The View From Paris

A first-time visitor reflects on both the light and shadows of the world's most famous urban tourist destination. Did I mention the bread?

For many reasons, we had never visited Paris. It was always “the big trip” that was penciled in for a major birthday or anniversary, but it never happened, for many different reasons. Last week, thanks to the generosity of old and dear friends who offered the extra room in a beautiful apartment in the 7th arrondissement, we went. And it was truly wonderful. 

Since I just got back 36 hours ago and am reasonably jet-lagged, I’m a little late on my regular Tuesday links fest and I thought I’d share this short essay with you instead. I’d like this newsletter to be as personal as some of the best blogging era posts, and while the impressions of Paris are still so fresh, it seems a good idea to share them here. So allons, dear readers.

There’s a widely reported - most likely over-reported - effect on travelers known as the “Paris syndrome,” which reflects symptoms of clinical depression in those whose expectations of the cinematic city doesn’t match the reality of the real living, breathing French capital city of more than two million people. We experienced none of this. But I think we tend to downgrade Disney-like expectations of magic and fantasy, and focus on the most tangible aspects of a city that is rightly famed as the world’s greatest tourist destination - architecture, history, food, art, and the sense that Paris is one of the more unique places on the planet. We also expected a modern city with all of the grit and urban tension of New York, not mystical transportation to another realm. 

And it was truly wonderful. We stayed in a quiet residential neighborhood two blocks from the Rue Cler, a well-known market street lined with shops and cafes. La tour Eiffel was a constant presence outside the window and above the entire neighborhood. One night after dinner on the late side (in another gustatory gem along the lovely Rue Saint-Dominique, where most of the diners are Parisians), we walked over to the parc du Champ de Mars, and down to the tower and just hung out in the cold December air with a crowd of people from all over the world, marveling at the cascading lights that go off every hour in the evening. Then to another cafe for a nightcap and the World Cup action. After France’s win in the round of 16 the next day, we saw a special burst of the sparkling white lights on the Eiffel Tower from a tourist batteaux on the Seine - and the huge tricolor hung from the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile as we sped past on the way to the airport.

Kylian Mbappé was the man of the hour. A native of Paris, Mbappé and his wonderfully stylish play was a point of pride that washed across the city during our short stay; and it symbolized to me just how much of what is Paris today is the product of cultures and styles from all across the world. Mbappé’s parents come from African backgrounds, and follow the path of migration so typical of former empires like France. As we walked to the Louvre on our second day in the city (the scale of the museum is incredible) we came across a massive demonstration in front of the city hall. Protestors had pitched hundreds of colorful tents in the square, to call attention to the treatment of unhoused migrant children, many of whom face life-threatening hurdles in a city of vast wealth like Paris. This struck a chord for me, as some of my work in New York - as a member of the board of BronxWorks, for example - is aimed at giving a sturdy helping hand to both immigrants and the homeless in our own great city. Of course, migrants and their growing numbers are a major issue across “white” Europe, and the echoes of dangerous nationalism rumble there, as they do here. The rise of Marine Le Pen, the reconstituted “softer” brand of the xenophobic National Front, and its vicious demonization of immigrants is cousin to our own extremist MAGA Republicanism. They argue that multiculturalism in France has failed, but every Mbappé goal argues otherwise.

There is another story of migration and deportation that hangs over Paris, I think. One day, we were walking past the large-scale construction site that is Notre-Dame - the scale and pace of the rebuilding work is also a point of national pride and impressive to see close up - when we reached the far end of the Île de la Cité (essentially the island up which Paris began). There we descended almost to the level of the Seine and into the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, which commemorates the fate of 200,000 mostly Jewish Parisians who were sent into Nazi concentration camps and almost certain death by French police and Vichy officials after Germany’s occupation in 1940. This was a stark and challenging place. All stone and steps and cold shadows, the cave-like memorial is an actual tomb; ashes from the camps are there, and so are the remains of one unknown deportee. Created on the site of the former morgue, the memorial was designed by French modernist architect Georges-Henri Pingusson and inaugurated by Charles de Gaulle himself in 1962. It is one of the most moving memorials I have visited, carved into the city’s birthplace just under its most famous Catholic landmark - "hollowed out of the sacred isle, the cradle of our nation, which incarnates the soul of France,” as survivors stated at its commemoration. “A place where its spirit dwells."

