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The Town of Versailles is often ignored by those visiting the Palace of Versailles. That’s understandable in that the palace, the gardens, and the Trianons in the park can keep a visitor well occupied for most of a day. Yet the town, as a planned adjunct to the palace, merits a visit as both an uncrowded extension of the royal domain and, for all its 17th-18th-centuriness, a welcome bit of contemporary, local French life during a visit otherwise devoted to historical and monumental France.

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La Ferrandaise: An Ode to a Cow and to a Region

Even after living in Paris for 30 years, Gilles Lamiot, proprietor of this highly satisfying restaurant near the Luxembourg Garden, sounds as though he’s just come in from branding cattle. As it should be in a restaurant that is an ode to both a rural region—Auvergne—and a cow—the Ferrandaise.

“I buy my calf directly from the farmer—130 to 140 kilos, five months old. I pay the slaughterhouse. I get it delivered.”

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Picnicking on the Pont des Arts

Over the past ten years Parisians and visitors alike have gotten into dinnertime picnicking as a way of enjoying the nonchalant beauty of Paris in spring and summer.

What had previously been isolated Seine-side clusters devoted more to afternoon sunbathing than to evening picnicking, has now developed into a popular ritual whereby, picnickers both French and foreign congregate at various choice setting in the capital.

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An Ode to Guy Martin, Chef of Le Grand Véfour

From his youth as a rugged boy in the mountains to his position at the heights and forefront of French cuisine in Paris, Guy Martin has always brought energy and intensity to his passions. Chef since 1993 at Le Grand Véfour, the perennially great and unwaveringly elegant restaurant by the garden of the Palais Royal in Paris, he continues to develop his craft and extend his reach. Fabien Nègre brings his own talents as interviewer, portraitist, and gastronomy commentator in this ode to an “elusive and singular man.”

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Les III O: Adventure, Intimacy, and Knowing Smiles

Les III O, a confidential little restaurant near Palais Royal in the center of Paris, has the feel of an exclusive swingers club: intimate, theatrical, its offerings a luxuriant mix of chemistry, quality, and craft. That doesn’t mean that you’ll eventually be sharing a bed with the couple at the next table, only that you and they are bound to exchange knowing smiles.

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Le Cotte-Roti: Exploring Bistronomy Near Marché d'Aligre
One of the nicest things about having a good meal in the company of someone who has much to tell is that you can save your own jaw muscles for the chewing and your tongue for the tasting.
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The Art of Punching, Kissing, and Lunching: Monet, Renoir, and the Impressionist Island at Chatou
A short-lived round of horror arose in the museum world in October 2007 when it was discovered that a band of drunken intruders had broken into the Musée d’Orsay at night and that one of them had punched a hole in Claude Monet’s Le Pont d’Argenteuil (Argenteuil Bridge).
 
The horror quickly faded for four three reasons: the curators of the Orsay described the damag
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