Stairs. Entry group. Materials. Doors. Locks. Design

Off the northwestern coast of France there are three rocky islands: Mont Saint-Michel, Mont Dol and Tomblain, of which only one is inhabited - Mont Saint-Michel. In 709 it was founded and consecrated in honor of St. Michael, from which it received its name. IN late XIX century, a dam was built to connect it with the mainland, and at the same time (in 1874) it was recognized as a historical monument. And since 1979, UNESCO has included it in the fund world heritage. With an indigenous population of less than 50 people, up to 3.5 million tourists and pilgrims visit it annually. So during your trip to France, do not miss the opportunity to appreciate the merits of architecture and natural features of this island.

How to get to Mont Saint Michel from Paris?

From Paris by railway can be reached in three ways:

· From Paris Montparnasse by TGV via Rennes (2 hours). Then from Rennes to Pontorson by train, and then by bus to Mont Saint-Michel or by direct bus from Rennes to Mont Saint-Michel.

· From Paris Montparnasse by TGV to Dol de Bretagne (2 hours 40 minutes), and from there by direct bus to Mont Saint-Michel.

· From Paris Saint-Lazare by train to Caen, then by train to Pontorson and from there by bus to Mont Saint-Michel.

Attractions Mont Saint Michel

Once you have reached the island, the entire visit can be called one continuous excursion. At the entrance to this medieval town is the former Burgher's Guardroom, now a tourist office. Working hours:

· July-August: daily from 7.00 to 19.00.

· March-June and September-October: from 9.30 to 18.00 (break 12.30-14.00).

· November-February: from 10.00 to 17.00 (break 12.30-14.00).

After passing through Boulevard Gate and King's Gate you will reach main street Grande Rue, where museums, shops and houses are located, the construction of which dates back to the 15th-16th centuries.

· L "archéoscope - tells about the construction and history of Mont Saint-Michel;

· Historical Museum – here are exhibits of ancient weapons, paintings and sculptures, and gives an idea of ​​local prisons and dungeons.

· Museum of the Sea and Ecology – tells about the connection between the city and the sea.

· Tiphaine House (le logis Tiphaine demeure de Bertrand Duguesclin) is a residence built in 1365 by Bertrand Duguesclin for his wife. Here you can see tapestries, furniture and paintings from the 14th century.

Museum opening hours: daily from 9.30 to 17.00. On the winter vacation All museums, except the maritime one, are closed. Tickets are sold at the door. Cost of visit:

· Subscription for 4 museums: for adults, over 25 years old - €18; for persons 18-25 years old - €9;

· Entrance to 1 museum for persons over 18 years old - €9.

· Children under 18 years old have free admission.

· Visitors under 18 years old – free.

Then along the route you come across the small parish church of St-Pierre, built at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries in honor of the patron saint of fishermen. Masses are held daily at 11 a.m. and on Saturdays at 6 p.m.

To get directly to the monastery, you need to climb the Great Steps of the Grand Degré. The abbey itself is open to the public every day except January 1, May 1 and December 25. Working hours:

You can visit it on your own or use the services of a guide (1 hour). Tickets are sold at the entrance to the monastery. Price:

· €9 – for persons over 25 years old (individual visit);

· €5.5 – for non-Europeans aged 18-25 years;

· €7 – for members of a group of 20 people;

· €30 – for schoolchildren (35 people + accompanying person);

· Children under 18 years old (when visiting with parents) – free;

· Citizens of EU countries or citizens of other countries permanently residing in France, under the age of 26 years - free.

Masses are held daily at 12.15 (Sunday at 11.30) and are free to attend.

The layout of the island's tourist sites can be seen on the plan, which you will find in the appendix under our article.

You can purchase a subscription for 4 museums using this link.

Ebbs and flows in Mont Saint-Michel

People also come to Mont Saint-Michel to see the largest tides in Europe. Twice a month sea ​​waters reach the walls of Saint-Michel. The exact dates of these events are listed at www.ot-montsaintmichel.com/horaires.htm. The water reaches its greatest height 36-48 hours after the new moon and full moon, especially in the mornings and evenings. The difference in water levels is 15 meters, covering and exposing 15 km of areas adjacent to Saint-Michel. Be very careful if you plan to leave your car in the parking lot outside the fortress walls at this time - it may be washed away by water. It is better to arrive a day or two before the expected high tide and stay at a hotel.

