The day started simply enough, with lunch at La Tartine on the rue de Rivoli in the 4th arrondissement.

Salade bergere at La Tartine

Donna Morris of Best Friend in Paris told Robin and me that they had spectacular salads; we feasted appropriately. My salade bergere featured smoked duck breast, a big slice of dried ham and goat cheese on toasted bread, all atop a heap of lettuce dressed with the ubiquitous salad cream that seems to be de rigueur at all cafés and bistros.

We’d planned to spend the day indoors at a museum, but the sunshine called us out insistently.

“Let’s go find Lafayette’s grave,” Donna suggested. Every time I visit her in Paris, she takes me off on another unexpected adventure. I’d just been reading about the Marquis de Lafayette in the book Portraits of France by Robert Daley – a book I heartily recommend.

So off we charged to the Place de la Nation, not too far away in the 11th. During the Terror following the French Revolution, residents living near the guillotine at the Place de la Concorde had complained about the stench of rotting blood, so the guillotine was moved here, further from the center of the city.

A few blocks away, at 35 rue de Picpus, is a private cemetery where the Marquis de Lafayette is buried. Lafayette was married at the age of 16 to Marie Adrienne Francoise de Noailles of the wealthy and influential Noailles family. He got her pregnant and promptly romped off to America for the Revolutionary War. He returned to France an immensely popular hero.

The cemetery is hard to find, and only open to the public in the afternoon, for a fee of two euros. On entering a gravel courtyard, we faced a spare church where nuns have been saying mass for the souls of the state-murdered victims for several centuries. (I wonder if they still do.) On the walls of the chapel were listed all of the victims of the Terror.

The chapel

There are three mass graves in the gardens, places where beheaded bodies were tossed in – after having their clothes and other valuables stripped off and “inventoried.” They were carried in on carts after the guillotine. The state tried to keep the location where the bodies were buried a secret, but – so the story goes – a young girl followed a cart and discovered the remains.

The cemetery was begun by Lafayette’s wife. All of her relatives had been killed (crime: being aristocrats), but the people in power left her alive because of fear of popular outrage if they touched the very popular Lafayette or his wife. She and other nobles wanted to be buried near their loved ones.

Lafayette's grave, a simple memorial to a monumental man

And now, her grave is here, with that of Lafayette and their son George Washington Lafayette. On his last visit to the United States, Lafayette shipped back a large trunk of dirt; he wanted to be buried in American soil. An American flag flies over his grave daily, even — according to the Daley’s book – during the Nazi occupation of Paris, because they never found the place.

We walked around the grounds, down a long allée of trees. Dark yew trees, symbols of mourning, studded the lawn. Two big fig trees, bearing not-yet-ripe fruit, clustered near one of the mass graves. There were almost no other people around; the place was quiet and peaceful, as it should be.

WHY is my nap being interrupted here? This is simply intolerable.

“Possum, get out of the trash can. Leave that tape alone, Possum!”

I love me a good piece of crackly sticky tape. It’s fun to eat, crunchy like a little bird (not that I’ve ever gotten my paws on a little bird, but a guy can dream). After I munch the tape, I settle down in the trash can for a nice nap.

“Possum, get off the couch right now! Get. Off. The. Couch.”

The Big One in the house yowls a lot. She lunges at me and whoooo!!! I get a ride to the litter box. Cool! Let’s do it again. I could do this for hours, except that I need a nap.

“Possum, time for your meds. Come up here, buddy.”

Treats!! Treeeeeeattttttsss!! I love the way the Big One hugs me and waters my eyes. She never does that for SammySosa. I’m so special; I’m really special. I love me very much. Then the Big One opens my mouth and sticks in that fishy-tasting paste. I love fishy-tasting paste. Oh I do. It’s great just before a nap.

Me and SammySosa. I'm the good-looking one.

“Possum, stop eating SammySosa’s food!”

The gloppy stuff in my bowl is really tasty. The gloppy stuff in SammySosa’s bowl looks good, too. I’ll just take a bite. Um, really love this stuff. Move over, Sammy. Hey, I just invented stereo eating, a bite from this bowl, a bite from that bowl. Oh, SammySosa, stop complaining. Let’s take a nap.

“Possum, stay away from my laptop. Stop it, Possum. Go away!”

This flat shiny thing makes fun little clicks when I walk over it. Sometimes paper comes out of the white square thing over there. Gotta attack and kill that paper while it’s still moving. I have such a fun life. Okay, time for a nap.

“Possum, I’m trying to brush my teeth. Get out of the way. Possum!”

Every morning the Big One and I enjoy flowing water together. Moving water tastes way better than bowl water. I love the way the water runs over my face. I really do. I could drink like this for hours, except that I need a nap.

I like this shot of me. I love every shot of me, don't you?

“Possum, sweetie, come here. Come sit in my lap and let me hug you, big boy.”

