As Terrance Gelenter notes on his Web site Paris Through Expatriate Eyes (paris-expat.com), “If Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships, then Paris is the city that launched tens of thousands of books.” Believe it or not, this list was edited—there are some (very good) titles I decided to save for my blog—but it simply isn’t possible for me to shorten this list of recommendations any further.
Living in Paris, José Alvarez with photography by Christian Sarramon and Nicolas Bruant (Flammarion, 2006). Originally published in French as L’Art de vivre à Paris, this is one of those rare coffee-table books that is filled with great photos and substantive text. It’s one of my very favorite books, and the eighteen-page visitor’s guide at the back of the book is excellent.
Paris, Julian Green (Marion Boyars, 2000). A wonderful, brilliant little book printed in both French (on the left-hand pages) and English (on the right-hand pages). Green (his first name is usually spelled Julien) was born in Paris in 1900 and died there in 1998, and he left only during World War II. He thus knew the city more intimately and far longer than many others. This is his very personal love poem to Paris, which begins with an inviting opening line: “I have often dreamed of writing a book about Paris that would be like one of those lazy, aimless strolls on which you find none of the things you are looking for but many that you were not looking for.” Having the French text side by side with the English presents a unique language-learning opportunity. Twenty-four of Green’s own black-and-white photos are included.
Paris: The Biography of a City, Colin Jones (Viking, 2005). In his introduction, Jones notes that one Piganiol de la Force, author of an early visitor’s guide in 1765, stated that “one would be very wrong if, seeing the vast number of books devoted to the history of Paris … one imagined that there was nothing more to be said.” The vast number of books about Paris is indeed staggering, but Jones sets out to encompass the city’s history in a single volume anyway, what he refers to as an “impossible” history of Paris. He’s done quite an admirable job—though, at nearly five hundred pages, this is not for the casual reader—and he hopes that, for all its omissions, the book “will contain enough of interest to manage a Michelin Guide recommendation: vaut le détour.” I think it is a worthy detour indeed.
Paris Inside Out: The Insider’s Handbook to Life in Paris, David Applefield (Globe Pequot, 2005). Applefield arrived in Paris in 1978 “at the Gare du Nord in the somber grayness of a typical Parisian October,” and he’s still there. This is a guide geared mostly for those who plan to live in Paris, but I find it very useful even for visitors who simply want to know Paris on a deeper level. “The Author’s Credo for Survival in Paris” is of value to both short- and long-term visitors, as are a great number of other topics.
Paris en poche (in your pocket)
An entertaining and ridiculously fun book to bring along is Paris Quiz: How Well Do You Know Paris? by Dominique Lesbros (Little Bookroom, 2009). With four hundred “provocative, curious, and humorous questions” about Paris arranged from the first through twentieth arrondissements, this little paperback (it fits in a pocket or small handbag) is not only interesting but perfect for those times when you might be waiting for a train or a subway, or just have some time to kill. I find the questions incredibly addictive, and even those who think they know a lot about Paris may be surprised.
Paris: Buildings and Monuments, Michel Poisson (Harry N. Abrams, 1998). This (heavy) hardcover is not one to bring along, but is very much worth reading before you go. Architect Poisson guides readers on a personal tour of 535 buildings and monuments in every arrondissement. There are no photographs but rather line drawings and hand-drawn maps that can be useful for arranging one’s own walking tour. Poisson has included a number of buildings that don’t appear in most other books and he has provided an illustrated index of Paris architects.
Paris Web sites
Some sites about Paris that I regularly browse include:
Bonjour Paris (bonjourparis.com), run by American expat Karen Fawcett. Regular subscribers receive a complimentary weekly missive, but only with a paid premium subscription do users have access to all the articles on the site (see more details in the Miscellany).
Paris Through Expatriate Eyes (paris-expat.com), created by “Anglophonic, Francophonic Francophiliac” Terrance Gelenter. The site not only includes a great list of recommended reading, but also includes information on Gelenter’s travel-planning service and airport transfers, insider tours, restaurant reservations, etc. And he offers several apartment rentals that look terrific. As author Pete Hamill has said, “If you believe that Paris is the most beautiful city in the world … if you want to better understand the mysteries of the Parisian character, then Paris Through Expatriate Eyes is the place to be.” Subscribers receive a biweekly newsletter, The Paris Insider, and for twenty euros you can be a prestige member and receive a number of benefits. Gelenter is also the author of Paris par Hasard: From Bagels to Brioche, which I’ve not yet read but am looking forward to. He also organizes swell gatherings in Paris—one of these days I will make it to one of them.
Secrets of Paris (secretsofparis.com), maintained by Heather Stimmler-Hall, who has written for a number of periodicals and travel guides (Fodor’s, Michelin, Time Out, etc.). She is also the author of a nifty guide called Naughty Paris: A Lady’s Guide to the Sexy City (Fleur de Lire, 2008). Hall has been writing a Secrets of Paris newsletter since 2001, and she covers a wide variety of topics for first-time and repeat visitors. She is also available as a tour guide for half- and full-day tours, and plans customized itineraries and self-guided tours.
Paris: History, Architecture, Art, Lifestyle, in Detail, edited by Gilles Plazy (Flammarion, 2003). “The ambition of this book is to prepare you for Paris, to remind you of the city when you reluctantly return home, or to console you if a journey to the City of Light proves an impossible dream.” That passage, from the foreword, accurately describes this very large, heavy (about eight pounds!), and gorgeous book. I positively love it, mostly because it’s so big that I feel it goes on forever. Each time I open it I discover there is so much I haven’t seen previously. This book is heavy enough to be a coffee table, but it is a very worthy (coffee-table) book indeed, and I do believe it is worth the price (list price about $95) for those who are insanely passionate about Paris. With contributions by eight writers and hundreds of color and black-and-white photographs and reproductions, this is a true tour de force.
Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik (Random House, 2000). I have my own story about when this wonderful book of Gopnik’s “Paris Journal” columns from the New Yorker was still a manuscript: I was working on the first edition of this book and I had earmarked two of Gopnik’s columns for inclusion. These were “The Rules of the Sport”—a hilarious account of the time Gopnik tried to join a Parisian gym—and “Papon’s Paper Trail,” about the 1998 trial of Maurice Papon, who was charged with complicity in crimes against humanity during the German occupation of France in World War II. (The trial was, according to Gopnik, “the longest, the most discouraging, the most moving, at times the most ridiculous, and certainly the most fraught trial in postwar French history”—all reasons why I wanted to include the piece.) Through a permissions representative, I learned that Gopnik had in fact included both of these pieces in his manuscript, and he felt that since our books would be appearing at approximately the same time, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to include them. I was disappointed, but also reassured that I had chosen well!
