Take the C train

Because the automated ticket kiosks at Gare Montparnasse play a spelling game with you: your destination begins with which letter? Then what comes next? All of which, while scintillating, is in vain if you bear U.S. credit cards rather than European ones. With those you must walk to the other end of the station, and buy your tickets the old-fashioned way. (And I suspect offers a clue to that particular failure at the Jussieu Métro station, too.) (While I was at my window purchasing, down the row a little was a pink cat carrier, from which were coming mournful and increasingly desperate and frustrated cries. When the woman at the window walked away, I was alarmed, thinking someone had abandoned the cat there. Someone did eventually come back, but not before I'd asked the ticket seller whether he was aware there was a cat, then had to clear up that it was not my cat that I was planning to take to Chartres with me.)

I've come to the conclusion that the majority of --Parisians, at least, must be by nature sensitive to cold. On a day when the weather was forecast to be--well, 73, let's just cut to the Fahrenheit (and I privately think it topped that; there were girls in tank tops outside the city, and people who'd started out in jackets carrying them and people in long sleeves pushing them up, before the day was over), the vast majority of them were still bustling around in long sleeves and coats. Scarves! I, on the other hand, had said to hell with trying to prepare for every possible eventuality, believed the forecast, and worn a t-shirt. Just a little cool toward the end of the trip out, and never again for the rest of the day.

I love traveling by train. Always. There's that one, fleeting point leaving Paris in this particular direction when you can look back for just a few seconds and see the Eiffel Tower in the distance, through haze. Then it's lots of nondescript apartment blocks and light industrial scenery, before perfectly banal business parks and housing developments, before finally passing through the rolling farmland and woods of the Île de France. (The first stop, of course, is Versailles-Chantier, where many people got off.)

The western façade (front) and main altar of the cathedral are covered and undergoing restoration, and still I kept saying "wow" to myself as I walked through. There's the labyrinth in the stone floor, of course, and many people fervently walking it. The sheer towering verticality of the walls and columns, though, the grace of them. The famous organ was being played the whole time--not a recording, clearly, because after a little break, it began to be scales, played very slowly.

After that I wandered (I had the destination in mind, but of course it still turned into wandering) down to the Église St. Pierre--where I was astonished to find I was all alone. It was originally part of a a 7th-century monastery (the church is from the 12th century) outside the town walls, so vulnerable to attack. The monks would take refuge in the pre-Romanesque bell tower (ca. 1000) (obviously I read all this). The interior of the tower's base is roped off, with archaeology in progress. I wonder what this church's situation is, funding-wise, with such a famous cathedral in the same town; it could definitely use some restoration itself, and I noticed some very serious problems with rising damp.

There's much more to see in Chartres, actually, which is a pleasant, pretty town--even the part not yet historic. Even I got to see half-timbered houses and climb narrow medieval passageways, and I wasn't, most of the time, on the official tourist route. As usual, I got to see a great deal most '"damned tourists" never do, both residential and commercial, before getting helpful directions and making my way back to the train station.

On the way back (Friday, and school out, so lots of teens and pre-teens on the train) someone had lowered most of the windows along one side of the car, so along with the noise of our movement, there was a fresh breeze. Thankfully, the boys who were playing the dangerous game of sticking their heads out got off before they could kill themselves gruesomely in front of us all. Well, me and a handful of others, in that car. We didn't stop at Rambouillet on the way back, so really gathered speed rolling through the countryside (which may have seemed like more with the windows open). It had never been made clear why our departure from Chartres had been delayed by police on the train checking for--something.

And so back to Montparnasse at the height of rush hour, with a visit to the bakery for bread once back in my neighborhood.