Showing posts with label curiosities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label curiosities. Show all posts

Welcome to 'Sab's Secret Paris' and...


DISCOVER PARIS WITH AN ADOPTED PARISIAN!

"Let me show you the city I love"

Hi, my name's Sab Will, and I've been photographing and writing about Paris for nearly 20 years!

I'm really passionate about two particular aspects of this amazing city: the incredible opportunities for street photography, and the countless historical curiosities and oddities there are all over the place, if you know where to look.

So I've put together a really great set of Paris tours, focusing either on street photography, or the quirks and curios of the city (or a combination of both) for you to choose from. Just click above for more details about the tours and weeks, prices and dates available.

The Tours
The Photo and Curios Tours are rich and totally personalised 4-hour walks around the city concentrating on the area or the photographic style you want to cover. These are private tours, with a maximum of four people, which means it's only you and your friends or family so you get precisely the experience you want..

The Weeks
The Photo and Curios Weeks are a specially designed series of five days of tours, from Monday to Friday, which cover a vast array of either street photography or Paris curiosities and history, depending on which topic you choose. The group has a maximum of six people so I can give everyone plenty of personal attention.

Customise Your Choice!
If you only have two or three days you can combine individual tours in anyway you like. And of course you can take photos on a Curios Tours, and discover Paris quirks on a Photo Tour, there's no problem about that!

I'd love you to spend a week with me photographing or just discovering this amazing city, especially the parts you wouldn't normally see on a typical tourist trip. Look around the site, and please get in touch at any time if you need more information. I look forward to seeing you in Paris soon!

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* Sab Will runs a variety of Paris and photography-themed sites and blogs, reviews Paris books of all sorts, interviews interesting Paris people, writes an illustrated Paris Chronicle every day, runs a Meetup group for Paris lovers, a Paris photo quiz and even contributes to the city's street art (shh), so feel free to browse some of the links below and in the right-hand column to find out more about what he gets up to out there...

                       
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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Suggestions, comments and requests are always welcome! J
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Free Quirk No.13 ~ "How Slow Can You Go?"

JOIN IN THE FUN ~ CHAT ABOUT QUIRK NO. 13!

"How Slow Can You Go?"

What a splendid sight, just across from the Grand Palais on Cours La Reine, this lone horseman, drawn sword thrusting skyward, saluting the passing pigeons with a nostalgic eye on more exotic birds perhaps.

For this is Lafayette, err, Général Lafayette, scusi, a member of parliament, head of the Guarde Nationale during the French Revolution and a hero of the American war of independence in the late 1770s no less.

It's for this latter role that in 1899 the recently hatched United States of America wanted to pay hommage to France for his role in the affair.

By way of a statue.

Apparently it was supposed to be 'the most beautiful statue ever created in in honour of a man'! With the only problem that the sculptor, a certain American called Paul Bartlett, was given precisely a year to complete it because it was to be unveiled with great ceremony for the International Exposition of 1900.

He didn't finish the real statue on time, but he did manage to complete a plaster model which was used instead, to the apparent approval of those present, including two school boys, one from each side of the Atlantic, with the French one being a descendent of Lafayette himself.

Once the fuss and fervour of the Exposition was over, Bartlett still had to produce a proper, bronze version of the general of course. Only he wasn't satisfied with the model any more and decided to completely redesign in. In his own time. His own eight years of time.
Eventually, he installed the proper statue in the place of the plaster one, still in the middle of Cour Napoléon, a place of high prestige, evidently. Only a couple of things had changed.

Due to a certain ambiguity of allegeances concerning the general, there probably wasn't much said when the final version had lost its Louis XVI style regalia - coat, wig, three-cornered hat - and had him bare-headed wearing a more revolutionary outfit! The originally down-facing sword was now being brandished aloft as I mentioned earlier.

But this is all just preamble for today's Paris Quirk folks - I hope you managed to make it this far!

"I spy, with my little eye,
something beginning with 'T'!"

Back in the 80s someone decided that an enormous glass pyramid would be better than a statue of some old general in the middle of the Louvre courtyard, and Lafayette was unceremoneously (he'd already had one in 1900, remember?) carted across the Tuileries to where he now sits between the Grand Palais and the river Seine.

Just him and his horse, way up high. Well... not quite.

