Hotel de Ville in Tours, France

On July 14, Independence Day in France, I walked up the long boulevard in Tours from my student pension to see the parade in front of the town hall, the hotel de ville. Victor Alexandre Frederich Laloux, beaux-arts architect 1850-1937, who was born in Tours, designed what is one of the most charming examples of such a building. It looks like an old-fashioned wedding cake, my wedding cake! And just as delicious. It was under construction during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, long after royalty frequented the Loire valley for hunting.

It still seems odd to me that military tanks were displayed in the Independence Day parade in France and that everyone dressed up. A 4th of July day parade in the US was kids on bicycles and all of us in shorts. But this was Europe after the second world war and the history, culture and disposition were different from the US.