Paris--Day 4: Where did the day go?

In walking around, basically. I worked on a story this morning taking time out to stroll up to Rue de Rivoli for ham and a baguette for lunch, to the Opera for tickets--except the box office was closed, it being June 1, a public holiday we'd forgotten about. In the afternoon, more walking...to the Pompidou Centre where we decided the crowds were really too large to make seeing the Kandinsky exhibit fun. Then to the Picasso Museum, arriving there on the dot of 5:15 to find a sign saying that 5:15 was exactly when ticket sales stopped. Tant pis. 

   Over to the rive gauche for a very welcome beer and then into Shakespeare and Company, my favourite Paris bookstore--in fact, my favourite bookstore anywhere. Tonight's reading was by Australian writer Marele Day, author of Mrs Cook: The Real and Imagined Life of the Captain's Wife and her soon-to-be-published Sea Bed, a novel about a Buddhist monk and a group of abalone fisherwomen in Japan. 

   We listened upstairs, surrounded by more books than you could read in a lifetime, then went off for supper at La Fourmi Ailée, a little place we ate at last year which was conveniently just across a park and around the corner. Fittingly, its decor is mostly books.