Paris Traditions (Watson-Guptill, 1999). This lavishly illustrated hardcover features contributions by eight writers on architecture, art, fashion, festivals, food and drink, music, sports, and stage and film. The photographs and illustrations are really wonderful and I find this book to be great for whetting one’s appetite for Paris. A four-page directory of addresses appears at the back of the book.
Paris: Wish You Were Here!, edited by Christopher Measom (Welcome Books, 2008). This chunky, hugely appealing book is organized by arrondissement, and sandwiched in between sections are excerpts from works by Mark Twain, Anita Loos, Ernest Hemingway, Ben Franklin, David Sedaris, Ludwig Bemelmans, and more; song lyrics; notes on les Américains à Paris (Charles Lindbergh, Josephine Baker, Mary Cassatt, etc.); recommendations for historic monuments, places to eat, and cultural offerings; and wonderful illustrations, reproductions, and photographs in black and white and color. Measom’s own first trip to Paris was when he was a student in Spain, where it was so hot and dry that by November he had running water only a few hours day. When he got to Paris, it was overcast, cool, and there was plenty of running water, and he’s been smitten with the city ever since. This is a great book to give as a gift if you could ever part with it.
Quiet Corners of Paris, Jean-Christophe Napias with photographs by Christophe Lefébure (Little Bookroom, 2007). This wonderful little gem of a book will ensure you see many of the lesser-known corners of Paris, including parks, gardens, squares, villas, cul-de-sacs, places, rues, backstreets, passages, art galleries, hills, buttes, cloisters, courtyards, churches, cemeteries, museums, international cultural centers, and libraries. Plus there’s one hôtel, the Hôtel des Grandes Écoles (75 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, 5ème), which is also one that I recommend. The author informs us that this book’s job is “to lead questers to the city’s magical islands—famous or unknown—where their thirst for silent escapes can be slaked.” It positively succeeds. Just a few coins (corners) this book led me to are the Jardin Saint-Gilles-Grand-Veneur (3ème), Butte-aux-Cailles (13ème), Square d’Orléans (9ème), and Square Récamier (7ème).
Remembrance of Things Paris: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet, edited and with an introduction by Ruth Reichl (Modern Library, 2004). For those readers who are clippers (like me), you will want to read this terrific anthology even if you already have most of the original articles from Gourmet in your files (as I do). As Reichl notes in the introduction, “For a true gourmet in the first few decades of the twentieth century, Paris was the heart’s home, the place that mattered, a shrine for everyone who believed that eating well was the best revenge. It was where Hemingway’s Moveable Feast took place, where Liebling spent his time Between Meals, where M. F. K. Fisher’s Gastronomical Me was born.” But Gourmet was founded in 1941, when Paris was impossible to visit, so it took a few years for Paris to be properly featured in its pages. The book is divided into ten sections—including “Remembering Paris,” “Feeding a City,” “Americans in Paris,” and “The Bistro Scene”—and some of my favorite articles ever written about the city are here: “Paris in the Twenties” by Irene Corbally Kuhn; “The Old Flower Market” by Joseph Wechsberg; “Noël à Paris” by Judith and Evan Jones; “It’s What’s for Dinner” by François Simon; and all the pieces by Naomi Barry (there are ten here). This book, like the magazine I very much miss, reminds us that food is linked in so many ways to place; in reading about one you also learn a lot about the other.
Seven Ages of Paris, Alistair Horne (Knopf, 2002). In his foreword, Maurice Druon, of the Académie Française, writes that “Horne is everywhere and knows everything.… Nothing escapes his paintbrush”—which indeed appears to be true when reading this magnificent book. Druon also calls the book “in itself, a monument,” an endorsement with which I wholeheartedly agree. Horne explains in the preface that in the course of working on nine previous books on French history over three decades, he kept a “discard box” of little details on Paris (as Churchill is said to have done during World War II), and that box became a scrapbook of sorts as well as the origin of this book. With inserts of photographs and reproductions, this is a de rigueur read.
The Locals’ Point de Vue
“There is a world of difference between the Paris of tourism and Parisians’ Paris,” notes Bill Gillham in Parisians’ Paris (Pallas Athene, 2008), which is a great book for anyone visiting Paris but especially so perhaps for repeat visitors, as Gillham has purposefully made only summary reference to the obvious sights. However, he does include such topics as making hotel reservations, bathrooms, special trips for children, and free concerts and classic films. He really does cover all the bases. He also wisely urges caution when reading articles that have titles like “Secret Paris” and “Hidden Paris.” The Saint-Germain quarter, for example, “is the most intensively scrutinized sector of Paris. Even outside the main tourist areas, can anything have escaped the city’s five or six million visitors a month and those who write guides for them? The answer is that Paris is always changing, at the same time always contriving to remain the same. The cliché is right: the process of getting to know the city is never finished. And so the first-time visitor is only to a degree at a disadvantage, as guide writers driven by the demon of updating know to their cost.”
A Parisian’s Paris by Philippe Meyer (Flammarion, 1999) is, despite the similar title, not a guidebook but a “wish” for anyone who picks it up to decide to visit Paris in what he refers to as the “fifth season,” known as la rentrée, the time of year at the end of summer when Parisians return home from wherever they’ve been for the month of August. La rentrée, as Meyer defines it for this book, exists only in Paris; it lasts for an unpredictable length of time—he’s witnessed it for a full ten days or for a mere forty-eight hours—and it ends without warning. It’s identified by subtle, unexpected changes, such as: “If someone runs toward a bus stop just as the bus is leaving, the driver waits and reopens the door.” It is a time when Parisians “reclaim possession and awareness of their city, once again struck by a beauty they had managed to overlook, by the realization that Paris is still a miracle. Filled with pleasure and pride, Parisians delight in sharing their contentment. They know full well they couldn’t live anywhere else. That’s the time to visit the capital, because it’s the one moment when Paris and the Parisians show themselves at their best.” Meyer, a well-known radio commentator, presents an urban chronicle that is critical, affectionate, and revealing.