The Big One makes a lot of noise but has no idea how to communicate. It’s best that I don’t encourage this kind of whining. So hard on the ear. Just need to check that SammySosa isn’t in the chair with the Big One; I don’t like that. Yah, I’m good. That sunny spot on the floor looks perfect for a nap.

There are plenty of reasons NOT to go to Paris in August: Lots of shops and restaurants are closed; it’s usually hot; and that’s when all the tourists are there. But there are some compensations, especially if you’re not planning to hang around the Louvre, Notre Dame or the Champs Élysées.

Last August, for the first time in 25 years, I revisited Versailles. Not the chateau, which would have been thronged with people on bus tours, but the gardens. According to the account told at Vaux-le-Vicomte, the chateau built by Louis XIV’s corrupt finance minister Nicolas Fouquet, when Louis first visited the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte, he was overcome with envy. He immediately engaged Fouquet’s architect, Le Notre, to create something even more splendid at Versailles.

And splendid the gardens are, all nearly 2000 acres of them – more than twice the size of New York’s Central Park. Beginning in the 1600’s, architects and gardeners built formal parterres, dug the Grand Canal stretching out from the view from the Hall of Mirrors, planted flower beds and thousands of orange trees, and created bosquets: rows of matching trees that intersected to form alleys and groves. And they commissioned fountains, many along the theme of Apollo, the sun god, since Louis styled himself Le Roi Soleil, the Sun King.

The Orangerie, from above.

Fountains even in that age of excess were expensive to maintain and run. I’ve read that when Louis and his pals frequented the gardens, the fountain engineers had a system of whistles to let each other know where the king was headed next. The minute he walked away from a fountain, they shut it down. Needless to say, in the years following the revolution, keeping up the gardens and fountains of Versailles didn’t come high on the priorities list.

But the gardens and chateau have long been recognized as treasures of France, and today you can walk through the grounds and see them much as Louis XIV did. Not a single tree we see today existed during Louis’s time; they’ve all been replaced over time, but the designs themselves are intact.

Strolling through the gardens, with all their hidden “rooms,” fires up my imagination. I can see the flash of a dainty heel as some woman flits away to meet her lover in their special place; am I hearing giggles and whispers on the other side of those trees?

In recent years, Versailles has been running the fountains during the tourist season. And in July and August, on Saturday nights, they produce Les Grandes Eaux Nocturnes, an evening in the gardens with fountains, light shows, music and fireworks.

With Donna Morris of Best Friend in Paris in the lead, we bought train tickets to Versailles at the Gare St. Lazare, the iron and glassed roofed station that both Monet and Manet loved to paint. It’s a short ride to the town of Versailles, and maybe a 20 minute walk from the station there to the chateau.

It was an overcast day, so the light was already fading when we walked onto the grounds. More and more people arrived; make no mistake, even with all those acres of gardens, there was a crowd here.

A snowstorm of bubbles.

Suddenly, along the side of the mirroring Grand Canal, plumes of fire shot into the air. We walked down the stone stairs from the back of the chateau into the gardens, where we were bombarded with iridescent soap bubbles thick in the air. At Le Bassin d’Apollon, dancing waters flickered and swayed to classical music. By now the night was fully dark, and even surrounded by hordes of people, we gasped in wonder at each new display.

The gardens are arranged into “rooms,” separated by trees and hedges. As we walked into the Bosquet de la Colonnade, the ring of columns seemed to have a flat ceiling along which eerie green shapes slid mysteriously above us. A ceiling out here wasn’t possible; we knew that, but we were having a totally other-worldly experience. “What IS this?” everyone around us asked. We sought out the works; the effect was made by pumping smoke into a wide flat green laser light.

Lasers and smoke in the Bosquet de la Colonnade

We moved through more magical rooms, but soon started checking our watches. We didn’t want to catch the last train back to Paris; it would have been jammed with people. So we skipped the fireworks, and we were back in town by midnight. Should you find yourself in Paris next summer, I’d highly recommend Les Grandes Eaux Nocturnes at Versailles.

Paris is famous for fine restaurants, but often they’re way out of my price range.

Amuse bouche of foie gras soup to start.

But my friend Donna Morris of Best Friend in Paris took Barbara Wendell and me to Bar Le Passage on place Madeleine, where we could taste the food of highly-decorated chef Alain Senderens.

Senderens famously decided several years ago to forego his three Michelin stars in order to offer less formal and expensive meals. Even so, his eponymous restaurant Alain Senderens is still too expensive for us – with main courses running from €39 – 54.

Here’s where Bar Le Passage comes in. Owned by Chef Senderens, it offers a fixed price €36 meal at lunch or dinner. At lunch, you choose from a set menu of starter, main dish and dessert. At dinner, there are four courses: a starter, two mains and dessert – but the chef prepares for you what he desires. The waiter inquires about any food allergies, and then it’s up to the chef to send out your meal.

