And in the end

Merde. Just—merde.

Today, do or die time, I took myself over to Gare Montparnasse to get answers. The short version being, I had to put this long-anticipated excursion out of its misery. It became my turn in line by the two young—I think Japanese—men before me being directed down the way to the one window sporting a tiny British flag (i.e., English-speaking). Oops. Well, I wasn’t going back to the end of the line, and I had sort of expected I would pretty much have to do all this in French. I will say with a tiny bit of pride that I had to ask the woman to repeat herself only a couple of times : ). And it took forever, with consultations with other workers there, the computer, filling out forms (which, thank goodness, she helped me with). The first thing to ascertain was whether my train still existed. Which it did not. Today or tomorrow I could have left at 6:00 A.M. or 5:00 P.M. All of which was completely moot, because I couldn’t get back (or from Alençon to L’Aigle, for that matter). At all.

But wait. When we finally were finished (and after I'd taken a few minutes to walk around in the park that’s on top of the Gare Montparnasse), and I’d made my way through the labyrinth beneath the station back to my Métro platform, the train pulled in. The LAST train on that line, as a matter of fact. Talk about scores of bewildered and dismayed people, both on the train and the platform, as an announcement kept being repeated (between the other noise on the platform and conflicting announcements and the fact that it was, as usual, a gargly P.A. system, I made out that the line was now “terminé,” but not exactly why (until I got home—finally—and checked online, to find that it actually was due to some technical problem, not the strikes). Plan B for me became staying in the Métro, taking line 12 to Concorde, mind you, then #1 to Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, and walking home from there (with barely time to grab a snack before walking to Coolin again—Marché St.-Germain. #4 not running). Quicker and with less wear and tear on moi than walking. The bus might have been just as quick; whatever. (Careful what ideas even flit through your mind; I had earlier thought, oh, sometime I wanted to take #12 into Concorde, because that’s the part of the station where the Declaration of the Rights of Man is spelled out on the tiled walls—and so I did.)

And à propos of nothing in particular, I find it interesting somehow that the stained-glass window in the Chapel of St. Denis in Notre Dame includes almost the identical pelican motif as the Louisiana state flag. Plus that nearly every candle was burning before the chapel of the Virgin of Guadelupe, today anyway.