Lyon

On Friday, July 24th, we had breakfast out in a little garden terrace atrium, which served as a very nice breakfast room.    I think their was fruit, soft-boiled eggs, croissants, bread and Karine's wonderful homemade jams: apple-cinnamon and apricot-lavender--all very nice.

We walked down to the Hotel de Ville, where we caught the Metro to Bellecourt, a very large dirt square with an equestrian statue of Louis XIV in Roman dress, very similar to the somewhat later statue of Frederick V of Denmark we had seen in the square of the Amalienborg in Copenhagen.

 There are fashions in autocratic self-aggrandizement as there are in anything else, and, as in anything else, the fashions were often set by the French.  On the south side of the square is the main Lyon tourist information office.  Back home, I had bought us Lyon City Cards, which gave us free public transit and museum entry all day, as well as one free walking tour and one free boat tour.  Now we picked up our City Cards and headed over the bridge across the Saone River to Vieux Lyon (Old Lyon).

Lyon was founded in 43 B.C. as the Roman colony of Lugdunum, where the Saone, coming from the north, joins the Rhone, coming from the east and Lake Geneva before heading south to the Mediterranean.  It has been an important city ever since.  It is the third-largest city in France and the proud capital of French cuisine.  The original Gallo-Roman town was built on the heights above the right, western bank of the Saone, just above its confluence with the Rhone.  The main commercial area developed across the Saone, on the flatter Presque'ile (Peninsula), between the two rivers.  Lugdunum was the principal city of Roman Gaul, the capital of one of its three provinces and the site of the annual meeting of the three Gauls on the Croix-Rousse hill, above and north of the Presque'ile.

Medieval Lyon (Vieux Lyon) came down from the heights but stayed on the right bank of the Saone.  During the Renaissance, Lyon became a major center of silk production.  The Presque Ile eventually developed as the administrative center of the city.  After the French Revolution, silk production mostly moved to the Croix-Rousse, which had previously been monastery gardens and vineyards.  The modern city, with its skyscrapers, shopping malls and the main train station, developed on the other side of the Rhone, the eastern, left bank.  In summary, from left to right on the map are: the heights of the old Gallo-Roman city and the Fourviere hill; the lower, medieval Vieux Lyon; the Presque'ile, in the V of the confluence of the two rivers, capped by the heights of the Croix-Rousse (with our B&B on the hillside, a few blocks north of the Hotel de Ville and Opera, which are just at the foot of the hill); finally, the modern city, east of the Rhone.

We took the funicular (free with our City Card) up the Fourviere hill to the Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere.

We went through the church and looked around.  Like Sacre Coeur in Paris, it is a grandiose statement of late-nineteenth-century Catholic triumphalism in the face of the militantly secular and anti-clerical Third Republic, on the highest available point.  It is of little interest, architecturally, artistically or religiously.  (Mary Joy finds this statement a little harsh.)

We walked down to the Roman Theatre, which was set up for a concert that evening,

then over to the Gallo-Roman Museum (free entry with the Lyon City Card).  This museum is so interesting, covering the period from prehistory to early medieval times, that we spent much more time there than we had expected.

 We went back up to the basilica and had a quick but very good (salads lyonnaise--greens, shallot, bacon, egg, mustard, vinegar) lunch,

before taking the funicular down to the Vieux Lyon Tourist Information office, for our 2:30 walking tour.  However, we needn't have hurried, since the tour took awhile to get itself together, what with confusion with other (French-language) tours gathering at the same spot out front, and problems with some of the audio sets that would enable our guide, a young woman named Claire, to communicate with the group of a dozen or so English-speaking people via microphone and radio.

Finally, around 2:45, we set off, and Claire gave us some historical background on Vieux Lyon, as we walked over to the Cathedral of Saint-Jean.   The "Primatiale," as it is called, since the Archbishop of Lyon has had the title of "Primate of the Gauls" since 1079, was started in the twelfth century and finished in the fifteenth.  It has nice thirteenth-century stained glass.