Where to stay on Mont Saint Michel?

On the territory of this small island there are a sufficient number of hotels. 7 of them are located a couple of kilometers from the monastery, another 9 are located directly on the territory (these hotels). In addition, from February 15 to November 11, visitors can stay in an electrified campsite with 48 beds.

· Le relais Saint-Michel – 4 stars, outside the walls of the monastery – 39 rooms costing €270-560;

· La mere Poulard – 3 stars, on the territory of the monastery – 27 rooms costing €190-550;

· Saint Aubert – 2 stars, outside the monastery walls – 27 rooms costing €90-145;

· Lavieille Auberge – 2 stars, on the territory of the monastery – 11 rooms costing €120-200.

Where to eat on Mont Saint Michel?

On Mont Saint-Michel you can eat in hotel restaurants or in a dozen cafes and creperies, almost all of which are located on the territory of the monastery. Traditional items on the menu here are various dishes seafood, mussels are especially often ordered (moules de bouchot de la baie de Mont Saint Michel). And a huge omelet “from mother Poulard”, baked on the fire of the hearth, is exactly what gastro tourists come here for. “La mere Poulard” is prepared in the restaurant of the hotel of the same name. The meat of 3-6 month old “lamb from the salty fields” (l’agneau de pré-salé), with a high content of iodine and salt, is incredibly tasty. And in pancake shops you can treat yourself not only to the usual homemade pancakes, but also buckwheat pancakes. In many catering establishments, the menu is translated into various languages, including Russian. To taste all of the above, be sure to check out

· Traditional pancake house La Cloche;

· Cafe Mere Poulard;

· Restaurant Le Saint-Michel;

· Le tripot snack bar.

The best time to visit Mont Saint-Michel is considered to be July-August.

Have a nice rest!

Walk through Latin Quarter will allow tourists to feel the special atmosphere of student Paris. Regardless of the time of day, you can safely head towards Boulevard Saint-Michel. This name appeared on the map of Paris only in 1859, so the street is considered one of the newest in the famous quarter of the capital. Literary scholars usually consider Boulevard Saint-Michel the birthplace of symbolism. Having settled in [...]

Walk through Latin Quarter will allow tourists to feel the special atmosphere of student Paris. Regardless of the time of day, you can safely go to the side Boulevard Saint-Michel (Boulevard Saint-Michel). This name appeared on the map of Paris only in 1859, so the street is considered one of the newest in the famous quarter of the capital. Literary scholars usually consider Boulevard Saint-Michel the birthplace of symbolism.

Having settled down in any cafe, tourists find out that they often sat at its tables until late Paul Verlaine And Rimbaud, met with friends Mallarmé And Heredia. It seems that on their way the poets did not miss a single student cafe, which over time acquired elitism and began to be called literary. In them, even now in the evenings you can count on meeting with musical and theatrical bohemia.

The price category of each cafe can be easily assessed by examining the boards displayed at the entrance, on which it is customary to write the menu in chalk. The most affordable ones will offer you pancakes with sweet or vegetable filling. This is, as a rule, a traditional order of poor French students.

On Place Saint Michel There are famous bookstores, but tourists are more attracted to small second-hand bookstores, where sometimes you are lucky enough to unearth some rarity. You can sit by the fountain nearby Archangel Michael statues. There are always a lot of young people here, there is music and multilingual speech.

Boulevard Saint-Michel, 75006 Paris, France

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Hotel on Boulevard Saint-Michel

Everyone has two homelands - his own and Paris.

Thomas Jefferson

After living in Paris for a week, I understood France perfectly, but after living in it for three years, I don’t understand it at all.

Kurt Tucholsky

For many years now, when we come to Paris, we stay at the same hotel on Boulevard Saint-Michel.

The hotel is over a century old. The 1904 guidebook mentions it. In honor of the nearby Cole des Mines, it is called “Htel des Mines” - “Hotel des Mines”.

They have long been accustomed to us and perceive us as eccentric distant relatives. They are surprised by their attachment to Paris and make touching concessions, discounts and small preferences.

The lobby retains some lovely traces Belle?poque: an umbrella stand in the then fashionable Guimard style, languid ornaments on the doors and wood panels, carved curlicues decorating the niche in which now stands quite modern computer for guests who want to access the Internet.

