Paris under cover: Cozy cafes, covered passages and museums offer insider's strategy for staying warm, dry
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The air was damp, and although it was just 4:30 p.m., it was almost dark. But this was Paris, and Tom, an American friend living here, and I were determined to be outside.
When it comes to people-watching, a sidewalk table in Paris on a Saturday afternoon is as good as a front-row seat at a French fashion show.
But as night fell, the wind kicked up. The gas heater above our table was giving out. I was shivering.
So much for the idea of a pre-dinner stroll along the Seine to browse the open-air bookstalls. Same for any thoughts of wandering through the outdoor sculpture garden at the Rodin Museum or a picnic in the Luxembourg Gardens.
This was January, not June. This weather called for a different strategy.
It was time to explore Paris from the inside.
When Tom and I met again a few days later, it was over plates of sausage and potatoes at Le Moulin A Vins, a bistro and wine bar in the hilltop neighborhood of Montmartre where he lives. The house cat jumped off its perch on the radiator near the window into my lap. We sat snug on red-leather banquettes, sipping a local Côtes du Rhône and nibbling on a lentil terrine.
This was more like it.
Off-season travel has lots of advantages. Air fares drop, hotels offer discounts and crowds thin out. But weather can pose challenges.
Ask any Parisian and he'll tell you that rain seems to fall throughout the year, with only the occasional heat wave.
But, just as in Seattle, a cold, windy or damp day in Paris doesn't have to be a spoiler. What better excuse to browse through a bookstore, take in a free church concert or relax with a newspaper in a tea salon decorated like your grandmother's living room.
Hot chocolate and French onion soup taste better when the weather's damp. Even the Paris Métro, stifling in the summer, becomes a welcome refuge, with the sounds of accordion-playing street musicians wandering from car to car.
Where to start?
Any of the covered passages that thread their way between Paris' Right Bank boulevards are good places to begin an indoor tour. The picturesque glass-roofed arcades - under-cover shopping areas designed to look like enclosed village streets --were built by speculators in the 19th century to give pedestrians places to shop protected from the mud and rain.
Considered the original indoor shopping malls, the passages eventually were replaced by department stores and fell into decline. Now they're making a comeback as developers repair the chipped mosaic floors, repaint faux marble columns and fill the wooden storefronts with shops selling one-of-a-kind items such as canes and antique cameras; restaurants and used bookstores.
I checked into my $65-a-night room at the Hotel Chopin, a 36-room inn built with the Passage Jouffroy in 1846, and I knew I'd made the right choice when I saw the fireplace and player piano in the lobby.
I settled into my room, newly carpeted and decorated in cheery greens and yellows, then set out to explore the shops lining either side of the arcade just outside the hotel's entrance.
The Jouffroy, with its skylight ceiling fashioned from glass and iron and its old-fashioned street lamps, is like a self-contained neighborhood. Lining each side of the narrow "street" are mom-and-pop stores selling everything from antique toys to old posters. My favorite spot became Le Valentin, a tea and chocolate shop run by Martine and Jean Luc Valentin.
After eyeing the pastries in the front window on my way to and from my hotel, I stopped in one day and asked Martine for her specialty.
"Try the Palmerosa," she insisted, reaching into the window for a tiny pastry molded in the shape of a satiny pink dome. "No sugar," she said. The little sponge was filled with grapefruit and whipped cream and sweetened with fresh raspberry juice. Delicious.
"All the passages were built for profit," a Parisian friend told me as we walked together a few days later. This is the reason nearly all (60 originally, now only about 30) are on the Right Bank, the commercial heart of Paris. She pointed out the strips of black marble along the sides of the storefronts. They were "imaginary" sidewalks. The openings in the glass roofs? They were put there because people started getting sick from the fumes from gas lights hung to recreate the feeling of strolling down a real street.
From the Hotel Chopin, I found I could stay under cover for about a mile by walking through several of the arcades and under the stone archways of the Palais-Royal all the way to the Louvre, the grande dame of Paris art museums.
The museum's chic Café Marly's outdoor terrace is the place to be on a nice day, but the best views are from inside the restaurant's rich red interior. Smoky and crowded at lunch, there's hardly anyone there in the morning.
