Now that the pictures are at the point where Sara is no longer in Paris, it'll be a lot of landmarks and a lot less Kason. Stop cheering. The first weekend that I had alone I made the long metro trip to the southern part of the city, even more south than Montparnasse, to get a picture of the lion that was featured in the book that Sara and I bought at the Louvre. You remember that book I mentioned in the blog a while back,
Un Lion à Paris? Anyhow, at the end of the book the lonely lion finds a pedestal in the southern part of Paris and sits on it to remain
for a long time safe and sound. I decided I'd go look of him, and there he was at the Place Denfert-Rochereau in the middle of the street. The statue is actually a copy of a much larger original statue located in Belfort, France. The sculptor of the original is none other than notre ami Frédéric Bartholdi, the designer of The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. The statue in Belfort is 22 meters long (pictured in black and white below) and sits just underneath the castle in the town. Bartholdi carved the lion in blocks and then had each block moved to Belfort individually and reassembled there in the correct order. The Belfort versio
n is dedicated to the defense of the area around Belfort from 40000 invading Prussians in 1870. General Denfert-Rochereau fought back the army with only 17000 men over the space of 103 days. The copy in Paris is dedicated to the defense of the nation over the same years. Pretty cool story says I. The Paris version of the lion isn't anywhere near as big as the one in Belfort, but is still a neat find in the streets of Paris.
Now that the pictures are at the point where Sara is no longer in Paris, it'll be a lot of landmarks and a lot less Kason. Stop cheering. The first weekend that I had alone I made the long metro trip to the southern part of the city, even more south than Montparnasse, to get a picture of the lion that was featured in the book that Sara and I bought at the Louvre. You remember that book I mentioned in the blog a while back, Un Lion à Paris? Anyhow, at the end of the book the lonely lion finds a pedestal in the southern part of Paris and sits on it to remain
for a long time safe and sound. I decided I'd go look of him, and there he was at the Place Denfert-Rochereau in the middle of the street. The statue is actually a copy of a much larger original statue located in Belfort, France. The sculptor of the original is none other than notre ami Frédéric Bartholdi, the designer of The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. The statue in Belfort is 22 meters long (pictured in black and white below) and sits just underneath the castle in the town. Bartholdi carved the lion in blocks and then had each block moved to Belfort individually and reassembled there in the correct order. The Belfort versio
n is dedicated to the defense of the area around Belfort from 40000 invading Prussians in 1870. General Denfert-Rochereau fought back the army with only 17000 men over the space of 103 days. The copy in Paris is dedicated to the defense of the nation over the same years. Pretty cool story says I. The Paris version of the lion isn't anywhere near as big as the one in Belfort, but is still a neat find in the streets of Paris.
1 comment:
Hmmm...I wonder if the one in Paris is smaller because they haven't done quite as good of a job defending the capital as they did in Belfort.
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