I envision this A to Z section of my books as an informative and interesting sourcebook, one that could almost be published as a separate volume. Compiling it is both fun and overwhelming—fun because I love enthusing about these engaging subjects and overwhelming because I could have submitted hundreds more under almost every letter of the alphabet. For me, this section is a compilation of good things and favorite places—and of course a list of anyone’s Parisian favorites is almost impossible to compile because it would be too long. I am always adding things to the list each time I visit, so it keeps changing, some entries replacing others. So in the spirit of sharing and comparing, what follows are worthy entries for all sorts of sites, lodgings, shops, museums, views, words and phrases, culinary treats, souvenirs, and noteworthy bits of trivia. I’ve tried not to repeat favorites of mine featured elsewhere in the book, but forgive me if I enthuse again about a few. And, as always, please browse my blog, Thecollectedtraveler.blogspot.com, for many more recommendations and updates.
Architecture critic Paul Goldberger has written that “a good hotel is a place, a town, a city, a world unto itself, and the aura it exudes has almost nothing to do with its rooms and almost everything to do with everything else—the lobby, the bar, the restaurants, the façade, the signs, even the corridors and the elevators.” Hotels like the ones Goldberger describes exist in all price categories, and they are, to my mind, the kind of places most of us seek. Paris has an abundance of selections in all categories and in all price ranges, and if anything it will be difficult to choose from the many appealing places! In fact, for a stay of more than a few days, I recommend making reservations at more than one place. In this way visitors may experience different types of lodgings as well as neighborhoods, perhaps choosing a combination of a modest inn and one very special place for a splurge. I do not buy into the idea that accommodations are only places to sleep—where you stay can be one of the most memorable parts of your trip, and the staff at your chosen accommodation can be enormously helpful in making your trip special. Deciding where to stay should not be taken lightly and deserves your best research efforts.
It is not my intent to visit dozens of hotels in Paris and report on them—that is the purview of guidebooks, Web sites, and accommodation guides. But as someone who pays close attention to the tiniest details, has stayed in accommodations ranging from campgrounds to five-star hotels, is practically allergic to must and dust, has an exacting idea of the words “customer service,” and has been known to rearrange the furniture in a few hotel rooms, I do think I have something valuable to share with readers. And besides, because many people ask me for recommendations, I move around a lot when I travel, changing hotels and arranging visits to those that are fully booked or that I otherwise might not see. I make sure to see lodgings both moderately priced and expensive, so that readers have personal recommendations for both. Most often, I am drawn to the moderate places that also represent a good value, as I’ve found that these sometimes receive the least attention. It’s never hard to find out about the budget or luxury places to stay, but the places in between—which I believe suit the pocketbooks of the majority of travelers—are often overlooked or given cursory consideration.
I myself do not generally prefer chain hotels, especially American ones, but those who do will find a number of them in Paris. I prefer to consult specialty hotel groups (assuming there is one for the destination I’m visiting), and among my favorites for France are Châteaux & Hôtels Collection (chateauxhotels.com), Gîtes de France (gites-de-france.com), Relais & Châteaux (relaischateaux.com), and Relais du Silence (relaisdusilence.com). Additionally, I like Small Luxury Hotels of the World (slh.com) and Leading Hotels of the World (lhw.com).
Regarding books about accommodations in Paris: there is no shortage. Here are the books I consult when I’m contemplating where to stay (and, yes, I really do peruse all of these—there is hardly any overlap and I like to know I’ve turned over every stone in considering my options before heading out):
Alastair Sawday’s Special Places to Stay series, with editons on Paris, French châteaux and hotels, and bed and breakfasts, and Go Slow France and French Vineyards (Alastair Sawday Publishing). Over the years I’ve used a great number of Sawday’s books for locations throughout the world, with great success. There’s also useful information on the Sawday’s Web site (sawdays.co.uk).
Boutique and Chic Hotels in Paris by Lionel Paillès (Little Bookroom, 2008) is a chunky little book with fifty-two great recommendations for places that Paillès refers to as “pocket palaces, boutique hotels, or neo-Oriental nests … atmosphere is their stock in trade, so it takes very little time to feel at home.” There are a number of hotels in this book with rates under one hundred and twenty euros per night—among them the Hôtel Eldorado (eldoradohotel.fr) and Villa Toscane (hotelvillatoscane.fr), both of which are far more appealing than many places I’ve seen for the same price. However, the listings vary widely, with some places over three hundred euros per night. The photos are satisfactory for giving you a sense of where you’ll be staying; there are also brief suggestions for things to do in each hotel’s neighborhood at the back of the book.
Karen Brown’s France Bed & Breakfasts and France Hotels (Karen Brown Guides, updated for 2010). Award-winning Karen Brown Guides have been great resources for accommodations for over thirty years, and are admired for their meticulous research. The guides differ from the Alastair Sawday series in that they typically focus more on exceptional high-end (rather than moderately priced) places to stay. Also find tips on her Web site (karenbrown.com).
Parisian Hideaways: Exquisite Rooms in Enchanting Hotels by Casey O’Brien Blondes and with photographs by Béatrice Amagat (Rizzoli, 2009) is my newest hotel resource and I just love it. Blondes’s vision of an idyllic Parisian location is a quiet street as opposed to a wide avenue, and she prefers places that are intimate with lots of personal contact, leaving out the palace hotels, franchises, and chains. Especially helpful are her own categories of hotels, such as Brocante Chic, Design Classics, Timeless Elegance, and Historic Flavor. She invited each hotel’s owner or manager to share their coups de coeur (favorites) for their respective neighborhoods, because, as Blondes wisely notes, “the most valuable resource a Parisian hideaway has to offer is the knowledge and rich culture of its owner and management. They know their neighborhood and relish sharing its secrets with guests.… There is a good chance your stay will engender an ongoing friendship, as these hotels, like the city they encapsulate, foster fidelity. It’s hard to find someone who has visited Paris and doesn’t dream of returning.”
Paris: Hotels and More by Angelika Taschen with photos by Vincent Knapp (Taschen, 2006). I admit I was initially drawn to the beautiful feel of this book (I even like the smell of the paper!), but it’s as useful as it is pretty. Taschen has chosen hotels that capture the character and atmosphere of Paris, and includes her favorite shops and sites in each neighborhood; she’s left room for readers to record their own favorite finds as well.
I highly respect the writers of the hotel guides above and don’t pretend to share their level of expertise, but I do stand by the lodgings that I particularly like. I believe any one of the places listed below will make your stay in Paris special:
Four Seasons George V (31 avenue George-V, 8ème / +33 01 49 52 70 00 / fourseasons.com/paris). I have long been a big fan of the Four Seasons brand, and the company’s Paris outpost is a splendid success. Four Seasons acquired the George V from Trust House Forte in 1997 and basically gutted the building before reopening in 1999; before the association with Four Seasons, the original George V hotel, opened in 1928, had an illustrious history: in 1944 the hotel was General Eisenhower’s headquarters during the liberation of Paris. The recent $125 million renovation included interior design by Pierre-Yves Rochon, a reconfiguration of the guest rooms—there are now fewer rooms (245) but they are larger—and a restoration of the building’s Art Deco façade.
It’s easy to enthuse for pages and pages about the George V. There’s so much to recommend it: its service; restaurant Le Cinq, with two Michelin stars under the direction of chef Éric Briffard; a wine cellar with more than fifty thousand bottles and twenty new labels added each week; recreations manager Claudia Caringi, responsible for the hotel’s younger guests (numbering up to eighty children a month during peak times), who makes it easy to see why the George V was named a family favorite by Travel + Leisure in 2009; the house Rolls-Royce Phantom (Hermès-inspired, hand-built, and available for airport pickups, day trips, or business in Paris); its concierge desk and specifically Adrian Moore (referred to as “a food-savvy culture maven who knows Paris inside and out” by Bon Appétit, and whose blog, Adrianmoore.blogspot.com, is a great resource); its truly beautiful spa, inspired by Marie Antoinette’s beauty secrets and a summer walk in the gardens of Versailles; the list goes on. But to my mind the best feature of the George V is the flower arrangements by artistic director Jeff Leatham. Even if the hotel is too costly for a stay, drop by the hotel’s lobby, the Marble Courtyard, and the lounge La Galerie so you can see Leatham’s breathtaking creations. Approximately nine thousand blooms are purchased every week from the Netherlands, and Leatham and his seven assistants design new themes for the hotel, refreshing the flower sculptures on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis. Leatham, who had no formal training in flowers but did have a landscape artist for a father, has observed that “flowers bring out the passion in people, they exude energy, color, and light, and they can lift us above the brouhaha of everyday life.” His arrangements have set the standard for all Four Seasons hotels. (Leatham provided arrangements for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding and has his own show on TLC, Flowers Uncut, plus he has a studio in New York; see Jeffleatham.com.) Rates at the George V range from approximately 825 to 13,000 euros.
Paris Splurges
In addition to the Four Seasons George V, there are a number of palace hotels and other very grand places to consider for a splurge, for just one night or several, including Le Bristol (112 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, 8ème / +33 01 53 43 43 00 / lebristolparis.com), Hôtel de Crillon (10 place de la Concorde, 8ème / +33 01 44 71 15 00 / crillon.com), Le Meurice (228 rue de Rivoli, 1er / +33 01 44 58 10 10 / lemeurice.com), Plaza Athénée (25 avenue Montaigne, 8ème / +33 01 53 67 66 65 / plaza-athenee-paris.com), and the Ritz (15 place Vendôme, 1er / +33 01 43 16 30 30 / ritzparis.com). Of this last, Travel + Leisure special correspondent Christopher Petkanas has said, “For sense of arrival nothing can touch it.” I am partial to Le Meurice because of its history and its location on the rue de Rivoli (I love the arcades), and the view from the rooms on the Tuileries side—overlooking the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre—takes my breath away.
Pavillon de la Reine (28 place des Vosges, 3ème / t33 01 40 29 19 19 / pavillon-de-la-reine.com). This lovely inn, among the most romantic in Paris, takes its name from Anne of Austria, who slept here just before her wedding to King Louis XIII (after which she became la reine, the queen).
It’s wonderful enough to stay in the vicinity of the Place des Vosges, but even more special to stay in a building that is actually a part of it. Pavillon is the only hotel on the place and its entrance is tucked away, so unless staying here tourists don’t usually wander by, adding to the hotel’s exclusivity. Pavillon was recently completely renovated; the interior décor, which blends soft and bold colors with velvets and arabesque-patterned fabric in the hallways, was the vision of Didier Benderli, formerly with Jacques Garcia and designer of David Bouley’s namesake restaurant in New York. A member of Small Luxury Hotels of the World, the hotel remains privately owned by the Chevalier family and is managed by director Tim Goddard, who oversaw the multi-million-euro renovation and has been at the hotel for nearly twenty years.
Each of the forty-two guest rooms and twelve suites is unique, but they all are elegant and evoke a sense of calm and intimacy. Indeed, from the minute you step into the Pavillon’s lobby you feel you’ve entered a different world, peaceful and far removed from the bustle on nearby rue des Francs-Bourgeois. There are lots of antiques and exposed wood beams throughout the hotel, but in addition to this Old World quality there are plenty of contemporary touches in both the public and the guest rooms, notably with the flat-screen TVs atop carved wooden chests and Molton Brown toiletries in the modern bathrooms. The duplex rooms on the first floor were decorated by interior designer Nathalie Prost—whose other hotel credits include the Lancaster, Sofitel Bora-Bora, and Club Med Kos—and they are warm, cozy, and fantastic. The Suite de la Reine, with an enlarged, handwritten parchment page from Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer above the bed, is one of the most unique and comfortable hotel rooms I’ve ever seen. A small Carita spa (two treatment rooms, fitness room, Jacuzzi, and steam room) was added during the renovation, and offers an anti–jet lag massage; there is no restaurant, and the breakfast room is open only to guests.
The hotel still attracts an artistic clientele; Jean-Paul Gaultier once lived in the hotel, and a look at the guest book reveals the names of John Malkovich, Jane Fonda, Christian Lacroix, and Jeremy Irons, who wrote, “What? Write in a book / Where gentlemen look / And ladies spy / Not I, not I!” Rates range from 375 to 835 euros. Note: A sister hotel, Le Pavillon des Lettres (12 rue des Saussaies, 8ème / +33 01 49 24 26 26) opened in the fall of 2010. I haven’t seen the hotel yet, but it’s also designed by Didier Benderli, and it pays tribute to letters written by such authors as Baudelaire, Hugo, Ibsen, Kafka, Nerval, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Yeats, and Zola. Particular passages from their letters are printed on the walls of guest rooms. Rates range from approximately 300 to 460 euros.
Hôtel Verneuil (8 rue de Verneuil, 7ème / +33 01 42 60 82 14 / hotelverneuil.com), Hôtel Thérèse (5–7 rue Thérèse, 1er / +33 01 42 96 10 01 / hoteltherese.com), and Hôtel Récamier (3 bis place Saint-Sulpice, 6ème / +33 01 43 26 04 89 / hotel recamier.com). Sylvie de Lattre, a stylish and savvy entrepreneur, now owns a trio of hotels that are my current favorites in Paris. The oldest in the group is the Hôtel Verneuil, a cozy twenty-six-room inn just off the rue des Saint-Pères in Saint-Germain that de Lattre acquired in 1997. For De Lattre, it was her first step into the hotel world. She had studied political science, worked in property management, and had lived in England, Hong Kong, and Singapore with her husband, but then realized she wanted to start her own business in hospitality management. She took over the Verneuil, which had changed hands a few times over a thirty-year span, and had it redecorated completely—and, she told me, she’ll likely change it all again in the next few years. The renovation and redecoration were done by Michelle Halard, a well-known designer and decorator also responsible for the interiors of restaurant Pierre Gagnaire and, in Provence, the Hôtel L’Oustau de Baumanière (as well as some dinnerware pieces for the French earthenware company Gien).
Each guest room in the seventeenth-century building is decorated differently and the overall feel is that of a maison particulière, or private home. Most of the guest rooms are small and space is tight—though imaginatively used, as in the narrow closet space on either side of the bed—and some rooms have doors so close together that occupants can’t open them simultaneously. This is a common feature, however, in very old buildings in Europe, as are other quirks, such as uneven steps, which you will also see at the Verneuil, and elevator service begins on the second floor, so your bags must be carried up a flight of steps first. I have no quibble with these features, as they contribute to the overall charm of this lovely hotel, and at any rate the staff here is so accommodating, and so genuinely concerned that you have un bon séjour (good stay), that it more than compensates for any architectural limitations.
Photo Credit bm1.6 (top), Photo Credit bm1.16 (middle, bottom)
Guest rooms combine (mostly) bold colors with printed fabrics; my room was a warm shade of red while a friend’s was a light mint green. The lobby and adjoining salon, with a black-and-white tiled floor, pretty wood paneling, bookshelves, and fireplace, are great public spaces where guests may gather and enjoy glasses of wine or Champagne. Breakfast is served in a subterranean room of bright whitewashed stone arches, another example of a creative use of space. It didn’t take me long to notice that every time I stepped through the Verneuil’s front door I was greeted by a really lovely scent, which was from a customized candle created for the hotel by the skilled perfumist Gilles Dewavrin (gillesdewavrin.net). Happily for me, guests may purchase these candles, and now every time I light one in my home I immediately think of my stay at the Verneuil (I also beg anyone who’s going to Paris to bring me back another one). The Verneuil’s location is superb: ten minutes’ walk from the Musée d’Orsay, ten minutes to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, fifteen minutes to Saint-Sulpice, and two blocks from the Seine, with the Louvre just on the other side of the Pont du Carrousel. Guest testimonials in the livre d’or attest to the hotel’s popularity, so advance booking is advised. Room rates range from approximately 148 to 240 euros.
Hôtel Thérèse is the only inn of the three on the Right Bank, located between the Louvre, the Opéra, rue Saint-Honoré, and the Palais Royal. It’s popular with business travelers (there is a seminar room for meetings) but its uncluttered comfort and airy feel appeal to leisure visitors as well. The talented Jean-Philippe Nuel supervised the décor of the forty guest rooms and three junior suites; rooms are larger than those at the Verneuil and are more contemporary, yet in a classic way. The street-level lounge has a very clubby feel and is a great place to read the paper, meet friends, and relax. Overall, the clientele at the Thérèse represents a more balanced international range; fewer Americans stay here than at the Verneuil or Récamier. Room rates range from approximately 155 to 320 euros.
Hôtel Récamier, opened in 2009, is the jewel of the group. Recently featured in the pages of Elle Décor and Maison Côté Paris, the Récamier is chic and classic at once. The hotel has a very similar feel to the J.K. Place hotels in Florence and Capri—in fact, when I met Sylvie de Lattre, she told me that although she’d not yet seen those noteworthy hotels, the designer she hired for the Récamier, Jean-Louis Deniot, had, and it’s apparent that there is some J.K. Place influence in the rooms of the Récamier. I happen to love J.K. Place, and so I also love the Récamier’s original touches. The Récamier was the first hotel project for Deniot, and the only direction she gave him was to create a cross between a traditional hotel and an elegant private town house, something that was special and that nobody had seen in Paris before. Deniot created twenty-four unique rooms using 150 fabrics and 50 wallpapers, and he put elements together that might at first seem not to blend. Each room mixes texture and pattern and each bed features patterned coverlets and a canopy, but every room is different and no two pieces of furniture are alike.
Every floor of the hotel has its own color scheme or theme—black and white, ethnic chic, gold and black, coral red and Asian, blue-gray—and on every level of the central spiral staircase is a bust of Madame Récamier, each a newfangled interpretation of Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting of the same name in the Louvre, in the styles of such artists as Niki de Saint Phalle, Christo, and Yves Klein. A nice feature is that, on every floor, the two rooms overlooking Place Saint-Sulpice can be opened up and made into a suite. The Récamier has a small outside patio where breakfast is served in nice weather; otherwise it is offered in the petit salon where complimentary tea, coffee, and refreshments are served to guests for l’heure de goûter (snack time) from four to six p.m. The hotel’s location in the sixth right by Saint-Sulpice is just fantastic. Room rates range from approximately 250 to 420 euros.
Recommended Budget Choices
Hôtel Chopin (46 passage Jouffroy, 9ème / +33 01 47 70 58 10) and its sister property, the Hôtel de la Bretonnerie (22 rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie, 4ème / +33 01 48 87 77 63); both reachable at hotelbretonnerie.com.
Hôtel des Grandes Écoles (75 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, 5ème / +33 01 43 26 79 23 / hotel-grandes-ecoles.com).
Hôtel des Grands Hommes (17 place du Panthéon, 5ème / +33 01 46 34 19 60 / paris-hotel-grandshommes.com).
Hôtel Mayet (3 rue Mayet, 6ème / +33 01 47 83 21 35 / mayet.com).
Hôtel Saint Thomas d’Aquin (3 rue du Pré-aux-Clercs, 7ème / +33 01 42 61 01 22 / hotel-st-thomas-daquin.com).
Mama Shelter (109 rue de Bagnolet, 20ème / +33 01 43 48 48 48 / mamashelter.com).
Port-Royal Hotel (8 boulevard de Port-Royal, 5ème / +33 01 43 31 70 06 / hotelportroyal.fr).
Recommended Hôtels de Charme
Hôtels de charme are in abundance in France and are perhaps a little hard to describe because there are so few in North America. An hôtel de charme is usually a place that is small, charming, not expensive or luxurious, and a good value. The phrase also denotes quality and character, and may be run by family members. Hôtels de charme may be found in rural areas as well as urban, and there are a number in Paris. Generally, an hôtel de charme is not the equivalent of a boutique hotel, which typically costs more and features more modern conveniences.
