to read the review

Thank You,

Fun, Fun, Fun -

Folks are sitting up

and taking notice

of Charlotte's App Tour!

I'm especially loving this little promo video about the bilingual release of Beware Mme la Guillotine (aka Gare à la guillotine) from Daily Motion.

Apps News also picked up on the topic: click here.

Then there's this little ditty from appsplit.

Thanks to one and all for your love and attention! Much Appreciated!

Sarah

I'm thrilled and honored to be interviewed by

Head on over to her blog to check out

The Post.

Send us your comments,

here, there, Everywhere!

With a lunch “Menu Formule” starting at 24€, beverage included, and a team of sufficiently English-speaking waiters, the Procope makes for a stress-free, pleasant, and highly atmospheric stop for the Anglophone guest in Paris. Kids are welcome and the staff has no trouble with patrons wandering the restaurant to seek out its many treasures. In fact they encourage it.

So don’t be shy! While waiting for your meal or once fortified, go on a hunt for these revolutionary artifacts and see what else you can uncover besides:

Look for

Marat’s Bell

in the Salon (dining room)

that bears his name.

Once you’ve found it…

Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793) was a revolutionary journalist and propagandist who printed his paper, l’Ami du peuple (Friend of the People), from a shop just across the back alley from the Procope. When he was not soaking in the bath, where he often languished due to a debilitating skin disease, Marat was most likely found here, at the Café Procope. But his presses never stopped humming. To inform him when the type had been set and the press was ready to run, Marat’s workers would ring this bell, attached by a rope strung over the alley from his press to the Café.

Look for the desk of

Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire.

Hint:

you’ll find it on the way to Les Commodités. 

Once you’ve found it…

Voltaire (1694-1778) was a famous French Enlightenment philosopher. He wrote against the monarchy as a student and was forced to leave France or go to prison. He fled to England where he discovered a new form of government called a Constitutional Monarchy. There, he experienced the meaning of such citizen rights as: freedom of religion; freedom from censorship; and the right to a fair trial. Volatire returned to France a spokesman for these ideals. He often came to the Café Procope to write as well as to discuss Enlightenment ideas with other philosophers. He always used the same red marble-top desk. One day Voltaire was arguing with the radical revolutionary, Hébert, who kicked at the desk with the heel of his shoe. Their argument must have been quite heated as the blow broke off a piece of the marble at the front. Do you see the broken piece? Can you find the desk of another Enlightenment philosopher just here?

Look in the Procope’s

Salon Cour de Rohan

for a replica of the most important

French 18^th century document.

Hint: It’s bigger than you might think.

Once you’ve found it…

La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen is one of history’s first official charters to define basic human rights and civil liberties. Its 17 articles laid out a new vision for government in which the protection of individual human rights supplanted the authority of the king. Many of the reforms favored by the Enlightenment philosophers appeared in the Declaration, such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, no taxation without representation, and the elimination of excessive punishments and arbitrary administration. La Déclaration was adopted by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789, and became the preamble to the 1791 French Constitution.

Look for the chapeau (hat) of

Napoleon Bonaparte.

If you need help, ask the host or hostess:

“Où se trouve le chapeau de Napoléon?”

Once you’ve found it…

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) became the first Emperor of France after the French Revolution. Legend has it that when still a young man and soldier, he stopped into the Café Procope one afternoon and while waiting for his order, he removed his hat. Suddenly, he rushed out, no one remembers why, asking that the management hold onto his hat until he got back. He never came back and they still have the hat.

Time Traveler Tours recommends Le Café Procope as the place for a thematic lunch in their interactive StoryApp itinerary to the French Revolution: Beware Mme la Guillotine, A Revolutionary Tour of Paris.

Learn more about this unique approach to educational tourism at this website. Put Paris in the palm of your hand with Time Traveler Tours mobile iTineraries. Discover history with those who made it!

Le Procope

13, rue de l’Ancienne Comédie

Paris, 6ème

01-4046-7900



Images:

By Sarah Towle, 2011, with permission from Le Café Procope.

He called his treasure coffee Arabica due to its already widespread use throughout the Arab world.

From the Middle East, the bean traveled to Turkey and Northern Africa from whence it ventured to Venice, then a vibrant mercantile crossroads and Europe’s leading port.

Initially, the pleasurable brew was reserved only for Italy’s very wealthy. But once Pope Clement VIII gave coffee his blessing, thereby sanctioning its use amongst Christians the world over, consumption of the beverage became commonplace, and the first coffeehouses outside the Ottoman Empire began to appear, in Venice in 1645.

