L'acceuil

Hello all! I know that I'm going to be bad about emailing while I'm here (so much to see, so little time) so I took Dad's advice and set up one of these consarned blogs.

So I arrived here in Croissy-sur-Seine on Wednesday, January 20th. It's a small town of about 2000, just about a half hour train ride* from the center of Paris, where classes begin on Monday. My roommate, Emily, and I live with M. and Mme Grandmaison in a relatively new house in an extremely old neighborhood. Everything here is picturesque--the streets are cobbled, the fences are wrought iron, and the open air market is...open. Well, on Saturdays, anyway.
*In French, r's are often pronounced as w's, and I first typed "wide" instead of "ride."

Notre maison.


Kind of like a miniature Longbourn, huh? Croissy is full of 'em.

Our first night in town, Mme Grandmaison drove us around and showed us some of Croissy's key landmarks. We passed the tradional outdoor market, a 13th century stone church, and an apartment where Napoleon courted his future wife, Josephine, then an immigrant from the West Indies. We also drove along the Seine, which was a popular subject for painting among the various famous impressionists who came to Croissy for a bit of country air. Mme took today to pack us into her Renault Twingo and shuttle us around the neighboring towns (Marly le Roi, Louveciennes, etc.) for some miniature history lessons.



This is a house in one of the neighboring villages where a mistress of Louis XIV lived and raised her illegitimate children by him until the revolution, when she, along with many nobles and their friends, was beheaded.


The front view of Marly le Roi Château. After building the palace at Versailles, Louis XIV decided that it was too large for everyday use and commissioned a smaller, less showy castle in Marly. These statues, called Les Chevaux de Marly, are actually quite famous--there are reproductions of them in the Louvre.


This is the view from the estate's hill. There is a gorgeous forest surrounding a large park, and these two ponds sit right in the middle. The large rectangular patch of dirt you see between the two ponds is the site of the former château. It, too, was destroyed during the Revolution.


La Maison Fournaise, a restaurant right here in Croissy that was the subject of this, one of Renoir's masterpieces:



Here is the same balcony today--note the blue railing and striped canopy.


Whew! That was only Croissy, and only part of it! I've got my work cut out for me...