Tables on one side look out onto IM Pei's glass pyramid, about 50 yards away. On the other side, only windows separate you from the art in the Richelieu Wing, a good place to visit on a gray day when the outside light pours into the glass-roofed courtyards that house a collection of French sculptures.
Most people only allow time for major museums. But there are many small, specialty museums that are also worth a look.
While browsing second-hand shops one Sunday afternoon, I came upon the Museum of Magic and Curiosity down a flight of steps off the Rue St-Paul in the Marais, the Jewish quarter of Paris. Its vaulted cellars include a hall of mirrors, a box for sawing a woman in two, and a mechanical clairvoyant that tells your fortune in French.
Kids love the 15-minute magic shows performed by a live magician. I was tempted to stay, but it was nearly 5:30 p.m., and I was on my way to the free Sunday organ concert at Notre Dame Cathedral.
There's hardly an afternoon or an evening when there isn't a concert in a Parisian church - everything from classical music to African-American spirituals. Many are free. The secret is to find music you like.
Rows of straight-backed wicker chairs in Notre Dame were filled when I arrived, but the droning pace of the music was not for me. I was happier with the music I heard earlier in the day at Saint-Sulpice, a massive church second in size to Notre Dame. It's here that a half-hour concert takes place at 11:30 a.m. each Sunday on an organ considered one of the finest in France.
The church has a tradition of allowing anyone into the choir loft to watch the organist play.
"Wait by the choir door just before noon," a friend told me, "and someone will come and unlock it."
I waited. In a few minutes, a man motioned me in. At the top of a spiral stone stairway I found organist Daniel Roth chatting with Miche Goussu, the choirmaster. As we talked, I learned that Goussu's wife, Camille Haedt, is a native of Spokane and a graduate of Gonzaga University who leads a choir and repairs organs in Paris.
Dressed in a scarf and long, black coat (churches are dry but not necessarily warm places), Roth offered us a Belgian chocolate from a box atop the organ, then we gathered around while he adjusted some of the organ's 102 stops, and performed a thunderous piece.
Eating and drinking
Culture aside, the very best way to spend time indoors in Paris is eating, drinking and sipping.
My favorite spot is a table by a window in a big, corner café around rush hour when people are hurrying around on foot or bicycle, shopping bags and briefcases in hand. Brightly decorated with chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling mirrors and little round faux-marble tables squeezed into every inch of available window space, Paris cafés are inviting places anytime day or night.
A café like Le Note Dame across from Notre Dame Cathedral is touristy, but it's prime real estate. I found a window table, ordered a glass of watery Beaujolais, then sat back and made mental notes on the latest in Paris fashions: long, big-ribbed scarves with matching hats, calf-high leather boots and lots of fur.
Another afternoon I slipped into La Cour de Rohan, one of dozens of tea salons around Paris, strictly indoor places (no sidewalk tables) specializing in cakes and tarts and teas served in china cups. There are fancier places, but La Cour de Rohan, with its worn white leather chairs, table lamps and oak sideboard filled with raspberry, orange-custard and chocolate-banana tortes, had a kind of tattered Left Bank charm that invited lingering.
It's fun to find restaurants with elaborate interiors. Some are like museums. I didn't want to pay $35 for the fixed-price dinner to see Le Train Bleu, the Belle Epoque restaurant built over the Gare de Lyons train station in 1900. So I admired the frescos of French scenes and polished-brass fixtures from a leather club chair in the Big Ben Bar. Same view of the paintings as in the dining room but at a more reasonable price: about $13.70 for a beer, hot Lyonnaise sausage and potato salad.
On another afternoon, after a fruitless couple of hours at the Paris winter sales, I found a dose of sunshine at Le Patio Provencal in a residential area a few Métro stops away from the big Right Bank department stores.
Booths painted green to look like picnic tables were decorated with artificial grapevines and covered with bright red and yellow tablecloths. The skies were gray and the temperature was in the high 30s, but as I tucked into a vegetarian cassoulet with goat cheese and a crisp, green salad, I felt as if I were in sunny Provence.
Carol Pucci's phone message number is 206-464-3701. Her e-mail address is cpucci@seattletimes.com.