Into the 11th and the 5th Arrondissements - 6-11-15

This morning we decided to head down to the Marche d' Aligre to see this brocante market because it's open every day but Monday.   Then we wanted to go and continue our exploration of the 5th arr. which we started a couple days ago.
Since the brocante at Place d' Aligre happens everyday but Monday we wanted to see if it had any merits as a place to indulge our sickness.   It does have some potential but unfortunately we got there too late to really go through it as the vendors were loading up to close for the day.  So we did a very quick run through what was still there and the headed out for a lunch in the neighborhood.



After a kind of surreal lunch, it was busy and they forgot to order our meals, so it was a very long lunch we headed over to the 5th.   We started at the Pantheon and first went through the St. Etienne du Mont church, which is the follow on church to the one that was founded for St. Genevieve.  St. Genevieve is the patron saint of Paris and is venerated by Parisian Catholics so the church is a sort of pilgrimage site.   It contains some bits of the original relics of the saint which survived destruction during the revolution of 1789, and it also contains the last chancel screen in Paris.  So there are some interesting things to be seen here.   Both Blaise Pascal and Jean Racine are interred here as are Clovis and his queen Clothilde, the early members of the Merovingian royal line.  

The architectural interest is the chancel screen and some of the original stained glass which has survived.  The chancel screen is reputed to be asymmetrical in the church and have non-level circular staircases, but while the staircases do look "funny",  everything looks out of center.  Bad design or execution, hard to tell.

After our visit to the church we followed streets around the quarter getting looks at some 12th century buildings and places where Verlaine and Hemingway lived and worked.  We stopped for refreshment at the Place de Contrescarpe which is the upper end of Rue de Mouffetard a very popular shopping street with clothing, gold, and food markets.   At the bottom we walked over to the Mosque de Paris but it was closed for services so we ended the day walking through the Jardin des Plantes.  One of the 2 oldest trees in Paris is here, planted around 1640 it's still pretty lively