2022 – France – Day 2

Friday August 26^th

Jackie and I wandered around the area near our hotel. We walked to the Luxembourg Gardens and Palace. The Palace is now the seat of the French Senate. It’s currently under renovation– as is most everything in Paris. They’re getting ready for the 2024 Olympics. So if you’re thinking of going to Paris sometime “soon,” don’t go until 2025. Pro tip.

The gardens are lovely, and it has statues of famous women throughout French history, some going back to the 6^th Century. (Most of them were queens.) I wondered how they knew what the women they were depicting looked like. Just another of many French imponderables.

We also found our way to the Montparnasse cemetery, very close to our hotel. There we found the graves of Jean Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir (they are buried together), Charles Beaudelaire (a famous French poet), and Samuel Beckett (who wrote extensively in French). We also found the grave of a man who claimed to be the father of Napolean I.

That evening we met with our tour group for introductions and a general overview of the trip.

Here’s the two of us at one of the many fountains in the Luxembourg gardens:

The grave of Charles Baudelaire:

The grave of Samuel Beckett:

The grave of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir: