Brrrr

I got in a nice walk but I was a little bit chilly every step of the way. If it is too cold walking at about 3 mph then the chill at 14-16 would be excessive. Bicycling did not occur.

But I do have a couple of untold stories, here is one.

This is the Hôtel de Sens, built between 1498 and 1519, and one of the last two remaining medieval buildings in Paris.The rest of the story is liberally paraphrased from the most excellent Walks Through Lost Paris by Leonard Pitt. I found the book to be an immensely informative resource for preparation and to also be a quite useful guide book while actually taking the walks.

The Hôtel was built for the Archbishop of Sens for his frequent visits to Paris when Paris was only a diocese subordinate to the archdiocese of Sens. In 1605, after a long exile from Paris, Marguerite de Valois (Queen Margot), the daughter of Henri II, gained permission to live in the hôtel. The hôtel is located on Rue du Figuier which derives its name from a great fig tree that stood before the entrance to the hôtel. Even though she did not live there for long, Margot found that the tree encumbered the comings and goings of her carriages so she had it cut down.

The Queen had a weakness for young lovers and in May of 1606, at which point Margot was age 52, the hôtel was the scene of a most dramatic incident. One morning as Margot entered the gate accompanied by her 20 year old lover, Julian Date, her former lover, the 18 year old Count de Vermond, stepped forward and shot his rival in the head. Vermond fled but was apprehended in Rue Saint-Denis. Two days later, Margot, dressed in mourning clothes, sat in a window of the hôtel and watched Vermond mount a scaffold constructed at the building entrance, presumably where the fig tree used to be, and the very spot where the crime took place. Vermond was given an opportunity to make an "honorable amend" to the Queen but refused. In a rage, Margot cried from her window, "Kill him, kill him!" And the blade fell. In grief, Margot moved from the hôtel to a big new house on the Left Bank.

Just to the right of the turret on the left side of the building and above the two windows a cannon ball is lodged in the stone, a leftover from the insurrection of 1830.

By the way I spent some time today learning how to and then configuring my keyboard so I can type all of those French letter accents with my regular English QWERTY keyboard. Take that you old dog new tricks naysayers.