The Occupation, which ended nearly 80 years ago, still feels recent in parts of Paris - whether in the bullet-pocked wall in the Marais where partisans and hostages were summarily executed by the Nazis, or in the expansive World War Two exhibit in the Hôtel National des Invalides, built by Louis XIV to house wounded soldiers and later a military complex. But then, Bonaparte himself can still feel relatively recent in Paris, even as you stand in the rotunda of the Dôme des Invalides and look down on his sarcophagus, just as Hitler did in 1940.

The fate of several empires is written not just in historic sites like this one, but in the streets of Paris itself - with the wide boulevards and circles, commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III and directed by his prefect of Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, between 1853 and 1870. The singular Haussman version of Paris is what we tend to think of in our collective mind’s eye - post Middle Ages, post Renaissance, post Revolution, post Bonaparte. The Eiffel Tower put a massive exclamation mark on the Paris remake, its opening marking the 100th anniversary of the Revolution in 1889. Six years later, my grandmother was born in New York - a city that grew into what we now think of as the layout of today, at the same time as Paris. The past is never that far away; she was proud of her college-taught French proficiency and taught me how to say “merci beaucoup” when I was a small child. I couldn’t help but think of her husband, my grandfather and namesake, who arrived in Paris in 1918 as a young officer in the American Expeditionary Force. He’d still recognize the Paris of today.

I wonder if he ever made it to Les Deux Magots on Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés? Hemingway certainly did. As did Picasso, Camus, Joyce, Sartré and many other literary and art world figures (also Julia Child). We did as well, after surviving a 45-minute wait in the cold for an indoor table on a 35-degree afternoon when sitting outside was not favoring my aching back; I proposed to our party that we collectively open a new cafe called Les Deux Advillé (“The Two Advils”) for walking parties of a certain age. Truth be told, the Parisians do their tourist traps very, very well. Despite the baedeker crowds, we had a great time at Les Deux Magots, with friendly waiters, savory croque-madame, and lovely house wine (which we sampled liberally at every lunch and dinner - no preservatives, no hangover).

Just as the past is not even past, so is culture and I think one reason why the Paris of a century or more ago still feels current is its deserved reputation as the center for western art. Our aching feet and oxygen starved museum brains were testament to the miles walked in pursuit of these masterpieces, from antiquity through the Empire at the Louvré and the half century covered at the Musée d'Orsay, in the fabulously converted Beaux-Arts railroad station on the Left Bank. We marveled at the Rodin Museum (and the stately Paris mansion and walled garden it’s housed in) and took in Monet’s famous water lilies at the Musée de l'Orangerie; to think that when he finished them as a old man in 1920 that they were considered passé and of another age.; modernism and the abstract were the new things a century ago.

One aspect of Paris life that is neither abstract or relegated to the past is the food. Each day, we’d rise early in the morning - not wanting to waste too many hours to sleep - a walk down the block to the boulangerie for baguettes and croissants, fresh every day and frankly, worth the price of airfare entirely on their own. The fromagerie held inexpressible charms and flavors. The wine shops. And the cafes, bistros and restaurants (in which we had the expert guidance of an experienced connoisseur). “I could live here,” I remarked, becoming the millionth visitor (since about July) to utter this phrase. In truth, this aspect of Paris life (which I know, we got a slightly romanticized tourist’s taste of) is something we could all use more of- the pride in the bread, the pride in the wine, the cheese, the broth in the cassoulet, the tart crust. And the time it takes to create, acquire and properly consume and appreciate these iconic foods. 

There are many echoes of the past in Paris and in truth, much of the visitor’s experience over a short first stay there is about tracking down that past, and understanding its meaning. But I think the sounds, the smells, and tastes are just as important. They’re immediate, the present, and fleeting, like our own lives. And they stay with you.