A Traveller’s History of Paris, Robert Cole (Interlink, 1998). This edition is one in a great series for which I have much enthusiasm. It’s a mini “what you should know” guide that’s small enough and light enough to carry around every day, and every edition in the series highlights the significant events and people with which all visitors should be familiar.
Vie et Histoire
I first read about the Vie et Histoire series—a twenty-volume encyclopedia about the city of Paris, one volume for each arrondissement—in Travelers’ Tales Guides: Paris. I’ve been slowly collecting the volumes over the years—though I’m still missing the seventh arrondissement, which is the one I most covet—and I hope I’m fortunate enough to acquire them all. These hardcover books, all in print in French (so it takes me a while to read them, dictionary in hand), each include these categories: histoire, anecdotes, célébrités, curiosités, monuments, musées, promenades, jardins, dictionnaire des rues, and vie pratique. Each is filled with color and black-and-white illustrations, reproductions, and photographs.
A Writer’s Paris: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul, Eric Maisel (Writer’s Digest, 2005). “You feel at home in Paris,” writes Maisel, “because the things that you care about—strolling, thinking, loving, creating—are built into the fabric of the city. Despite its negatives—eighteen million tourists annually, eleven percent unemployment, large numbers of homeless people—Paris remains the place where you can feel comfortable decked out as a dreamy artist.” This little book is not for everyone—Maisel really has written it for writers, notably those who plot to go to Paris to write—but there are nonetheless wonderful passages in it that would appeal to anyone with a smidgen of creativity and a deep devotion to the City of Light.
Janet Flanner
Readers of my first Paris edition may recall that I included an obituary of Janet Flanner that appeared in the New Yorker. Flanner—who wrote under the nom de correspondance Genêt—wrote a regular “Letter from Paris” for the New Yorker from 1925 to 1975. Readers of the magazine before the 1990s know that it was a long-standing policy not to print bylines. Not until I requested permission to reprint the obituary did I learn it had been written by William Shawn, distinguished editor of the magazine for nearly forty years. Of Flanner, he wrote, “She loved the people of France among whom she lived so much of her life, and she loved no less the American people for whom she wrote,” and “her estimates of people and events, her perceptions and illuminations, were rarely embarrassed by time.”
I love all of Flanner’s books, which include Janet Flanner’s World: Uncollected Writings, 1932–1975 (1979), Paris Journal, 1944–1965 (1977), and Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939 (1972), all published by Harcourt. These collections are for both those of us old enough to remember her missives and young Francophiles about to discover her. We are most fortunate, not only as readers but as human beings, to have such a vast and perceptive record of Parisian life and times. She was there for much of the twentieth century’s momentous events.
Equally interesting is Flanner’s personal life. In Janet, My Mother, and Me: A Memoir of Growing Up with Janet Flanner and Natalia Danesi Murray (Simon & Schuster, 2000), William Murray explains how his mother, Natalia, met Flanner—at a cocktail party given by Natalia in 1940 at her apartment on East Forty-ninth Street in Manhattan. The encounter, Murray relates, was a coup de foudre. His account illustrates what life was like for him growing up with these women in New York and Rome. Murray’s book is fascinating on several levels—we learn about his own career at the New Yorker, where he was a staff writer for thirty-three years—but it is perhaps most valuable in its portrayal of what it was like for gay professional women during a time when it was not accepted. In the introduction to Darlinghissima, a book of letters between the two, Natalia writes, “I hope that my grandchildren, and other young women like them, born in a freer, more liberated society, more knowledgeable about relationships between the sexes and without the inhibitions or taboos of an earlier era, will understand and value our experiences and efforts to be, above all, decent human beings.”
It’s a toss-up if there are more memoirs written of Paris, Provence, or Tuscany, which is to say there are an awful lot about each of these hugely appealing destinations. It’s hard for me to pass up reading a Paris memoir, so, yes, I’ve read all of these, and can report that each is unique and worthwhile. I think you’ll agree that any one (or five) is an enjoyable read.
Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris, Sarah Turnbull (Gotham, 2003). “Like an Aussie backpacker in need of a bath, probably,” is how Turnbull describes her appearance when she meets Frédéric, her French boyfriend, at Charles de Gaulle airport. “I’m not the sort of girl who crosses continents to meet up with a man she hardly knows,” she reveals, yet there she is, indeed meeting up with a Frenchman she’s only conversed with for approximately forty-five minutes. Thus begins this wonderful love story and memoir, in which you find yourself cheering for Turnbull at every step of her sometimes rough way. One aspect I especially like is that she shares a great number of French phrases that are quite useful: instead of ordering a verre de vin (glass of wine) at a café or restaurant, ask for a coup de pif (which she says is slang and untranslatable)—I did the last time I was in Paris and I just know the raised eyebrows of the waiter signified he was surprised I knew such a phrase.
C’est la Vie, Suzy Gershman (Viking, 2004). “I always knew that one day I would live in France,” Gershman writes on the first page of her memoir. “This was not a dream on my part, but a fact of life, not whispered in the winds of chance, but firmly written on the mistral of my life.” She had me right away with that, but she sealed it when she further explained that when she heard Billy Joel sing, “Vienna waits for you,” she knew exactly what he meant: Paris was her Vienna, and it was waiting for her. Trite as that may sound, I was completely on board—I identify enormously with song lyrics. Without giving away the details, the stage of Gershman’s life that is the subject of this book is sad, funny, and uplifting all at once, which is reason enough to read it. But she also reveals a lot of details about French traditions and daily life in Paris. One custom is the crémaillère, a party to show off a new home. The word derives from the expression pendre la crémaillère—to hang the saucepan on a hook over the fire. At the time the expression was coined, people cooked only on open fires, so when the saucepan was hung the house was ready. Today, in their version of a housewarming, “French people [invite] all their friends for the crémaillère, given as soon as the new home is set up and functioning—usually at a point just under one year after arrival.”
French Lessons, Alice Kaplan (University of Chicago Press, 1993). This well-written book was selected as a Notable Book of 1993 by the New York Times Book Review and was a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. It’s an unusual memoir and an insightful work about language. I love the way she writes about learning and teaching French, her French summer camp in 1968, where if you were caught speaking one word of English you got a mauvais point, and her love affair with André on her junior year abroad. I also found her research on French fascist intellectuals—and her interview with the only one still living at the time, Maurice Bardèche (who has since passed away)—fascinating and unsettling.
