Ok, I want to start with a disclaimer, I’m not a gothic guy. I know that Notre-Dame is great and I feel a little guilty that I don’t like it better, but… 
…the Panthéon, a Neoclassical Church dedicated to Secular Humanism, now that’s a Church. 
And, under the Church, in a vast Crypt area – simple and unadorned – the National Intellectual Heros are buried; the people who made France, France. This is so Civilized, so French, it brings me to tears and a big smile at the same time. We came to see Émile Zola, my family’s personal intellectual saint, and there he was, honorably laid to rest in the same room as Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. 
As an aside, this year, Simone Veil, who died on June 30, 2017, had just been interned with her husband (the first person since 2015). Her picture, with her husband, dominated the Pantheon and her life story wrapped around the outside, one panel that stood out for me, said: A woman, Jewish, and a former deportee, Simone Veil’s presidency [the first presidency of the European Union] was much more than a strong symbol. It was a message of hope on which the values of Europe were built; democracy, human rights, freedom, and solidarity. End aside.
As another aside, wouldn’t it be great if we had a National Pantheon? I would like to see FDR and Leonard Bernstein in it along with Washington and Jefferson. Any suggestions? End aside.
The Louvre is fantastic and, to my way of thinking, it is I.M. Pie’s Pyramid that makes the museum great rather than just a huge old building stuffed with iconic art (I.M. Pie being an out-of-town architect, of course). Stuck in the middle of the Cour Napoléon, between the wings of the Louvre complex, the Pyramid provides a Grand Entrance and, more importantly, a crowd dispersal and distribution system. The Pyramid also brings the museum complex to life and it is fun to see our fellow tourists interact with it.
After hours of wandering through galleries of famous paintings memorializing once famous people, often behind crowds of smartphone photographers, we came to the Wedding at Cana by Veronese. It is, of course, famous for showing the first selfie, a once famous nobleman taking a selfie with the eternally famous Jesus.
I have been taking pictures of the Madonna and Child statues that decorated the entrances pre-Renaissance churches and cathedrals because the variety of interpretations and expressions fascinated me, but I was overwhelmed by the number of Madonna and Child paintings at the Louvre. Most were great, some familiar from long-forgotten history or art books, and many showing a very white Jesus. 
The Louvre has a huge collection of Egyptian artifacts, most looted from Egypt during Napoleon’s conquest and towards the end of the day, we wandered into that area to see for ourselves. I’m glad we did but, while the sheer amount of artifacts the French looted is disturbing, the quality of the Egyptian sculpture, much of it over 3,000 years old, is the most shocking. This is representational art, not archetypical, and the feelings evoked by seeing real people, over three thousand years old – holding hands or with an arm around a loved one’s back – is chilling. 
Paris is sort of like the Louvre, writ large. Impossibly big and dense, impossible to see even a tiny bit in less than, say, five years – it would be easy to get lost for a week just looking at the ceiling paintings in the Louvre, hell, it would take a week to just see all the column capitals – and very familiar because it has been painted and photographed ad nauseam. 
After four days in the area around Cousin Marion’s home in the foothills of the Pyrénées Mountains – officially the Midi-Pyrénées area – 
we drove to Bordeaux to catch the train to Paris.
After the rural towns where we have spent the last several days, Bordeaux just seems big and dirty.
We did have a terrific dinner in a small restaurant that was much more modern than the restaurants where we have been eating. 
The next morning, we caught a quick breakfast and then dropped the car off near the railroad station – Gare de Bordeaux-Saint-Jean – just as it started to rain. As an aside, dropping a car off at the rental agency, near a railroad station in a strange city, in a rainstorm, is a major ordeal. End aside. We ended the day in Paris – the first time I have ever been there, although I did go through Paris on the Orient Express many years ago – at Cousin Claude’s home, where we watched Hamilton qualify on the pole in a rainstorm, at the Hungaroring in Budapest (on Michele’s laptop which was playing the recording on our VCR at home!). 