Hôtel d’Angleterre (44 rue Jacob, 6ème / +33 01 42 60 16 93 / hotel-dangleterre.com).
Hôtel Duc de Saint-Simon (14 rue de Saint-Simon, 7ème / +33 01 45 48 68 25 / hotelducdesaintsimon.com).
Hôtel du Jeu de Paume (54 rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, 4ème / +33 01 43 26 14 18 / jeudepaumehotel.com).
Recommended Rental Agencies
À La Carte Paris (alacarteparis.com).
I Love Paris Apartments (iloveparisapartments.com).
Paris Appartements Services (paris-apts.com).
Paris Home Shares (parishomeshares.net).
Vacation in Paris (vacationinparis.com).
Paris has long been a great destination for antiques, and visitors who love antiques shopping will not be disappointed in one area in particular: in the streets of the sixth and seventh arrondissements. Big news in the auction house world came in 2000, when a monopoly restricting auction sales to French nationals was declared void. (Previously foreigners had to arrange for a French person to bid for them.) The monopoly had been established by a royal edict of Henri II in 1556, and in the four centuries since, London and the United States had outpaced Paris in sales, as well as in market savvy and diversification. Christie’s and Sotheby’s (both British firms) now have a presence in Paris, but the Hôtel Drouot (drouot.com) is Paris’s historic auction house, founded in 1852 and located on the corner of rue Drouot and rue Rossini in the ninth arrondissement; there are also salesrooms at 15 avenue Montaigne in the eighth, as well as at Drouot Nord and Drouot Véhicules (outside of the city). The house is actually an umbrella group now owned by a subsidiary of the bank BNP Paribas, with sixteen different halls and seventy independent auction firms, which can be intimidating indeed to would-be auction participants.
Antiques professionals, interior decorators, architects, casual collectors, or simply those interested in attending an auction or a flea market should contact Emily Marshall at Grotto Antiques tout de suite. Marshall is the only American to have earned a diploma from the famed École Boulle, a prestigious applied-arts school for the decorative arts in Paris. Named after Louis XIV’s cabinetmaker André-Charles Boulle, students of the school must have a thorough knowledge of the history of French furnishings and demonstrate proficiency in drafting and hand sewing to earn the Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle, or CAP, degree. Marshall prepared for the CAP by training for two years with Madame Catherine Bientz, a drapery-maker for the shah of Iran. École Boulle is highly selective; in 1995, the year she began at the school, only eighteen students were selected out of several hundred to attend. Since graduating, Marshall has created draperies for distinctive apartments in Paris and has continued to apprentice and train, acquiring professional techniques few, if any, other Americans know. In addition to operating Grotto Antiques (1399 East Tutt Road, Trenton, Kentucky / 615 430 5491 / grottoantiques.com) and specializing in haute couture for the home, Marshall and her husband offer an international antiques courier service in France. They also organize antiques shopping tours to the flea markets and auction houses, always negotiating for the best price.
Through a serendipitous saving of Marshall’s business card, nearly ten years after first meeting her I tracked her down, and we reconnected by telephone and e-mail.
Q: When did you first visit Paris, and what was it that inspired you to go?
A: I’d majored in anthropology and Brazilian Portuguese in college and had lived and worked in Brazil. When I was job hunting, I discovered the Austin Company, a tobacco agency based in Greeneville, Tennessee, that bought tobacco for domestic and foreign manufacturers and it had plants in Brazil, so I decided to explore job opportunities with them. I was hired as Austin’s first woman in the leaf department, which I was mainly responsible for buying at auction.
I’d work half the year and travel for the rest. I went to London and Paris, where Austin’s second-largest customer, SEITA, the French tobacco monopoly, was based. So it seemed natural to inhale Gauloises and Gitanes sur place. Through family connections I was able to arrange a stay in a bohemian garret in the fifteenth, and Paris cast its spell. Once I returned to work, I began to scheme: how could I go back and stay longer? Austin gave me a year off to work on an MBA degree. I met a Parisian and fell in love—ironically his godfather headed up Philip Morris in Switzerland, one of Austin’s clients—and I said adieu to the tobacco business. I stayed in Paris until 2006, returning to the States only then to start Grotto Antiques with my second husband, Mehdi Zohouri.
Q: Were you always interested in antiques and textiles?
A: Looking back now as an older woman, I realize one should never underestimate the ability of a child’s eye to be educated and cultivated to appreciate beautiful and worldly things. I grew up on a rolling cattle and tobacco farm in the middle of Tennessee, but foreign influences blew regularly in and out. My father was a sea captain, and his annual visit home would have him loaded down with silk from India and Egypt, ebony from Africa, and lacquerware from the Orient. My favorite uncle, Jim Beaumont Marshall, was a career State Department employee and traveled the world. His keen eye and own fascination with textiles initiated me to the world of Indonesian ikat, Suzani embroidery, and Indian silks. I’m sure the textile bug comes from him. Also, a woman named Dorothy Ann Ross Russo was a great influence—she’d spent her junior year abroad studying at the Sorbonne, and her home had mysterious escargots and freshly baked French-style bread. She read us Babar in French. I’d sip coffee with her artist husband, Remo, in their kitchen nook and quiz her on those buildings taped to the wall: Chinon, Chenonceau, and Blois. I see those black-and-white prints even now; I was seven at the time.
I started sewing at six. Both my grandmothers did beautiful work and my mother made her own Vogue Paris Originals during the early sixties. By twelve, I could make most anything, and in my teens, I could make coats interlined and lined. When I was nineteen I had a job in Washington, D.C., working for a gift shop, where I learned of Cristal d’Arc, Limoges china, and Quimper ware. The back area had French fabric, and on my breaks I would drool over the material. So my eye developed in America, but it was École Boulle’s Histoire de l’Ameublement Français (History of French Furniture) course that ignited the passion for French antiques, textiles, and decoration.
Q: You are the only American to ever attend Paris’s prestigious École Boulle. What transpired that made you want to apply for admission?
A: A terrible French divorce! Did you see the film Le Divorce, based on Diane Johnson’s book? Leslie Caron is nothing compared to my ex-belle-mère. Sewing calms my nerves and was a channel to relieve a whole lot of stress. But more officially, I was thumbing through a catalog of adult courses offered by the Mairie de Paris (mayor’s office) and I stumbled upon the heading Tapisserie d’ameublement, and it got me thinking that I wanted to learn soft furnishing techniques. Later, when I sent in the application to the École Boulle, I was selected out of hundreds of candidates.
Courses at École Boulle include French, physics, industrial and hand sewing, technology, drawing, cutting patterns and draping, and the history of French furniture and architecture. Each subject has a coefficient. Meaning if you’re not so hot in French (coefficient 2), you’ll make up points with the sewing project (coefficient 10). Just don’t make a zero in a subject: no diploma will be awarded. I became passionate for French antiques in the History of French Furniture class. Working chronologically, we worked our way up through the styles, starting with the Romanesque. It wasn’t just furniture but the architecture and fabric associated with each period. I made up flash cards scrambling all the periods together, and I received a perfect score on the final exam. I loved it, and I’d discovered what I wanted to do with my life. I drove my husband crazy—he’d see me coming down the hall and duck out of the way, not wanting me to quiz him on some fauteuil canné à la reine, époque Louis XV or duchesse brisée.
Q: Where did you meet your second husband, and did he, too, have a passion for the antiques market in Paris?
A: At the marché aux puces, the Paris flea market, bien sûr! One Friday morning, I came around a corner in the Marché Dauphine and there was this gorgeous man with an equally gorgeous stand. Voilà! He’d grown up in Tehran’s bazaar with his father, and when the shah’s regime collapsed, he lost his scholarship and had to eat, so he sold antique photographs at the puces to survive. He’s been there thirty years now.
Q: When did you establish Grotto Antiques, and what do you specialize in?
A: January 2007. The antiques side of the company deals in a refined eighteenth-century look. Unfortunately, a dealer has to buy what the market wants, and now, modern rules. Magazines dictate the current look and most people don’t have the courage or taste to buck the trend. I like to think we hold people’s hands to help them be individualistic and nonconforming when it comes to creating a home. The other part of our business is the École Boulle atelier. We just landed a prestigious project with one of America’s top architectural and interior design firms. Our specialty? Roman shades made in the same fashion as the Élysée Palace.
Q: When did you start attending auctions at the Hôtel de Vente Drouot?
A: Right after I got the CAP in 1996. The official visit at Drouot is all day long the day before the auction. (Check La Gazette de l’Hôtel de Vente Drouot for specific information on hours and merchandise to be presented—for example, silver, coins, books, wine, furniture, modern paintings, etc.) Still, professionals huddle around the steel grates just before eleven a.m., chatting and smoking, waiting for the one-hour visit, eleven to noon. The steel grate opens and they’re off! A mad frenzy of hundreds of dealers, pushing and elbowing, up and down escalators, all on a mission: to find things that’ll make money. There’s an hour to scout through thousands of articles: sixty minutes to note the salle, estimate price, leave an order, corner the commissaire, befriend the auctioneer, and spy the competition. Promptly at noon the doors slam shut.
Auctions begin at around two, though longer ones can start at one-thirty or sometimes even in the morning. You stand—all day long—in the back or running between the salles. You have to stand so you can see your competition or whether the auctioneer has a pigeon (fake bid) in the corner. Dealers crush you, on purpose. You’re on tiptoes trying to see. And the smell can be overwhelming—there is often a clochard (bum) in his filthy clothes, trying to warm up in winter weather. The auctioneer announces the numbered article and opens with a bid: Monsieur, est-ce que j’ai cinq cents? (Do I have five hundred?) Five hundred in an eloquent, slow chant. Six cents? (Six hundred?) Six cents! Et sept cents? (Seven hundred?) Est-ce que j’ai preneur à sept cents? Sept cents! Sept cents! Adjugé, sept cents euros! The commissaire flies to the person that’s bought the lot, gets his check or cash, and hurries back with his name to the recording secretary, who makes out the bill. In the meantime, the crieur has already started taking bids on the next auctioned article. Back and forth and back and forth, all day long, every minute, a lot is sold.
Q: The Drouot auction house can be intimidating to visitors, which is where your courier service can prove to be invaluable. What exactly does your service provide, and what are some notable pieces that you’ve found for your clients over the years?
A: Drouot is a closed world where if you’re unknown, you can’t bid. The auctioneers don’t know you—won’t take your bid—and the dealers won’t let you have anything anyway. Are you fluent in French? Can you follow the auction? Do you have a K-bis (professional license) and a business checking account? Foreign check? Forget it. Letter of credit from a foreign bank? Too expensive and too long to arrive. Credit card? Probably not. Most auction houses don’t take them anyway. We make it possible to get over these hurdles, and it’s worth it. Daily, Drouot has treasures for those who wait and happen to be at the right place at the right time.
We provide two services: buying at auction, and our courier service at the main Paris flea market (Puces de Clignancourt) and professional trade shows (déballages). We take customers under our wing at the flea market and protect them from dishonest dealers and unsavory characters who tend to congregate near the market. (We know a Manhattan dealer who got his cell stolen right out of his hand and an old woman whose teeth were knocked out at an ATM. Tip? Never put cash in your purse; thieves will rip it right off your shoulder.)
Tackling this sometimes seedy world, though, has its fruits: beautiful antiques found at great prices. We really do it all from A to Z, honestly and with a genuine pride in seeing to our customer’s satisfaction.
Q: What are Les Grands Ateliers de France?
A: Simply put, they’re the best artisans in France—la crème de la crème in their field, of upholstery, gilt bronze, embroidery, furniture restoration, etc. Maison Brazet is one; Rémy Brazet’s fine upholstery atelier may be visited in an inner courtyard on a shopping street in the sixteenth. Many locals don’t even know it’s there. Last time I went, he was placing feathers on Catherine the Great’s bed that the Getty Museum had bought from Bernard Steinitz. Brazet also works for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and once had a New York customer who flew on the Concorde to discuss trim with him. His work is so perfect that one museum thought he’d cheated by using foam instead of horsehair. He sliced open the chair to prove them wrong.
Q: I know you have literally hundreds of Paris addresses, other than Maison Brazet and some known only to the trade, in your attaché case. Can you share some of your favorite and most distinctive with Collected Traveler readers?
A: Dealers never give out their sources. That’s how we make our living. But here are a few I can share with my brief notes:
Fried Frères (13 rue du Caire, 2ème / +33 01 42 33 51 55 / friedfreres.fr). Supplies crystal beads, sequins, and pearls to haute couture houses. Sold prestrung for crochet embroidery. Stockroom stuffed to the ceiling! Minimum order. Worth a visit to feel the energy of the Sentier, the garment district.
Lesage (13 rue de la Grange-Batelière, 9ème / +33 01 44 79 00 88 / www.lesage-paris.com). François Lesage, the father. Right beside Drouot. The master of French hook (crochet) embroidery and has a school open to the general public. Courses, beginning level I, expensive. His haute couture atelier for designers like Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier, and YSL is never open to the public.
Jean-François Lesage (207 rue Saint-Honoré, 1er / +33 01 44 50 01 01 / jeanfrancoislesage.com). François’s son. Luxurious home embroidery produced in India; mostly gold and silver thread. Don’t even bother calling unless you’re professional or seriously interested in ordering. Works only with high-end customers: Saudi Arabian princes, aristocrats, and foreign governments.
Boisson (181 rue Saint-Denis, 2ème / +33 01 45 08 02 61). Rue Saint-Denis can be disturbing, as prostitutes of all sizes and ages hang out in doorways. A single woman, especially a pretty one, might be bothered if walking alone. Don’t let that stop you from visiting this boutique stuffed with thread and yarn of all descriptions for weaving and embroidery. Cotton warp thread for tapestry and rug making. Owner welcoming and knowledgeable.
Au Ver à Soie (102 rue Réaumur, 2ème / +33 01 42 33 52 92 / auverasoie.com). The best store in the world for silk thread! Located in the heart of the garment district. Silk thread and ribbon in all forms, shapes, and sizes, even chenille. Color palette incredible. Minimum order. Can find retail at Ultramod (3–4 rue de Choiseul, 2ème).
Léobert (75 ter rue de Charonne, 11ème / +33 01 43 71 70 05). Wholesale-only upholstery supplies. École Boulle’s source.
Brigitte Duros (27 rue Froidevaux, 14ème / +33 01 43 22 44 77 / tapisserie-paris.com). Judge for Meilleur Ouvrier de France embroidery competition. Restores tapestry, embroidery, and antique fabrics. Can duplicate most any textile. Dyes her own yarn, fixing the tint in bouse de vache (sounds better in French—fermented cow manure!) to restore antique tapisseries. Located on charming courtyard behind the Montparnasse cemetery.
La Galerie des Cadres (131 rue des Rosiers, Saint-Ouen / +33 06 80 65 22 33 / galeriedescadres.studio-batignolles.com). Michel Idée owns this great source for frames at the Paris flea market. All periods and styles. If he doesn’t have it, he’ll find it!
Maison Degroote-Mussy (12 passage des Taillandiers, 11ème / +33 01 48 05 17 16). Last time we popped in, they had a back order of six months, fabricating furniture for Alberto Pinto. One of the few furniture makers still in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
Gauthier et Cie (68 avenue Ledru-Rollin, 12ème / +33 01 47 00 60 44 / gauthier-cie.com). Monsieur Tournay’s boutique used to be hidden inside a courtyard on rue de Charonne. He’s upscale now, with a beautiful shop. Why not, for the most beautiful curtain rods in the world? Massive gilt bronze Louis XV consoles. Hand-sculpted wooden rods tinted to the client’s specification. Sells primarily to Russian and Middle Eastern markets. A downer? No new catalog nor price list. To-the-trade only.
Georges Le Manach (31 rue du Quatre-Septembre, 2ème / +33 01 47 42 52 94 / lemanach.fr). Upstairs, delicious silks produced by a meilleur ouvrier de France using Adidas-clad foot power. Jean Paul Getty’s fabric source. Factory in Tours to visit by appointment only. Worth it to see men—tattoos and earrings—hand weaving silk. Sale on slightly irregular fabrics.
Passementerie Île-de-France (11 rue Trousseau, 11ème / +33 01 48 05 44 33 / pidf.fr). Passementerie (trims, cording, and tassels) for royal families and castles. Antique collection to view.
Q: And speaking of addresses, what are some of your favorite culinary haunts in the vicinity of Drouot?
A: A lot of dealers just cross the street to one of the cafés; having a sandwich jambon-beurre at the bar helps to pass the time before the doors open again. Order a demi and you’ll hear the latest scandal or coup in the trade. It’s more pleasant here since smoking was banned. For a real meal, Chartier (rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, 9ème / +33 01 47 70 86 29 / restaurant-chartier.com) provides bistro fare in an incredible Belle Époque atmosphere. I love it from the minute I walk in. The waiters dash about in their long white aprons, torchon swung over their arm, serving up steaming French cuisine. Try the tartare de boeuf just to witness the waiter’s flair in whisking together raw hamburger, mustard, and egg. Orthodox and pied noir Jews (formerly of colonial Algeria) trade in diamonds and textiles in this part of the ninth arrondissement, so good kosher restaurants and bakeries exist down most any street east of Drouot. La Boule Rouge (1 rue de la Boule Rouge), owned by the famous pied noir singer Enrico Macias, offers typical Algerian dishes, including couscous. Watch out for the harissa, the hot chili and garlic condiment.
With fine weather, walk a block to the shopping street, rue Cadet, or continue on up the hill along rue des Martyrs, for a food lover’s paradise of shops filled with foie gras, cheese, pastries, sausages, and bread. Order takeout (à emporter) and eat in the Square d’Anvers, at avenue Trudaine, with a glorious view of Montmartre. Afterward, hoof it down the hill to 3 rue de Rochechouart and stop for Aurore Capucine’s lavender cookie. I’ll travel five thousand miles just to gorge on one. Zazou (20 rue du Faubourg-Montmartre) specializes in North African pastries. Get a tray and load it up with makroud (date-stuffed cakes), semolina and honey cake, or homemade loukoumia. Eat standing up. Mint tea is wonderful on a cold day.
La Mère de Famille (35 rue du Faubourg-Montmartre/ lameredefamille.com) is Paris’s oldest candy shop (confiserie) in its original location. The boutique’s windows change with the seasons: giant chocolate bells at Easter, candied muguet (lily) for the first of May, mushroom-shaped pâte d’amande in the fall. All beautiful and delicious! Pricey, though. The same commercial cookies can be found at the local Franprix. Only locals go to Restaurant Petrelle (34 rue Petrelle, 9ème / +33 01 42 82 11 02/ petrelle.fr). Food is bought daily at market according to the chef/owner’s whim. It’s totally magic at night and haunted mostly by actors filming in nearby studios. But there are only a few tables; you must reserve!
Q: Lastly, what do you find most rewarding about your work?
A: Welcoming the dealers from around the world, clinching the deal, la chine (the hunt, the pursuit), getting up at four a.m. to land a treasure out a truck’s back end, and just being with our family, the thousands of people that make up the puces. Also, being surrounded daily by a world of beauty—a magic one where objects from the past bring joy.
