Our flight out of Cairo to Paris was delayed by about twelve hours, so we were able to spend an extra night in Egypt and then — our connections having all been broken — were obliged (quelle horreur!) to spend a night in Paris.
We used that extra night rather well, if I must say so myself.
Along with our son and two friends who were caught in the same situation, we hired a van and driver and drove from Charles de Gaulle Airport into the city. We had a really good dinner at the Procope Restaurant, which was founded in 1686. Now, measured by the standards of the Step Pyramid of Zoser and the Great Pyramid of Khufu, that’s not very old. Roughly 333 years? Practically yesterday. But, when compared to your typical Taco Bell or Chili’s — that is, evaluated on a restaurant-calibrated time scale — it’s pretty good. One begins to suspect that Procope may last longer than most new start-ups in the food industry.
As you walk up the stairs in the Procope, you see a tricornered hat in a display case. It belonged to the Emperor Napoleon, and he left it behind one night as a kind of promissory payment for a meal in the restaurant. From the looks of things, I’m guessing that he never paid.
According to the restaurant’s materials, Voltaire used to eat at the Procope with his buddies in the eighteenth century, and his contemporary Denis Diderot commenced his famous Encyclopédie at one of its tables.
We also drove through the city, taking brief looks at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, the Eiffel Tower, the Place de la Concorde, La Basilique du Sacré Cœur de Montmartre, the Louvre, and etc.
We almost didn’t get to see the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe because, just an hour or two before we were there, they were engulfed in violence and destruction:
“Day of Rage: Smoke Rises Over Paris as Yellow Vest Riots Turn Violent (VIDEOS)”
“Paris urban riots continue into the night”
We saw burnt out motorcycles, piles of broken bottles, scores of police vehicles and innumerable riot police, still there. I haven’t seen such smouldering rubble since a stay in Athens several years back, where cars had been burned, a bank around the corner from us had been destroyed by a Molotov cocktail (with fatalities), and the ground-floor windows of the hotel had all been smashed.
Posted from Paris, France
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