At the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel and the Seine embankment

There is a welcoming and constant aroma in the lobby good coffee and clean, quiet housing. The hotel is cleaned all the time. Since night the tables have been set for petit d'jeuner: a pleasant reminder that tomorrow will be a new day of Parisian unchanging life.

The rooms are austere and lack style, but have everything you need. Sterile cleanliness ( nickel, as the French say) with some indifference to order. The plug in the bathtub has been torn off and remains in this state for years. Pas de problems! Owner Monsieur Laurent, jack of all trades (homme savant tout faire), performs the duties of a plumber himself (plombier), once he even repaired the elevator himself, but he doesn’t have enough time for everything. He owns another hotel on Boulevard Pasteur. He works harder than anyone else: sometimes he serves coffee, sweeps floors, and, if necessary, carries clients' suitcases - in the early years we took him for the most humble hotel employee. He rides a motorcycle and wears simple checkered shirts. However, he lives at Eiffel Tower, once let it slip that he had a Porsche, and was embarrassed. In France, it’s not poverty that’s embarrassed – it’s wealth.

Outside the doors of the hotel, Paris greets us every morning - cold, warmth, fog, sun, short rains with cheerful bubbles and splashes, humid wind, the light rustle of dry leaves falling on the pavement in autumn and winter.

The hotel is on the odd side of the boulevard, in the fifth arrondissement (the opposite side already belongs to the sixth), in the Vale-de-Gr?ce quarter.

However, the question of a passerby who wants to know the way: “Vous ?tes du quartier?” (literally – “Are you from the quarter?”), does not refer to the administrative division of Paris. We are simply talking about the habitat, limited by habit, knowledge and, of course, love, if it has not been replaced by irritated fatigue or dissatisfaction with the place where one had to live.

Boulevard Saint-Michel. Bus stop

Step onto the sidewalk - and the constant, dizzying confusion of the present moment with the distant and recent past begins: in Paris this special “stuff of time” is always noticeable, in which the past, the present, the imperishable and the fleeting are united. Different eras, but the intonations seem eternal. Beyond the threshold, wherever you look - familiar faces or just randomly remembered ones. We don’t know the names, but you can say hello to strangers: they will certainly answer with a smile. The owner of the used bookstore “Le Petit prince” and I have been kissing tenderly for a long time, talking about books, weather and news, but neither she knows our names, nor we hers. It doesn't matter.

"Bonjour, Madame." - “Bonjour, Monsieur, comment allez-vous?” - “Tr?s bien, et vous?” - “Tr?s bien, Madame, bonne journ?e...” No one will respond to the question: “How are you doing?” - tell exactly how he is doing. Just an indispensable, always smiling, cheerful ritual, the exchange of affectionate morning phrases with the pharmacist from the neighboring pharmacy, with the motorcyclists delivering pizza, with the garbage man sweeping the street. People are happy to each other and, without thinking about it, give their interlocutor a piece Have a good mood, even if they themselves aren’t having much fun.

Haussmann's house in a motorcycle mirror

Diagonally opposite is the lattice of the Luxembourg Gardens.

I learned the word “Luxembourg” seventy years ago, during the war, from the book “The Three Musketeers,” which I read when I was nine years old. I didn’t understand what it was then. But in 1960, without having yet been to Paris, in a book about Jacques Louis David he wrote about the days the artist spent in Luxembourg Palace, which served as a prison after Thermidor. And in August 1965, for the first time, I sat on a bench, watched toy boats float in the pool, and did not believe in my happiness. In 1972, I lived with my cousin, almost opposite our current hotel; in 1977 - with friends on the same boulevard, only lower, near Rostand Square.

“Life is the gradual disappearance of the stunning” (Yuri Trifonov). I constantly not only remember these words of probably the best writer of Soviet times, I feel them in Paris. Sometimes, even in this city, the dark demons of everyday life triumph, all that Trifonov himself called “the rubbish of life.” But here the beginnings and ends of my human, professional and literary destiny, childhood dreams, first meetings, anxious happy and bitter thoughts, books read, written and conceived are so tightly intertwined here, the characters are so mixed real story and literary heroes, that everyday despondency recedes before the feeling of eternal return to the city, which for so long remained only a phantom, Atlantis, a mirage, the abode of musketeers - Rastignac, Sylvester Bonnard, my childhood dream, unquenchable and not fading to this day.