I’ll Always Have Paris!, Art Buchwald (Putnam, 1996). I fully expected this memoir to be funny (it was), but I was unprepared for it also to be a bit sad. I should explain: I am the sort of person who still gets choked up when the Tin Man tells Dorothy his heart is breaking at the end of The Wizard of Oz, so you may not get as teary-eyed as I did when reading about Buchwald’s wife, Ann, who passed away before this book was published. She is present on nearly every page even when she’s not part of the narrative. But it’s hard for anyone not to laugh at Buchwald’s press-junket adventures with the International Herald Tribune and the VIPs he meets over the years. Very entertaining, with eight pages of black-and-white photos.
A Girl in Paris: A Persian Encounter with the West, Shusha Guppy (Tauris Parke, 2007). In his preface, Philip Mansel, author of one of my favorite books (Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924), writes that “if there was one area of the world for which Paris, France and the French language possessed particular magnetism, it was the Middle East. In the Ottoman Empire in the 1830s, French became the second language of the governing classes. By the 1850s an Ottoman poet could write: ‘Go to Paris, young sir, if you have any wish; if you have not been to Paris, you have not come into the world.’ ” Guppy, born in Iran and now London editor of the Paris Review, arrived in Paris in the 1950s at age seventeen to attend the Sorbonne. I love her personal story of living “on the top floor of a seven-story building” on the Left Bank as well as hearing about Paris shortly after World War II. But most of all I love how she writes about exile, weaving Persian memories and vignettes into her French experience.
A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from my Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg (Simon & Schuster, 2009). The title of this wonderful, wonderful book does not give any clue that it has to do with Paris, and certainly when I picked it up I had no idea that the word “Paris” would appear in it even once. But it turns out that Paris is a very special city for Wizenberg, as she has spent lengths of time there over the years, studying, living, visiting, and eating. She lived in the eleventh arrondissement after college, in a “petite piece of paradise,” and in that year she learned she loved to cook. Wizenberg says that the only reason she travels is for an excuse to eat more than usual. “I couldn’t tell you what the inside of Notre-Dame looks like, but I do know how to get from the greengrocer on rue Oberkampf, the one with the green awning, to that terrific fromagerie way down in the seventh, near Le Bon Marché.” Though she clearly has a sense of humor, it’s not humor that sustains this book. Wizenberg cares deeply about food—browse her blog (orangette.blogspot.com) and read her monthly column in Bon Appétit—but also about family. When she tells the story of her father dying and I got teary-eyed (on the train, no less), I was crying not only because I was thinking of my own wonderful father (who also has passed away) but because I truly cared about Molly and what happened in her life. She has a winning way of drawing people to her, and when you finish the book you feel like you could pick up the phone and call her. She shares a number of recipes at the end of each chapter, which are among the very few that have appeared in a book like this and that I actually tried—with super results. I don’t believe I will spoil anyone’s pleasure in reading this book by sharing some lines from the final chapter. What life comes down to, Wizenberg says, is winning hearts and minds. “Underneath everything else, all the plans and goals and hopes, that’s why we get up in the morning, why we believe, why we try, why we bake chocolate cakes. That’s the best we can ever hope to do: to win hearts and minds, to love and be loved.” Read this book!
Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas (2008) and We’ll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light (2006), both by John Baxter and published by Harper Perennial. Of these two, I enjoyed Immoveable Feast best, and not only because I learned that Baxter had been a visiting professor at my alma mater, Hollins College (now University), in 1974. He writes that Hemingway meant the title of his famous book (A Moveable Feast) to allude to periods in the Christian calendar—notably Lent and Pentecost—that change their dates depending on when Easter falls. Similarly, as Baxter explains, there is more than one “right” time to discover Paris. “Its pleasures can be relished at any moment in one’s life. But the phrase is subject to another interpretation. At certain times of year, the spirit of Paris moves elsewhere. Its soul migrates, and this most beautiful of cities briefly falls empty.” The two times of year when this happens are during the month of August and at Christmas. Baxter, who is married to a French woman, delightfully and humorously recounts a Christmas meal he made for his French family while revealing much about French customs and traditions.
Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes, Elizabeth Bard (Little, Brown, 2010). I was prepared to like this book but was surprised to really love it. From the first few pages, I felt Bard could also have been describing me. I felt a kindred spirit when I read, “Wherever I’ve been in the world, museums have been my second homes,” and “When the age for dress-up was over, I immersed myself in novels, diving into other peoples’ imaginary worlds. The streets of Dickens’s London were much easier for me to get my head around than fractions.” But when she admits to despising mayonnaise, I knew I’d practically met my twin (for the record, we’re talking supermarket mayonnaise, not the homemade variety). Gwendal, the love in Bard’s life, is a dream of a boyfriend/husband. Without giving too much away, I’ll just note that when he spruces up the apartment while Bard is away in New York, he immediately secured the top spot on my list of World’s Best Husbands (knocking to second place Richard Dreyfus’s character in The Goodbye Girl when he sets a dinner table for two on a New York rooftop). It is Bard herself, however, for whom we’re cheering. She is inspiring, warm, funny, wise, and lucky, this last for figuring out sooner than most what truly matters in life. And her passage about the “promised land” in the conclusion is the best I’ve ever read about embracing the values that France offers while retaining the best ones from the U.S.A.
My Life in France, Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme (Knopf, 2006). In her introduction to this wonderful memoir, published not long after her death in 2004, Child describes the book as being “about some of the things I have loved most in life: my husband, Paul Child; la belle France; and the many pleasures of cooking and eating.” It was a new experience for her, writing a series of linked autobiographical stories instead of a collection of recipes, and it focuses mostly on the years she lived in Paris and Marseille, 1948 through 1954. “Those early years in France were among the best in my life,” she writes, and you can feel her excitement about being in Paris on the page. By now everyone knows that the movie Julie & Julia was based on this book and Julie Powell’s book Julie & Julia (Little, Brown, 2005), which I enjoyed mostly because I loved that Powell was so inspired by Child to start her blog and work her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Paris in the Fifties, Stanley Karnow (Times Books, 1997). Before he was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines and before the bestselling Vietnam, Karnow went to Paris in 1947 intending to stay for the summer. He stayed for ten years, landing a job as a foreign correspondent for Time, and happily for the rest of us he saved carbon copies of all his original dispatches, a revised selection of which form the basis of this engaging look into a noteworthy decade.
Paris Personal, Naomi Barry (Dutton, 1963). “Fortunately,” Barry writes in her introduction, “the story of I Love You has no end. It can stand being retold over and over and over again. Otherwise, I ask you, how could anyone dare to write still another book about Paris? So, with love as the excuse, I dared.” And thank God she did, even if it’s now more than forty years old. What is amazing is that a number of restaurants Barry recommends are still with us—La Tour d’Argent, Prunier, La Closerie des Lilas, Maxim’s, Le Grand Vefour—as well as some shops, antiques galleries, museums, etc. In his endorsement, Art Buchwald writes, “Naomi Barry knows Paris better than any American woman I know.” Having had the supreme pleasure of meeting Barry on several occasions, I completely concur. I treasure this volume.
Paris: Places and Pleasures, Kate Simon (Capricorn Books, 1971). There are few travel writers like Simon around anymore, so if you run across a copy of this out-of-print volume, buy it without hesitation. “An Uncommon Guidebook” is how it’s described on the cover, and indeed this is much more like a memoir than a guidebook. Though there are recommendations for things to see and do, they aren’t approached in a predictable fashion, and it’s the essays—“How Come the Angry Parisian?,” “Est-ce Que Vous Parlez Anglais?,” and “Parisian Contours and Stances”—that really make the book worthwhile and still apropos. Simon wisely notes that, with few exceptions, every neighborhood in Paris has some treasure or other to offer.
Paris Times Eight: Finding Myself in the City of Dreams, Deirdre Kelly (Greystone, 2009). Kelly’s book is such a good read because she is truthful and self-deprecating and she has a passion for Paris that is utterly infectious. The “eight” in the title refers to eight life-changing and/or momentous visits to Paris, some of them made while on assignment for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, where she still works as a reporter at large.
The People of Paris, Joseph Barry (Doubleday, 1966). Though many references in this book, by a former correspondent for the New York Post, are dated, it’s still a good read, especially as a record of Paris just after World War II and in the 1950s and ’60s. It is indeed the people that Barry focuses on, as they are what interest him most. “France is never more French than when it is universal,” Barry writes. “When I am most exasperated with De Gaulle’s nationalism, I think of the beau geste of this Frenchman. One of the big people? One of the little people? One of the people of Paris.”
Petite Anglaise, Catherine Sanderson (Spiegel & Grau, 2008). The words “A True Story” appear at the bottom of this book’s cover, which is probably wise as the book looks and reads like a novel. Englishwoman Sanderson was realizing a dream when she moved to Paris, though not far into her teaching stint she recognized that something was missing from her experience. “I was living alongside the French, not among them. Observing French life, but never truly living it. A hairbreadth away from fulfilling my dreams. And yet sometimes this tiny gap seemed so unbridgeable.” But when she met a French man (Mr. Frog) at the Café Charbon and had a daughter with him (Tadpole), all this changed. She also started a blog (petiteanglaise.com), and her life changed again. Without revealing the rest of the story, I admit Sanderson’s tale didn’t end the way I wanted it to, but she didn’t then, and doesn’t now, ever want to leave Paris. (Sanderson now also has a son, and I was happy to read that she has “moved on” and no longer feels the need to document every detail of her personal life on her blog.)
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, Thad Carhart (Random House, 2001). The title of this gem of a book appealed to me immediately because I took piano lessons for seven years when I was young. But you don’t have to know anything about pianos to love this memoir, inspired by a sign—DESFORGES PIANOS—on an ordinary storefront in Carhart’s Paris neighborhood. The people Carhart introduces us to, and their relationships to music and to each other, tell another, little-known story of Paris.
Return to Paris, Colette Rossant (Atria, 2003). If you, like me, are a fan of Rossant’s Memories of a Lost Egypt (Clarkson Potter, 1999) you will be predisposed to like this memoir as well. Rossant’s own family story is of interest, but the Paris she returns to in 1947—she was born there but spent eight years in Cairo—is an interesting subject as well. Early in her life, Rossant paid attention to food, and she shares a number of recipes here, some of which I’ve tried and liked. Rossant lives in New York now, but a large part of her will always be French.
The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World’s Most Glorious—and Perplexing—City, David Lebovitz (Broadway, 2009). This book includes more than forty recipes as well as a directory of culinary bonnes adresses, making it useful and valuable, but it’s also a great memoir of the years since Lebovitz, a dessert cookbook author and former pastry chef at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, moved to Paris. It’s positively filled with insights, expressions, and new vocabulary words (my favorite: les bousculeurs, from the verb bousculer, meaning “to push abruptly in all directions” and referring to the habit Parisians have of cutting people off in line or walking on a sidewalk and expecting you to move out of their way; as Lebovitz notes, “they just refuse to be herded into straight lines”). I’ve made a handful of the recipes and they all turned out great; the real star was Spiced Nut Mix, which combines nuts with, among other ingredients, chili powder or smoked paprika (I used Spanish pimentón), maple syrup, cocoa powder, and pretzel twists, and it is d-é-l-i-c-i-e-u-x. Lebovitz also maintains an award-winning blog (davidlebovitz.com), which is a good resource for visitors to Paris—not only is it chock full of culinary recommendations, but he’s compiled a great list of travel tips. (See this page.)
A Town Like Paris: Falling in Love in the City of Light, Bryce Corbett (Broadway, 2007). When I first learned of this memoir, by a (then) twenty-eight-year-old Australian guy who’d been living and working in London before moving to Paris, I was inclined to dismiss it—I feared it would be little more than a Drinker’s Guide to the City of Light. I’m glad I read it, because even though there are plenty of references to bars and drinking I am, after all, a wine-loving writer, and Corbett is a lovable man with whom I share a (perhaps) over-the-top infatuation with Paris. I found myself smiling—if not laughing out loud—at many passages, especially in the hilarious “Get 27” chapter, which refers to, usually, a not very popular mint liqueur available in French bars. Corbett and some friends form a motley band by the same name, Get 27, spoken jet vingt-sept in French, “a name that rolled easily off the tongue,” and perform at a Marais bar called Le Connétable. Regardless of how many glasses of beer and wine you vicariously consume while reading the book, you find yourself completely agreeing with Corbett about the reasons he is in Paris in the first place, chief among them “because having a modest yet comfortable lifestyle is more important than acquiring and aspiring.”
Paris en Photo
Of the many, many books filled with photographs of Paris, here is a selection of titles whose pages I never tire of turning:
À Propos de Paris, Henri Cartier-Bresson and with texts by Vera Feyder and André Pieyre de Mandiargues (Bulfinch, 1994). More than 130 black-and-white photos by a photographer whose name is virtually synonymous with Paris.
