Rue Mazarine

One of the many pleasures of walking in Paris is stumbling upon obscure historical plaques on the sides of otherwise nondescript buildings. In Rue Mazarine, which is near the Seine and virtually in the centre of the city, I came across three within a hundred metres of each other that got my geek-tourist juices flowing:

Theatrical types might hone in on Moliere, but it was the reference to Champollion that got me a bit excited. He was the first to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics and unravel the “mystery” of the Rosetta Stone. There are a bunch of documentaries about him, including this little piece narrated by Carl Sagan:

This is an bloody amazing city to wander around.