BOXES 38-39: Paris.

Paris was my last stop on a trip that had made a sort of loop going from London to Bruges, down to Rome, up to Venice and Innsbruck, west to Paris and either back to Heathrow for the return trip or back to the U.S. directly from Paris (the slides don't show and I don't recall).

My first hotel room in Paris was literally a garret--an attic space with a slanted ceiling so that I couldn't stand fully upright. The bed had one of those old-style French pillows, basically a hard cylinder that ran along the top and pinned in place underneath the sheet. But there was a small window looking out over roofs of the Latin Quarter. Maybe I should have been content with this La Boheme setting, but after an uncomfortable night I spent part of the next morning looking around the quartier for a better place and found one. (The day of my arrival I'd been lucky to find the garret: everything in Frommer seemed to have been booked already.) When I came down to the front desk with my suitcase to check out, the manager pointed out that I had booked for several days and so was obligated to stay the whole time. I must have just stood there looking miserable, doubtful that my inadequate French was capable of persuading him otherwise--after a moment, out of pity or impatience, he basically said, "All right, it's ok, get out of here."

My photos are mostly of the most famous landmarks, as you'll see. I did meet up with Mike Bavar, and I recall going to Versailles with him (see below) and to a performance of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme at the Comedie Francaise (where my French was also inadequate to understanding what the actors were saying; at one point, when there was an especially big laugh from the audience, Mike leaned over and whispered that this was the famous moment when the newly high-class protagonist is delighted to learn that "I've been speaking prose all my life!").

So here's the Palais Garnier, the famed opera house:

Palais Garnier

closeup of opera house

Just for contrast, here is a digital photo I took in 2015, on a rainy evening:

And back in 1969, here, of course, is Notre Dame, including my Instamatic's game but still feeble effort to capture the rose windows:

I see that I strolled alongside the Seine and visited the Tuileries, where the colors were beginning to change (this is early September):

Two slides show a distinctive Parisian contrast: the grandeur of government buildings and the intimacy of a street market:

I see that I walked up the Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe:

And at some point I visited Montmartre, though my only photo (besides a damaged one looking out over the city below) is of walking up the steps to Sacre-Coeur.

At least my pictures of the Eiffel Tower are (I think) a little less standard-issue. I saw it from a distance earlier in the day:

And then arrived up close toward sunset:

My one excursion from Central Paris was to Versailles. My slide photos offer only a few glimpses of the many acres of grounds: the formal gardens adjacent to the palace; the columns of the rotunda in the English-style garden; the imitation farmhouse where Marie Antoinette played at being a shepherdess; an unusual tree, a fishpond and a shady walk; and a view of the distant palace from one of the fountains.

Mike and I went on to London for a few days more before I returned to New York. I took no more photos, probably because I had run out of spare cash and slide film was expensive in Europe. The memorable parts of this visit involved Hector Berlioz. As I described in "BOXES 22-24," I had become the president of the American Berlioz Society --Mike being the brains behind the organization--and our first public event had had conductor Colin Davis as our guest of honor. Now he was about to lead the London premiere of Berlioz' epic opera Les Troyens at Covent Garden (a bit belatedly, since the opera was completed in 1858), and Mike had managed to get us "Berlioz people" from the US into a rehearsal and also tickets for the opening night. I also remember meeting the head of the British Berlioz Society (a much bigger organization than ours): he took Mike and me on a long but enjoyable walk through the city to a house where Berlioz had once stayed. The house was now adorned with one of those round blue plaques you see around London declaring some historical connection. Seeing the premiere was of course exciting, but Berlioz fans can ask me for the details--I've gone on for too long without photos.

When I returned to New York it was to start a new fulltime teaching job. My teaching fellowship at Columbia had run its course, but I was now an Instructor in Humanities at Stevens Institute of Technology, across the Hudson in Hoboken, NJ.