Sculptor Constantin Brancusi was originally from Bucharest, but the majority of his works were created in his Paris studio. He bequeathed his studio and all its contents to the French government on one condition: that the Centre Georges Pompidou reconstruct the studio as it had been in its original Montparnasse location. The museum brought in architect Renzo Piano, who also designed the Pompidou, et voilà: the world’s largest Brancusi collection—consisting of sculptures, drawings, tools, and more than fifteen hundred photographs—in a great, light-filled space on Piazza Beaubourg in front of the museum. It is firmly on my short list of favorites. (www.centrepompidou.fr)
This mini chain of shops dedicated to roses—a favorite of mine for over a dozen years—carries bouquets and loose-cut roses in a great variety of colors as well as lots of other things having to do with the flower: candles, extrait de parfum to refresh potpourri, culinary items, soap, and rose petals—which I’ve scattered on a white tablecloth set for dinner, to great effect. There are several Paris locations (aunomdelarose.fr); it’s a great place for picking up a small bouquet for your hotel room at a good price.
Poet Max Jacob gave the name Le Bateau-Lavoir to a group of artists’ studios in Montmartre, at the top of the steps leading to 13 rue Ravignan. By all accounts, the studios themselves were dark, dreary, and dirty; as to the origin of the name, accounts differ. Some have it that on stormy days the wooden planks of the studios swayed in the wind and creaked dangerously, resembling the laundresses’ boats that used to float on the Seine—this seems reasonably plausible to me. The original building, which was destroyed by fire in the 1970s, is also reported to have been either an old piano factory or a manufacturing facility of some kind. Whatever it once was, in the late 1800s and early 1900s it was home and gathering place for a veritable hit parade of artists and writers, including Maxime Maufra, Juan Gris, Modigliani, Kees van Dongen, Apollinaire, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Marie Laurencin, Maurice Utrillo, Jacques Lipchitz, Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Ambroise Vollard, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and Picasso. Picasso painted one of his most legendary works here, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Avignon refers not to the Provençal town of Avignon, as many people assume, but to a street in Barcelona, where he lived for some years when he was younger; whether or not the women in the painting may be prostitutes I will leave to art historians.) Picasso left the Bateau-Lavoir in 1911, and by the time World War I ended, everyone had left, migrating mostly to Montparnasse. Today there is a reconstructed display of the Bateau-Lavoir in Place Émile-Goudeau; for art history buffs it’s worth stopping by while you’re in Montmartre.
Short for Bazaar de l’Hôtel de Ville, the BHV (52 rue de Rivoli, 4ème / bhv.fr) is one of Paris’s legendary department stores—see a very detailed and informative entry on les grands magasins on my blog. I reference it here not for its wares (though the basement hardware department, believe it or not, has incredibly cool stuff that you just can’t find in North America) but for its rooftop terrace, which I rarely hear anyone talk about. I found it by accident and couldn’t believe my good fortune to be sitting up there with a grand view all around and only two other people. It’s a great outdoor space to know about—it’s free, relatively quiet, and a good spot to take a break if you’ve been shopping or sightseeing in the fourth arrondissement.
I love La Mère de Famille, the most famous address in Paris for old-fashioned candies and confections, but I also love newcomer Le Bonbon au Palais (19 rue Monge, 5ème / bonbonsaupalais.fr). The shop is decorated to make you feel like you’ve stepped into a 1950s classroom, with a note to all written in chalk on the blackboard. On my last visit there, I learned: La vie est bien plus belle avec des bonbons … (Candy makes life better.) The owner has gathered the best sweets from all around France and displays them in large glass jars with lids. It is indeed a palace, filled with forgotten treasures and childhood favorites (for the French, anyway), and though it seems an obvious destination for kids, it’s hard for anyone of any age not to appreciate the whimsical and exuberant atmosphere of this unique shop.
This phrase translates as “good style, good class,” and is roughly equivalent to the North American word “preppy.” It’s commonly used when referring to restaurants, stores, and anywhere “les BCBGs” hang out (that’s pronounced bay-say-bay-zhay). BCBG is also the name of Max Azria’s line of clothing.
Bonjour Paris is a terrific Web site (bonjourparis.com). It’s an outstanding resource for visitors to Paris as well as anyone who is a devoted Francophile. American expat Karen Fawcett, who’s lived in Paris since 1988, has been maintaining the site since 1995, and with each passing year it becomes more and more indispensable. May 1, 2010, marked Fawcett’s twenty-second anniversary in Paris, and as she noted in a posting that day, “After all these years, more of me is French than American.… Paris has captured my heart and part of my soul.”
Fawcett and I share not only a passion for Paris but also for the Eloise books, and for the idea that the more people are able to travel, the greater global understanding will become among people and nations. I caught up with her by telephone recently:
Q: Before moving to Paris, what had your relationship with the city been?
A: I fell in love with the Eiffel Tower when I was thirteen and in Paris on a teen tour. Years later, when my (now deceased) husband was transferred to the City of Light, at first I didn’t want to leave the States, even though his gig was only for one year, but once there I was in love all over again. Though it bears repeating that living there is an entirely different experience than visiting. But I had one hell of a time! Eighty-seven consecutive nights of house guests, not knowing three words of French, and a husband who worked sixty-five hours a week.
Q: What are some features about Bonjour Paris that you think make it different or more worthwhile than other Internet sites devoted to the city?
A: Mainly, we’re not for readers who just want to know where the Eiffel Tower is located. Bonjour Paris devotees have been there and done that. The site is known for featuring in-depth stories by good writers on Paris and other places in France, as well as for tons and tons of practical information and tips.
Q: You have been very honest in your postings about life in Paris—that it isn’t all roses and foie gras. Now that you have the benefit of years there behind you, what are some of the most important words of advice you might share with anyone thinking of moving to Paris or France?
A: I would say that both for anyone thinking of moving here and for first-time visitors, come with the idea that things will be different. Look at the buildings, try to learn even the most rudimentary history, say “Bonjour” and “Merci,” and know that not everyone speaks English. We’re guests here!
Q: What are some reasons why you feel living in Paris is rewarding?
A: I have such a feeling of safety, for one. I like being able to walk anywhere in my neighborhood and stop for a drink. And I am constantly amazed by the wonderful people I meet. I love feeling as if I am living in a global society.
Q: In a typical week or month, how do you spend your time in your quartier, and what places do you frequent?
A: No two days in Paris are the same, but I spend a lot of my life behind the computer working on Bonjour Paris. It’s my passion as well as an addiction, having spent the past fifteen years typing away and sharing my love of, and more than occasional frustration with, France. At least once a week, I try to make a pilgrimage to a neighborhood with which I’m not familiar, but a lot of my free time is limited by the weather. As much as I try to go to the Luxembourg Gardens each day, if it’s freezing cold or raining I don’t make it.
I’m desperately trying to stay away from daily pilgrimages to Kayser, the wonderful bakery that’s less than a block away from my apartment (even though I may have only one croissant on a visit, the calories gravitate to my thighs). My money is better spent at Monceau Fleurs, where you can buy moderately priced flowers, which, although ephemeral, give me pleasure. Rather than going to the gym, my exercise consists of walking and walking some more. When taking the Métro, there are invariably stairs involved, and even though I know better, I jog from one platform to another when changing trains, as if I’d have to wait an hour if I missed the next train pulling into the station. I do take taxis occasionally, when I’m very dressed up, but that’s pretty rare since Paris has become a substantially less formal city (unless it’s a three-star restaurant, men often don’t wear ties anymore).
People who live in France usually have a favorite café, and it’s more than a place to drink coffee: it’s a front-row seat to observing others and living theater. My cafés tend to change according to where there’s the most sun. And as much as some visitors assume all Parisians eat out all the time, those days aren’t frequent unless you’re made of big bucks. When I first arrived in Paris, I was horrified by the few kitchens I was allowed to see [typically, guests would not be welcome to visit the kitchen], because they looked like dungeons. The French are now into chic kitchen design—all you need to do is walk down boulevard Saint-Germain near rue du Bac in the seventh and you have your choice of one über-expensive kitchen store after another.
My main shopping venue is Ed, located at the end of my block on rue Notre-Dames-des-Champs. Initially, the store was kind of a dump where the neighborhood’s residents would pretend they didn’t see each other. The grocery store stocks its own inexpensive Dia brand and many generics that cost less than comparable items at Paris’s mainstream groceries. This doesn’t mean I don’t go to La Grande Épicerie at Bon Marché if I want special goodies to serve to my guests. And I’ve become a dévotée of Picard, a chain that sells the best frozen foods anywhere. You can order via the Internet and a delivery truck will arrive the next day. One of the joys of living in France is the availability of first-rate cheese, one of my greatest weaknesses—it’s hard to say no to a Vacherin Mont d’Or at its runniest perfection.
I’ve come to the realization that it’s okay to let a place annoy you on occasion and still know it’s an integral part of your heart and soul. At a party I went to recently I was greeted by a sea of unfamiliar faces, and people were from a great number of other countries. Everyone spoke French and English, and many people said they came to Paris on a year’s assignment and were now still here ten, twenty, even thirty years later, and had no intention of ever leaving. Sometime after midnight, I walked home, and by the time I reached my front door I realized I’d been seduced by Paris again. I will always travel, and revel in it, but I wonder whether I will ever leave—except feet first.
If you like visiting local bookstores when you travel as much as I do, I feel certain you’ll love these favorites of mine:
Librairie Florence Loewy (9 rue de Thorigny, 3ème / florence loewy.com). A truly unique store/gallery with books by artists.
Galignani (224 rue de Rivoli, 1er/galignani.com). The first English-language bookstore on the Continent.
La Hune (170 boulevard Saint-Germain, 6ème). For an impressive selection of art, design, film, poetry, literature, and philosophy titles.
La Librairie des Gourmets (98 rue Monge, 5ème). Wonderful store for cookbooks and culinary books of all types, as well as a great selection of posters, cards, and culinary maps of France. The shop was chosen to run the Paris chapter of Slow Food.
Librairie Gourmande (92 rue Montmartre, 2ème/librairiegour mande.fr). Also a wonderful, two-story culinary bookstore near the site of the original Les Halles food market, appropriately.
Paris et Son Patrimoine (25 rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, 4ème). Books (nearly all in French) about Paris neighborhoods, streets, monuments, architecture, music, and theater.
Taschen (2 rue de Buci, 6ème). Hardcover illustrated books on art, fashion, travel, design, film, etc.
Village Voice (6 rue Princesse, 6ème / villagevoicebookshop.com). An all-around terrific selection of books in English and a stellar lineup of author appearances and special events (plus a very thorough list of recommended books about Paris on its Web site).
I think the first time I came across the word bouquiniste was when reading Hemingway, and ever since then I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for these secondhand booksellers (sellers of bouquins) who set up shop along the banks of the Seine. Rhonda Carrier relates in In Love in France that the bouquinistes originated in the sixteenth century, a time when some of Paris’s bridges had shops and stalls along their lengths. The booksellers sold their wares from wheelbarrows until someone came up with the idea to attach trays to the sides of the bridges with leather straps. This continued until the late nineteenth century, when the bouquinistes were permitted to fasten their boxes to the quaysides on a permanent basis. Apparently there is an eight-year wait for a bouquiniste spot! Over the years I’ve bought quite a few items from bouquinistes—old stamps, postcards, paperback books, prints—though admittedly the value lay in actually purchasing them from a bouquiniste rather than owning them. I do very much love the two colored etchings I bought and had framed, and they are joined by other etchings I’ve collected on one wall in my living room.
The Canal Saint-Martin, in the tenth arrondissement, is one of my favorite places in Paris, especially on Sunday, when many shops are closed and museums can be crowded. The canal’s construction was ordered by Napoléon in 1802 to supply Paris with a source of drinking water, to help eradicate diseases like cholera and dysentery, and to provide a shorter river traffic route through Paris rather than around it. Gaspard de Chabrol, then prefect of Paris, proposed a canal that would be four and a half kilometers long and would connect the river Ourcq to the Seine, and the project was funded by a new tax on wine. The Canal Saint-Martin was completed in 1825; in Paris it is bordered by the Quai de Valmy on one side and the Quai de Jemmapes on the other. The Hôtel du Nord—the very same from Marcel Carné’s 1938 film—is at 102 Quai de Jemmapes and is now a bar and restaurant (with a cool Web site, hoteldunord.org). Readers may remember that in the movie the character Arletty utters a classic line implying that “atmosphere” is overrated; appropriately, there is a nearby bistro, L’Atmosphère (49 rue Lucien-Sampaix), serving inexpensive plats du jour. On the Quai de Valmy, at no. 95, I’m especially fond of Antoine & Lili, the most colorful shop (think pink and fuchsia!) I’ve ever been in, which specializes in women’s and kids’ clothing and lots of cool decorative stuff (antoineetlili.com). But the best way to experience the scenic Canal Saint-Martin is to take a barge ride on it: the cruise is two and a half hours and passes through nine locks. Canauxrama (canauxrama.com) and Paris Canal (pariscanal.com) both offer cruises.
I love the wrought-iron chairs that are set up around the fountain in the Tuileries Gardens. People move them around to their liking, usually based on where the sun is shining (or not), and I have taken dozens of photos of them. There is something incredibly attractive about their shape and decorative scrollwork, and I remain fascinated by the fact that the chairs aren’t permanently affixed to the ground (so that no one steals them) or covered with graffiti (the way they might be in many other cities). I was disappointed to learn a few years ago that the original Tuileries chairs had been replaced with far less attractive models. I have no idea why, so the photos on the facing page are for those of you who may have never known the beautiful originals.
A chèque-cadeau is a gift certificate, which I learned when I wanted to buy my friend Luc one as a birthday present to use at La Librairie des Gourmets. A staff member kindly taught me this phrase, and I thought an occasion might arise when you, too, would be happy to know how to ask for one.
Dehillerin (pronounced DAY-luh-rhain), a family business founded in 1820, is the mother lode of stores selling materiel de cuisine (18–20 rue Coquillière, 1er / e-dehillerin.fr). If you have a passion for cooking, you have likely already read about Dehillerin and my voice will just be one more added to the chorus of those who love this store. I haven’t yet bought a copper pot or bowl from Dehillerin—its copper cookware is usually the first thing enthusiasts note—but the help I received when I was looking for a kugelhopf mold was kind and helpful (many people say the service is frosty at best). My only other purchase here was a set of pewter skewers for grilling, with decorative shells, fish, and crustaceans at their ends, but even if I never buy anything else again, I will not miss out on walking around this (rather dusty and) rambling shop. The Web site is fine for seeing the vast assortment of items available here, but nothing beats a real visit.
The only store I’m familiar with in North America that is remotely similar to Dehillerin is Bridge Kitchenware, which is also a family business, founded in 1946 by Fred Bridge. Bridge was located in Manhattan until 2008, when Steven and Kathy Bridge moved the store to New Jersey (563 Eagle Rock Avenue, Roseland / 973 287 6163 / bridgekitchenware.com) so they could be closer to their family. The store, like Dehillerin, has been a favorite for home cooks and noted chefs; there is a customer story shared on the Web site about a young woman whose grandmother “grabbed her by her arm and said buy whatever Mr. Bridge recommends, he knows his stuff and never argue with him, just nod and be quiet and hand him your money.” I think the Dehillerin family would recognize the story as being similar to many of their own.
A feature I love in A Food Lover’s Guide to Paris by Patricia Wells is the sprinkling of French words and phrases throughout the book that are culinary inspired but used in everyday speech. Beurré (buttered) is a colorful way to say someone’s had too much to drink, and le temps des cerises (literally “the time of cherries,” equivalent to our phrase “salad days”) is one of my favorites as well. Clotilde Dusoulier, on her blog, Chocolateandzucchini.com, calls these “edible idioms,” and she regularly adds such phrases to her site. A few she’s highlighted are tourner au vinaigre (literally “turning to vinegar,” but implying a situation or conversation that’s taking a bad turn; things going sour); etre serrés comme des sardines (being packed together like sardines, used when people are squeezed into a very small space); and ne pas manger de ce pain-là, or “not eating that kind of bread,” meaning refusing to act in a way that goes against one’s values. For each phrase, Dusoulier also gives an example in a complete sentence in French and provides a link for an audio sample; for the example for ne pas manger de ce pain-là, we have this translation: “I’d have to kowtow to the principal to get a spot for my daughter, but I don’t eat that kind of bread.” This idiom highlights two kinds of people, she notes: those who would do anything for a piece of bread and those who would rather do without than “eat bread that was acquired in a way that doesn’t sit right with their sense of ethics or morals”—and we know how the French feel about their bread. The phrase was the title of a 1936 book of poems by Benjamin Péret, a French Surrealist whose tombstone in the Batignolles cemetery bears the phrase as its epitaph. His book in its English translation is titled I Won’t Stoop to That. I just love how much you can learn from a simple phrase.
No matter that it is one of the world’s most touristy symbols: I love la tour Eiffel. Writing in the New York Times in 1989, the year the tower turned one hundred, architecture critic Paul Goldberger aptly noted that, compared with nearly all other famous architectural icons, the Eiffel Tower is bigger than you expect: “That is the first thing that differentiates it from almost every other well-known structure in the world: no matter how many times you have stood before the Eiffel Tower, it is always at least a little bit bigger than you expect it to be.” Writing for Gourmet in 1977, Joseph Wechsberg admitted that ever since arriving in Paris some fifty years earlier he had never been up inside the Eiffel Tower until recently. Once he did go, it was an “astonishing experience—and not only for the view,” and I completely agree.
Gustave Eiffel’s other works are noteworthy as well, including the Tan An Bridge in Vietnam, the Oporto Bridge in Portugal, the Garabit Viaduct in the Massif Central, the frame of the Bon Marché department store, and the framework for Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty—but it is of course the Tower for which he is best known. If you admire it as much as I do, I encourage you to read the chapter entitled “The Ogre of Modernity: Eiffel’s Tower” in Frederick Brown’s excellent book For the Soul of France (Knopf, 2010). The building of the tower took twenty-six months, Brown informs us, and “eighteen thousand numbered pieces” were delivered to the Champ de Mars with military precision. Yet its construction was mired in controversy. Guy de Maupassant, along with other writers and artists, signed an open letter of protest—known as the Protest of the 300—addressed to Alphonse Alphand, minister of public works, referring to the tower as “useless” and “monstrous” and declaring themselves devoted to stone. In Paris, they wrote, “stand the most noble monuments to which human genius has ever given birth. The soul of France, the creator of masterpieces, shines from this august proliferation of stone.” They criticized the tower as being “American,” and “an odious column of bolted metal.”
The details surrounding this structure are endlessly fascinating. For example, the Eiffel Tower is classified within a catégorie spéciale indicating that it is not designated as a historical monument. If you want to learn more, another good account is Eiffel’s Tower: And the World’s Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count by Jill Jonnes (Viking, 2009), a truly fascinating peek into the Paris Exposition of 1889 and the history of the tower, defined by Eiffel as “not Greek, not Gothic, not Renaissance, because it will be built of iron.… The one certain thing is that it will be a work of great drama.”
The French word pont (bridge) is also used as the equivalent of “long weekend” in English. As Bryce Corbett humorously notes in A Town Like Paris, “Through a clever melding of the Christian and Socialist calendars, the entire month of May is one long public holiday in France.” He exaggerates, though not by much. When a holiday falls on a Thursday or a Tuesday, for example, the French like to faire un pont (“make a bridge”) by also taking off on the surrounding days. This is useful to keep in mind if there is a scheduled holiday during your trip (especially in May)—if so, do not expect things to operate as usual.
