Montmartre au matin

On Tuesday we arose early to go to Montmartre, warned of ever larger tribes of tourists as the day matures. We came out of the art nouveau metro cover at Abbesses, but had to wait until 0830 for petit dejeuner at the traditional boulangerie- a bowl with about 500 ml of cafe au lait, half baguette with large portions of butter and two thick fruity jams.
We caught the Monmartrobus up the hill to just short of Sacre Coeur. A short look inside and then we absorbed the panoramic view from the butte. The simpler church of St Pierre next door took over foman a Roman temple (perhaps Mars) from which a column or so survives (see photo).
From there, guided by Rick Steves on my kindle, we took an exploratory walk down through the village, noting houses at times occupied by Renoir, Dali, van Gogh, and a host of other artistic names too numerous to mention, noted the places where they ate drank and played billiards, saw the view that Utrillo painted (see photo) and the last two functioning mills (painted by Renoir) and the sole current vineyard (photo).
We encountered St Denis in a little park, still keeping his head.
Then the studio of Picasso and many others (photo).
Lower down we passed the cafe where Amelie (Audrey Tatou) was shot and finished up at Moulin Rouge. There seemed no need at the midday hour to continue on to Pigalle, so at Blanche we boarded the Metro for our base.
The evening was spent pleasantly in meeting with a friend of Wendy's from Melbourne. We met at metro Monceau and walked through the gardens and then strolled around the area wending our way back to her apartment in Batignolles where we had an aperitif before going out for dinner at a Japanese French restaurant called Epicure 108. A very relaxed and pleasant evening was had by us and we returned to our apartment at about 11pm to tumble into bed in preparation for Wednesday.