Guided walking tour of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
In July 2014 I took a guided walking tour (in French) of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter of Paris. We met at the exit of the Métro station Mabillon, because this is Read More …
Tag: Victor Hugo
Birth house of Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Victor Hugo was born in Besançon for the same reason that the poet Paul Verlaine was born in Metz. Their fathers were military officers who happened to be stationed in Read More …
In the footsteps (or wagon ruts) of Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo’s first visit to Liège was in 1840, when he was thirty-eight years old. He was travelling by stagecoach, known in French as a diligence, and was on his Read More …
Salomé in the opera tent
The Théâtre Royal de Liège, home of the Royal Opera of the Wallonia, was closed for several years to be reconstructed and enlarged. When I was there in 2011, I Read More …
Maritime Museum in Paris
On August 11, 1858, the emperor Napoléon III arrived in Brest in his uncle’s boat, the Canot de l’empereur, rowed by twenty oarsmen, with a golden Neptune on the front Read More …
Hugoffenbach
In Paris back in 2011 I saw an insightful theatrical revue about the Second Empire, the eighteen-year period from 1852 to 1870 when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte ruled France as Emperor Napoléon Read More …
Guided walking tour of Montparnasse
The meeting point for this guided walking tour (in French) was the Métro station Notre-Dame des Champs. This is a small station with only one entrance, so there was no Read More …
The Bièvre River in Paris
If you go snooping around the western half of the 13th arrondissement (and adjoining sections of the 5th) in Paris you will find numerous references to a river called the Read More …
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Reims
The first French king to be crowned in the Reims Cathedral was Louis VIII in 1223. The twenty-fifth and last was Charles X in 1825. Charles’s predecessor Louis XVIII and Read More …
Austerlitz Bridge in Paris
The Austerlitz Bridge is a stone bridge with five arches. It was originally built from 1801 to 1805, but it was widened and strengthened twice during the nineteenth century. The Read More …