy the Alsatian architecture and cuisine. Of which we got plenty of both. We stayed in a 16th century, half-timbered building that was the site of a continuously operating apothecary (later, pharmacy) from 1298 until 2000 (La Pharmacie du Cerf). The ground floor now houses an ice cream shop--which is probably a the...
The Great God Pan in the 7th Arr. A few years back, I read Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) for the first time. I was not surprised that the book was very different than the story told in the 1949 Disney cartoon The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad , which was then my only point of reference. But I was not prepared for chapter 7 , in which Rat and Mole, after searching all night for Otter's lost child, have an eerie encounter with the great god Pan. “Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?” “Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!” Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship. It seems like an odd passage in a children's novel, and Pan doesn't reappear anywhere else in the book. Then again, it may be the key to the entire story, especially if the cover of the book's first edition is any indicati...
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