Bus 38 passes by the hotel, crossing the city from south to north. It (like most Parisian buses) has practically not changed its route since the 1920s, since its introduction. It takes you to Gare du Nord, next to which at 100 Rue Lafayette there was once the Hotel Francia. Almost half a century ago, on August 11, 1965, we, Soviet tourists, were brought there from Le Bourget airport.

In Dumas's novel The Count of Monte Cristo, the hero, fed up with revenge, comes to the Chateau d'If, the dungeon in which he spent fourteen long years at the behest of the villains. He comes to remember the suffering he suffered and find new strength to bring vengeance to the end.

Boulevard Saint-Michel

E. Guimard. Subway entrance

This pathetic and not very accurate comparison came to my mind when I once again made a pilgrimage to Lafayette Street. Everyone wanted to remember myself - still very young, thirty-two years old, to return the elusive presence of a miracle, which over time began to turn into simple pleasure. I began to get used to everyday life in Paris, and began to forget what humiliations I had to go through in ancient times to get to this city. It was necessary to relive again this miraculously won battle with a cruel world, to evaluate one’s own choice, the first, not at all simple trips to Paris and the current visits, for the sake of which - consciously and joyfully - one had to give up a lot in this almost lived life.

Sometimes meeting with a former hotel helps. Sometimes they leave a feeling of annoyance and awkwardness. Are these dialogues with the past necessary? The hotel is long gone. In the magnificent building with a Guimard canopy over the entrance there are faceless offices, and the neighboring one has disappeared over time. parfumerie, from where that first Parisian summer floated the eternal, and then amazing, magical Parisian aroma - bitter and arrogantly festive.

A twilight but elegant lobby, glossy advertising brochures, a friendly receptionist, a kiosk - what a temptation! – Folies Bergere slides – striptease! From the window of a room on the seventh floor (calico wallpaper even on the ceiling, a toy telephone, a bidet behind the partition) you can see - very close - the absurd and at the same time graceful, piercingly familiar building of the Sacré-Coeur.

And the next day there was a conversation, the significance of which I was able to appreciate much later - a conversation that I still remember in every detail, because every year I become more and more convinced of its value for understanding many Parisian mysteries. The conversation that later different options repeated countless times.

Very early in the morning (before breakfast, we, supervised Soviet tourists, were reluctantly allowed by the group leaders to walk alone) I sat on a bench not far from our hotel near the Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul on Place Lafayette.

Two old Parisians standing nearby immediately realized that I was a visitor, a foreigner. They greeted me warmly (this surprised me beyond words!) and said something about the weather. I didn’t understand everything - it seems that the morning is beautiful, but in the afternoon it will be very hot.

Flattered by the fact that two Parisians were talking to me as if they were one of their own (and they looked like something out of a movie! I still remember them clearly: one in a beret and a bow tie, but in worn-out slippers, the other with a bright scarf around his neck, in a collarless shirt and corduroy wide pants!), I enthusiastically and confusedly entered into the conversation, expressing as best I could the most banal idea that Paris is always and in any weather unusually beautiful.

“You, monsieur, are, of course, a foreigner,” said the gentleman with the handkerchief. – But you speak French perfectly!

I melted with joy. I just didn’t know yet that the worse a foreigner speaks French, the more ardently he is praised. This is how it is done in France. This is not hypocrisy at all, just a desire to encourage a visitor who is trying to speak their language. Now I know French much better, but I don’t receive compliments.

“And of course, you really like Paris,” the man with the handkerchief continued, rather affirmatively, but partly with a condescending irony that was unexpected for me.

“A va sans dire,” I answered, immensely proud of the uttered idiom I had read in some book.

My interlocutor wrinkled his face and became surprisingly similar to Houdon’s Voltaire. And he delivered a skeptical, even bilious monologue (I didn’t understand much, but what I understood was enough), the meaning of which boiled down to the fact that Paris in the sixties was not Paris at all, and could not be compared with pre-war. De Gaulle, the new Franks, youth, morals, American films, sex shops, and, most importantly, the completely disappearing politeness for which Paris was once famous suffered.