On a recent Sunday night, our dinner consisted of an amuse bouche of crème foie gras sesame (a creamy soup of fois gras with a sesame cracker); salmon miso (raw sushi-grade salmon in an oyster consommé with seaweed, tiny baby corn and root vegetable chips); brandade de Morue (puréed salt cod whipped with potatoes and garnished with baby lettuces),

Cochon du lait

cochon du lait (stuffed suckling pig with Brussels sprouts and carrots), and, for dessert, tarte a la passion (passion fruit tart with apricot foam and lemon ice cream).  It was all delicious, and in small enough portions that we didn’t feel stuffed ourselves.

Even the waiter didn’t know what our food would be until it came out of the kitchen. “How do we order wine,” we asked, “when we don’t know what we’re going to eat?”

“You just choose what you like,” he replied. So with dinner we drank a bottle of Bourgogne Haute Cotes de Beaune 2009.

We noticed that the couple sitting next to us had a completely different meal; it appeared that one of them had a number of allergies.

Barbara, with the Madeleine visible through the window.

The bar actually consists of several rooms. We sat near a window, which was filled with a view of the columns of the Madeleine church over Barbara’s shoulder.

While the restaurant Alain Senderens is located right on Place de Madeleine, the door to the bar is inside a covered passageway to the left. You must buzz for them to let you in, and advance reservations are definitely recommended.

“Why don’t they talk about the wife?” Robin wondered as we toured the Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris.  “Have you noticed she’s never mentioned?”

Robin and I had walked the two blocks from our hotel, the Relais Monceau, to visit one of my favorite places in Paris, a house museum in the 8th arrondisement.

The house was built in the early 1900s by Moise de Camondo, a spectacularly wealthy banker who turned to collecting fine decorative objects. The Camondo family were Sephardic Jews, originally from Spain. They’d been firmly established as the leading bankers of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul by the time they emigrated to Italy and then on to France.  Moise Camondo was particularly interested in 18th century furnishings, and he hired architect René Sergent to design the house in imitation of the Petit Trianon at Versailles.

Each room is impeccably furnished; the audioguide that comes with the price of admission tells stories of the often years-long efforts Camondo made to locate just the right pieces for each spot. Many of the Savonnerie carpets were originally woven for the Louvre. There are paintings by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Guardi and a bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon. Everywhere are antique handmade tables and chests crafted by some of the  most well-known of French cabinetmakers: Oeben, Riesener and Jacob.

One room showcases part of Camondo’s exquisite collection of table settings, including the Orloff silver dinner service commissioned by Catherine II of Russia in 1770 and a Sevres porcelain service from the 1789s with a bird theme.

The house backs onto the Parc Monceau, a jewel of green lawn and small follies. I particularly like getting glimpses of the park through the tall windows. The visit covers three floors: the main level has formal reception and dining rooms; the first floor (second floor to Americans) has bedrooms and wonderfully modern (for the time) white-tiled bathrooms. On the lower floor are the huge kitchens.

But, interesting as the house and its furnishings are, what is even more intriguing is the story of the Camondo family. Moise Camondo built the mansion with the intention of leaving it to his son Nissim. Sadly, Nissim was killed in an air battle in 1917 during World War I. Moise Camondo continued to live in the house till his death in 1934, when the building and all its contents were bequeathed to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

Further tragedy struck the family in World War II. Camondo’s daughter Béatrice, an accomplished horsewoman, lived with her husband Léon Reinach and their children, Fanny and Bertrand, in Neuilly, a suburb of Paris. As the Nazi war machine threatened, she believed that her family’s wealth and position would protect them. All four were deported to the Drancy concentration camp and eventually murdered at Auschwitz. They were the last descendents of Moise de Camondo; the family no longer exists.

As we browsed through the exhibits of family portraits and photographs, Robin and I noticed that there was almost no mention of Moise’s wife, the mother of Nissim and Béatrice. Curious, we went back to our hotel and fired up the laptop, scouring the internet and translating French web sources into English.

The wife, we learned, was Irène Cahen d’Anvers, daughter of another fabulously wealthy Jewish family. She was a good bit younger than Moise, but she only stuck around five years or so before running off with the family stable manager, Italian count Charles Sampieri. She converted to Catholicism.

Irène is most well-known for the story of an Impressionist painting. She was painted by Renoir as a young girl. Apparently the whole family hated the picture (though today we would judge it to be quite beautiful). She brought it with her to the marriage with Moise; it was stuffed into a cabinet and forgotten. Later Béatrice found it and sent it back to her mother.

Irène survived the Nazi occupation of France, most likely because of her Italian surname and religion. But the Nazis confiscated the Renoir; it was owned briefly by Goering before being sold to Swiss armaments dealer Georg Bürhle. After the war, Irène recognized the painting in an exhibition and petitioned for its return. She later sold it through a dealer – to Georg Bürhle. It’s owned by the Swiss Foundation Bürhle to this day.

After the death of Béatrice and her children, the Camondo family’s wealth was inherited by Irène who, the story goes, squandered it all in the casinos in the south of France.

A recent book, The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, tells the story of another wealthy Jewish family who were neighbors of the Camondo family; Irène’s mother figures prominently in part of the book. It’s a great read.