Métropolitain: A Portrait of Paris, Matthew Weinreb and Fiona Biddulph (Phaidon, 1994). I like this photography book because none of the images are typical; Weinreb has focused on the smallest details, which, he says, “are so often missed by the hurried walker in the street.” The photo of the Institut du Monde Arabe is especially nice as the building is quite difficult for an amateur to capture on film, and the photo of Chagall’s ceiling in the Opéra is magnificent—if you somehow miss seeing the real thing, this is a good consolation prize.
Paris (Assouline, 2004). I am crazy for Assouline’s books, and this one, in its own slipcase, features good text with hundreds of photos.
Paris: 500 Photos, Maurice Subervie with a foreword by Bertrand Delanoë, (Flammarion, 2003). “How many people,” Paris mayor Delanoë asks in his foreword, “during an aimless stroll through our city, have felt the urge to seize a color, an instant, a piece of the azure sky, or a fragment of the night?” An awful lot, surely, but there’s no question that most of us cannot possibly capture that color, instant, or piece of sky as seductively as Subervie.
Paris: The City and Its Photographers, Patrick Deedes-Vincke (Bulfinch, 1992). A fascinating look at the history of photography and the role Paris played in its development, featuring the work of Lee Miller, Brassaï, Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, and others. There are no photographs after 1968 because, as the author states, “with the student riots of that year and the ensuing disruption, and with the urban upheaval of the mid-1960s, came the end of an era.”
Paris Vertical, Horst Hamann (teNeues, 2006). In order to photograph Paris vertically, Hamann notes, he had to rethink how he looked at things. “The visual challenge was not the search for the top, the vanishing points in the sky, but the inconspicuous, the details at eye level.” Hamann’s black-and-white photos are paired with great quotations in both French and English.
For classics titles listed here, multiple editions are generally available.
Babylon Revisited, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The Blessing, Nancy Mitford (Vintage, 2010).
Birdsong, Charlotte Gray, and The Girl at the Lion d’Or, a trilogy by Sebastian Faulks, available from Vintage.
The Book of Salt, Monique Truong (Mariner, 2003).
The Children’s War, Monique Charlesworth (Knopf, 2004).
City of Darkness, City of Light: A Novel, Marge Piercy (Ballantine, 1996).
Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet, Stephanie Cowell (Crown, 2010).
The Club Dumas, Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Harcourt, 1996).
Le Divorce (1997), Le Mariage (2000), L’Affaire (2003), all by Diane Johnson and published by Dutton.
Don’t Tell Alfred, Nancy Mitford (Vintage, 2010).
Fields of Glory, Jean Rouaud (Arcade, 1992). This is a beautifully written, slender little novel that was awarded the 1990 Prix Goncourt for best work of fiction in France.
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo.
Is Paris Burning?, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (Simon & Schuster, 1965).
Balzac (1799–1850) was the first novelist to place Paris at the heart of his fiction, and travelers have a number of Balzac novels from which to choose: Cousine Bette, Eugénie Grandet, Old Goriot, Lost Illusions, The Unknown Masterpiece, The Wrong Side of Paris.
Balzac’s Paris: A Guided Tour (balzacsparis.ucr.edu) is an outstanding online resource that I stumbled upon while working on this manuscript. It’s a promenade through the heart of Paris in the time of Balzac, described through some of his works and accompanied by maps and engravings, and it’s wonderful. The site is composed of materials from the Vernon Duke Collection in the special collections department of the University of California Riverside library. Duke was the songwriter who composed “April in Paris,” and his collection includes eight hundred books, rare maps, and other documents that present life and manners in Paris from the reign of Louis XVI to the end of the Belle Époque. To quote from the site, “One would have to go to the Musée Carnavalet in Paris to find a more comprehensive collection of original documents from this crucial time in the development of Paris.”
Many of the Parisian scenes that feature in Balzac’s novels take place along a route that’s very popular with tourists today—from the Arc de Triomphe to the Concorde, the rue de Rivoli and Palais Royal, the Louvre, and on to the Île de la Cité and the Latin Quarter. This route was the scene, to quote Balzac, of the greatest “splendors” and “miseries” of Parisian life during his time.
Alan Furst
“Astonishingly,” wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times in 2000, “Alan Furst is not yet a household name.” If you don’t yet recognize his name, I urge you to read one of his very good thrillers (I doubt you will stop with just one), and if you do already know Furst’s name, I know you will agree with Maslin’s remark. I am not generally a reader of thrillers, and I even hesitate to refer to Furst’s books as thrillers, because they’re so much more—I prefer to think of them as espionage novels that are amazingly evocative and atmospheric. Paris is the backdrop, major or minor, in nearly all of his books. These include The World at Night (1996), Red Gold (1999), The Polish Officer (1995), Dark Star (1991), Night Soldiers (1988), The Foreign Correspondent (2006), and The Spies of Warsaw (2008), all currently available in Random House paperback editions. (Spies of the Balkans, published in 2010, is Furst’s most recent book, though the action takes place in Greece.)
Furst told New York Times writer Rachel Donadio that after he wrote a few desultory novels, “I suddenly realized there could be such a thing as a historical spy novel … but I went looking to read one and I couldn’t find one.” So he set out to write one, and the result was Night Soldiers. In a 2008 interview with Charles McGrath, also at the Times, Furst explained that the Europe he describes so perfectly in his books is largely a place he carries around in his head and visits at will—he referred to it as being like teleportation. “The first time it happened,” the piece reports, “was in the early ’90s, when he was listening to a tape he had bought of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli playing in Paris with the Hot Club of France in 1937.” Furst said, “I went right there, to that nightclub in Paris, with war coming on, and the Spanish Civil War in the background, and the purges going on in Moscow.… I smelled the smoke, the cheap perfume. The whole thing just came to me, and I knew I wanted to put it in a novel.”
Literary Paris, Jeffrey Kraft (Watson-Guptill, 1999). Though this book includes passages that are the author’s own very real observations and opinions, the inspiration for it is wholly literary, which is why I have included it in this section. As Kraft states, “My choice of text is just that, my own. I am only a devoted student of French literature,” and he has chosen choice lines from works by Apollinaire, Barthes, Baudelaire, Brillat-Savarin, Hugo, James, Joyce, Rimbaud, Saint-Exupéry, Sand, Stein, and Zola, just to name a few. Kraft’s black-and-white photos are quite nice, and his literary selections steered me toward a few works I was eager to read in full. I like the way he describes Paris as characterized by both grandeur and décadence (decline), Balzac and Proust: “While we are there it is the city of Balzac … yet in memory Paris is Proustian, a gradual unfolding backward.”
