We were flâneurs all day today

Charles Baudelaire defined a flâneur as "a person who walks the city in order to experience it", which is exactly what we did today, though we only scratched the surface of this amazing city. We left our hotel after a splendid breakfast of croissants, bread and corn flakes and headed down Rue Lafayette, past the Opéra Garnier and towards where we thought the Louvre probably was.
We took lots of photos of the sculptures adorning the opera:

Then we spotted a large green column sprouting above the surrounding streets and headed straight for it. It was the Place Vendôme, a large square where the haute monde of Paris and the rest of the world live and stay. Its buildings include the Ritz hotel, where we intend to stay next time we're in Paris (ha ha).

I took a photo of Net outside Tiffany's - OK, it's an American company but it typifies the opulence of this area.

No sooner had we recovered from the wonders of the Place Vendôme than we were greeted by the sight of the Jardin des Tuileries, the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower in the distance!

Net visited Germany over two decades ago and I've never been to Europe so the sight of all these eyeball-pleasing sites almost stupefied us. We admired the fountains with Neptune and other mythical figures and then walked toward the Champs-Élysées and then across the Seine - where Net was accosted by a young lady trying to involve her in some sort of scam involving a gold ring she'd just "found" on the bridge (just say "non").

And so we flâneured along the banks of the Seine, this time on the Left Bank and walked past the magnificent Musée d'Orsay, which used to be a railway station and back towards the Louvre. The old palace is staggeringly imposing and huge.

There were tourists everywhere, snapping away like us, plus numerous hawkers, almost all of them African, selling miniature Eiffel Towers, little artificial flying birds, drawings and paintings of Parisian landmarks and divers other things. Net was worried that the hawkers might prove to be insistent but they behaved themselves quite well (I've been to Bali so these touts were pussycats as far as I was concerned!) In the gardens near the Louvre there are mazes and numerous sculptures, including many by Aristide Maillol:

There was a semi-naked guy doing a workout using plastic drink bottles as weights right next to one of Maillol's most famous works:

We lunched at a cafe (or was it a brasserie? It wasn't a bistro or a restaurant) near the Louvre and once again were impressed with the charm and civility of French waitresses. When are we going to be confronted with the stereotypical rude Frenchman? Maybe the men are all rude and the women the opposite but I doubt it - a man engaged us in conversation outside the museum near our hotel and he was polite and charming and very tolerant of my terrible schoolboy French when I asked him what a Franc-Maçonnerie was (I think the Maçonnerie bit is to do with Freemasonry). He spoke as much English as I do French but it was a marvellously civil exchange. We've found the French generally to be very polite and somewhat formal, which is rather nice. They believe in manners, it seems. (We've been in the country two days and already we're experts!)
WE then trudged back home, exhausted again after many kilometres of flâneuring, only to venture out an hour or so later for dinner, which we had in a small and crowded cafe in Montmartre.
Tomorrow, the Louvre on the inside!