Coffee Arabica made to France, to the court of King Louis XIV, in the 1650’s. But it wasn’t until the 1669-70 visit of the Ambassador to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV, who came bearing gifts of the finest quality beans, that coffee drinking became all the rage in Paris.

In 1686, the savvy Italian immigrant, Procopio Cutò, opened the doors of one of Paris’ first coffeehouses: Le Café Procope. Then, it was a place for fashionable men of means to meet and sip coffee and other hot beverages from porcelain cups served by waiters dressed in Turkish garb.

Three years later, however, in 1689, the Comédie Française raised its curtain for the first time at its original location just across the street from the Café Procope. From that point, the Procope became the theatre’s ad hoc nexus, where patrons gathered before, during and after performances of Moliere, Racine, Corneille and other famous French playwrights. Now the coffee house of the French intelligentsia and literati, the Procope continued to attract notables in the world of arts, politics, and literature for the next 200 years.

In the early 18^th century, the Procope became home to the French Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and others. It was without question the birthplace of the world’s first catalog of all human knowledge, the Encyclopédie.

Following in the footsteps of Les Lumières, the most radical spokesmen of the French Revolution, such men as Camille Desmoulins, George Danton, Maximillien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat, adopted the Procope as their favorite watering hole. Indeed it can be said that the very Revolution that would eventually rock the entire world was sparked right there, at the Café Procope.

Time Traveler Tours recommends Le Café Procope as the place for a thematic lunch in their interactive StoryApp itinerary to the French Revolution: Beware Mme la Guillotine, A Revolutionary Tour of Paris.

Learn more about this unique approach to educational tourism at this website. Put Paris in the palm of your hand with Time Traveler Tours mobile iTineraries. Discover history with those who made it!

Le Procope

13, rue de l’Ancienne Comédie

Paris, 6ème

01-4046-7900

Images:

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Time Traveler Tours

Creative Non-Fiction

Writing Contest

3-Dimensional Stories*

for Youth and the Young at Heart

Subject: LONDON

If you have…

• A London-based story of creative non-fiction

• rooted in a specific historical era

• narrated by a colorful central character and

• steeped in well-researched historical fact

• that can be brought to life through the real-time, three-dimensional exploration of the sites where the story actually took place

• dedicated to youth (10+) and the young at heart

…then you have the makings of an awesome StoryApp iTinerary!

Time Traveler Tours, LLC, seeks short works of well-researched, historically accurate creative non-fiction for youth and the young at heart that bring London’s rich and vibrant past to life through great storytelling. Each story should focus on a single historical era and be told by a narrator who lived at that time. Narrators can be fictionalized, but their stories must be plausible and believable.

*A three-dimensional tale, as defined by Time Traveler Tours, is able to exist in the form of a narrated itinerary. For an example of a three-dimensional StoryApp iTinerary of Paris see: Beware Madame la Guillotine, A Revolutionary Tour of Paris.

With

Time Traveler Tours

mobile StoryApp iTineraries

Put the past in the palm of your hand

and discover history with those who made it!

Entry Deadline: April 1, 2012

Winner(s) will be announced

April 15, 2012

 Click Here for

Submission Guidelines

Big Ben on a Rainy Evening, 2008, by Stwilts at en.wikipedia.





Happy New Year!

from all of us at

 

 
Beware Madame la Guillotine:
A Revolutionary Tour of Paris

Wins a 2nd Top 10 Honor!

Teachers With Apps

includes BMLG in their list of

Top 10 Tried & True Classroom Apps

"This app is great because it combines the traditional power of storytelling

with the latest in mobile technology!"
   

But wait! There's more!

The French-English update

is ready and will soon be

Click here to go to our preview page.

joins

School Library Journal

in its praise for

Beware Madame la Guillotine:

A Revolutionary Tour of Paris

and other great 2011 apps dedicated to teens and tweens.

is thrilled and honored

to announce that

Beware Madame la Guillotine,

A Revolutionary Tour of Paris

has been named one of

School Library Journal's

Top 10 Apps

of 2011!

We are equally proud and honored to share this fantastic disctinction with the following standout storyapps,

• Moonbot Studios' The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, 
• David A. Carter's Spot the Dot from Ruckus Mobile Media & Unicorn Labs
• Nosy Crow's Cinderella: A 3-D Fairy Tale,
• Thomas Wharton's book-to-app Hildegard Sings (One Hundred Robots), and
• Perrenial favorite since the 1940s, the original intractive book, Pat the Bunny (Random/Smashing Ideas Inc.)

as well as with such giants as

• T.S. Eliot,
• Al Gore,
• Jack Kerouac, and
• Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Scientific American.

Thank you School Library Journal!

We hope you also like the bilingual version of Charlotte's app, soon to come!