A Feast of Fat Things

"A feast of fat things"--that's exactly what our last day in Paris was.  We ate a lot of pastries.  In fact, that's all we ate!  They weren't cheap pastries either, but how often are you in Paris?  So we just tried not to calculate what the price tags would be in dollars!

Before our pastry lunch, snacks, and dinner, however, we met up with a wonderful professor I had had as a Master's student and that Rachel has had as well.  She was in Paris leading a study abroad group, and we all went to Notre-Dame Cathedral together.

It was a gray morning with occasional light showers.  Our professor was a little worried since she had to lecture to the students about the sculptures on the exterior of the cathedral, but I pointed out that a stormy day with rain was ideal for talking about things like gargoyles and Quasimodo.  Of course, we didn't really talk about the Hunchback of Notre-Dame--we mostly stayed with the non-fiction account of Paris's cathedral!

On the other hand, though, even though the nineteenth century cooked up all kinds of tales about monsters, ghosts, and spooky corridors in Gothic cathedrals, it is thanks to their renewed interest in Gothic buildings that Notre-Dame is still around today.

The cathedral started to deteriorate during the Renaissance when Gothic architecture fell out of style, and during the French Revolution medieval cathedrals and sculpture came to be negatively associated with the old monarchy and were often vandalized and damaged.

Today, most of the sculpture on Notre-Dame was restored in the nineteenth century.  This tympanum depicts the death and coronation of the Virgin Mary.  Although the church was originally dedicated to St. Stephen, it was later dedicated to Notre-Dame, or "Our Lady," in the manner of most French Gothic cathedrals.

Jamb statues of saints and Old Testament kings and queens greet you as you enter the main portal.

There is nothing quite so beautiful as a Gothic rose window, seemingly weightless and floating in the darkness.

It was too dark inside the cathedral for my camera to work very well, but I did get this picture of the medieval statue known as the "Virgin of Paris."  For centuries, Parisians have regarded her as the protector of their city.  Often at the conclusion of mass in Notre-Dame the congregation will turn to face the image and sing a hymn in her honor.

We left our professor and her study abroad group at Sainte-Chapelle, and Rachel and I went looking for a list of pâtissereies we had written down.

The displays in the windows made it very hard to decide what to get!  There was an unbelievable spread of cakes, tarts, puff pastry, and chocolate extravaganzas!

Meringue tarts with raspberries, pistachios, and rose petals for decoration?  We are definitely not in Kansas anymore!

We finally decided on a few pastries--a chocolate one with nuts and a cream one with raspberries and wild strawberries.

We ate them, along with a pear tart, on the steps of the Church of Saint-Sulpice.

But that wasn't the end of the snacking.  Our next stop was one of the most famous pâtissereies in Paris--Pierre Hermé.  Their selection of macaroons was extraordinary, and if even the little tiny ones hadn't been so expensive, I would have bought about a dozen of them.  Both the meringue part of the macaroon and the ganache or butter cream filling are flavored, so you get amazing combinations.  Rachel and I got passion fruit with milk chocolate (even though it was milk chocolate and not dark chocolate, it was still fabulous) and rose.

We also bought a marvelous creation of different layers of chocolate with fleur-de-sel caramel.  The slight saltiness to the caramel is what really made this a perfect pastry.  The chocolate decorations are very artistic, don't you think?

We ate our Pierre Hermé "feast of fat things" in a little garden next to the old Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près.

Then on our way to the Cluny Museum of Medieval Art we stopped at another pastry shop and bought an orange-flavored croissant--just in case we got hungry on the road!  Then we met up with our professor and her study-abroad group to go through the museum.  We were a little fatter than when we had parted company that morning!  The Cluny has a wonderful collection, including fragments of medieval stained glass windows that you can look at closely.  In a large church with the windows high above the ground, you don't have a chance of seeing the tiny details brushed onto the faces and clothing of the saints and angels.   

Here is a sobering sight!  Do you remember those Old Testament kings and queens on Notre-Dame Cathedral?  Well, here are the originals--or at least what remains of the originals after the French Revolution.  As if it weren't enough to guillotine the living king, they had to behead long-dead ones, too!

Unbelievably, before heading off to the train station to return to Holland and England, Rachel and I made one more dessert stop!  One of the students had told us about phenomenal gelato near the Panthéon, and they were right!  It was marvelous gelato, and since you could have as many flavors as you wanted in a one cup, we got mango, kiwi, coconut, lemon, and raspberry.  It took us longer than we planned to get to the train station, and we ended up having to sprint through those endless hallways in the metro system--up stairs, down stairs, up elevators, and through more corridors. Then you have to just sit still on the metro train and watch your watch tick away the seconds and minutes.  You start calculating how much more time it will take you to get to the train station, and then you look back at your watch, and then you nearly explode in stress, and then you try to laugh about it, and then you almost cry, and then the metro train doors open and you sprint again ahead of all the people, lugging Rachel's enormous purple suitcase!  Rachel very nearly missed her train, but fortunately she got aboard and was on her way back to London.  I made my train to Amsterdam, and I resolved to myself once again that I would always give myself plenty of time to get places in the future!