Covid travel restrictions don’t stop us from planning and dreaming
Most of us currently have as much chance of getting to Perth and Port Douglas as we do Paris, so what the heck – let’s go.
Picture a street in Paris. Would you visualise the Champs-Elysees? The luxury shopping strip of rue Montaigne? Perhaps rue de Rivoli, running alongside The Louvre?
For American journalist Elaine Sciolino, there is only one: rue des Martyrs, down the hill from Montmartre. The former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times wrote a wonderful memoir (published in 2016) of her time living just off this historic boulevard. It’s a love letter to Paris; seductive, and filled with intimate insights painstakingly earned on her gentle journey from outsider to “local”. You can almost smell the fresh baguettes in the boulangerie, feel the worn rosewood banister of the staircase circling up to Sciolino’s apartment, hear the residents debating the demise of the neighbourhood poissonerie.
Rue des Martyrs is a microcosm of everything we love about the French capital, filled with art, history and attitude. It’s where Denis, patron saint of France, had his head lopped off. It’s where Renoir and Degas worked on their paintings of acrobats. A young Edith Piaf roamed its courtyards, singing for her supper to an audience that would toss coins from their windows. Truffaut fans may recognise its facades from scenes in The 400 Blows.
I’m only halfway through my literary stroll up the rue but it’s filled me with yearning. I’ve been revisiting photos of my last trip to Paris, way back in 2015. Before Covid, before the Bataclan terrorist attacks, before the Notre Dame blaze. Snaps show early-morning crepes in Bastille, vintage le Creuset enamel pots at a flea market, medieval tapestries and Roman baths, gilt statues on the Alexandre III bridge, my son cycling around Les Invalides.
And so, what the heck, let’s go to Paris. Click here and read Susan Kurosawa’s evocative piece about her stay, in 2019, at Hotel Lutetia in Saint-Germain, on the Left Bank. Yes, it will be some time before any of us can check in to this particular establishment, but isn’t half the pleasure of travel in the planning, the research?
That’s why you’ll find a little more overseas content creeping in to Travel + Luxury’s pages over the next few months. Our Destination Next and Places in the Heart features are designed to inspire future adventures, not taunt readers with missions impossible. Let’s face it, most of us currently have as much chance of getting to Perth and Port Douglas as we do to Paris. So read on, but don’t weep. Instead, cut it out and keep. There is a light at the end of Covid’s long, dark tunnel.