Claire talked about how, during the Renaissance, Lyon became an important center for the manufacture of silk cloth.  Most buildings had interior courtyards, and many of these connect to streets on both sides of the block, so that one can pass through (in classical Latin, transambulare; in late Latin, trabulare) the building to get one side to the other.  These "traboules" are common in Vieux Lyon and the Croix-Rousse, the early and later silk-working districts, because their principal use was to enable silk workers to easily move their products down to the river.  Dozens of these passageways are still open to the public, by contract between the city and the building owners.  The public is asked to be quiet and respect the privacy and property of the inhabitants.  Claire took us through a number of these traboules.  Most of them are designated by a particular sort of plate next to the door, but others aren't--you have to know they're there, or have a map that shows them.

It was an interesting tour, lasting an hour and forty-five minutes, and Claire was a good guide.   We decided to get in a quick visit to the nearby Gadagne Museums while our City Card was still valid.  On the way there, we noticed a family with ice cream cones and asked where they'd gotten them.  As a result, we stumbled onto what we later learned is the best ice cream parlor in Lyon, La Terre Adelices.  It was, indeed, terrific ice cream.

The Gadagne Museums are an old mansion containing a rather odd combination of museums: the Museum of the History of the City of Lyon and the Puppet Museum.  Both are interesting, but not something that one absolutely needs to see.

We walked back over the Saone and to the Place des Terreaux, where we got a better look at Bartholdi's fountain representing the Saone.  Actually it was designed to represent the River Garonne, with its four sources, for the City of Bordeaux, but Bordeaux couldn't come up with the money for it, while Lyon could, so the lady depicted in bronze changed her name from Garonne to Saone!

We went back to our chambre en ville to decide what to do for dinner.  Our choice was a modern version of a classic Lyon bouchon.  Back in the early twentieth century, during an economic downturn, a number of wealthy lyonnais had to let go of their private cooks.  These women, with their training in upper-class cuisine, went into the male-dominated restaurant business, cooking a refined version of local working-class dishes.  These Meres (mothers), with their bouchon (bottle stopper) restaurants, soon made Lyon the go-to place for French cooking, earning stars in the first Michelin restaurant guides.  Le Bouchon des Filles (the Bouchon of the Daughters) plays off of the idea of a homage of a younger generation of women chefs to the Meres.

We got there a little after 7:30--half an hour after it opened, but early for the French.  When we arrived, there were only two other parties there, but by 9:30 the place was jam-packed  (literally--most of the guests are seated at large tables next to strangers, though we were early enough to get a table of our own in the corner) and they were turning people away.

They have a single menu, for 25 euros, though you get a choice from four or five main dishes and a number of desserts.  Otherwise, everyone started with an amuse-bouche of a small piece of cornbread, but not your mother's cornbread--I forget exactly what flavor were in and on it.  Then came the salad course--French lentils in a mayonnaise-scallion sauce, a smoked herring mousse and a hog-jowl and carrot terrine.

Then came a palate-cleanser--a tiny soup of some sort, topped by a single pea.  As a main course, Mary Joy had quenelle de brochet--according to Lonely Planet, "pike dumplings served in a creamy crayfish sauce."  I had boudin noir aux pommes ("blood sausage with apples"), with a puff pastry crust.  Both very good, both classically bouchon lyonnais food.

Next were three cheeses, followed by dessert: Mary Joy had a peach cake with pistachio ice cream; I had a chocolate mousse cake with some sort of ice cream.

While waiting for dessert, Mary Joy said: "One has never eaten until one has eaten in Lyon."   Coming from Mary Joy, this was the highest of praise.  We found Lyon's reputation for great food to be fully deserved.

Mary Joy had entertained the idea of taking a free (with the City Card) boat tour at 9 p.m., but I hadn't thought that would be possible, and it wasn't.  In France, you have to expect that dinner will take at least two-and-a-half hours.  By American standards, wait-staff is too small and service is therefore too slow.  But French restaurants do not expect to turn over your table, even if you arrive at an hour at which no self-respecting Frenchperson would yet even think of dinner (and as for Spain, where the restaurants don't even open until 8:30 . . .).   So when we left, sometime after ten, we went back to our room.