And now, already in the new millennium, when the French, with some even condescending sympathy, having listened to my declarations of love for Paris, say that the city is no longer the same, I remember the meeting at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul on August 12, 1965.

And much later, I read a letter from twenty-two-year-old Mozart to his father: “Those who are not in Paris cannot even imagine how disgusting everything is here! ‹…› And then - how much Paris has changed: the French no longer have the same politeness as they did fifteen years ago; they are rude and monstrously arrogant..."

Lafayette Street. Hotel "Francia". 1965

Maybe somewhere here lies the answer to the question of the “elusiveness” of this city. In the crucible of the mysterious “substance of Paris” Time melts, centuries, tastes, skepticism and joy of life, dissatisfaction with one’s era and the ability to feel the happiness of being are united, the past and the present merge. Nothing in him completely disappears, he preserves everything - you just need to look, love and see. I try to remember this every time I cross the threshold of our favorite hotel to return to Paris.

And then I didn’t think much about it. Everything delighted me, intoxicated me, my soul was inflamed with happiness, and Paris smiled at me.

Lunch in an inferior, by Parisian standards, hotel restaurant - simple and tasty: juicy meat, an unusual, very French side dish - green pods, cheap wine in dark bottles without stickers, orangeade "Pchitt!!!" - in tiny, ice-cold and pot-bellied bottles, ashtrays with the eternal inscription “Ricard”, the indispensable “merci!” the waiter even taking away the dirty plate.

In the metro, a tired inspector in a blue robe, punching tickets with tongs, seemed like a character from a French film, like the cars themselves - four green (second class), in the middle red (first), and these advertisements, and outlandish machines with bottles, and booming announcements on natural French.

The real Paris, in all its alarming clarity, mercilessly destroyed the fragile children's mirages, the fruits of dreams and imagination. Nevertheless, this “finality” of the real city was evidence of luck, victory: I recently (without having yet been to Paris, of course!) published two books about French artists - Daumier and David. Then, oddly enough, it was perhaps easier than going abroad. And here I am! Despite his youth and non-partisanship, despite his – albeit then modest – knowledge of the language. “Thank you, they let me in, I am the chosen one!” - beat in my humiliated consciousness.

I felt humiliation many years later. Through, so to speak, the optics of memory. And then - drunken joy.

No matter how many times I come to Paris later, those distant hot August days do not leave my memory, just as childhood does not go away. The walls of medieval buildings glowed with warm silver - a different, strange beauty not of plastered and painted, but of stone houses and churches that seemed light and fragile, like light cooling ash. It seemed that they were not built, but carved out like sculptures, and the hackneyed phrase about “the dust of centuries” did not seem banal here at all. And the cornices, capitals, gutters, statues, high reliefs washed in the background by rains over many centuries dark walls created the effect of the finest and solemn engravings.

Then, in 1965, the black city again became white, as in the Middle Ages: they began to clean it with sandblasters...

Luxembourg Garden. M. Herman. 1965

The pictures of the first day, the smells and sounds remained in my memory as a stable and complex mosaic. High iron roofs with thin pipes, gleaming with noble rust, gray firewalls, balcony bars, cheerful lace decorating the facades of warm-silver limestone, slightly clouded by time, red awnings of the lower floors over the windows of cafes and shops, the graceful bulk of the Louvre (Dos Passos saw its stones gray and pink , and I again appreciated the vigilance of the great observer). Unexpectedly, the southern Parisian heat with some even slight fog from the heat. And all these people are Parisians: children, ajans (policemen) in now-forgotten capes and capes, and this ancient, elegantly and somewhat provocatively dressed and made-up old woman (the French call such people coccinelle– coxinel – ladybug), in black lace mittens, with an equally decrepit and also well-groomed dog on a leash; and a lovely girl with dark bangs, hurrying somewhere with a flying gait, and a polite gentleman in a three-piece suit and a gloomy shimmering, elegantly tied (French!) tie - then the discreet style had not yet become universal casual clothes, and a sterile, academic-looking old man in a beret, and children dressed brightly and simply, and completely bookish fishermen with fishing rods, and a clochard who really seemed like an actor in make-up, and for some reason a memorable nun in a hood pulled low, hiding her face, walking in small , but with quick steps and reading a prayer book as she walked...

