Surprise, after all that walking, I’ve got a wicked blister on my toe! Today I wanted to see La Conciergerie, once the site of a medieval royal palace and now most famous as the last prison of Marie Antoinette, so I left my traveling companions at the Musée d’Orsay Métro stop and walked along the Seine to the Île de la Cité.
The Conciergerie was sort of meh, not worth a full blog post, so I’m just going to take you along on my walk, looking at the amazing architecture along the way. This is the Louvre, of course, right across the river:
And this is a snippet of the Musée d’Orsay, an excellent museum that you should definitely visit next time you’re in Paris.
Walking along the Quai Voltaire:
and the Quai de Conti
Crossing the Pont Saint-Michel, we walk past the Palais de Justice and arrive at the Conciergerie. The only remnant of the medieval palace is this wonderful hall, once the refectory for the palace staff. It is about 10 feet below ground now, but was at ground level when it was built. Walking down the stairs into the building is a wonderful way to grasp the scale of the changes to the island since medieval times.
The rest of the museum is a series of prison cells reconstructed based on old diaries and engravings of various Parisian prisons. Marie Antoinette’s has also been “reconstructed,” complete with a regal mannequin dressed in black 18th century mourning clothes. I didn’t take a picture because well, do you really need to see that? If you’ve only got a few days in Paris, skip this one. Heck if you’ve only got a month in the city you could skip this, unless you’re a very thorough Marie Antoinette fan.
OK, back outside in the sunshine, heading over to the Île Saint Louis:
And back into the Marais district along the Rue Vielle du Temple:
Just off the Rue d.V.d.T is the Rue François Miron, where the two oldest houses in Paris are still more or less upright (they date from around the 1400s):
And this is on my own street, the Rue Saintonge, and I am supremely jealous of whoever gets to have their morning coffee on this perfect balcony.
Another magnificent post!
Lovely~! Still wonder how anyone arrives at the ‘big attractions’ in Paris… there are so many grand little details in every nook and cranny along the way to everywhere. I’m so enjoying ‘revisiting’ Paris through your lens. TY.
I am jealous of that balcony also… one can dream~
The ornamentation on many of these buildings makes me yearn to sit right down in front of them and sketch – those deep pink doors with their scrolled window grilles would be first!