It was too beautiful a day to head home straight away after our visit to the Panthéon. F and I let our feet did the choosing, and found ourselves heading westward, passing École Polytechnique, walking along rue Monge before weaving past a few smaller streets to arrive at the entrance of the Jardin des Plantes. And oh, finding the Russian restaurant which we went to when we first met had now been replaced with a Portuguese canteen. That’s Paris for you: so much that’s familiar yet things change all the time.

It was surprisingly quiet in the Jardin des Plantes. With the Natural History Museum calling it a day, and presumably the same over at the ménagerie, few families lingered about the garden anymore. I was intrigued to find a sculpture of a lion, looking intently at a pair of feet. I was delighted to find the rose garden in bloom, with a few peonies here and there too. And amusingly, there were a few sculptures of our primate cousins, except I don’t recall seeing them the last time I was here…