Boulevard Saint-Michel near the Luxembourg Gardens

Luxembourg Garden. 1965

Awkward looking old fashioned green buses with open areas and tram bells crossed the courtyard of the Louvre, on the lawns of which couples were serenely kissing; at the entrance to the museum, small black and red Peugeot 404 taxis were waiting for passengers (on the doors of radio-equipped cars there was an inscription: “All?, taxi!”); round tables-gueridons (gu?ridons) in front of the cafe (in glasses, mugs, glasses, glasses - multi-colored sparkling drinks), the smells of coffee, unusual perfumes, sweet tobacco, good food, many smiling, cheerful faces (in the Soviet Union people were taught not to smile , and the friendliness and smiles seemed strange!), the outlines of buildings so familiar that they seemed like decorations for themselves, the theatrical elegance of Parisian speech, sunbeams in rich shop windows, cars of unprecedented beauty - I still remember all these precious molecules of reality.

Yes, the bookish knowledge of Paris melted into the hot stream of reality, the plane engines were still roaring in my confused brain, and every now and then I lost my understanding of where and what.

At the same time, I, still young, “released into a capitalist country” and finding myself in a city that I had dreamed of since my not-so-distant childhood, did not feel like a stranger. It was (and remains) one of the first, unexpected and timeless wonders of Paris. Equality – ?galit?- no, no, not at all the sublime concept that the utopians dreamed of, not the cry of the Jacobins drenched in the blood of Terror, not the cliché above the entrance to the city hall (along with “freedom” and “brotherhood”), but simply a feeling of joyful unity in the air with people ready for a friendly smile, who (later I realized how important this is in France) will hardly ever look at you contemptuously or servilely.

Then this dialogue began between what I was looking for in Paris, not yet seeing it, and what I was learning? now, when I spend hours walking either along its painfully familiar sidewalks, or along still unknown corners; when I read about him, think or write.

And then I was sure: I would never return here.

Neither I nor anyone else could then know how the world would change, how different travel would become, how, “obedient to the general law,” I too would change. But even then there was still a subconscious confidence that my childhood love for this city was as eternal as it was insatiable.

And in those minutes my romance with Paris began, my “eternal return.” The imaginary, then the real.

The novel is not at all serene, at first it simply tore at the soul, full of vanity, petty ambitions, timid hopes and vague dreams. Joyful and joyless, terrible and seductive trips, difficult meetings with myself and despair from my own ingratitude, written and unwritten books - what this city, which I began to dream about back in the war years, in evacuation, behind the stove, brought into my life in a godforsaken village.

Will I find out? more and more about Paris, and along with this knowledge there is a growing understanding of how much I Don't know! AND I don't understand!

To say that Paris is my “second homeland” or “fatherland of the soul” would be pretentious, and most importantly, it would not be true.

Still, I have never been anywhere abroad for so long, nowhere have I experienced such happy and bitter moments; I grew up, matured and aged, dreaming of Paris, coming to it, returning from it and reflecting on it over the pages of other people’s and my own books.

There is a special “feeling of Paris”, it has both a universal and deeply personal meaning, it can hardly be analyzed, but without realizing it, you cannot get closer to understanding the city. Paris is like Proteus, but, unlike the ancient deity, if it reveals its secrets, it is certainly not under duress.

The belly of Paris. 1965

Montmartre. Tourists

Moreover, nowadays Paris increasingly disappoints visitors, and the skeptical judgments of my charming interlocutors from the public garden near the Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul would undoubtedly have pleased them. The city is tired, has lost its textbook cheerfulness, has accumulated indifference, Parisian women do not amaze with their graceful outfits, restaurants and shops are not particularly pompous, glossy and, of course, obsequious (this, however, is generally unusual for Paris!).

The elegant, aging “garçons” do not have their former graceful dexterity, and it seems that they are an unprecedented case in Paris! – sometimes unable to hide fatigue.

But to the nouveau riche it may seem provincial. There are no brilliant boulevards here, as before, and the Champs Elysees they do not shine with lights so much as to amaze the imagination of visitors; It has neither the grandiose scale of New York, nor the cheerful charm of Vienna, nor the cyclopean pomp of Las Vegas, nor the vibrant nightlife of present-day Moscow, nor, even more so, the stunning scale of the newest megacities, such as Singapore with its skyscrapers that surpass the imagination.