Mademoiselle Victorine, Debra Finerman (Three Rivers, 2007).
The Mark of the Angel, Nancy Huston (Vintage, 2000).
Mavis Gallant
Most of Gallant’s short stories are set in Paris or are about Parisians, or both, and her characters and scenes are unforgettable. In my favorite, “Across the Bridge,” Sylvie’s mother turns her leather bag, filled with Sylvie and Arnaud’s wedding invitations, upside down over the Seine—one of the most memorable short story images I’ve ever encountered. Other memorable stories are gathered in The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant (1996) and Overhead in a Balloon: Twelve Stories of Paris (1987), both published by Random House. These volumes are out of print—though very much worth tracking down—but New York Review of Books Classics has recently published two great editions, Paris Stories (2002) and The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories (2009).
I will always remember how reading Hemingway made me feel when I was a student in Paris—I loved reading his books and I was bursting with happiness. Years later, I came across the following quote in an article in Gourmet by Gene Bourg, and was relieved that someone else had “got it” and set things straight: “In A Moveable Feast Hemingway postulated that once a man has been young and happy in Paris, he can never be truly happy again. Agreeing with him would be very dangerous indeed. But agreeing and understanding are entirely different things.”
Over the years I went on to read just about everything Hemingway wrote, but it all began with A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises. Both are set wholly or partly in Paris and both, I’m happy to say, are just as good in the rereading as they were thirty-two years ago.
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo.
The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham.
A Paris Hangover, Kirsten Lobe (St. Martin’s, 2006).
Pictures at an Exhibition, Sara Houghteling (Knopf, 2009).
Sarah’s Key, Tatiana de Rosnay (St. Martin’s, 2007).
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens.
The Year Is ’42, Nella Bielski (Pantheon, 2004).
It was the title of Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Europa, 2008) that got my attention first, and then when I read that Renée, one of the main characters, is the concierge of twenty-seven years at “number 7, rue de Grenelle, a fine hôtel particulier with a courtyard and private gardens,” I was completely hooked. As a student I lived with a French family in a hôtel particulier also on the rue de Grenelle, also with a courtyard and private garden. The book turned out to be one of the best books I’ve ever read. Really. I have stuffed so many little papers in it to mark so many memorable and beautiful passages, like this one: “We have to live with the certainty that we’ll get old and that it won’t look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it’s now that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there’s a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. That’s what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.”
Gourmet Rhapsody (Europa, 2009) is equally brilliant and unique, and takes place in the same building. The “greatest food critic in the world,” Pierre Arthens, is dying, and his last wish is to identify a flavor that he can’t remember. He knows that “this particular flavor is the first and ultimate truth of my entire life,” and he knows that the flavor dates back to childhood or adolescence, predating his vocation as a food critic. In alternating chapters we meet members of Arthens’s family and others in the building, and after Arthens relates some of the best eating experiences of his life, we do finally learn the flavor he’s searching for in the final chapter. (I didn’t guess it, and I will only say that it comes as a bit of a surprise.)
“Novel Ideas” was the title of a March 2009 article written by David Burke in the (wonderful) former Paris Notes newsletter. In it, Burke—who moved to Paris in 1986 intending to stay for a year but has now been there twenty-five—shares a quote by Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia that I love: “Paris is a book city, a written city, a printed city. A book city made of thousands of books. A city that might be called a library’s dream, if a library had the ability to dream.” And Burke had the envious task of living that dream while he worked on his unique and engaging book Writers in Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light (Counterpoint, 2008). He had the opportunity to page through books, study maps, paintings, and photographs, and walk all over the city tracking down literary sites. “All of this was rich and rewarding,” he notes, “but what really brought Paris to life for me were the great Paris novels and the lives of their characters, who illuminated the soul of the city.”
His book is filled with dozens and dozens of authors and works of fiction, as well as maps, so readers may craft literary itineraries of their own. Burke writes that “immersion creates its rewards,” a statement with which I wholeheartedly agree, and he aptly observes that our appreciation of writers’ lives and work, and Paris itself, “is heightened by following them from place to place in our imaginations or, even better, in our walking shoes.”
There are many ways to walk around Paris. You can set yourself precise destinations, or just drift along. With a guidebook in hand, you can try to systematically explore a neighborhood, or else you can just take the first bus that comes along and ride it to the end of the line, or you can try to go places by taking a different route from the one you normally take. Or else you can devise a route by deliberately imposing arbitrary rules that will restrict matters even more, such as, for example, taking streets whose names begin with the same letter, or going exclusively in alphabetical order, or in some particular chronology. In practice, these itineraries are extremely difficult to work out. During the course of one’s walks, with the aid of guidebooks and maps, one can follow them more or less in their entirety. For the stroller who restricts himself like that, Paris becomes a giant labyrinth that during the course of his peregrinations gives him the feeling of having left the beaten path.
—Georges Perec, Paris
While it’s always nice to simply wander aimlessly, have a day or two on your trip without a single plan or reservation, it’s equally important that other days be more structured, with sites to see, architecture to admire, and cafés to linger at. As I noted in the introduction, the more you plan, the more free time you have, and walking tours give you just that. Sometimes, a plan to just amble along the rues is structure enough, as François Baudot, in the introduction to Paris (Assouline, 2004), wisely notes: “You drift in Venice, you meander in Rome, you wander in Madrid. In New York, you go from point A to point B. You often get lost in Tokyo. You always find your way in Marrakesh. In London, you catch a taxi; in Seville, a sunstroke. But only in Paris do you stroll.” Along with Thirza Vallois’s trio of Around and About Paris, the following are my favorite walking tour books. I continue to use these even though I know exactly what I will encounter and where I will end up.
