The Villlemin Garden (Jardin Villemin) is a public park in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, between the East Station (Gare de l’Est) and the Canal Saint Martin. It is named after Jean-Antoine Villemin (1827–1892), a French army physician who was the first to demonstrate that tuberculosis is an infectious disease. Read More …
Désamiantage is a new French word I learned recently. It means asbestos removal, and is one of the reasons the Centre Pompidou aka Beaubourg will be closed for five years, from 2025 to 2030. Originally the closure was scheduled for 2023 to 2027, but it has been postponed because of Read More …
In October 2013 the Rodin Museum presented an exhibition of twenty-two sculptures of Camille Claudel (1864-1943), including some that had not been on display for several years during the ongoing renovation of the museum. The exposition’s introductory brochure said that Camille Claudel “has become an almost too familiar figure today: Read More …
The Domaine de Montaigu is a large park which straddles the boundary between the towns of Jarville-la-Malgrange and Laneuveville-devant-Nancy. It includes the Museum of the History of Iron aka Le Féru des sciences at the Jarville end (northwest), and the Château de Montaigu at the Laneuveville end (southeast). The Château Read More …
The name of this town means, literally, “the new city in front of Nancy”. This is certainly an accurate description if you are approaching from the south, not so much if you are coming from some other direction. The expanse of water in my lead photo is part of the Read More …
Jarville-la-Malgrange is a suburb that borders directly on the southern edge of Nancy, in the Grand Est region of France. Like most European towns, Jarville-la-Malgrange has a monument listing the men who were senselessly massacred (this is not the way it is worded on the monument) in the two ‘World Read More …
Metz is built partly on islands and partly on the shore of the Moselle River, which gets its name shortened to Mosel further downstream when it crosses the border into Germany. There it flows through the city of Trier and eventually unites with the Rhine at Koblenz. My first two Read More …
The three big museums of Metz are all together in one complex, called La Cour d’or (The Golden Courtyard). The first is the archeology museum, which was built on the site of the ancient Roman baths that were excavated here starting in 1932. As in Saarbrücken, which is 60 km Read More …
Currently there are about ten TGV trains per day going from Metz to Paris (and the same number from Paris to Metz) via the new high-speed railway line TGV-Est — provided there are no strikes in progress and the country isn’t shut down because of an acute pandemic, as in Read More …
On a clear summer evening you could do worse than to join the many Parisians and visitors for a stroll along the banks of the Seine at sunset. I took this first photo in 2007 from the bridge called Pont de la Tournelle, looking towards Notre-Dame Cathedral. By coincidence this Read More …