Yes, Paris is tired. It is neglected and not always clean, it goes to bed early, and its famous cathedrals and palaces are illuminated in the evenings discreetly and almost unnoticeably.

But this city has accumulated a gigantic capital - grateful memory, history, love for it from countless generations (to understand, you have to love, and there is no love without understanding), the dreams of those who have never seen it, and the memories of the lucky ones who saw it in it living. And there is enough interest from this capital for the “feeling of Paris” to continue to excite those who have almost become disillusioned with Paris.

Memories of the “former Paris” - an integral part of Paris today.

It's not easy to eat feeling, but some "the substance of Paris".

Not only old houses, the bends of the Seine, silver-lilac plane trees, the expanses of royal esplanades, the gloom of narrow Gothic streets, ancient towers were created from it, but also graceful intonations, quick smiles, the established smells of wine, perfume, roasted chestnuts and almost always fresh flower beds, his cheerful sun and lungs short rains, the wind from the nearby sea, seagulls under the arcades of the Palais Royal, tables on the sidewalks, the seething joy of the abundant morning markets worthy of the womb of Gargantua, the readiness for the simplest joke, for the vigorous and hourly struggle for life, which (which the French always remember and know ) is incredibly valuable: “La vie est belle!” But this is not all that the “stuff of Paris” consists of.

Azhany. 1965

How can I tell you everything when I myself don’t know the answer!

For almost half a century I have been asking myself the same question.

Besides Paris - albeit fleetingly - I still saw a lot amazing cities. The red brick of the Krakow Barbican behind the dark greenery of dense trees, the spiers of Prague, the opal-emerald pool of the Barcaccia fountain at the foot Spanish Steps in Rome, ancient houses on the embankments of Ghent, the crimson gold of the trees of New York's Central Park, reflected by the glass of skyscrapers, the sad joy of London's Covent Garden - all this is beautiful, significant and eternal.

But the irresistible, imperious, eternal appeal of Paris is inexplicable and so strong that I don’t even want to seek objectivity when writing about it. On the contrary, I try not to get close to it, leaving it to guidebooks and statistical reference books. I’m writing not so much about the city, but – I’ll say it again – about my love for it.

Pantheon. View from Marais

Red gloves

Why is it that when people come to Paris - from different parts of the world - they have different, happy faces? A sophisticated traveler or even a simple-minded farmer from the Australian state of Queensland, who does not know a word of French, sitting in a modest bistro, feels himself in a different reality, in a space in which the dream of generations has accumulated for centuries.

Not long ago, in the deepening twilight of a sultry September, we struck up a conversation with a nice middle-aged couple who were sitting next to each other in a cafe on the embankment, opposite Notre Dame, in the most “tourist” (not made any worse) place. Canadians. They flew to Paris for three days. The vacation is very short, and flying overseas, even for wealthy people, is a serious expense...

With every spoonful of onion soup gratin?, with every sip of light wine, with every glance at Notre Dame (which they saw not for the first time), they - it was clear - tasted the taste of happiness, that very “feeling of Paris”. The language was native to them (they are from Francophone Quebec, but for some reason they were embarrassed by their accent, although the French like Canadian pronunciation). They were pleased to talk with foreigners who were equally in love with Paris.

And one more memory. It's late, almost night. On a deserted street in Amsterdam, behind the Saint-Lazare train station, a out of breath, still very young man in sneakers, with a backpack, mixing English and French words, asked how to get to the Eiffel Tower. “No, not the metro,” he said. - I'll go on foot!" The distance of the journey (a good hour on a cold damp night!) did not frighten him. It looks like he didn't even have money for a ticket. Or I didn’t want to go underground - the buses hardly ran anymore. He didn’t care, his eyes shone with happiness, it was his first time in Paris (he managed to tell us about this). He said goodbye and disappeared into the darkness with his backpack. How many such meetings there were! New links in the chain of memories of an inexplicable and so natural love for this city.

More and more questions, fewer and fewer answers, and the charming French saying “doubt is the beginning of wisdom” no longer consoles me.

1.5. Hotel During the years of the existence of the magazine “Hotel for Travelers in Beauty” (1922–1924), the anti-futurist rebellion of the Imagists took a new direction. Without a doubt, this is happening following changes in sentiment in the camp of the futurists themselves. Fashionable