Reims to Nancy - June 3

Our next stop after champagne country was Bar le Duc, in the Meuse department of the province of Lorraine. for lunch. Michelin recommended places in the old "upper town,"
but we ended up buying sandwiches at a street stand near the river (one with excellent locally made sausage; another "americain" containing ham, cheese, and fries!), and sat on a bench by the river (Ornain?), sat outside and ate. I took a walk along the river (once again, saw a 19th-century synagogue) while Jimmy rested on the bench.

















Then we got some ice cream at one of those gorgeous patisseries.











Our next stop was the town of Commercy, where we were introduced to Stanislas Leszczynski , king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and, after his daughter's marriage to Louis XV, duke of Lorraine. The early-17th-century palace at Commercy was sometimes his. The modern-day significance of this is in reference to the pastry known as madeleine (of Proust fame). We made a tourist stop to some sort of Center of the Madeleine, where we shown (just the two of us in the theater) a film of the supposed origin of the madeleine: something about Stanislas's cook having a major baking failure just when company was arriving, and a servant girl named Madeleine saving the day with her own confections.

(The film went on to give an appalling graphic tour through the very corporate, very modern, very un-romantic, un-French-looking massive mass-production of madeleines that seems to be the pride of Commercy.)

We made one more stop before Nancy, in Toul - an old city on a hill, with a new skatepark on the outskirts, and an old portion of city wall with a gate, and with a "flagrant Gothic" (a technical term for some kind of late Gothic) cathedral.

What was particularly interesting about this cathedral is that all the statuary that normally
adorns the niches on the exterior had been removed during the French Revolution, no doubt as an anti-clerical statement.


























We continued to Nancy. Awful traffic, but we found our way to the very fancy Maison de Myon B&B, old building on a very narrow street, with chic if impractical furniture inside and out (no place to unpack valises or store clothes), behind Rue St George and a few blocks from the Place Stanislas.
















The big courtyard was a comfortable place to drink our champagne and plan our next moves.

Our windows looked down on the courtyard; the stained glass window was our bathroom.

Place Stanislas is entirely stunning. It doesn't matter that it is full of tourists. It is capacious and bright, with brilliant black and gold wrought iron gates, matching buildings around the sides, and lively cafe and restaurant life. And no cars.























Many of the surrounding streets are full of restaurants. We ate at one that was really in the Place itself, a somewhat clever pizza restaurant that served a terrific salad as well, and where we also ordered an odd artistic appetizer of a crab mousse that had candied walnuts? whipped cream?...












After a walk, we had a drink at Le Stan in the Grand Hotel - indoors, by the French doors, old R&B recordings. I had one of their cocktails, in honor of our president, a "Yes We Can": bourbon, cacao, apricot, passion, raspberry. Brown and very good.


















As always, you can click on images to see them displayed larger, and you can go to our Picasa album to see more photos.
June 2-3 walking around Reim
Reims Cathedral
Intro to our trip

Next post will be June 4, Nancy and Art nouveau