We’ll always have Paris
The French capital is the ideal destination for a midlife metropolitan love affair.
I am an inveterate traveller who somehow had never got to Paris and was embarrassed to admit this to those who dropped rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore or Le Bon Marche casually to me in conversation, and with perfect accents. Once, I’d passed through the city early one morning on a train when I imagined I caught the whiff of Gauloises and freshly baked baguettes. Like Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly loitering outside Tiffany’s with a croissant, I was an outsider looking in.
I kept the city in my back pocket as a promise to explore with my husband, but our work schedules never seemed to align. When in middle age I finally visited with my dearest friend and was sitting in an open-topped sightseeing bus on a bright summer’s day, the wind in my hair, like some superannuated Marianne Faithfull, I burst into tears, overcome with a complex assortment of emotions I’d experienced nowhere else.
That’s just Stendhal syndrome, my friend reassured me, and nothing to worry about. Four months later, as winter knocked its bony hand on the city’s door, I was back. This time with my husband, installed in a little apartment in the 5th arrondissement overlooking the Seine and straight into the window of the kitchens of Paris’s oldest restaurant, La Tour d’Argent. At night we would lie in bed and watch the chefs in their sky-high toques, and plan where to eat come dawn. By day we pursued the life of a flaneur (and flaneuse), exploring on foot, never with a plan.
Most such boulevardiers would have been horrified by our early start. Beset with jet lag, we were up before dawn walking rain-slicked streets waiting for the cafes to open, finding plaques on houses where Ernest Hemingway or James Joyce had lived, kicking through piles of golden leaves near the Luxembourg Gardens, enjoying the special magic of a city before it wakes.
We endured snooty waiters and average roast chicken at the nonetheless captivating Brasserie Lipp, experienced the works of the Impressionists on empty stomachs (as recommended by Hemingway) and drank coffee at Les Deux Magots and Cafe de Flore where I bored my husband with tales of my adolescent obsession with Simone de Beauvoir. We found much better roast chicken at the enchanting L’Hotel (where Oscar Wilde spent his last days duelling with the wallpaper) and better coffee at Shakespeare & Company bookstore, which had just recently opened a little cafe.
I loved everything about the city — the tiny rickety lift that creaked up between the curling, stone staircase with its timeworn steps to our fifth-floor apartment; shopping on Ile Saint-Louis for cheese and truffle saucisson; strolling the gardens at Musee Rodin; admiring the creative nose-to-tail parking of little European cars; zooming around Place de la Concorde in a taxi at breakneck speed; the fact a glass of wine cost less than a cuppa at most cafes. I spent hours gazing out our apartment window at Parisians huddled against the cold, scurrying across Pont de la Tournelle trailing cigarette smoke in their wake; at the grey-streaked bulk of Notre-Dame wreathed in low cloud. The whole thing felt like an art house movie.
I returned to the city with my sons in November 2015, less than two weeks after the dreadful Friday 13 terrorist attacks. Although a shadow hung over the streets, for my boys it was a rather compelling introduction to the city. We toured the Louvre after dark with an art historian and only a dozen folk gathered around the Mona Lisa; strolled an almost empty Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. It was a city sans queues and bereft of tourists and we felt a tremendous solidarity with the Parisians, and might well have been the only out-of-towners at the Christmas markets on Champs-Elysees, or at Galeries Lafayette, which we visited again and again mostly to admire the staggeringly large Christmas tree nestling beneath the famous department store’s beautiful glass dome.
My eldest son, a budding cellist, had me in and out of specialist classical music shops and off to the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, where we sat in the bleachers amid a phalanx of music students, most of whom were asleep (this is very normal, my son assured me). I continue to return to Paris whenever I can. For our 25th wedding anniversary, my husband booked a beautifully restored pied-a-terre on the third floor of a crooked 17th-century building on Ile Saint-Louis above Pont Marie, our bed tucked beneath massive oak beams, the windows opening onto the life of the river. The sound of music from pop-up bars drifted up, along with car horns, sirens, motorbikes and, in the morning, garbos and clip-clopping police horses. I loved the life-affirming din, like a permanent table at a pavement cafe.
The weather was glorious (mostly), the markets crammed with fat asparagus, plump strawberries and great armfuls of peonies. We were at the enormous flea markets (Marche aux Puces de Saint-Ouen) for opening, before lunching at the thoroughly demode Le Petit Navire with its red-and-white checked cloths and moules-frites served in enamel pots washed down with a pichet of rose.
We watched summer thunderstorms from the safety of our pied-a-terre, roiling clouds and torrential rain sending river revellers scurrying for shelter. I loved these storms and, reminded of the whimsical Midnight in Paris and Gil’s (Owen Wilson) conviction the city is even more beautiful in the rain, encouraged my husband to stroll with me through the Luxembourg Gardens during a light shower. Romance turned to comedy turned to drama as the rain became heavier, then a monsoonal deluge. We sprinted past Notre Dame as the gargoyle spouts became waterfalls and the streets ran with water, finding shelter in a little bar where the kindly waiter produced towels. And wine.
I’m very glad I waited as long as I did to visit Paris, as it has only sweetened the city’s allure, and I intend to return every year for as long as I’m able, to pursue my studies in flaneuring. If that’s a word, of course.
In these COVID-constrained times Paris has never been a better idea, to paraphrase Audrey Hepburn.
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In the know
STAY: Guest Apartment Services lists a brilliant selection of elegant apartments available for short and long-term stays, mostly in the 5th arrondissement, the Marais and on Ile Saint-Louis. There’s a concierge, cleaning, best quality Italian linens and an on-call team to book restaurants, excursions and car transfers and offer insider touring tips; guestapartment.com.
STROLL: Sign up for an expert-led small group walking tour with Localers. Themes cover everything from art, history, literature and food to fashion and flea markets; localers.com.
CAKE: La Tarte Tropezienne, at 3 Rue de Montfaucon in the 6th arrondissement, sells only one type of cake, a delicious buttery brioche (pictured) filled with orange cream, and apparently made famous by Brigitte Bardot. If dinner at the legendary Left Bank’s La Tour d’Argent, 5 quai de la Tournelle, is a budget breaker, enjoy something delicious from its boulangerie, 2 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine; tourdargent.com.
COFFEE: Le Peloton Cafe at 17 Rue du Pont Louis-Philippe in the 4th arrondissement is run by a New Zealander and offers proper antipodean coffee, plus great waffles and guided city bike tours; lepelotoncafe.com.
MUSEUMS: Don’t miss Claude Monet’s mesmerising waterlily canvases at Musee de l’Orangerie (there’s also an excellent collection of Impressionists downstairs) in Jardin des Tuileries near Place de la Concorde; musee-orangerie.fr. Musee de Cluny (the National Museum of the Middle Ages) is another gem, tucked away in the 5th arrondissement in one of the oldest buildings in Paris above the ruins of a Roman bath. Its medieval collection includes the ravishing Lady and the Unicorn tapestries; musee-moyenage.fr.