This phrase, meaning “annual closing,” is one you’ll see often during the month of August, when nearly every resident of Paris (or so it seems) is on holiday, either for a few weeks or the entire month. It is an important one to remember because, similar to on ponts (above), some restaurants may be closed, sites may keep different hours, some shops may be closed, and the plumber will be unavailable to fix the problem you’re having at the apartment you’ve rented. All this changes at the time of la Rentrée—the “return,” and it is often spelled with a capital R—signifying that everyone is back from vacation, school is starting, and the busy fall season has just begun.
One of my favorite forms of travel immersion is to invite friends and family over for an evening of a themed dinner and a movie. It’s a great way to familiarize yourself with some of the foods you may be eating on your upcoming trip, and the movie is just icing on the cake. Potluck is especially fun for guests who enjoy the challenge of making something new or bringing an appropriate favorite, and guests who aren’t cooks can supply the wine. There is no shortage of films featuring Paris to watch after dinner. Some I particularly like include: Amélie (2001), An American in Paris (1951), Avenue Montaigne (2006), Le Ballon rouge (The Red Balloon, 1956), À Bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), Le Dernier Métro (The Last Metro, 1980), Funny Face (1957), Gigi (1958), Hôtel du Nord (1938), The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945), Paris, je t’aime (2006, and my absolute favorite!), Paris When It Sizzles (1964), and Paris la belle (Beautiful Paris, 1960). This last is an unusual documentary directed by Pierre Prévert featuring black-and-white images of Paris from 1928 with the same shots—in color—from 1959, with his brother, poet Jacques Prévert, doing the narration and song lyrics.
This is a good retail phrase to know, as it’s used to refer to items that have been discounted because there are only a few left or will no longer be available (i.e., the line is being discontinued).
Flamant Home Interiors (flamant.com), founded by brothers Alex, Geo, and Jacques, is a great store to browse in for anyone who loves the arts of the home. Its stated mission is “the revival of handicraft furniture and old objects adapted to the needs of today,” and the selection includes dinnerware, tabletop items, paints, and decorative pieces. (I am partial to its Manosque line of white dinnerware.) The Paris store is at 8 rue de Furstenberg/8 rue de l’Abbaye, in the sixth.
Eric Maisel, in A Writer’s Paris, defines a flâneur as “an observer who wanders the streets of a great city on a mission to notice with childlike enjoyment the smallest events and the obscurest sights he encounters.” I like that definition, but I like Bryce Corbett’s, in A Town Like Paris, even better: “The term flâneur exists only in French, describing a person who spends entire days wandering aimlessly with the express purpose of doing little more than taking in whatever he sees. A French man is never in danger of running too quickly past the roses to ever stop and smell them.” The word is uniquely French, and though I keep the word in mind here at home, it is positively Parisian.
Paris’s coat of arms is a boat motif borrowed from the seal of the Watermen’s Guild, appointed by Louis IX in 1260 to administer the city. In the sixteenth century, the Latin motto Fluctuat nec mergitur—“Buffeted by the waves, we shall not sink”—was added, and it remains today. You’ll see this coat of arms around the city, carved into buildings and imprinted upon documents. To view some on the façades of buildings, log on to the creative Web site Ruavista.com and browse its selection of photographs.
There are very few pieces of mail that arrive in my mailbox that I am genuinely excited about, but France Magazine is one of them. This wonderful, fully illustrated quarterly—filled with a heady mix of articles covering culture, travel, timely topics, and cuisine—began publication more than twenty years ago. Under the direction of editor Karen Taylor, the magazine is published by the French-American Cultural Foundation (FACF) in Washington, D.C., whose mission is to foster cultural and educational ties between France and North America. Previously available only by subscription, France is now for sale at select Barnes & Noble, Borders, and smaller bookstores nationwide, and I highly recommend becoming a regular reader (202 944 6069 / francemagazine.org).
I first learned of this shop from Patricia Wells in her first edition of The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris, and I’ve been a loyal customer of Le Furet-Tanrade ever since (63 rue de Chabrol, 10ème / lefuret-tanrade.com). Initially, I went to the store in search of confiture de poire passée, a smooth, delicious pear concoction Wells recommended for mixing with plain yogurt. I did as she prescribed, and I was rendered speechless by how delicious it was. Later, I discovered pêche de vigne jam, and all I have to say is if you think you’ve had better peach jam anywhere in the world than this one, you are dead wrong. Still later, I discovered the shop’s orange-flower water made from the blossoms at the orangerie at Versailles, and the chocolates, which are of quite good quality. Tanrade has, according to Naomi Barry in Paris Personal, “enjoyed the reputation of being the first house in Paris for fine jams, jellies, and fruit syrups” for nearly 250 years. At the time Barry penned her book (1963), she considered Tanrade’s marrons glacés the finest in Paris. I can’t vouch for that, but I can for every single item that I’ve purchased here. Tanrade is positively vaut le détour.
In recent years, I’ve become incredibly fascinated by Les Halles, Paris’s central food marketplace until 1969. Though there was a market on the site since 1183, it is Victor Baltard’s iron and glass pavilions, constructed between 1854 and 1866, that captivate my imagination (ten original market halls were erected in the 1800s, with two reproductions added in 1936). Les Halles is pronounced lay-AHL, one of the few examples in French where liaison—the practice of pronouncing the final s in a word when the next word begins with a vowel—does not apply. (Other examples include les hors d’oeuvres, les haricots, les homards, and les hot-dogs.)
Les Halles, as Naomi Barry wrote in her 1963 Paris Personal, was “a kind of butter-and-egg Casbah, packed with history, glamour, traffic, trading, and vice.… To stroll through this brilliant, aromatic bazaar is to spin your senses until they reel with the colors and the smells of everything that grows on earth and comes up out of the sea.” There was a profusion of two-wheeled carts at the market known as diables, belonging to neighborhood grocery owners who needed fresh produce for their shops. There were also porters, known as les forts des Halles, who had had their own guild since 1140. Les forts also served as pallbearers to the kings, who, upon their deaths, were carried to the Basilica of Saint-Denis, just outside of Paris, where French monarchs have traditionally been buried. In 1461 les forts went on one of the most successful strikes in French history: halfway to Saint-Denis, they set down the casket of Charles VII and refused to go any farther until they were promised more money. Lastly, Barry tells us that the word clochards (bums) may derive from Les Halles: a bell (cloche) would be rung after the day’s trading was finished, and the clochards were the (hungry) recipients of anything left over. (Another theory about the name, Barry relates, is that clochard comes from clocher, a verb meaning “to limp” or “to bump along,” as clochards are often observed walking in a rather uneven fashion.) The streets in the vicinity of the market that still exist today were aptly named: the rue des Lombards was so named for the merchants from Genoa, Venice, and Florence who set up shop as bankers and money changers. Rue de la Ferronnerie was named for ironmongers (iron is fer), and the boulevard Poissonnière was the street used for fish (poisson) transported to the market.
In the Middle Ages, the entire Les Halles quartier was prominent as the place for starting riots, hatching plots against the government, and seeking approval of the crowd, and royal ordinances and peace treaties were first read here to the market people. Émile Zola’s 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris) is set in the Les Halles neighborhood, and his vivid descriptions are one of the best records we have of this extraordinary market. A more recent reminiscence is found in Saveur Cooks Authentic French, from Claude Cornut, second-generation proprietor of a market bistro, Chez Clovis: “Les Halles was a village unto itself in the very heart of Paris. We were so content and self-sufficient that we would forget that there was a world outside. Imagine the ambience of a place that is alive at least twenty hours of the day!”
But by mid-twentieth century the market’s location, which took up about forty acres, became problematic: the nighttime truck traffic was unbearable, and much of the arriving foodstuffs had to be repacked and sent out again to other parts of France and beyond. In 1969, the decision was made to move the market to Rungis, south of Paris (see Rungis entry, this page). Only one of Baltard’s pavilions survived the demolition, and it is now located in the suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne, to the east of Paris (reachable by the RER). According to Thirza Valois in the first volume of Around and About Paris, there were many people who lamented the end of the world Les Halles had created. A sculptor observed, “It was a place of bliss … the last vision of natural life in the city. It is now paradise lost,” and a social observer and poet opined, “The death of Les Halles has tolled the knell of Paris.” Fortunately, this last didn’t come to pass, though what followed the demolition was justified cause for alarm: a giant hole in the ground remained for ten years, and then in 1979 the Forum des Halles opened.
The Forum does incorporate nice pedestrian and garden areas that I am fond of, but any mention of the Forum usually refers to its underground shopping mall, which quickly became seedy (and at times unsafe) when the Châtelet–Les Halles Métro station was expanded to become the largest station in the system—the suburban lines connect with the city lines here, and it’s easy to get lost in the labyrinth of passages. Currently, plans are under way for a new glass canopy to cover the existing shopping complex, and a music conservatory, a museum, restaurants, and additional shops will be added. There will be additional garden space added as well, and the whole thing is slated to be completed in 2016.
If I rarely see any North Americans around Les Halles, I have seen even fewer at Saint-Eustache, bordering Les Halles to the north, the second-largest church in Paris after Notre-Dame and among my favorites. Built in the sixteenth century, Saint-Eustache is where Cardinal Richelieu and the Marquise de Pompadour were baptized, where Louis XIII made his first communion, where Jean-Baptiste Lully was married in 1662, and where funeral services for Molière and fable writer Jean de la Fontaine were held. In The Belly of Paris, Monsieur Claude (who is likely based at least a little on the painter Cézanne) tells Florent that he doesn’t believe it was coincidence that brought Saint-Eustache’s rosette windows in alignment with Les Halles. This is modern art confronting old art, he says: “Since the beginning of the century only one original building has been erected, only one that is not a copy from somewhere else but has sprung naturally out of the soil of our times, and that is Les Halles. Do you see it, Florent? A brilliant work that is a shy foretaste of the twentieth century. That is why it frames Saint-Eustache. There stands the church with its rosette window, empty of the faithful, while Les Halles spreads out around it, buzzing with life.” Saint-Eustache is also known for its strong musical tradition due to its outstanding acoustics, and the church has one of the most prestigious organs in Paris. According to Thirza Valois, the organ’s case was designed by Victor Baltard, and as it is “equipped with both a mechanical and an electronic transmission system, [it] is the biggest double transmission organ in the world.”
Besides the Ecoute sculpture by Henri de Miller in front of Saint-Eustache, my favorite feature of this wonderful church is the haut-relief in resin and acrylic gouache entitled The Departure of the Fruits and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris, February 28, 1969, by Raymond Mason. It is entirely fitting that this artist’s tribute to Les Halles is here, in the church that, despite its association with elite names of the past, served the working-class merchants of the market.
Georges-Eugène Haussmann could trace his lineage back to Cologne, Germany, and Alsace, but history has made his name nearly synonymous with Paris. In fact, as David Jordan notes in his excellent Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann, “No name is so attached to a city as is Haussmann’s to Paris. The great founders of cities in antiquity, both mythological and actual, even Alexander the Great or the Emperor Constantine, who gave their names to their creations, have not left so indelible an urban imprint.” The French (as is their wont) even created an adjective from his name, haussmannisé.
Baron Haussmann was named prefect of the Seine under Napoléon III, and the city of Paris as we know it today is the direct result of Haussmann’s plans, which included the creation of the city’s grands boulevards, the continuation of the rue de Rivoli, the redesign of the Bois de Boulogne and Les Halles, the addition of more parks, the blue and white plaques bearing street names, and apartment buildings that even today are coveted for their solid walls, good structural foundations, high ceilings, and well-lit rooms. Haussmann oversaw nothing less than the most extensive urban renewal project ever attempted. The elegance and even the sense of grandeur that Haussmann brought to Paris are undeniable, but in the mid-1800s his ideas were met with virulent criticism. In creating the boulevards, huge numbers of impoverished people were swept aside, unable to afford the new rents, and nothing was done to help them relocate elsewhere or to alleviate their conditions in the neighborhoods they were forced into, such as Belleville and Vaugirard.
In his preface to Transforming Paris, Jordan writes that initially even he had no affinity for Haussmann. “Hadn’t he destroyed Paris so the army could deploy rapidly and shoot down demonstrators? My sympathies were on the other side of the barricades that Haussmann—so the cliché ran—had made obsolete.” It’s true that Napoléon III wanted a capital city that would never again allow protesters to so successfully fight against his troops as they had during the creation of his Second Empire, which was born out of a street battle that left four thousand Parisians dead. Haussmann proposed a modern and clean city, as opposed to the medieval city Paris was, with squalid living conditions, a lack of clean water, few trees, no plumbing, and narrow, dark streets. He especially admired the Marquis de Tourny, who under Louis XV had transformed Bordeaux, where Haussmann had lived for more than twelve years (if you’ve visited Bordeaux you may fondly recall the wide and beautiful Allées de Tourny). Tourny’s Bordeaux also had some striking similarities to Haussmann’s Paris, including an opera house in the center of the city, a major river, grand public buildings inherited from the past, and an old medieval core that had been successfully integrated into the new city. But, as Jordan notes, Bordeaux was not Paris: “There was no city like Paris. The concentration of money, energy, people, and institutions, the dominance of Paris over France, was unparalleled.”
You don’t have to walk far in Paris to experience a bit of the baron, and Transforming Paris (Free Press, 1995) is a wonderful companion. It’s really a book about Paris that features Haussmann more than a biography of Haussmann. Included are many maps and photographs that excellently convey the changes Haussmann made, plus a moving epilogue about Jordan’s visit to his grave in Père-Lachaise. Haussmann’s grave is not featured on the Père-Lachaise map you can buy for a few euros at the entrance, but it’s in the avenue Principale in the fourth section. “He is prominently placed for eternity,” Jordan notes, “amid the graves of distinguished contemporaries, many now as forgotten as he. Visited, without deep emotion, by very few, he is best remembered by what he did. Take a moment to look down on Paris from the cemetery. It is the best memorial.”
Launched in 2000, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline (metmuseum.org/toah) is “a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection.” It is nothing less than an extraordinary achievement: “an invaluable reference and research tool for students, educators, scholars, and anyone interested in the study of art history and related subjects.” A vast number of French works appear in the timeline, from the year 500 to the present (the timeline goes much further back), and I encourage readers to dip into it and get lost in it. The timeline—which is researched and written by the Met’s curators, conservators, and educators—allows visitors to compare and contrast six thousand works of art from around the globe at any time in human history.
I’m very fortunate to be a graduate of Hollins University (formerly Hollins College), a private women’s college in Virginia founded in 1842. Hollins has a fine liberal arts curriculum (Forbes recently included Hollins in the top one hundred of its America’s Best Colleges list) and renowned undergrad and graduate English and creative writing programs. Graduates of other alma maters may feel equally fortunate, but Hollins has one other attribute that most colleges and universities don’t: its study abroad program in Paris. Hollins Abroad Paris, founded in 1955, is one of the longest-established American programs in Paris. Its distinctive program was for many years located in the sixteenth arrondissement (rue Lauriston), then in the seventh (rue de l’Odéon), and is now a member of the Reid Hall campus, which it shares with nine other American schools, including Columbia University, Smith College, and Dartmouth College. I attended in 1979, and lived on the rue de Grenelle in the seventh arrondissement with a family of five that didn’t speak a word of English. Absolument, HAP is greatly responsible for who I am today as well as for the creation of The Collected Traveler.
“Letter from Paris,” a booklet written by the Hollins Abroad pioneers of 1955, perfectly conveys, in words I wish I’d written myself, the experience:
If you are a girl with a call for adventure, with curiosity, a widening scale of values, and a bit of courage, then you are the one who should go abroad. You may cry when you leave, count the days till you come home, and be a homesick pup, but you’ll never—we promise you, never—regret it or forget it. When you’re a sophomore in college and having the time of your life, we know it’s no easy thing to consider throwing it all aside for a year of who knows what; but we, the ones who went in ’55, are asking you to follow. Our year’s adventure has been invaluable; we have seen and lived an existence preciously given to very few; we have stumbled on obstacles only to turn them into stepping stones; we have fought and then praised, living, we think, the most profitable year of our lives. So join us; leave the boyfriend, family, and half the wardrobe home; take a big step and live a year that’s worth a lifetime.
One Hollins Abroader, Susan Gilbert Harvey, was inspired to pen a book weaving her own experience with that of her great-aunt, who lived in Paris in 1898. Tea With Sister Anna: A Paris Journal (Golden Apple, 2005) reveals the life Anna McNulty Lester led in Paris as an art student, which Harvey, also an artist, pieced together from letters she’d discovered in her great-aunt’s steamer trunk. In her preface, Harvey says she admired her great-aunt’s talent and tenacity, and enjoyed walking her streets in Paris, but she was surprised to find such passion in her great-aunt’s solitary life. It was a simple typed quotation she’d come across in one letter that encouraged her to investigate Aunt Anna’s sojourn and to examine her own life as an artist: “Let us hang our life on the line, as painters say, and look at it honestly.” On the final page of the book, Harvey writes, “When I first read these words, I pictured a clothesline art display. Now I know that ‘on the line’ means hung at eye level, the most prestigious position for a painting in the Salon.”
When I attended the fifty-year reunion of HAP, I met some other women who also lived in New York, and we had such a great time together that we now meet several times a year for a French-themed fête. As a group we are of varying ages and, with two exceptions, we all attended HAP in different years. But what doesn’t vary is our conviction that our time in Paris irrevocably changed our lives. For this edition I asked mes amies de New York
to share some of their memories and favorite things about Paris, and they were, naturellement, only too happy to comply:
There is nothing like Paris at twilight. Enough daylight remains to allow the city’s architecture to be admired in all its glory, but the exteriors now share center stage with glowing interiors. There’s a fabulous juxtaposition of centuries-old structures and illuminated contemporary life. This contrast excites the eye—and makes the heart beat a bit faster.
—Amanda Miller, Hollins Abroad Paris, 1984; vice president and publisher, John Wiley & Sons
• Spend several hours at the Musée d’Orsay (my favorite museum in all the world).
• Have dinner at Le Grand Véfour in the Palais Royal.
• Marvel at the stained-glass windows of La Sainte-Chapelle with the sun shining in.
• Sip a café crème and people-watch at Les Deux Magots, the famous expat hangout on the Left Bank; or take afternoon tea at the century-old Angelina tearoom on rue de Rivoli.
• Stroll the Tuileries Gardens west of the Louvre.
• Have pre- or after-dinner drinks in the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz.
• Have your portrait sketched by street artists in Montmartre (and explore the neighborhood of Amélie while you’re up there).
• Wander around the Île Saint-Louis and have an ice cream at Berthillon.
• For two splendid views, climb up to the top of the Arc de Triomphe and ride the escalator to the rooftop café of the Centre Pompidou.
• Have drinks at Harry’s New York Bar (5 rue Daunou, 2ème) near the Opéra.
• Both the Musée Rodin and the Musée Marmotton are very special.
• For visitors with a sweet tooth, you can’t leave Paris without going to Ladurée (16 rue Royale, 8ème) and sampling the pastel-hued macarons—they were invented here over a century ago. My favorites are pistachio, cherry-amaretto, lily of the valley, and grenadine. With its Jules Chéret décor, this branch of Ladurée is strictly an Old World experience.
• Have a meal at the Le Jules Verne restaurant on the second étage of the Eiffel Tower—it’s open for lunch and dinner, is under the direction of Alain Ducasse, and has earned one Michelin star.
• Take in the after-dinner spectacle at the Crazy Horse cabaret on avenue George-V.
