After a big mileage day yesterday, we slipped more into holiday mode today, not getting out of the flat until 9:30am. And that was only to get breakfast!
I don’t usually write about meals, and definitely don’t photograph them, but breakfast in France needs some explanation.
Everywhere provides pretty much the same fare. Standard breakfast is coffee, orange juice and a croissant. You can substitute tea or hot chocolate for the coffee, and substitute toast for the croissant.
I ordered the one-up from standard, as that included scrambled eggs. I asked for toast, instead of croissant and was told that with the special breakfast I actually got both. Win, win.
The ‘toast’ is half a baguette, split lengthways. Fine, only it’s not bloody-well toasted, it’s fresh! I know the croissants are always cold, but I did fully expect the toast to have been in the vicinity of an electric element at some stage before getting to me. All the apartments we’ve stayed in have toasters. They must realise what they’re for?
Anyway, with that gripe out of the way, we headed off to see Hôtel National des Invalides.
Louis XIV (the Louvre and Versailles man) initiated the project in 1670, as a home and hospital for aged and disabled soldiers. It still is, in part, but the bulk of it is the National Army Museum, plus some other museums.
Napoleon’s tomb is also in this precinct. The Dôme des Invalides, 107 metres tall contains the Emperor’s remains, plus those of some of his family. Jerome and Joseph Bonaparte (younger and elder brothers, respectively) are laid to rest here, as is his son Napoléon II.
To say the tomb is grand would be an understatement, his cask is made of brown marble and is the size of a delivery truck. The dome itself is also amazing.
Turned out that there was also some medal presentation ceremony on today and we witnessed what we assume were army cadets, in full ceremonial kit with sabres, march up and around the square before the big wigs started handing out the medals.
There are a number of museums in the place. We only did two of them, the Order of Liberation Museum, dealing with the Resistance and Free French involvement in booting the Nazis back to Berlin, and the Musée de l’Armee. There are several others.
I expect a French museum to have text in French. It’s nice when they have it in English too. The museums at the Les Invalides had a bad habit of offering the occasional English version, not all displays and placards, just some and in no particular pattern, to keep you on you toes.
The Order of Liberation Museum was full of the usual French heroics – we won the war single-handedly, gosh we are brave – and very little about the caving in quickly once the shooting started part. Still, it’s their museum and their history, they can interpret it as they want.
The Army Museum is astounding. Not a lot in the way of tanks and big kit, but it’s got the most extensive display of swords, cutlasses, pistols, muskets and rifles as you’ll see anywhere. Uniforms too. Mainly Napoleonic and earlier. And I didn’t take a photo of any of them as the glass case makes for poor photos. We bailed before we’d seen everything, as there was just so much to see.
Back to the apartment, Montmartre for a farewell dinner and an early-ish night in preparation for our return to the UK on the morrow.
Mention needs to be made of an atrocious driving display witnessed this morning. A woman, Antoinette we’ll call her, tried to park in a small space in a one-way street. The space was at least a metre shorter than the car. Anyway the ambitious endeavour wasn’t concluded until the third attempt, after she’d collected a restaurant’s eating area on one side of the road and backed into the car behind her. The motorists behind her waited patiently while all this was going on.
So, just because you’re willing to drive a car along some of these crazy torturous roads, doesn’t mean that you can.
Stephen and Michelle
*I need to fix up some of the posts. It appears that anything taken with ‘Live’ mode on the iPhone doesn’t display on the web. There are some orphan captions. I’ll gradually convert the photos to standard jpegs. Stay tuned.
Leave a Reply