First off, this place has 3 separate double bedrooms and a huge living room and kitchen! If you’ve been looking for space to sleep more than 4 people in central Paris and not spend a fortune, you know this is a rare find. This is also not a sterile, commercial place—the place has the feeling of being someone’s home, with mail on the mantelpiece and stuff on the kitchen counters.
It is between the Pantheon and the Sorbonne, with easy access to metro line 10, and it’s an easy walk along the Seine to the RER B to CDG. (Slightly less easy with wheeled luggage on the cobblestones, but is very flat!) The street is mixed residential and commercial; the immediate neighbors are building trades, so there is often loading and unloading of wood and workmen about. If you are a windows-open sleeper, they are working early, but are much less annoying than the motorscooters that ZOOM by later in the evening. Closing the windows totally muffles it all, though, and except for the random motorbikes, it is a very quiet street.
The shower water pressure and the hot water were awesome, as was only being up one flight of stairs. There is a teeny elevator for luggage; doorways have the raised lintels, and the shower is up 3 tile steps.
Our train was cancelled because of the rail strike, so we arrived in Paris 5 hours later than planned. Cassandra, Alain’s daughter, met us to let us into the apartment. There is no lockbox, so this is a personal handoff of keys and orientation to the space. This is important because other than the wifi password, there wasn’t any written information about the space or the neighborhood, so then is the right time to ask questions.