—Missy Van Buren, Hollins Abroad Paris, 1975;
former client relationship manager, IPC Systems
From a kaleidoscope of memories of a college student’s year abroad comes this one: less pleasant or inspiring or soul-searching than some, but important in its lesson about living in harmony with la vie quotidienne—everyday life—in Paris.
My roommate Amanda and I had been in Paris already for several months when we happened to bump into our elderly French hostess on the street close to where we lived with her. We were stepping into a bakery to buy a baguette, and Madame followed us into the shop while we made our purchase.
Back on the street, she turned to us in fury. “Are you always so rude to the baker?” she demanded in French. Amanda and I looked at her, and at each other, in stunned silence. We had said please and thank you. We could not imagine that we had been anywhere close to rude.
Turns out, in Paris, it is de rigueur to catch the eye of the shopkeeper upon entering an establishment and to greet them with a heartfelt Bonjour, madame/monsieur! After making your polite request and payment, it is also important to conclude the visit with Merci and Au revoir, madame/monsieur!
While this might seem like a formality to Americans, it is a small ritual that echoes throughout boulangeries, newsstands, pâtisseries, and boutiques all over the city, day after day, woven into the culture of which the French are so proud and so protective.
I’ve shared this story with countless Americans who have asked about the (supposed) rudeness of the French, and I think it helps them to appreciate a timeless exchange essential to the fabric of everyday life in Paris.
—Nicole Osborn Ash, Hollins Abroad Paris, 1984; personal coach and former vice president of marketing, American Express
In the back of the stage at the Paris Opéra is a beautiful room where cocktail parties are held after some performances. While you are sipping Champagne and munching on wonderful treats the curtain is raised and you have this spectacular view of the orchestra. Each time it gives me goose bumps!
—Frances Hershkowitz, Hollins Abroad Paris, 1962; former executive with McKinsey & Company and Ballet de Paris enthusiast
A FRENCH REMEMBRANCE
Paris was the first real city in which I ever lived and is like a second home to me, even though I have only returned to visit a handful of times in the past twenty-five years (including my honeymoon!). In 1982, my roommate and I lived with a family at 115 boulevard Saint-Germain, just steps from the Odéon Métro station and a quick jog to the Palais de Luxembourg with its beautiful jardins. While our room-and-board contract did not include lunch, our family was generous, especially on the weekends, and often included us in their Sunday dinners if we were around. Because the Vietnamese maid had Sundays off, the fare was usually something simple, such as choucroute (sauerkraut) with sausages, a spinach dish with hard-boiled eggs, or a roast chicken. One Sunday during lunch I offered to make the family a meal that was typiquement Américain the following week. I couldn’t think of anything more American than meat loaf and baked potatoes. My roommate, not being much of a cook, decided she would contribute dessert—banana splits.
The following Saturday we went to the open-air market and purchased the ingredients, which was an adventure all on its own and a rather expensive endeavor for our meager student budgets. The family’s kitchen was not exactly up to date, with a gas oven and stove that required using a lighting device to get started, a very small refrigerator, and quite cramped quarters. After almost setting the apartment on fire trying to light the stove, everything took twice as long as it would have in a normal American kitchen, especially the baked potatoes (no microwave to fall back on).
When everything was finally ready the family had been waiting for a very long time and they were hungry. I will never forget the father stabbing his baked potato with his fork, holding it upright with his left hand, and peeling the skin off with his right. So much for sour cream and chives! When dessert was served, the chocolate sauce was hard as a rock and the ice cream like soup. Needless to say, they never asked us to cook for them again!
—Judy Morrill, Hollins Abroad Paris, 1982; managing director, Highmount Capital
The Hollins Reid Hall program (hollins.edu) welcomes students from all colleges and universities, so if you know someone who might be interested, encourage him or her to explore further!
The word hôtel in French not only refers to a lodging but also is a general word used for many other buildings or complexes. Some common hôtels are: a private, aristocratic mansion (hôtel particulier, like the Hôtel de Sully in the Marais); a city hall (hôtel de ville, which every French town of any size has); a hospital (sometimes called a hôtel-Dieu); a general post office (hôtel de poste); an auction house (hôtel des ventes); and, in Paris, a home for wounded war veterans (the Hôtel des Invalides, founded by Louis XIV, now also a military museum).
The French word for “forbidden” or “prohibited,” interdit can be an annoying word, especially when it is displayed on signs on the grass of many Paris parks and gardens, justifiably among the world’s most beautiful. I used to bristle at the signs, but then I decided that a feature I really like about Paris parks is that they are part of people’s daily lives, not a place for recreation only. Parisians walk through parks and gardens every day, to and from work, to take a break, to rendezvous with friends or family. We have very few urban parks and gardens in North America that are quite the same—New York’s Central Park and Boston’s Public Garden are two that are—as we tend to think of parks as places to go just to play sports or lay down a blanket for a picnic. In Paris, you can’t separate the parks from the boulevards or avenues, and I think being prohibited from walking on the grass is a small price to pay to stroll or sit in such picturesque surroundings (and the grass is often the most perfect you’ve ever seen).
Today reserved for temporary exhibitions with an emphasis on contemporary photography and video, the Jeu de Paume museum once housed the Impressionists. For many years after living in Paris as a student (when I was typically at the museum twice a week), I was able to still remember the exact placement of each painting in every room. Alas, my memory fails me a bit now, though I do remember whether a work was on the first floor or the second, on the rue de Rivoli side or the Tuileries side. It may seem pointless to mention something one can’t really experience anymore—after all, we can still see the Impressionist paintings in the Musée d’Orsay (thankfully)—but there is something very special and worth emphasizing about viewing art in a small museum.
Thinking about how compact the Jeu de Paume is reminds me of a passage from the chapter “Hunger Was Good Discipline” in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, in which he speaks of the small museum of his day:
There you could always go to the Luxembourg Museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
I was hungry often in Paris, too, but I will never forget how standing and looking in the Jeu de Paume made me feel about art, about my life, about the extraordinary place that is Paris. I mention all this to encourage visitors not to overlook Paris’s wealth of small museums—in any one of them, you may very well have your own illuminating thoughts.
France is home to the fourth-largest Jewish community in the world and the largest in Europe; after Catholicism, however, Islam is the second-largest religion in France. Though Jewish communities in France date back hundreds of years, France’s reputation as a terre d’asile (land of refuge) for political or economic exiles emerged during the Napoleonic Wars, when the “liberating” army attracted immigrants from Germany and Italy. France was also the first of all Western European countries to emancipate the Jews, in 1791, and many Russians who enriched Paris in the late 1800s and early 1900s were Jewish, as Nancy Green recounts in The Pletzl of Paris (Holmes & Meir, 1986); pletzl is Yiddish for “little place.” Green writes that “the mystique of France’s appeal was embedded in both the embodiment of ‘civilization’ and the enduring aura of the French Revolution.… For the Russified Jewish intelligentsia, ‘Russification’ also included a certain amount of French language and literature. French civilization, from its poets and philosophers to its culture and cuisine, had even penetrated the Pale [of Settlement].” (The Pale was an area of western provinces in Russia where Jews were confined to live, as decreed first by Catherine the Great and then definitively established under Nicholas I in 1835. The population within the Pale rose from 1 million at the beginning of the nineteenth century to approximately 5.5 million by the end.) Not even the Dreyfus Affair was seen as an obstacle: l’affaire was in fact outside the realm of understanding of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews since, in Russia, no Jew (except a few doctors) could attain such a rank as army captain. There was also a proverb that Yiddish oral tradition adopted as its own: lebn vi got in Frankraykh—to live like God in France—which dates to 1693, when King Maximilian reportedly said, “If it were possible that I were God and I had two sons, the first would succeed me as God and the second would be king of France.”
The pletzl in Green’s book refers to the Marais quarter, which has a Jewish history dating back to the thirteenth century, though not continuously. At that time, present-day rue Ferdinand-Duval was rue des Juifs (Street of the Jews); nearby rue des Écouffes (pawnbrokers) and rue des Rosiers (perhaps, Green notes, from ros, the teeth on a loom) were already known as centers of Ashkenazic Jewry in Paris. Wealthier Jews, mostly of Sephardic origin, lived in the fifth arrondissement. Today the Marais is home to the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme (71 rue du Temple, 3ème / mahj.org), a really great museum housed in the beautiful Hôtel de Saint-Aignon, dating from the 1600s.
According to Lucien Lazare in Rescue as Resistance (Columbia University Press, 1996), three out of four Jews present in France in 1940 survived World War II. However, not a single deported child survived. It is particularly sad to note, as Pierre Birnbaum explains in his chapter “Grégoire, Dreyfus, Drancy, and the Rue Copernic: Jews at the Heart of French History” in Realms of Memory (volume I), that in the 1980s “various administrative and political authorities refused one after another to provide sites for statues of Captain Dreyfus, Léon Blum, and Pierre Mendès France.” At the site where once stood Paris’s Vélodrome d’Hiver, built as a bicycle racetrack but now mostly known as the site where Parisian Jews were taken before they were deported, there is now only a small plaque that is somewhat hard to find (which I can attest to, though I did manage to find it and take a photo). “This place of remembrance par excellence,” notes Birnbaum, “has simply vanished. Even worse, there is apparently no surviving photograph of the July 1942 roundup to preserve a visual record of the event.”
It’s true that, as Birnbaum maintains, “physical sites of Jewish memory in France are quite rare”; still, Paris, and many other cities and towns in France, has a number of noteworthy sites of Jewish interest. In Paris there is also the Memorial to the Deported behind Notre-Dame on Île de la Cité, as well as the Mémorial de la Shoah (17 rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier, 4ème / memorialdelashoah.org). Two books to consult are The Complete Jewish Guide to France by Toni Kamins (St. Martin’s, 2001) and A Travel Guide to Jewish Europe by Ben Frank (Pelican, 2001, third edition). Both books devote large sections to Paris, and the authors note that visitors who keep kosher need not worry about where to take their next meal: there may be more kosher places to eat in Paris than in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles combined! Additionally, the French Government Tourist Office publishes “FranceGuide for the Jewish Traveler,” which can be accessed at Franceguide.com.
This partially English-named shop (campagne means “countryside”) is actually very French, founded in the South of France in 1990 by Azzedine Berkouk, who designs women’s handbags. Berkouk’s line of what I refer to as “regular” leather bags are perfectly fine and nicely crafted, but it’s the open-weave leather bags with interchangeable linings that are truly distinctive. The leather is available in only two shades, but the linings, in cotton, linen, and wool, come in a variety of colors, and the price is dependent upon which lining you choose, wool being the most expensive. All Just Campagne bags are hand finished in Toulouse and each has its own serial number. Stores in Paris are at 159 boulevard Saint-Germain, 6ème, and 14 rue des Pyramides, 1er (just campagne.com).
Everyone will tell you that it is essential to attempt to speak some French when in Paris. This is true—the French warm to anyone attempting to speak their beautiful language—yet it is also true that the natives of any country love it when visitors try to speak their language. What you might not realize is that French is still in many ways a universal language. It has been my experience that someone always speaks French, even in such seemingly unlikely countries as Egypt, Portugal, Turkey, Greece, and Croatia. Spanish may be the second language in the United States, but it won’t serve you very well outside of Latin America, Spain, and the Philippines.
With this in mind, I wasn’t surprised to learn, in Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow’s excellent and fascinating The Story of French (St. Martin’s, 2006), that though in terms of numbers of speakers French ranks only ninth in the world, French is flourishing. Of the six thousand languages now spoken on earth, French is one of only fifteen spoken by more than a hundred million people; it is one of eleven other languages that are the official language in more than one country, and among these, only four—English, French, Spanish, and Arabic—have official status in more than twenty countries (French, with thirty-three countries, ranks second to English, with forty-five). Two G8 countries, France and Canada, are French-speaking, as are four European Union members: France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. And French, along with English, is one of the two primary languages of the UN. Nadeau and Barlow also inform us that French “is the number two second-language choice of students across the planet, attracting learners as far away as Lesotho and Azerbaijan.” And finally: “There have never been as many French speakers in the world as there are today: The number has tripled since the Second World War.”
Nadeau and Barlow share their surprise at discovering, on a trip to Tel Aviv, that the first language they heard when they stepped out of their hotel was French. They were surprised because most Israelis speak Hebrew and English, and they figured it would be difficult for a third language to emerge among them. But what they learned was that 10 percent of Israelis speak French, including the large Moroccan population there, and that there are French-speaking communities in many more places than Tel Aviv. This solidified an impression that grew as they worked on their book: “that French is more resilient than people generally believe” and that “it has an enduring hold on the world, a level of influence that in many ways surpasses—and is even independent of—France’s.”
The French macaron is distinct from other similarly named sweets, notably the American macaroon, coconut blobs sometimes dipped in chocolate. I once loved American macaroons, but some years ago I decided they were too sweet and, after trying French macarons, too limiting in flavor. French macarons are made with a large quantity of egg whites and are therefore very light, and they are a sandwich cookie—unlike a giant blob—with a flavored filling. Many people rave about the macarons at Ladurée, the pâtisserie credited with having invented them, but I think the macarons are substantially better at La Maison du Chocolat, Pierre Hermé, and Gérard Mulot—and, of late, at my own home.
Before I was in possession of I Love Macarons by Hisako Ogita (Chronicle, 2009), the recipe I used was from an old issue of Gourmet attributed to Mireille Guiliano, author of French Women Don’t Get Fat. The recipe is a good one, but required the assistance of my daughter to hold down the parchment paper on the pan so I could pipe the batter out of my pastry bag. Ogita explains so much more about the making of macarons—what can go wrong with the batter, how to make them with Italian meringue, how to add flavor to the batter, etc.—that I can’t imagine I’ll ever look back. It really helps that there are photographs, and I was happy to learn I can use my Silpat baking mat instead of rolled parchment paper! Plus Ogita is thoughtful enough to provide six recipes at the end of the book to use up all the egg yolks you’ll have left over from making the macarons.
Boutique Maille, at 6 place de la Madeleine in the eighth arrondissement (maille.com), is the Burgundy mustard company’s official representative in Paris, and it’s a good culinary stop to add to your itinerary. Founded in 1747, Maille is now owned by the mega-conglomerate Unilever, a far cry from the day in 1769 when Antoine Maille was named official vinaigrier-distillateur for the royal court of France. The reason to come here is not for the ordinary jars of mustard and condiments, which can reliably be found throughout North America, but for the freshly pumped mustards on the central counter, which come in attractive stoneware containers in three sizes. Three different mustards are offered daily, all of which are more potent than the Maille mustards imported in the States. The staff pumps your mustard choices into the jars and seals them with lids made of coated paper and cork. (Don’t worry: these will make it through your flight home just fine if placed upright in your carry-on luggage.) You can also purchase small wooden mustard spoons and some nice gift arrangements with mustards in painted faïence jars.
Fans of Rimbaud will recognize the pun on his poem “Le Bateau Ivre” (The Drunken Boat) embedded in the name of this charming and hugely appealing shop, La Maison Ivre, founded by Sylvine Nobécourt in 1991 (38 rue Jacob, 6ème/maison-ivre.com). As Sylvine, who has a great sense of humor, tells it, she studied French literature at university and loved it, but didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do with it upon graduation. She’s not even sure she can pinpoint the day she came up with the idea for a store, but she does know that since the “great adventure began, I became entirely devoted to the store. In fact it is La Maison Ivre that has chosen me.” She likes the association between literature and her shop, devoted to “a symphony of colors to brighten your home,” and indeed the shop is filled with irresistible items. Here you’ll find torchons (tea towels) in more than fifty patterns, aprons, coasters and trivets (including some with the store’s logo), poterie artisanale—the store is a veritable showcase for handcrafted ceramics from several regions of France—and one-of-a-kind items like lavender wands. Sylvine’s wands are made by a woman in Provence who is one of the few people making them at all these days, and they are prettier and larger than others I’ve seen. I’ve loved these wands since I bought my first one thirteen years ago in the Provençal town of Vaison-la-Romaine—I remember it well because I was pregnant with my daughter at the time—and I intend to continue depleting Sylvine’s stock. Sylvine’s English is very good, and she loves nothing better than telling the stories behind all the items in her shop.
Founded in the 1990s in Paris, Metal Pointu’s (“edgy metal”) is a jewelry line created by designer and artist Bernard Bouhnik. I first learned of it when my good friend Lorraine gave me a Metal Pointu’s bracelet for my birthday, and I absolutely flipped over it. With a number of boutiques in Paris (all the locations are on the Web site, metal-pointus.com), it’s easy enough to stop into one and see if the bijoux line is your thing. Bouhnik works in tin, silver, and bronze, and some pieces also include colored beads and crystals; his works are bold and decidedly not overly feminine. Bouhnik’s sister and partner, Sylvie Buchler, has described the collection—which includes neck pieces, earrings, bracelets, cuffs, and rings—as “definitely for a woman who is not shy,” and she explains Bouhnik is inspired by “architecture, urbanism, and engineering.” Some of Bouhnik’s pieces are in museum collections, including the jewelry collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. I am also drawn to the packaging: each piece comes in its own fabric sac with the Metal Pointu’s logo stitched onto it, which is slipped into a black deckle-edged box tied at the top with a white ribbon.
I wore the bracelet Lorraine gave me almost every day for three years, until the day the elastic finally gave out. I was crushed, but I figured I would bring it with me on my next trip to Paris and see if it could be repaired. I was so happy to discover soon after that Metal Pointu’s has opened a boutique in New York! I made a beeline to the shop (252 Elizabeth Street/646 454 1539), and Sylvie, who is overseeing the Soho outpost, had the bracelet restrung. I’m wearing it almost every day again.
“Because it is so easy to understand,” Franz Kafka wrote, “the Métro is a frail and hopeful stranger’s best chance to think that he has quickly and correctly, at the first attempt, penetrated the essence of Paris.” Mastering the Métro, which turned one hundred years old in 2000, does give one a sense of truly belonging to Paris. While it may be over a century old, Paris’s system is elegant and (strike days aside) very efficient, and it is in a state of constant renewal. In addition to new tramways ringing the city, the newest line, 14, is one example: the Météor (MÉTro Est-Ouest Rapide), which debuted in 1998, runs from the Gare Saint-Lazare in the eighth to Olympiades in the thirteenth and is completely computer operated. It makes the trip rapidement and tranquillement, and there are no doors between cars, so you can see from car to car, end to end. There are a number of Métro ticket options available to visitors, so be sure to consider them all before you purchase one.
If, like me, you are fond of the original cast-iron Art Nouveau Métropolitain entrances—when I am feeling homesick for Paris, I’m so glad I can walk just a few blocks to MoMA in New York to see the Hector Guimard entrance in the museum’s sculpture garden—and want to learn a little more about this famous subway system, you’ll love these two books: Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations, and Design of the Métro by Mark Ovenden (Penguin, 2009) and Métro Stop Paris: An Underground History of the City of Light by Gregor Dallas (Walker, 2008). Paris Underground is like a love letter to the Métro, with positively everything you’d want to know about the Métro’s graphic history at your fingertips: black-and-white photographs of the original stations, maps, illustrations, reproductions of posters, the creation of the RER lines and the Météor, signage and logos, and a directory of designers. This is the kind of book you can dip into and out of at random, each time discovering some interesting bit of Métro trivia.