You see, as they were moving him, they noticed something very curious indeed. In between his horses back legs was a little slow-moving friend, insignificant indeed, under the stride of such a magnificent beast, just about the size of a... well, have a look at the side-on picture of the statue above, which was taken just as spring was sprouting and the leaves were rapidly covering up this curiosity for another year (until next winter anyway). Can you see the little guy hiding there in amongst the branches?

A tortoise! A little, green and highly symbolic tortoise keeping the soldier and his mount company across the decades, and only visible for the leafless months of winter and early spring.

And what was he doing there? Well we can't be certain as I haven't come across an authentic report of the sculptor mentioning this, but the general opintion is that Bartlett had a fairly ironic sense of humour and this was his way of saying to whoever might discover him one day... boy-oh-boy, did that take some time to finish!

Although we, the statue appreciating public, seem to have been even slower to discover his funny furtive little fellow than it took his master to create him - but what a pleasure it is to do so now that we have.

If you've stumbled across this page by accident and like what you see, why not get the other 19? There are 20, you see...

Just sign up now for Sab's Secret Paris: 20 Quarters / 20 Quirks in the box above on the right, and make sure to let me know what you think, or go here for more details! See you soon in Paris!

                       
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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Suggestions, requests and comments always welcome! J
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Free Quirk No.14 ~ "Don't Mention The War..."

JOIN IN THE FUN ~ CHAT ABOUT QUIRK NO. 14!

"Don't Mention The War..."

Let's not call it weird, let's content ourselves with 'unusual'. After all, you never know who might be reading or listening in when it comes to one of the most talked about, yet still most mysterious secret societies in France.

Can you guess who this decidedly 'unusual' structure might be the work of?

I'll give you a clue. They have members in the highest echelons of power and influence and yet no-one can say for sure who.

They generate an enormous amount of fascination and suspicion, in more or less equal measure.

Members of this organisation across Europe were probably loathed and mistrusted over and above any other group, including Jews, homosexuals, and Tziganes, and they were persecuted accordingly.

Yet they profess a gentle faith, insist they refrain from meddling in politics, and stipulate that all members must be loyal citizens of their country.

We're talking about the Free Masons, and they have an 'unusual' monument just a stone's throw from another iconic structure, the Eiffel Tower!

"If you scratch below the surface...
the secrets become even more intriguing!"

When I say 'they', that's not quite accurate. There's a monument on the Champs de Mars to human rights which was installed just a few years before I arrived, in 1989, which was the bicentenery of the French Revolution.


It is literally encrusted with strange inscriptions and recognised Masonic symbols, but as Masonic ways of thinking were somewhat central to policy making in those days (it's said that Napoleon, amongst others, were Free Masons) this is actually less sinister that it might appear.

The 'Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen', the most significant of the revolutionary texts to be voted in 1789 establishing principles of equality and the abolition of privileges (theoretically 'bye-bye aristocracy', but very theoretically..) can be seen along with other works moulded into the two bronze pyramidal/pylon-type structures on the side facing towards the centre of the park.

The architecture of the monument itself is influenced by Egyptian temples, but I won't show you a picture of that - it'll be more fun for you to find it for yourself!

Instead I'll show you another part of the same structure, another statue in fact, taken this time on my iPhone and played around with as part of my Paris and I Paris Photo Chronicles blog.

Regarding other supposedly Masonic structures in Paris, well yes, there are quite a few! Some are clearly bona fide, while others seem to be more like flights of certain fantasists' imaginations. But the best and maybe the most annoying thing of all is... we'll probably never know for sure.

Sign up for my 400 Paris Quirks if you want to discover more of them with me. Watch out for a very special offer on this at the end of your 20 FREE Paris Quirks series ;-)

As so often with Paris this find surprises on two levels: in and of itself it's a remarkable thing to look at and investigate; and if you scratch below the surface a little (not literally, that could get you arrested..) the secrets within are even more intriguing... see you for the next Paris Quirk, friends!


If you've stumbled across this page by accident and like what you see, why not get the other 19 FREE Paris Quirks? There are 20, you see...

Just sign up now for Sab's Secret Paris: 20 Quarters / 20 Quirks in the box above on the right, and make sure to let me know what you think, or go here for more details! See you soon in Paris!

                       
_______________________________________________________________________________________
© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Suggestions, requests and comments always welcome! J
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