Today was to be mostly about getting to Paris and other logistics, but we’d have one bit of Paris sightseeing at the end.
We packed up, cleaned up the condo, and drove the two hours back to the Marseilles airport where Uncle Andreas keeps the car (he’ll be coming down from Munich himself next week). We just missed the shuttle bus to the train station, so got a taxi. This taxi driver was particularly surly, even by French standards. He didn’t even grunt when Chris gave him a tip on top of the exhorbitant fare; later Chris discovered that he’d left his sunglasses in the cab, so that bastard got those too.
Thankfully the TGV ride to Paris was just about perfect. TGV stands for Train Grand Vitesse, or simply high speed train. The station was easy to navigate, the train was right on time, and we quickly found our seats. Chris had sprung for first class fares, which meant assigned seats, big ones, quiet car (cell phones banned), big windows. Chris watched the countryside go by — and with a trip from Provence to Paris, you are watching a large part of France go by indeed. The Massif Central (the “massive” mountainous region in central France, sparsely populated) loomed to our west as we coursed up the Rhone valley at speeds of around 180 MPH. We arrived in Paris in the Gare du Lyon train station, and from there we caught a couple Metro (subway) connections. The weather for our entire European trip has been unseasonably warm and Paris would be no exception. The Metro is not air conditioned, and with our 5pm arrival in the city we were right in the middle of the sweltering rush hour crowds. Dragging heavy suitcases. Not knowing exactly where we were going. Oppressive heat aside, the Metro whisked us to our hotel’s neighborhood (Saint-Germain-des-Prés), within two blocks of the station we had finally reached our hotel for the next two nights. Tucked into a courtyard off the quiet Rue Jacob, the Hotel Marronniers is your typical Parisian hotel, with tiny everything — tiny lobby, tiny elevator, ludicrously tiny shower … but a great location. And we lucked out (well, Chris had asked for it a month ago) and got one of the few rooms at the top of the hotel (at the hotel’s attic level, basically) that overlooked the courtyard, with a view to the Saint Germaine church (and beyond, the controversial Montparnasse tower). 
After a respite and a quick wash to remove the Paris Metro slime, we were back out on the streets. Tonight’s one destination would be the Musée d’Orsay, which we had only had a chance to literally speed through (in 15 minutes) during our first trip to Paris in December 2008. This time we had 2-3 hours to soak it in. The building is an 1890’s train station, a gargantuan open hall, that was converted in the 1980s into this museum. The Louvre has all of the French national art treasures from antiquity through about 1848, and that’s where the Musée d’Orsay picks up, with paintings and sculpture and everything else from the second half of the 1800’s and on into the 1900’s. 
As we would also see later in the Louvre, the scale of the building allows them to put on display truly huge artwork, such as the scenes by Courbet, but there were also plenty of small spaces for more intimate works (such as, ~cough~, some paintings by Courbet).
At 9:30pm they started kicking everyone out, so it was finally time for our late dinner. After a few misfires, we found a restaurant still open and had a simple but fantastic meal — a french onion soup appetizer, veal scallopine, a “salad” with everything (shown here), wine and beer.