Métro Stop Paris is one of my absolute favorite books about Paris, a history of the city via the Métro. Dallas informs us that the underground train service came to Paris in 1900, after London (in the 1860s) and New York (whose elevated rapid transit service dates from 1870). But the idea of a railway system linking the city’s quartiers dates back to 1845, when it was proposed to link the Gare de Lyon to the Gare du Nord. The Universal Exposition of 1900 was the event that propelled the creation of underground trains driven by “electric traction.” Though today there are some fifteen subway lines and almost three hundred stations in Paris’s Métro system (not counting the RER commuter rail), Dallas focuses on just five lines and twelve stations to take readers to certain key spots “where we will observe a building, a street, a statue, a tombstone or some other landmark that will spark off a story that tells us a lot about the character of the city.” Dallas advises, “As you emerge from each Métro stop, look up those alleys, stare into those old shops, pass your hands over the stones in front of you” so that “you will discover what Parisians call … the ‘genius’ of their civilization.”
This phrase translates as “Métro, work, sleep” and refers to the daily routine—le train-train—of urban dwellers in France. In recent years it has morphed into Vélo, boulot, dodo, the vélo referring to a bike, especially with the addition of Paris’s public bicycle share program, Vélib.
The Musée Carnavalet (23 rue de Sévigné, 3ème) is the museum I recommend to visitors above all others, and I also suggest that it be the first museum you visit, as it is the museum of the history of Paris. The museum today consists of two homes, the Hôtel Carnavalet and the Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, which were joined in 1989. The Carnavalet is one of the most beautiful houses in the Marais and is a rare example of a Renaissance mansion still standing in Paris. It was originally built for Jacques des Ligneris, a president of the Paris parliament in the 1500s, but is better known as the home of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné, who lived there from 1677 to her death in 1696. The Peletier de Saint-Fargeau mansion was built in 1688 for Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, state counselor and financial administrator.
Among the many remarkable items in the museum’s permanent collection are medieval shop signs; a model of Paris showing the bridges over the Seine, which in medieval times had houses and buildings on them; furniture from the family of Jacqueline Bouvier; paintings, drawings, and ephemera relating to the French Revolution and the July Monarchy; photographs by Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson; the ballroom of the Hôtel de Wendel, painted by José-Maria Sert and dating from 1924; the room, with original furniture, where Marcel Proust wrote In Search of Lost Time; and paintings by Paul Signac, Albert Marquet, and Maurice Utrillo. The garden of the Hôtel Carnavalet is also beautiful. I recommend buying a general guide to the museum in the bookstore before you begin your visit, as interpretive text in English is limited.
The Musée Marmottan (2 rue Louis Boilly, 16ème / marmottan.com) has long been among my favorite Paris museums. The building itself was once a hunting lodge for Christophe Edmond Kellerman, the duke of Valmy, who sold it a few years later to Jules Marmottan, a nineteenth-century industrialist. Upon Marmottan’s death, he bequeathed the home to his son Paul, who initially devoted himself to collecting artworks of the Napoleonic era. When Paul died, he bequeathed the home to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and the museum opened its doors in 1934. In addition to a superb collection of illuminations donated by Daniel Wildenstein (son of noted gallery owner Georges), and another exceptional donation of Berthe Morisot works by Denis and Annie Rouart (Denis was the grandson of Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet), the Marmottan owns the largest collection of Claude Monet’s work in the world. Among its many Monets is Impression, Sunrise, first exhibited in Paris in 1874 and considered the work that gave the name to Impressionism—a critic referred to the painting as “impressionistic” and soon after works by Degas, Pissarro, and Renoir were similarly described. This along with eight other Impressionist paintings were stolen from the Marmottan in 1987—a theft then valued at nearly twenty million dollars—but in December 1990 they were recovered in Corsica and returned. In addition to Monet canvases, the Marmottan also has one of Monet’s palettes.
Since I first began visiting as a student, the museum has been enlarged and now also hosts temporary exhibits. Though it is receiving visitors in greater numbers, I still don’t often see many North Americans here, and I urge readers to make time for this museum gem.
Some readers may already subscribe to Nota Bene, a quarterly publication founded in 2001 dedicated to independently, impartially, and exactingly reviewing the world’s finest destinations. It’s aptly named, as the reviews are brutally, ruthlessly honest, and founder and chairman Anthony Lassman is keenly aware that many hotels, for example, command extremely high sums for service that seldom matches the price. Nota Bene offers three services: the Review (ten guides published per year, focusing on hotels, food, nightlife, and travel tips), Pulse (devoted to shopping, fashion, lifestyle, and well-being), and Bespoke (tailored travel management service for members). Plus it offers a full-service Web site (notabenetravel.com). When the Nota Bene folks rave about something, you can be assured it will not disappoint. But their expertise comes at a price: upward of several hundreds of British pounds per year. Register for white, black, or platinum membership online.
The rue Oberkampf, in the eleventh arrondissement, has been hip for about a dozen years or so, and I very much enjoy walking along it and the streets nearby, stopping for some inexpensive international cuisine and poking into refreshingly different shops. I suspect many people don’t know, however, that the street is named after Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf, a German-born textile entrepreneur honored as a royal manufacturer by Louis XVI. Oberkampf created the fabric known as toile de Jouy, cotton or linen decorated with scenic French patterns and printed in one color on a light ground. His designs were originally printed from woodblocks, though by 1770 copperplates were used; and he set up shop in Jouy-en-Josas, near Versailles on the river Bièvre. Fans of toile de Jouy may want to visit the museum there (54 rue Charles de Gaulle, Jouy-en-Josas / museedelatoiledejouy.fr).
There are a number of notable flower shops in Paris, but Olivier Pitou (14 rue des Saints-Pères, 7ème) is my new favorite. Fleuriste Pitou is a narrow shop absolutely jammed with magnificent flowers, potted plants, garden specialty items, and statuary—it’s more like a mini jungle than a shop. Pitou also has a terrific épicerie directly across the street, at no. 23, with prepared foods, olive oils and vinegars, wines, cheese, pâté, and bread; if you’ve forgotten a tire-bouchon (corkscrew), they’ll kindly open the bottles for you.
I’m a nut for fine papers and journals, and my favorite paper haunt in Paris is Papier Plus (9 rue du Pont-Louis-Philippe, 4ème / papierplus.com), which has been around since 1976. It stocks notebooks, binders, stationery, photo albums, boxes, and portfolios by French craftsmen. The notebooks come in a range of sizes and formats, and every year they’re offered in a range of new colors. I especially like the photo albums, which feature a cut out circular window on the cover, perfect for your best photo of the City of Light.
I just love Pariscope (pariscope.fr), the weekly publication detailing everything happening in the city and appearing every Wednesday. Its small size—about five by seven inches—is compact enough that you can carry it around in just about any size handbag or satchel. Even though it’s in French, you can easily read the listings, and it’s great for double-checking current opening and closing times of museums, sites, and shows you want to see. (I usually try and pick one up at the airport before I even arrive in the city.) Pariscope’s competitor is L’Officiel des spectacles (offi.fr), which is also useful, but it’s not as branché (trendy) as Pariscope.
The reason for my first visit to the Père-Lachaise cemetery was no different from that of many other American college students: to see Jim Morrison’s grave. I owned only one album by the Doors (The Soft Parade), so I didn’t even consider myself a proper fan, but it seemed like the thing to do—and anyway, the wine that was offered to me by a group gathered there was better than the plonk I bought at Félix Potin. Only later did I learn that so many other famous people were interred here, and that, taken together, they represented a broad cross section of French personalities. But Père-Lachaise, one of the world’s largest cemeteries, is even more than that, as Alistair Horne notes in Seven Ages of Paris: “It contains probably more of France’s past than any other forty-four hectares of her soil.… In it resides a whole history of Paris, indeed of France herself, in marble and stone.” Catharine Reynolds, writing in Gourmet, observed that the cemetery “evokes civilisation française—for citizen and foreigner alike.” Whenever I recommend Père-Lachaise to visitors, they always thank me, reporting that it was the surprise of their trip, and some say it was their favorite site in all of Paris.
In addition to the many famous names of the deceased—you’ll find them all (except for Baron Haussmann; see this page) on the map you can buy at the entrance—within Père-Lachaise are a few other spots of note. The Mur des Fédérés is a wall in the eastern corner where 147 Communards were lined up and shot during La Commune. The monuments honoring the victims of Nazi persecution are the most moving memorials I’ve ever seen, anywhere (my friend Sarah and I came across one that was simply footprints leading into a large, dark stone structure, and we were reduced to tears). There’s also the tombstone of Victor Noir. I first saw a photo of Noir’s unusual grave in John Berger’s Keeping a Rendezvous, and I was so intrigued I had to go and take a look at it myself. The story goes that in 1879 Prince Pierre Bonaparte, cousin to Napoléon III, wrote an article in a reactionary Corsican journal that criticized La Revanche, a radical Paris newspaper. The editor of La Revanche sent Noir and another journalist to Corsica to seek an apology, but Prince Bonaparte shot Noir instead. The grave portrays Noir, just twenty-two, dead on the ground moments after he was shot. (As an aside, the groin area of the bronze work is a little enlarged, and has received an abundance of indecent rubbing by female visitors.)
In recommending Père-Lachaise (boulevard de Ménilmontant and avenue Gambetta, 20ème / pere-lachaise.com) so highly, I do not mean to slight Paris’s two other famous cemeteries, Montmartre (avenue Rachel, 18ème) and Montparnasse (boulevard Edgar-Quinet, 14ème), each worthy of a detour as well. Among those buried at Montmartre are Degas, Jacques Offenbach, Vaslav Nijinsky, François Truffaut, and Stendhal, and within the grounds of Montparnasse are Brancusi, Baudelaire, Brassaï, Jean Seberg, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Readers who want to discover more will be happy to have a copy of Permanent Parisians: An Illustrated, Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of Paris by Judi Culbertson and Tom Randall (Walker, 1996). This is a fascinating read, even if you don’t have any desire to walk among tombstones; in addition to the three big cemeteries it also includes Les Invalides, the Panthéon, Saint-Denis, and others.
The point zéro milestone set in the parvis of Notre-Dame is the point from which all distances in France are measured. Legend has it that if you stand on the point zéro plaque, your return to Paris is assured. I’ve never wanted to take any chances about that, so I try to make sure at least one of my feet touches the plaque on every visit.
Remember that in France the rez-de-chaussée refers to the floor at street level, while the first floor—premier étage—is the equivalent of our second floor.
Paris is likely the most romantic city in the world. And you don’t have to be in love, have a partner, or feel a certain way about a certain someone to know this indisputable fact. A walk along the Seine at night, when all of Paris’s bridges and monuments are lit, a stroll across the Pont des Arts, a respite on a bench in the Tuileries, dinner at the Jules Verne, or merely a glance at Robert Doisneau’s famous photograph Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville is proof enough that Paris is synonymous with l’amour.
If you’d like to plan an especially romantic trip to Paris, with or without a companion, a book you must have is Romantic Paris by Thirza Vallois (Interlink, 2003). Vallois, also the author of the indispensable Around and About Paris series (see this page), here outlines a love history of Paris in addition to providing great tips for a three-day romantic itinerary, restaurants and salons de thé, stores for the heart and senses, cozy museums, sentimental walks, and recommended nightspots. Most importantly, Vallois reminds us that “we come to Paris as to a stage on which to enact an episode of our love life, but before we know it we are caught under the spell and find out, to our astonishment, that it is Paris herself that has gotten under our skin, the one love that has no rival and that even time will never erode. It was when I realized that Paris was my one source of inspiration, the object, in turn, of both my celebration and desecration, that I understood that Paris herself is a tale of passion, full of turmoil and fury and dazzling charm, the very essence of romance.”
One very wonderful romantic site not featured in Vallois’s book is the Mur des Je T’aime (Wall of I Love Yous). The wall was created by Frédéric Baron, who first collected the phrase “I love you” a thousand times in more than three hundred languages in three large notebooks. Baron and Claire Kito, an artist who practices Oriental calligraphy, collaborated on the idea of a wall, and another artist, Daniel Boulogne, specializing in murals, helped to bring it to completion. The wall, ten meters wide, is composed of 612 tiles of enameled lava whose shapes are meant to symbolize the sheets of paper in Baron’s notebooks. The splashes of color on the wall are “the pieces of a broken heart, those of a humanity which is too often torn apart and which the wall attempts to reunite.” The mur is really very cool and very touching, and it’s free. Just take the Métro to Abbesses, and the wall is right there in the Square Jehan-Rictus on Place des Abbesses (if that sounds confusing, it’s not—you can’t miss it).
For the record, some other spots I think are particularly romantic in Paris include the Place de Furstenberg, the little recessed seats on the Pont Neuf, the wall in the little park at the tip of Île Saint-Louis, and the Square du Vert-Galant.
In Love in France
It’s hard for me to believe that anyone, a romantic or not, would not fall head over heels for In Love in France: A Traveler’s Guide to the Most Romantic Destinations in the Land of Amour by Rhonda Carrier (Universe, 2010). I love this book, which is, naturellement, mostly devoted to Paris—“Paris loves lovers,” as Cole Porter knew and Carrier quotes on the opening page. Carrier knows France intimately, as she has lived in and traveled around the country since she was a teenager. Other chapters cover the Loire Valley, Champagne, Normandy and Brittany, and southern France; there are also chapters on “Love and Food” (“Food, like love, can change your life,” she says) and on getting married in France. I consider this book essential, as it is jammed with coups de coeur—her passions, places she fell instantly in love with—even as Carrier wisely notes, “Paris is also oversubscribed, and thus I’ve tried to point you in the direction of some of its lesser-known treasures.”
The word ruche means “beehive” in French, and in Paris the word refers to the famous honeycomb-shaped structure housing studios for such artists as Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Ossip Zadkine, Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall, Moïse Kisling, Chaïm Soutine, and Amedeo Modigliani. Academic sculptor Alfred Boucher created La Ruche just after the 1900 World’s Fair. He bought a plot of land in the fifteenth arrondissement from the owner of a bistro, Le Dantzig, that was then sandwiched between the Vaugirard slaughterhouse and an area of slums called la zone. Boucher had a vision, however; he planted trees and flowers and bought Gustave Eiffel’s octagonal wine pavilion that was left over from the World’s Fair. (This was, according to Thirza Vallois, common practice at the time; other artist quarters in Paris are still made up of such pavilions.) Boucher planned to rent each octagonal side of the pavilion as a studio—yet he was also a philanthropist, known to overlook the unpaid rents of his extremely poor tenants. La Ruche provided a roof over the heads of struggling artists, but it was only marginally better than the hovels in Montparnasse, where the “better off” artists lived.
La Ruche almost met its end in the late sixties, when the heirs of Boucher intended to sell it to the French housing authority. President Pompidou stepped in to save it from destruction, with a chorus of supporters including André Malraux and even parties in the United States. Today there are only twenty-three honeycombs in the pavilion, as opposed to the original eighty, and while visitors are permitted only in the surrounding garden (unless you happen to know one of the painters or sculptors who live inside), it is nevertheless a site worth visiting, to spend a few moments reflecting upon the artistic fervor and spontaneity that existed within. Vallois’s Around and About Paris (volume III) provides the best summary of La Ruche.
This street, and neighboring rue du Chevaleret and rue Duchefdelaville, in the thirteenth arrondissement, form a new art gallery center in Paris. Every month or so, the galleries here host an open house, which is a great and fun way to see what’s happening in the contemporary avant-garde art scene. All the galleries are located at numbers five to eleven and twenty to thirty-four on rue Louise-Weiss, and are open Tuesday to Saturday from eleven to seven (Métro: Chevaleret).
Rungis, located seven kilometers outside of Paris near the Orly airport, succeeded Les Halles as Paris’s wholesale food market starting in 1969. Rungis (the final s is pronounced, by the way) is the world’s largest wholesale food market, an ultramodern, extremely hygienic facility, about as opposite from Les Halles as possible, and it is extremely interesting to visit. Visite Rungis (visiterungis.com) organizes visits, mostly for groups, but individuals may visit during a specified day each month. A better alternative, I feel, is to arrange a private visit with Canadian expat Stephanie Curtis (stecurtis@free.fr), who gives tours for two to twenty people, 120 euros per person, including breakfast, round-trip transportation, and visits to about seven pavilions. I arranged a visit with Stephanie for a group of my friends and we all agreed it was a really special experience. Curtis arranges to pick you up from your hotel between four and five in the morning so that you arrive at Rungis when the most activity is occurring. After a stop at a café, you set out for the pavilions—we saw those devoted to seafood, poultry, meat, cheese, and produce. (Tip: Some of the pavilions are necessarily kept quite cold, so even if it’s hot outside, bring a sweater or jacket.) Approximately five or six hours later most of the vendors are finished for the day. Though you’re technically not permitted to purchase anything at Rungis, Curtis will take you to one store on the premises where you can buy some items; the selection is limited to packaged provisions, but I bought fleur de sel, chocolate, and dried mushrooms at prices far below what I would have paid in the States.
The Alexandre III bridge over the Seine isn’t the only symbol of a very old friendship between Russia and France, but it’s the most visible. The bridge was named after Czar Alexander III and was built in time for the Universal Exposition in 1900, and for many years it was my favorite Seine bridge. French was the second language spoken by the nobility in Russia, and in the late 1800s and early 1900s Paris was filled with Russian émigrés. Nina Berberova’s The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels (Knopf, 1991) is a work of six short novels all set in Paris and peopled with Russian émigrés. Berberova, who passed away in 1993, wrote these stories of a “wistful, shabby-genteel society that a generation of Russians created in Parisian exile” which were first published in Europe in the 1930s. I think The Tattered Cloak deserves to be better known, and it includes one of the most memorable passages I’ve ever read about the city: “Paris, Paris. There is something silken and elegant about that word, something carefree, something made for a dance, something brilliant and festive like Champagne. Everything there is beautiful, gay, and a little drunk, and festooned with lace. A petticoat rustles at every step; there’s a ringing in your ears and a flashing in your eyes at the mention of that name. I’m going to Paris. We’ve come to Paris.”
When I lived in Paris as a student, I decided that my favorite park in the city was the one next to Église Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, in the Latin Quarter. This was not because the park was particularly pretty—it isn’t—or because the oldest tree in Paris, a false acacia, has reportedly grown there since 1601 (it was planted by Jean Robin, thus the name of the tree is le robinier). Rather, I chose this little park—more properly known as Square René-Viviani—because I was sure it was the one Joni Mitchell sang about in her song “California” on the album Blue (“Sittin’ in a park in Paris, France …”). The reason I was so sure was because I went to every jardin and park in Paris and I sat in each one until I determined she could not possibly have been referring to any other park. (I really did this, by carefully perusing my plan de Paris, and I can honestly report that I dutifully visited nearly every park in the city. I have not been referred to as compulsive for nothing!) I have no verification that this little park is the one Mitchell sings about, but I’m still certain of it, and though I’ve since come to prefer other parks in Paris, I’ll always be fond of this one. The Église Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, which was built on the foundations of a sixth-century church, is among the oldest in Paris and serves the Melchite (Arab and Near Eastern) sect of the Greek Orthodox Church. Don’t miss visiting the interior, which is dimly lit, very atmospheric, and features gorgeous icons (and it smells really old).
The French—like the Italians, Greeks, and Spaniards, among others—are very attuned to scent, as am I. Each scent I encounter—of a room, a food, a person, a locale—becomes a memory-smell and forever associated with a place. Sometimes the scent is obvious, like the time I drove through Boise, Idaho, at approximately four in the morning in the summer with all the car windows open and I got a huge whiff of potatoes (what else?). Other times, the scent is surprising, like the time I was fortunate enough to have lunch at the former Bouley restaurant in New York. Upon entering, diners were greeted by a small wheelbarrow filled with apples—and though the meal itself was amazing, it is the smell of those fall apples ripening in the foyer that has stayed with me all these years. Every time I open one of my kitchen cabinets and smell the whole cardamom pods I have in a container, my memory-smell is of the Indian sweet shops I frequented in Mombasa and on the island of Lamu in Kenya; when I come across herbs growing wild, my first thought is of Corsica—one of my favorite places on earth—and its maquis, a unique combination of numerous herbs including juniper, myrtle, lavender, and mint (it’s so distinctive that Napoléon allegedly said he would recognize it if he were out at sea with his eyes blindfolded).