Impressionist Paris: The Essential Guide to the City of Light, Julian More (Pavilion, 1999). This illustrated hardcover isn’t particularly hard to pack, but it’s a little hard to conceive of carrying it around while walking, as it’s thick and heavy. I recommend making photocopies of the pages you want to bring along. It is a very good and interesting (if not quite “essential”) guide, and More, who has lived in France for many years, is also the author of some of my favorite books, including Views from a French Farmhouse. In eight chapters, More proposes walks and drives within Paris proper as well as in Fontainebleau, Giverny, and along the Seine and Oise rivers. Each is more of a “contemplative ramble” than a heavy hike or tour, “to be taken at your own speed and leisure.” Visits outside Paris can be done within a day, and walks are full-day or half-day adventures. More describes his book as being “mainly about looking. Looking at paintings, looking at town and country, absorbing a distinct atmosphere that still exists.”
The Impressionists’ Paris: Walking Tours of the Artists’ Studios, Homes, and the Sites They Painted, Ellen Williams (Little Bookroom, 1997). With twenty color reproductions of artworks, period café and restaurant recommendations, maps, and vintage photographs, this great little (about 5 × 7 inches) hardcover features the works of Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Bazille, and Caillebotte. (Pissarro, whose Parisian street scenes seem to beg inclusion, is left out since, as Williams notes in the afterword, he didn’t begin painting his grands boulevards canvases until the 1880s, whereas this book focuses on the 1860s and 1870s.) I’ve used this book (and the Picasso one below) several times, following each route to the letter, and I continue to be amazed at how many sites depicted in the paintings remain the same. The author’s recommendations for cafés and restaurants have all turned out to be memorable spots.
A Paris Walking Guide: 20 Charming Strolls through the Streets, Courtyards, and Gardens of Paris, translated by David Cox (Parigramme, 2009). This is a more compact edition of Parigramme’s twenty-volume guide to the arrondissements of Paris, the Guides du Promeneur, and it is a must-have book, but only available in France. I bought it in Paris and saw it in many bookstores and museum shops there. There are two guiding premises for the series: “We never see—or only poorly see—things that have not been pointed out” and “Seeing and learning changes our lives.” There is much in this edition that does not appear in any other English-language guidebook, and the walks are terrific.
Pariswalks, Sonia, Alison, and Rebecca Landes (Henry Holt, 2005, sixth edition). The Walks series has been a favorite of mine since it first appeared in 1981, originating with the Paris guide. This edition features walks through five of the oldest neighborhoods of Paris: Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, La Huchette, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Mouffetard, and Place des Vosges. Each walk is about two and a half hours, and after each one you’ll be “a friend and possessor of the quartier forever.” I share the authors’ enthusiasm for getting to know a part of the city intimately, what they call “close-up tourism.” Two useful tips: morning walks are recommended because courtyard doors in both business and residential buildings remain open for mail and other deliveries, and sitting on the grass is not interdit in the Square René-Viviani, next to little Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. However, recommendations for cafés, restaurants, hotels, and shops are covered better in other books.
Picasso’s Paris: Walking Tours of the Artist’s Life in the City, Ellen Williams (Little Bookroom, 1999). This sister volume to the Impressionists guide above is equally appealing, and it’s not just for first-time visitors. As Williams notes, “Following in the footsteps of this one extraordinary inhabitant can reveal entirely new aspects of the city even to those familiar with it.” Picasso lived in four neighborhoods in Paris—Montmartre, Montparnasse, Étoile, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés—and happily, as Williams discovered, most of his Paris still exists today. The four museums in Paris that display his work are included in this volume. As with the Impressionists guide, this one also has a red ribbon marker, a thoughtful touch for walkers who want to easily mark a page while looking around or stopping for a vin ordinaire.
Secret Paris: Walking Off the Beaten Track, Jacques Garance and Maud Ratton (Jonglez, 2007). I bought this in Paris and in North America it’s probably available only online, but wherever you see it buy it tout de suite! This slender paperback is filled with things to see in Paris that, almost exclusively, do not appear in any other book. Take, par example, the first arrondissement: until I picked up this book, I had never even heard of the strange image of Napoléon at the Colonnade de Perrault at the Louvre, the Galerie Dorée of the Banque de France, or the Colonne Médicis on the rue de Viarmes … not to mention the Cercle Suédois, the Swedish club where Alfred Nobel created the Nobel Prize in 1895 and where you can, twice a month on Wednesdays, see the desk he sat at and have a drink in rooms that overlook the Jardin des Tuileries … or the commemorative plaque of the Texas embassy at the corner of rue de Castiglione and Place Vendôme (the state of Texas established its own embassy in Paris after it gained its independence from Mexico in 1836 and before it became a U.S. state in 1845). This book is an eye-opener and a gem.
Walks Through Napoléon & Joséphine’s Paris, Diana Reid Haig (Little Bookroom, 2004). I bought this book because of the affection my daughter has for Napoléon—as she’s only eleven, she’s not quite an expert (yet). But when we were in Ajaccio, on the island of Corsica, we visited Napoléon’s childhood home and saw statues aplenty of him—so many that Alyssa began referring to him as “you know who.” I thought the book would be fun and interesting for her, and indeed it has proven to be so. The four walks detailed here—and the itineraries for Malmaison and Fontainebleau—are wonderful for me, too.
If you prefer guided walking tours, here are a few that I highly recommend:
* Context Travel (contexttravel.com) offers very in-depth walking tours for small groups (no more than six) of “intellectually curious travelers.” The walks are led by scholars and specialists in such fields as archaeology, art history, cuisine, urban planning, history, environmental science, and classics. What initally drew me to Context was its stated mission, which sounds very compatible with The Collected Traveler: “We are committed to the character of the city—its built environment, cultural heritage, and living fabric.” Just a few of the company’s Paris tours are Paris by Riverboat, Louvre French Masters, Modernist Architecture, and Marais Mansions; there are family walks specifically geared to kids as well. Context, based in Philadelphia, offers equally terrific tours in eleven other cities, including Athens, Istanbul, Rome, Venice, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
* Isabelle Hauller, a conférencière officielle and docteur en histoire de l’art, has tours listed on the Paris Balades Web site (parisbalades.com/hauller). Her tours are in French, and she sends monthly e-mail updates of her offerings so you may reserve in advance.
* Centre des Monuments Nationaux (monuments-nationaux.fr). This government organization offers guided tours of many well-known monuments and gardens in all regions of France.
Before you depart on a walk, remember to bring something to record the names of interesting spots you pass that you may want to return to later. Unless they state otherwise, guides appreciate tips, so if you feel yours was particularly good, give him or her a few extra euros. Guides are also good sources of information and typically enjoy sharing the names of some favorite places (often little visited by tourists). They’re there to answer your questions, so don’t hesitate to query them after your tour.
