A Tour Of France's Historic Gas Stations

My Favourite Tourist Sights Are Those Where You Can See The Present Layered Upon The Past

PARIS -Every parent knows the joke about the two categories of travel: first class and with children. This summer, my wife and I are testing the limits of that second category by travelling to France with, count 'em, five children: our three, a nephew and my elder daughter's best friend, ranging in age from 16 to 5. When my wife and I enter the subway with this brood, we feel like one of those familles nombreuses on which French law confers such lavish benefits.

We rented an apartment in Paris to house our big pack, undaunted by our rather mixed record with European apartments in years past. Two summers ago, we found what seemed a miraculous apartment in Venice, advertised as huge, well located, with a view of the Grand Canal from a roof garden. And such a good price!

The roof "garden" turned out to be a terrace reached by a broken, swaying, stairway. Once arrived in the open air, a few clay pots filled with dead plants and a low rusty iron fence were all that separated one's child from a 70-foot drop onto the paving stones below. True, the child would have had an excellent canal view all the way down.

Dark and gloomy enough to begin with, the apartment had been filled with paintings of beheadings, flayings, disembowelments and other scenes of early Christian martyrdom. As art, the pictures possessed little enough merit, but they certainly succeeded in terrifying the children. We might have saved our money and rented a one-bedroom: All three children ended up sleeping on the floor of our room every night.

This time, though, we got lucky: a 17th-century coach house at the back of what was once a hospital for the incurably ill near the old abbey of St. Germain des Pres. A window overlooks a baroque courtyard; massive beams overhang the kitchen. We spend a lot of time in the kitchen, even though early hopes that we could economize by cooking our own meals have been disappointed: In this neighbourhood, the groceries cost more than cafe meals almost anywhere else.

The children appreciate my efforts at economy almost as much as they enjoy my attempts to pound culture into their South Park-infatuated heads.

Of course, there are two sides to every story. They argue that they would show more enthusiasm for my cultural excursions if my idea of culture were some-thing more interesting than taking them to a gas station underneath a highway bridge and telling them about all the fascinating things that might have been seen at this spot had you visited 1,500 years before.

I hate to admit it, but they may have a point. My favourite tourist sights are those where you can see the present layered upon the past. On Wednesday, for example, I went to visit the chapel built over the spot where the French revolutionaries had dumped the guillotined bodies of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, along with 3,000 other victims of the Terror. (The chapel is situated just a few blocks northwest of the Paris Opera.)

On the chapel front has been carved a dedication by Louis XVI's brothers, restored to power by Waterloo. Just below the dedication, you can see the shadows of more lettering, faintly spelling out Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite: A post-Restoration government had attached the motto of the republic in bronze underneath the royalist dedication -- and then some still later government had taken them off again. It's almost too perfectly symbolic: The past can be effaced, but not erased.

The effacement continues. It was strange enough to visit Europe a decade ago and use money that almost always carried the faces of artists and writers rather than political leaders. In France as everywhere else in Europe, there was little consensus on who should be regarded as a hero and who as a villain. De Gaulle? No. Charlemagne? No. Robespierre? Certainly not! Nobody, however, objected to Rene Descartes -- so there he was.

But even Descartes goes too far for unified Europe. If Descartes, why not Immanuel Kant? What about Leonardo da Vinci? And did not the smaller countries of Europe also produce great artists, scientists and discovers? Is Copernicus chopped liver? Rembrandt? Vasco da Gama?

So the designers of the euro settled for architectural images: doors, windows, bridges, etc. Pretty empty.

My own theory was that the currency should celebrate the only people who would be recognized as heroes by all Europeans: George C. Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and the other U.S. liberators and reconstructors of Europe.

I've tested the idea on probably 200 Europeans over the years, and the reaction has been unanimous: Nobody liked it.

Maybe I can test it on the kids the next time I see a McDonald's on what used to be a Roman bath.