Paris St Denis

There are days when you have a good experience and then there are days when the experience is not so good. Sometimes something will happen and when it's over all you can think about is what you should have done or should have said. The day we walked down rue St.Denis is one of those days.

I had read in Murder in  Sentier by Cara Black that rue St. Denis used to be the medieval route to the royal tombs. So I had too see it. And of course I was highly disappointed, because it looked just like any other street.

Dick looked up and down and said it looked like a center of the garment trade. And there were men standing around with hand carts, which Dick explained meant they carried goods to the shop from the trucks or from one shop to another.

If you peer behind the man with the briefcase, you can see them. I tried three times to photograph them and failed.

Then out of the blue comes this short fat lady of color, all decked out with jewelry and a short skirt screaming at me to stop photographing. I looked blankly at her, because I was shocked. She started pushing me and hit my arm. Dick, of course, had disappeared down the street, looking in the window at some nonsense or other. So no knight on a white horse. What should I do? I ignored her and kept walking. But then I thought. "What should I have done? Or said? I am not good at using foul language in print, but you can imagine what I would have liked to have said.

However, as we strolled along. Yes, Dick finally came to and joined me. Here's what we saw.

But I don't see any hookers, do you?  Frankly I probably wouldn't recognize one if she were staring me in the face.

Perhaps Pussy doesn't have same connotation as it does in English, but it certainly fit the overall aura of the street.
 
But back to Cara Black, she claims that the hotels, which are now warehouses, were once homes to Marquise de Pompadour, Josephine Bonaparte, and Madame du Barry. And she says that the hookers keep the prices down. I should have been forewarned. Hey we should buy an apartment there.