Monday was our fifth and final day in Paris, and we chose to do more walking (of course!) to see churches and wander around the Left Bank. We started out on the Metro, taking it to Ile de la Cite. This Metro sign is one of only a few original early-20th century Art Nouveau signs left in Paris
and it is just steps away from our first stop, Sainte-Chapelle. This Gothic cathedral was built in only six years (1242-1248) for King Louis IX to house the Crown of Thorns.
The stained glass windows inside are amazing! 15 separate panels, more than 1100 different scenes, over 6500 square feet of stained glass. Incredibly beautiful.
Next we walked over to Notre Dame, which took almost 200 years to build! Work on this Gothic cathedral began in 1163 and it wasn't finished until 1345.
Beautiful.
After Notre Dame, we did a walking tour of the Left Bank, and saw the houses of George Sand, Richard Wagner, and Eugene Delacroix as well as cafes where Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, Picasso, Hemingway, Jim Morrison and others drank coffee, wrote novels and plotted coups.
We ended our walking tour at the Cluny Museum where the famous Unicorn tapestries are housed. The museum is located on the site of a Roman bathhouse, built in A.D. 200. This room has a 40-foot high vaulted ceiling.
Besides the Unicorn tapestries, we also saw more original stained glass from Sainte-Chapelle and these stone heads of the biblical Kings of Judah, originally from Notre Dame. In 1793, an angry mob of Revolutionaries beheaded the stone kings, believing they were the kings of France. A schoolteacher gathered the heads and buried them in his backyard, where they were accidentally discovered in the 1970s and are now housed at the Cluny Museum.
We ended our last day in Paris with a lovely dinner in the Rue Cler neighborhood. Gene and I had a wonderful time exploring Paris together and hope that more getaways for just the two of us will be in our future!
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