Marcel Proust and the madeleine aside, the French make a commendable effort to ensure that their homes, shops, and workplaces smell pleasing. Scent is one of the easiest ways to bring an element of “Frenchness” into your home and, simultaneously, create a sense of well-being. Barbara Milo Ohrbach, in her wonderful and bestselling book The Scented Room, notes that she has made it a habit to buy flowers from a market or corner kiosk when she travels so she can make her hotel room feel and smell more like home (a habit I endorse!). Pico Iyer writes in Condé Nast Traveler (“Scents of Place,” May 2010) that when he opens the cabinet above his bathroom sink, “all the perfumes of Araby—and Bangkok and Addis Ababa and Paris—come flooding out.… Ever since I began staying in the kind of hotel that offers high-end toiletries more than a quarter of a century ago, I’ve been unable to contain myself.” Gretchen Rubin, in her wonderful book The Happiness Project (HarperCollins, 2009), noticed one day that “though I sometimes mocked the scented-candle-pushing brand of happiness, I discovered that there is something nice about working in an office with a candle burning.” I, too, can testify to the effect something as simple as a candle can have on my mood, my happiness, and my level of motivation. Additionally, potpourri, lavender sachets, bowls of quince, dried rose petals, room fragrance sprays and diffusers, and ceramic lamp rings are all great mood pickups. (For particularly alluring room fragrances, check out Florence, Italy–based Antica Farmacista, anticafarmacista.com.)
Some of these can be made at home, and two good resources include The Scented Home: Natural Recipes in the French Tradition by Laura Fronty (Universe, 2002) and The Scented Room by Barbara Milo Ohrbach (Clarkson Potter, 1990). Some scents, of course, simply can’t be replicated back home, like that of Gauloises or Gitanes cigarettes, the smell of very old churches like Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and some Métro stations, which is good: some scents don’t travel, so attached are they to a certain place.
I became even more fascinated by the way things smell after I read The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession by Chandler Burr (Random House, 2002). I felt like a whole new world had opened up for me, one that isn’t always sweet: the competition between the world’s largest scent companies is fierce and cutthroat. Burr informs us that “virtually all the smells in all scented products in the world are manufactured by [five] huge companies that operate in carefully guarded anonymity.” These big boys—with power now even more concentrated, after several mergers since the publication of Burr’s book—are International Flavors & Fragrances (United States), Givaudan Roure (Switzerland), Firmenich (Switzerland), Symrise (Germany), and Takasago (Japan). The story-within-a-story in this book is that of Luca Turin, a renowned biophysicist who wrote Parfums: Le Guide, a bestseller in France, and The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell (Ecco, 2006). Turin is something of a scientific maverick, having proposed a new theory of smell to unravel the mystery of scent. Turin told Burr that he got into the scent world because it was part of his upbringing and heritage: “Because I’m French, at least by upbringing. Frenchmen will do things Anglo men won’t, and France is a country of smells.” Some of the scientific equations and explanations here are admittedly over my head, but I still love this inside look at a world where science, marketing, art, and nature come together.
Le Labo
One of the more creative olfactory items I’ve ever seen is the Santal 26 perfumed notepad produced by Le Labo, a really cool company that I only recently discovered. Founded in 2006 by Édouard Roschi (Swiss) and Fabrice Penot (French), Le Labo—short for laboratoire (laboratory)—aims to “enable people to access the art of perfume in a setting inspired by a perfumer’s lab.” Both Roschi and Penot worked previously on the fragrance team of Armani (licensed by L’Oréal) and their scents are developed in Grasse, on the Côte d’Azur. (Home, by the way, to the excellent International Perfume Museum, museesdegrasse.com, as well as another under the auspices of Fragonard, fragonard.com.) Roschi and Penot’s mission is to “create ten exceptional fragrances, with no eye on costs and one goal: to create a sensory ‘shock’ as soon as you open the bottle.” I think they have done this brilliantly.
There are Le Labo boutiques and counters around the world (lelabofragrances.com), but only two in North AmericA: New York City (233 Elizabeth Street / 212 219 2230) and Los Angeles (8385 West Third Street / 323 782 0411). Not only are their scents exceptional, but the Santal 26 notepad—with its leather cover and brown kraft paper—is, too. The notebook is referred to as a carnet de boucher, or “butcher’s notebook,” which must refer to the brown kraft paper sometimes used to wrap purchases at a butcher shop. Other than the name, there is nothing remotely butcherlike about this wonderful creation! It’s handcrafted in France by the also terrific La Compagnie du Kraft (lacompagniedukraft.fr) and is scented with Le Labo’s cult interior scent, Santal 26, characterized by a smoky, leathery essence. It comes with an elastic band, and it is just one of my absolute favorite objets on the planet. “Use it and abuse it,” note the founders, “as it’s made to outlast you. And it probably will.”
When I visited the New York boutique, I decided to sample a few scents to see if I could find one more perfume to add to my (very small) stable of scents—they’re not easy for me to find, as perfume tends to be very fleeting on my skin. I tried four and loved them all, but six hours later the scent of only one still remained: Rose 31. So, yes, Rose 31 is now next to the other two bottles of perfume I own, and I’m extremely happy this scent is a part of my life. Each Labo scent is freshly bottled at the time of purchase and the label is personalized with the customer’s name. Each boutique has a unique city-exclusive scent: for Paris it’s Vanille 44, for New York it’s Tubéreuse 40, and for Los Angeles it’s Musc 25. Each perfume has an accompanying body lotion, and Le Labo’s line of candles and home fragrances are composed of completely different scents.
In Paris since 1887, Sennelier (magasinsennelier.com) is a renowned art supply shop founded by chemist Gustave Sennelier. He opened Maison (now Magasin) Sennelier on the Quai Voltaire, just across the Seine from the Louvre and not far from the École des Beaux-Arts, and happily Sennelier is still a family affair. According to the company, Sennelier’s work “was so meticulous and his eye for color so accurate that the artists soon began to consider his palette as the ultimate standard of quality.” Sennelier began packaging some paints in metal tubes, which enabled the painters of the day—notably the Impressionists—to paint outdoors; Cézanne, Pissarro, Bonnard, and Picasso are said to have been frequent clients.
Today the shop—known also as Couleurs du Quai—doesn’t look much different, inside or out, from its original appearance. The small glass door and creaking wooden floor seem perfect for an art supply shop, and there are papers, large rounds of colorful pastels, pencils, paints, watercolors, brushes, and drawing pads stuffed everywhere—this is not a pristine space, but rather a gold mine for anyone who is artistically inclined. Even for nonartistic types like myself there are quite a few things of interest: I found some great pads of paper in varying sizes and textures that I use for note-taking and journals, as well as a beautiful refillable leather case that snaps closed and holds a pad of paper inside. There are very handy Couleurs du Quai journals, in several sizes and with an elastic band, with standard brown kraft paper and covers featuring a photograph of the store dating from the early twentieth century.
But the best find here are the 24-carat gold-plated accroches-tableau de décoration (picture hooks). These old-fashioned hooks with decorative symbols on the top—such as the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Napoléon, an artist’s palette, and so on—hold the picture up at the top (not from wire strung from the middle of the backing) with the decorative symbol showing above the frame. I just love these, and at a reasonable price of about thirty euros they’re a unique and lightweight souvenir. The original shop is at 3 quai Voltaire in the seventh arrondissement, and there are two other locations: Magasin Sennelier Frères (4 bis rue de la Grande-Chaumière, 6ème) and L’Atelier des Couleurs du Quai (6 rue Hallé, 14ème).
The rue de Verneuil, in the seventh, is home to the Serge Gainsbourg wall, at no. 5 bis. Born Lucien Ginsburg in 1928, singer-songwriter Gainsbourg was a French legend who recorded a great number of albums from the 1950s through the 1980s (a good place to start if you’re unfamiliar with his music is the 2006 compilation The Originals). He was also a sensation who made headlines often due to his relationships with Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birken and his sometimes public displays of drunkenness. The “Serge Gainsbourg Wall,” which is covered with graffiti and has been visited since his death in 1991, is the exterior of his former home, now owned by his daughter Charlotte. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2007, Charlotte revealed that one day about seven years prior she’d discovered that all the graffiti had been covered up with “disgusting yellow” paint. She presumed it had been done by the police, but learned that the neighbors thought the wall was offensive and had organized a paint cover-up one night—“But the great thing was a week later, it was all covered with graffiti again.” Now she is hoping to turn the house into a museum with the help of architect Jean Nouvel. True Gainsbourg fans may also want to visit the newly dedicated Jardin Serge-Gainsbourg, on the northeast edge of the city at Porte des Lilas—where, unlike in the Tuileries, the chairs are permanently affixed to the cement! If the location seems odd, keep in mind that an early hit of Gainsbourg’s was “Le Poinçonneur des Lilas” (The Ticket Puncher at Lilas Station)—the Porte des Lilas Métro station is very nearby.
It is next to impossible to find anyone who knows more about shopping—for souvenirs or, well, anything—than Suzy Gershman, author of the bestselling and terrific Born to Shop series (Frommer’s) and the memoir C’est la Vie. Gershman’s shopping guides—which I read cover to cover—are packed with store suggestions for every type of shopper and pocketbook, and include tips that can save you bundles of money. After a number of years in France, with an apartment in Paris and a house in Provence, Gershman moved back to the States, and now lives in Southern California, where she is near her kids. I reached her by phone a few days after she moved back.
Q: When was the first Born to Shop guide published, and how did the idea for the series come about?
A: It all began with a lunch in 1984, just before the start of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. A lot of people felt then that the Games would be a nightmare for L.A.—huge amounts of traffic, etc.,—and at this lunch I learned that all these women had rented their houses out and were leaving town until the Olympics were over. They were going to Venice, Treviso, the South of France, and so on, and everyone was excitedly sharing all their shopping tips for these various destinations. Not highfalutin tips, but everything from cut rate to couture, Monoprix, factory stores—real people shopping as opposed to designer shopping—and the idea was born to put all these tips together in one book. My husband came up with the title and the original concept was for a really big book, but Stephen Birnbaum’s guides were really popular then and statistics showed that travelers would buy a more specialized book rather than one large one. Bantam, my original publisher, decided to break up the big book we created and spin it off into smaller editions. Four different editions came out in 1986—London, France, Italy, and Hong Kong—and it grew from there. It was destination-based and very timely, and it was the tight revision schedule that made the books last. (And as it turned out, the L.A. Olympics were hugely successful and there was hardly any traffic, but we couldn’t have predicted that.)
Q: When did you first show an interest in retail shopping?
A: It all started when I was eleven years old. My father was a chairman of the World Health Organization, and in those days he worked for a division called the Pan American Health Organization. We lived in Caracas, Venezuela, for a year. We went to the markets a lot, and my dad often gave me the equivalent of fifty cents and said, “Here, Sue. See what you can buy with this.” I loved the theater and excitement of shopping.
Q: What are some organization tips you employ when researching a Born to Shop guide?
A: I was a correspondent for Time and People, and have basically been a reporter for most of my life. I’ve learned that the more organized you are, the more you get done that you wanted to in the first place. I have basic charts I create for each destination—these show the streets of my neighborhood’s hotels and transportation. I have developed a theory that tourists want to see specific sites and they want to know about shopping that is nearby those sites. I’m not a nighttime person, so I order room service and I turn on CNN and I sit in bed with my maps and my notes and I work the charts. I will send you to an out-of-the-way place only if I think it’s worth it. I really believe that people use guidebooks to eliminate things as opposed to following everything, and that’s really valuable information. I’m like an Indian scout who’s riding up at the head of the wagon train to tell you what’s ahead.
Also, I stay in the same few hotels every time because I know my way around most quickly—if I stayed in different hotels, I’d have to learn new neighborhoods constantly. I usually have three to five in each city. I need to know where my grocery store is, where I can get a rotisserie chicken, etc. I really lead a far less glamorous life than people might think. I choose hotels by nearby transportation, extra amenities, and whether there is a club floor or a lounge with food I can call dinner. I just don’t really use concierges. The first thing I do when I arrive in town is go to a kiosk and buy every local magazine on the stand, and then I spend that down time in bed, turn on local television, and start turning the pages. I don’t need to be able to read everything comprehensively, but this gets me in tune with the community.
Q: What are some hotels you particularly like in Paris?
A: The hotel I really like to recommend is the three-star Hôtel de L’Élysée (12 rue des Saussaies, 8ème / +33 01 42 65 29 25), across the street from the Élysée Palace. The location—half a block off the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, midway between the Champs-Élysées and rue Royale—is superb, and it’s a bit over a hundred euros per night. Some of the rooms are better than others—you have to be able to say, “I don’t like this room; I want this one instead.” Recently I stayed in a hotel that knocked my socks off: the InterContinental Avenue Marceau near the Arc de Triomphe (64 avenue Marceau, 8ème / +33 01 44 43 36 36 / ic-marceau.com), with twenty-eight rooms designed by Philippe Starck protégé Bruno Borrione. I have never been a contemporary-art person, having long preferred an old grande dame hotel, but this was so intime (intimate) and interesting, the décor a mix of Kenzo and wild and wacky and very creative without being offensive. Also you could get Wi-Fi access everywhere—often the old hotels don’t have the IT that you expect.
Q: What are some Paris souvenirs you recommend?
A: Well, it’s important to define what a souvenir is, because for each person it’s different. To me a souvenir works if it fits into your real life back home—it’s not necessarily a blinking Eiffel Tower. To me, something real life is the best souvenir: a kitchen towel, baby bibs with writing in French … I’m not so big on traditional touristy souvenirs.
Monoprix is probably my favorite store, and visitors should know that not all Monoprix supermarkets are created equal—you may have to go to more than one to find what you want. (Some have wonderful grocery stores—I have bought salt, sugar, lavender sugar, and and great gifts there.) I usually tell people to avoid the big department stores because I find them overwhelming, but I was just in Galeries Lafayette and it was terrific! Upscale grocery stores are great, including Lafayette Gourmet and the Grande Épicerie at Bon Marché, which is just so great. The arcades of the Palais Royal are a great place to find more unique things. I’ve also just found two new stores that are fab: Uniqlo (17 rue Scribe, 9ème / uniqlo.com), a Japanese version of Gap; and Igloo (111 avenue Victor-Hugo, 16ème), which at first glance seems kind of a tourist trap, a little like Pier 1 with weird stuff, but it is very cool, like a little department store—they have everything.
Q: Why did you decide to leave France?
A: It was hard to think about leaving France at first, especially Vaison-la-Romaine, where I was part of a little community, but everybody had left except for me and Patricia and Walter Wells. It just suddenly felt right. At my age I should be downsizing. My kids are in Paso Robles, which is just this amazing community. It’s truly in the middle of nowhere and exists because it’s halfway between L.A. and San Francisco. It was once the heart of the salad bowl but is now grapevines—about 80 percent are only five years old. There are a few people who’ve been there for thirty years making wine, but not many, and tastings are free or around five bucks. Some bottles of wine are fifty dollars, but the average is ten to twenty dollars. It’s thriving here! The French will tell you that one of the most important things in life is sitting down and sharing a meal and talking, and this happening in Paso.
Q: Is there any place you’ve not yet been that you’re dying to visit?
A: There are a million places that I’m dying to visit. Born to Shop books are chosen by numbers of visitors to various destinations, so I’ve never been to Cape Town, for example. There are a couple cities in Vietnam I’d like to go to, and I’d like to get back to Bangkok. I always want to go someplace else.
In addition to Gershman’s Born to Shop books, I also like to consult a few others that I’ve found very helpful over the years:
Chic Shopping Paris, Rebecca Perry Magniant with photographs by Alison Harris (Little Bookroom, 2008). Magniant founded the Chic Shopping Paris company (chicshoppingparis.com), a service offering personal tours of Paris’s bonnes adresses by bilingual guides. I have yet to work my way through every boutique in this book, but I’m almost there, and I can report that each shop I’ve visited is unique and interesting, even those I left empty-handed (which didn’t happen very often). Most of the shops Magniant recommends offer goods and services available only in Paris, and she regularly updates these listings and posts her new finds on her Web site.
The Flea Markets of France, Sandy Price with photographs by Emily Laxer (Little Bookroom, 2009). Though this terrific book covers a number of regions in France, one chapter is devoted to Paris and includes the marchés aux puces at Porte de Clignancourt, Porte de Montreuil, Porte de Vanves, and Place d’Aligre. As Price notes, the objects for sale at these markets “provide a glimpse of everyday life in decades past, and also suggest how that heritage continues to resonate today.” She includes much practical information for the flea market experience (when to go, how to get there, how to communicate, how to bargain, market schedules), as well as good suggestions for other things to do and other markets close by. I think this is indispensable for flea market aficionados.
Markets of Paris, Dixon Long and Ruthanne Long with photographs by Alison Harris (Little Bookroom, 2006). The authors, who also wrote Markets of Provence (William Morrow, 1996), “have a love affair with markets,” and so might you after flipping through this book. As the Longs note, the attraction of markets is that, “above all, it’s the opportunity to observe a social experience that is quintessentially French and independent of class.” They include markets with food, antiques, artisanal crafts, and books, many of which I’m eager to explore—plus restaurant recommendations. The two-page primer “When in Paris, Do as the Parisians” is very helpful, as are the suggested daily itineraries.
Paris Chic & Trendy: Designers’ Studios, Hip Boutiques, Vintage Shops, Adrienne Ribes-Tiphaine with photographs by Sandrine Alouf (Little Bookroom, 2006). As the title suggests, this guide focuses exclusively on fashion, and includes jewelry, lingerie, shoes, and handbags. The fifty-four recommended shops “together make Paris what it has never ceased to be: the all-time moving and shaking capital of fashion.”
Paris: Made by Hand, Pia Jane Bijkerk (Little Bookroom, 2009). Stylist Bijkerk adores all things fait main (handmade), and she presents an enticing selection of papermakers, shoemakers, jewelry designers, milliners, umbrella makers, dressmakers, ceramicists, and more. She also explains the interesting concept of fait main: it’s not only about creating something by hand, but also includes the act of restyling, restoring, or reinterpreting a found object. “In French,” Bijkerk notes, “the act of finding vintage objects has its own verb: chiner. And chineurs are the talented individuals who chinent. Many of the chineurs I have included in this book have the ability to see a found object in a whole new light, and they can’t wait to get back to the studio and get their hands dirty.” Packed with memorable ateliers and boutiques, the book also includes a list of her dozen favorite fait main stops.
The Paris Shopping Companion: A Personal Guide to Shopping in Paris for Every Pocketbook, Susan Swire Winkler with Caroline Lesieur (Cumberland House, 2006, fourth edition). Winkler has “pursued the enigma that is French style” for some time: she imports French linens for her own shop in Portland, Oregon, she lived in Paris as a graduate student in French literature, and she was a Paris-based fashion journalist for Women’s Wear Daily. Coauthor Lesieur is a native Parisian and a personal VIP guide, so between the two of these specialists, readers are in good hands. They inform us that the first tourist guidebooks to include information on French luxury goods and boutiques appeared in the seventeenth century. “Even then, during the time of Louis XIV, the shops were put together as nowhere else, positively seducing their customers. Little has changed and the world still flocks to Paris to be seduced by the charm, elegance, and glamour of its offerings.”
