In which we go on a pilgrimage

At this point, the posts are all out of order with the time in which we did them. I believe that the relevent date here is the 27th of June, but I wouldn't be willing to swear to it.

Several weeks ago, while wandering around Paris, we visited a church that had once served as the home of St. Vincent de Paul. My encounters with him had largely been through the St Vincent de Paul Society, which runs thrift shops for the Catholic church, though that at least gave me more context than I have for most Catholic saints. Blaise, however, decided to do a little bit of research online, and discovered that there is a fairly substantial "cult" (I hesitate to use that word here, but I don't know a better one) around St Vincent de Paul, and that if we wanted to, we could visit the churches that had his bones and his heart.

Accordingly, once Blaise's schedule had cleared up a little bit, we made our plans and set off, choosing to combine our St Vincent de Paul pilgrimage with one for food. First stop, the St Vincent de Paul chapel. It is much more recent than many of the Paris churches popular with tourists, and is very definitely off the tourist track. They also appear to have worked very hard to obtained the stone for the floors, which squeaked loudly every time I took a step, despite the fact that my shoes were bone dry. So I tried to walk as little as possible while still seeing the chapel.

From there we walked to the Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, which is very much a pilgrimage site. When we arrived, a very well attended service was in progress, so we listened a little bit from the back and looked at what we could see from there. Blaise and I managed a glimpse of the waxen figure containing the heart of St Vincent, but all of the kids were too short to see over the heads of those in front of us. After a stop at the bathrooms (Free! And clean! And I, fortunately, had Kleenex in my pocket), we headed off to find food. (There was actually another church that was on our list, but when we got there we found that, alas, it was only open during the week.).

Our first food stop was at a little pastry shop, Patisserie Sadaharu Aoki (some of it is actually in Japanese), which has some of the best macarons in Paris. We each picked one: violet for Cherry and me, raspberry pistachio for Blaise and Sapphire, coffee for Ezio. Then we walked with them to the Jardin de Luxembourg where we found a bench in the shade and nibbled away at them until they were all gone. Ezio and Cherry ran races around the benches until Cherry fell and starte crying, and then we headed for the next stop on our pilgrimage.

We stopped at two more very famous pastry shops (Pierre Hermé Paris and Patisserie Gérard Mulot), and went in and gazed rapturously at the exquisite (and very expensive) things in the glass cases. And paged through the very beautiful recipe book they had for sale. And left without spending a cent. That, of course, was because we were saving the rest of our money for a trip to Grom, which is a tually an Italian gelato chain with a shop in Paris. Ironically, we had been there when we visited Turin last summer, where it is considered to be about the best gelato in town. In Paris, it ranks second to Berthillion, where one pays a small fortune for tiny scoops of very good ice cream. Once we had our cones (or cup, in Cherry's case), we settled down to enjoy them at one of the little tables in front of the shop.

A map of our day can be found here.