Winkler’s shopping favorites represent a very personal selection, and in fact she covers a limited range of neighborhoods, but what she does cover is thorough. I particularly like that she not only chooses her favorites and points out good values, but also has “made a special effort to highlight wise purchases in even the most expensive shops. These often make the most distinctive gifts because they come so beautifully wrapped and packaged.” Practical information—sizing charts, tax refunds, shipping, customs, a “shop talk” glossary—is included, as are some places to stay and a chapter called “Paris on a Budget.” They leave us with this parting thought: “In a culture where style of life is a source of national pride and pleasure, shopping as the French do is an invaluable approach to understanding French culture.”
The Riches of Paris: A Shopping and Touring Guide, Maribeth Clemente (St. Martin’s, 2007). Amid other similar titles, Clemente’s book stands out and is very much worth perusing. For seven years Clemente operated the Chic Promenade shopping service in Paris, and she lived there for a total of eleven years; she is also the author of The Riches of France: A Shopping and Touring Guide to the French Provinces (St. Martin’s, 1997). In this book, Clemente reminds readers of Paris’s long history of commerce, with its first trading outposts set up along its bridges, “where people could bargain for their essential goods as they plodded along the route from northern Europe to the Mediterranean. The actual shops during the mid-seventeenth century were merely storerooms for the goods lined up outdoors; store windows didn’t begin to appear until the end of the seventeenth century.… But somehow I imagine that the Parisians found their own alluring way of displaying their wares …” (I completely agree.) Clemente admits, “In Paris I relish the idea of entering a boutique that is quaint, enticingly decorated, and, most of all, has a soul all its own.” But don’t let this preference lead you to think this book will lend you to the passé or the démodé—there are plenty of contemporary, appealing, dynamic establishments here. As Clemente says, having a soul of its own is the most important quality of a retail shop. Organized by specialty rather than neighborhood, Clemente also includes dozens of “Riches of Paris Tips” and great sidebars with topics such as “Ten Ways to Find the French Look for You.”
Shopping Tips
Here are some good retail vocabulary words to know, especially if you’re in Paris during the national sales in January or August: soldes (sales); dégriffés (clothing where the labels have been cut out; more generally, “marked down”); moitié prix (half price); coin des affaires (the bargain section of a large store); deuxième choix (seconds); and tout doit disparaître (everything must go!). Je regarde (I’m just looking) is a useful response when someone asks you, “Vous désirez?” (May I help you?).
You might want to adopt my motto of “When in doubt, buy it now.” I learned years ago that the likelihood of being able to retrace my steps to a particular merchant when it was open was slim. A number of individual shops are closed on both Sunday and Monday, or open only on Monday afternoon, and many are still closed for two hours at lunchtime.
In short, remember that stores in Paris are not open twenty-four/seven, so if you spy a baguette in the window of a boulangerie or an article of clothing that has your name all over it, allez (go) and get it, for Pierre’s sake. One has regrets only for the roads not taken—or in this case the objet not purchased!
Spas and salons have become wildly popular, even de rigueur, in many hotels and inns, and in a city like Paris, where well-being and beauty are taken seriously, spas are plentiful. Some are quite lavish, as you might expect, but even those that are not are still something special. Only recently have I begun to appreciate how wonderful and truly beneficial spas are, especially during travels, and though it is easy enough to obtain the names and addresses of spas and salons in Paris, it isn’t so easy to compare them or know what to expect when you show up. Thank god there is now Pampered in Paris: A Guide to the Best Spas, Salons and Beauty Boutiques by Kim Horton Levesque and with photos by Kristyn Moore (Little Bookroom, 2010). If you are even remotely interested in spending some time at a spa or salon while in Paris, you positively need this book.
I had the great pleasure of meeting Levesque in New York when the Spa Vinothérapie Caudalie, in the Plaza Hotel, hosted a fête to celebrate her new guide (the Paris Caudalie spa is one Levesque recommends). We are very much kindred spirits; she told me, “I think I’m like you in that I am obsessive about pre-trip research. I always have several guidebooks and a folder of photocopies with me when I travel.” Levesque first visited France as a high school exchange student, and she returned to France every summer throughout college and worked variously as an au pair, farmhand, and cook at an auberge in Normandy (“I was cooking mainly for British travelers who wanted to get off the beaten path and experience authentic France—they didn’t know there was an American in the kitchen!”). She attended the Sorbonne as an undergraduate and taught French in an International Baccalaureate high school program in Phoenix. Her husband’s family is originally French-Canadian, “so it was a pleasant surprise,” she said, “that my father-in-law’s first language was French and that I was able to communicate with my husband’s entire extended family in their native tongue.” In addition to her French background, she’d been doing writing and translating for companies in the beauty industry; plus some of her favorite skin-care products are French, and she’s long had an interest in well-being. All of this made her a natural for authoring a spa book. Levesque thought many of the books about beauty in France created caricatures of French women, and she set about to improve upon that: “I wanted to offer more of a holistic and practical guide to Parisian beauty.” She was fortunate, while researching her book, to rent an apartment next to the Luxembourg Gardens, as she had her two daughters with her and was pregnant with her third. It was exhausting, she said, “but my parents came along to help with the girls and they spent part of almost every single day in the Luxembourg. I think it is one of the most beautiful gifts I can give them, the experience of travel.”
There are useful chapters in Pampered in Paris on basics such as French words and phrases and etiquette, which is essential, as Levesque can tell you: “I had a spa experience a few years ago that would have been much more relaxing if someone had told me what to expect. I was not anticipating a male masseur or a chest massage on my first Parisian spa day, but that’s what I got!” Levesque introduces readers to more than fifty spas in the first through ninth arrondissements, plus the twelfth and sixteenth, as well as four in the suburbs. They are quite varied—some offer traditional French treatments while others specialize in Thai, Chinese, or Indian therapies—and range in price from budget to very expensive. (Also included is the rare Nickel Spa for Men, which opened the first men’s salon in a department store in Paris at the Printemps on boulevard Haussmann and operates another outpost in the rue des Francs-Bourgeois in the third.) Levesque discusses thermalisme (thermal cures), hammams (Turkish baths), and thalassotherapy (treatments from the sea). She recommends manicure and pedicure salons as well as makeup boutiques, chains, and perfumeries. She explains that the French regard weekly salon visits for manicures and pedicures as “peculiarly American”; only a few salons are dedicated to nail care, but almost every spa offers a full menu of nail treatments.
My favorite chapter, “Beauty Secrets Revealed,” extolls the virtues of French pharmacies, which I adore. Pharmacies are identified by a light green neon sign; every neighborhood has a handful, so you are never very far from one (they also take turns staying open on weekends and holidays). Not only can you fill prescriptions here, but you can also find some items available over the counter that in the United States are available only by prescription. Levesque shares a list of must-have pharmacie items, including Avène and Nuxe products, which “have a mass popular and critical following.” Perhaps best of all is her recommendation of Be Relax, a kind of mini spa at both Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports. Walk-ins are expected, and a number of services are offered, including deep massage, massage designed to help travelers relax before a long flight, and foot massage. Though I understand why these services are popular before a flight, I actually think they would be better after a flight—how much better I would feel if I arrived at my hotel after a thirty-minute foot massage!
Levesque, who has dry and very sensitive skin, chooses Nuxe Crème Fraîche de Beauté Suractivée as her favorite moisturizer. “Also, as my French friends told me and I confirmed with research, Bioderma Créaline H20 Sans Parfum is many a French woman’s well-kept secret—it’s a gentle cleanser, and Bioderma Atoderm is a wonderful body lotion that doesn’t irritate my or my girls’ skin.” When I asked her which Paris spas or salons she would choose if she were forced to name only a few of her absolute favorites, she replied, “Well, I change my mind on any given day of the week, but this week my favorites are Wassana and Anne Fontaine for massage; Anne Sémonin Spa at the Bristol Hotel for facial, and the Détaille and Artisan Nature boutiques for perfume.”
I like walking through the Luxembourg Gardens and coming upon the Statue of Liberty there. The first time I saw it, it came as a complete surprise. Likewise, when I saw the other one, on the Île des Cygnes, a man-made island in the Seine at the Pont de Grenelle, I couldn’t believe it (and I think I got a little teary eyed). I was reading Gertrude Stein’s Paris France and I completely latched onto her remark that “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” It’s a beautiful and almost startling moment to see a Statue of Liberty in Paris.
The D stands for débrouillard—resourceful—or for the verb form, débrouiller—to untangle. Think of le système D as “winging it” or “getting by,” but it can also mean “beating the system.” Ross Steele, in his book When in France, Do as the French Do, explains that it is a French “national pastime to find a way around a government regulation or administrative decision,” and he notes that the expression says a lot about the French temperament. From the French point of view, “the chaos of a French line is a logical consequence of a mass of individuals untangling the knotty problem of getting to the head of the line.” Anyone who has witnessed the French inability to stand neatly in line knows that this is true. Le système D is present in nearly all aspects of French life, and one of the highest compliments in France is Il/Elle sait se débrouiller (He/She knows how to get things done). As Steele notes, this is “always sincere and expresses admiration for a person’s resourcefulness.”
The name of this original shop in the Marais, Le Thé des Écrivains (16 rue des Minimes, 3ème / thedesecrivains.com), translates loosely as Tea of Writers. Founder Georges-Emmanuel Morali has created an incredibly appealing concept that weds tea with writers and readers. There are, for example, canisters of teas blended to evoke Russian, Japanese, American, French, and English writers, alongside a terrific assortment of handmade journals, photo albums, and notebooks. I have a great memory of the first time I stepped into this shop: it was an uncharacteristically overcast, chilly day in late September, and I was offered a complimentary cup of tea brewing in a samovar at the back of the store. I soon discovered one of my favorite souvenirs on earth: a carnet de voyage composed of three notebooks and one accordion folder housed in a handmade paper case held together with an elastic band and a brown bead. I’ve bought about a dozen carnets since then, filling up three and giving the others as gifts. The handmade notebooks come in a great range of bright, cheerful colors, and the store’s Collection Vacances features luggage and gift tags. If you love reading, writing, tea, or all three, you will not want to leave this shop.
I’ve never been the kind of person to record daily personal entries in a journal, but I’ve known many people who find that “Dear Diary” approach meaningful and positively addictive. When I’m traveling, however, I want to record as many details as possible—where and what I ate, what the weather was like, how much money I spent, how a site, monument, or event made me feel. Recently, I’ve also borrowed a habit from my good friend Arlene, who likes to record a quote of the day in her journals. This can simply be a funny or memorable remark, uttered by a traveling companion or, really, anyone encountered on a trip. Sometimes more than one quote is worthy of inclusion on a given day, and these are great fun to read after a trip is over.
My journal is indispensable to me not only while I’m traveling but before I depart—I typically fill up at least half a journal with notes and clippings that I glue onto the pages. The journal then becomes my main resource on a trip, eliminating the need for lots of other books—otherwise I bring only one or two guidebooks, plus a novel or two and a work of nonfiction. By the time my trip has ended, my journal is a complete record—a true souvenir—of everything I experienced, bulging with even more handwritten notes, paper ephemera, pressed flowers, wine labels, postcards, you name it. Yet it’s also much more than a souvenir: compiling the journal before I depart and while I’m away is among the most treasured experiences of my life.
Over the years I’ve purchased a great number of journals, a few of which have had features I’ve liked and many of which have not. So a few years ago, I created one of my own: En Route: A Journal and Touring Companion for Inspired Travelers (Potter Style, 2007), which includes general travel tips and recommendations, wonderful travel quotations, lined pages for your own notes, sketching pages, address and emergency information pages, and a clear sleeve at the back that zips closed. Additionally, I asked several noted travelers to share the titles of books that inspired them to hit the road, and the replies—from Colman Andrews, Melissa Biggs Bradley, Dana Cowin, Ina Garten, Frances Mayes, Peter Mayle, Barbara Ohrbach, Fred Plotkin, and Ruth Reichl—are sprinkled throughout.
Kids like journals, too, and without doubt the best one I’ve seen is The Children’s Travel Journal by Ann Banks and with illustrations by Adrienne Hartman (Little Bookroom, 2004), which is spiral-bound and has lined and blank pages and a pocket in the back. There are sections for the destination, first impressions, food and restaurants, landmarks and monuments, museums and galleries, people, best and worst days, and “I’ll never forget …” This is just so creative and so much fun, a real opportunity for younger globe-trotters to create a masterpiece of memories. My daughter already has two of these, each stuffed to the gills with her drawings, notes, photos, dozens of entry tickets, postcards, maps, stamps, and even some restaurant menus (it’s remarkable how waiters will let you keep one when a child is asking).
Translated loosely as “one day, one bag” (sac refers to a handbag), the concept of the store Un Jour Un Sac by François Rénier is one that I love: it’s mixing and matching handbags with different handles that clip on and off—or “it’s all the bags you can imagine,” to borrow from the Web site. The possibilities are practically endless, and it’s like having a bag custom made just for you. There are six stores in Paris (unjourunsac.com) and each bag is made entirely in northern France.
La Vaissellerie (lavaissellerie.fr) is a chain of five stores—“les petites boutiques chic de Paris”—with inexpensive tabletop wares and kitchen items you didn’t know you needed. I have bought a number of useful and attractive items here over the years, and it’s a good shop to know about for gifts. My favorite find is a cylindrical plastic container meant to store Camembert cheese in: there’s an upright piece of plastic on the bottom half that acts as a knife, so when you put a round of unwrapped cheese inside, the “knife” actually cuts it, and each time you lift up the round and move it, the cheese is sliced in a new place. You can find sets of white porcelain platters and plates at great prices, plus linen towels, silverware, ceramics, place mats, glassware, utensils, and more. When you make a purchase, you automatically receive a carte de fidélité that entitles you to future discounts.
Le WC (vay-say, or double vay-say), is how you refer to a restroom in a public place in France (as opposed to a bathroom in a private home, which is often composed of two rooms, the toilettes and the salle de bain). Some visitors may be surprised to find that many bathrooms in older bars, cafés, and restaurants are chronically short of toilet paper (it’s never a bad idea to start out each day with some tissues in your pocket), and many are still even à la turque, meaning squat toilets. I have read (and I believe) that these are actually physiologically healthier than our fashion of sitting on a toilet seat; however, anyone who has trouble squatting and standing up again—to say nothing of those who find the prospect repellent—may not enjoy navigating one of these. It can also be confusing to figure out how to flush the toilet. Typically, there is a chain or a lever marked tirez (pull), and when you do water can produce quite a wave, sometimes coming up over the basin and your feet—so you should prepare to flush as you simultaneously open the door of the stall and step out. If these seem like unnecessary details, I share a comment from author Bill Gillham in Parisians’ Paris: “All I can say is that a bad experience in a Parisian lavatory can spoil your day; or at least put you off your meal.” Gillham also reminds visitors that, “if you are not to experience a minor trauma,” if you find yourself in complete darkness when you close the door to some bathroom stalls, don’t panic: the light will come on when you slide the bar to lock the door.
Lovers of the fruit of the vine will find wine sold mostly everywhere: in supermarkets like Monoprix and small neighborhood grocers, at the wine retailer Nicolas—the oldest wine chain in France, founded in 1822, with more than four hundred stores in France and some other European countries—and at renowned and beautiful shops. Here are some of my favorites:
Lavinia (3 boulevard de la Madeleine, 1er / lavinia.fr). This three-floor shop, Paris’s largest wine store, carries many very affordable wines in stock as well as rare bottles.
Legrand Filles et Fils (1 rue de la Banque, 2ème / caves-legrand.com). In the beautiful Galerie Vivienne, Legrand is one of the oldest grocers and wine merchants in France. On one side of the galerie is a shop selling glasses, books, and other wine paraphernalia, while on the other side is the actual wine store, with more than four thousand wines and a great espace-dégustation for tastings.
Les Caves Augé (116 boulevard Haussmann, 8ème / cavesauge.com). Founded in 1850, Augé has a reputation for carrying the very best wines, but there are lots of bottles for twenty euros and under.
Clos Montmartre (9 bis rue Norvins, 18ème / commanderie-montmartre.com). Paris’s own vineyard, fifteen hundred square meters planted with Gamay and Pinot Noir grapes. The land was set to be exploited by property investors for a housing development but was saved by artist François Poulbot in 1929. The first vines were planted in 1933, and every October since then a five-day Fête des Vendanges has been held, with proceeds from all the wine sold going to children’s charities. Clos Montmartre’s location seems appropriate, as Romans built a temple here on this hill dedicated to Bacchus.
The stone Zouave soldier on the Pont de l’Alma, built in 1856 to commemorate Napoléon III’s victory in the Crimea, is one of my favorite symbols of Paris. The Zouaoua were a fiercely independent tribe living in the hills of Algeria and Morocco; in the summer of 1830 some Zouaoua lent their services to the French colonial army, and later that year were organized into two battalions of auxiliaries. Over the next decade the Zouaves, as the French called them, proved their valor in dozens of bloody desert encounters. Even as Zouave units began to be increasingly composed of native Frenchmen, their distinctive uniform remained a derivation of traditional North African dress: a short collarless jacket, a sleeveless vest, flowing trousers, a long woolen sash, white canvas leggings, and a tasseled fez and turban. By 1852, the Zouave units were made up entirely of native Frenchmen, and Louis Napoléon restructured them into three regiments of the regular French army. Algerians and Moroccans alike were assigned to units of the Tirailleurs Algériens, or Turcos, and wore their own distinctive light blue version of the Zouave uniform. According to the Web site Zouave.org, U.S. Army captain George B. McClellan, observing the Zouaves in 1855, praised them as “the finest light infantry that Europe can produce,” and soon after American militia units began to adopt the baggy trousers, braid-trimmed jacket, and tasseled fez of the Zouaves.
The Crimean War of 1854–55 confirmed the reputation of the Zouaves, and after the battle of Alma, Marshal de Saint-Arnaud noted, “Les Zouaves sont les premiers soldats du monde”—The Zouaves are the best soldiers in the world. It was at the battle of Sebastopol, however, that the Zouaves won immortal renown. They went on to play major parts in the battles of Magenta, Solferino, and Mexico, and in the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. But the Great War saw some Zouave battalions lose as many as eight hundred men in a single charge, and as camouflage, not color, became standard dress, their uniform passed into the pages of history by 1915.
Vincent van Gogh painted five works of Zouaves; with the exception of one in a private collection, all are on view in public museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim in New York and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The Pont de l’Alma originally had four statues of Zouaves built into its span, but now this one soldier stands alone, and he is Paris’s official flood gauge. During the worst overflowing of the Seine, in 1910, the river waters reached his beard.
Paris, to be Paris, must be the place where the great moral dilemmas of mankind are identified and where the experiments in the life of thought—if not of action—take place at the highest register. Paris should be infuriating, as it must have been to millions when, for example, Édouard Manet painted a naked woman lunching on the grass.… Above all, for Paris to be Paris, it has to be free. The question thus is not: Are there too many Arabs in Belleville, too many Chinese in the thirteenth arrondissement, too many neighborhoods that have lost their character? The question is: Will the fear that there are no longer any Parisians lead the inhabitants of the great village on the Seine no longer to fashion a place that matters to all humanity?
—Richard Bernstein, Fragile Glory
