now we know

Patience is not my best quality, but I’ve been practicing. It took a lot of patience to get to Paris, and still more to capture it adequately in writing. At long last, resolution 2018 is complete.

When I met Phil, he was the only person I knew besides me who had never traveled beyond North America. Of all the places waiting across the map for us, we agreed that Paris was the most important. We agreed on enough such things that we got married, and, having spent all our money on that party, we honeymooned in Vegas, at the Paris Hotel & Casino.

A decade whirled by, a promise hibernated, a resolution was made. Two days before our 10th anniversary, we took a ferry to a friend’s car to a light rail to an Icelandair flight to Reykjavik. The sun never went down; our Tuesday never ended. The plane parked in the middle of the tarmac and a bus drove us to the terminal, so we were outside in the misty gray-green dunes of Iceland for a few breaths. The passport with my married name got its first stamp, and three hours later we were at Charles de Gaulle; allegedly it was Wednesday afternoon.

Arrivals at CDG is a maze of circular vestibules and escalator tubes. Outside in a wind-roaring passageway full of transport options, after practicing our first French with a Disney tour representative, we decided on a taxi to the city center. The stoic Senegalese driver introduced us to the pandemonium of negotiating Paris traffic. When he stopped the cab at our HomeAway address, I handed him my Visa, and he shook his head in disgust. Euros only. But Rick Steves told me the best way to pay for everything was with a credit card. Huh.

My sharp-eyed spouse had seen a bank down the street, so he jogged there while the cabbie huffed off to le toilette and I stood stupefied. When cabbie's cash arrived, he left us unceremoniously idling in our gauche rain jackets with two suitcases on Rue St Denis. Across from a Love Shop, between a Kurdish bistro and an Italian café, we waited conspicuously until our HomeAway liaison arrived. Apologizing for the delay, he showed us through two coded doors and a charming courtyard, up one flight of charming curved stairs into our flat, where we crashed on the charming futon the minute he left. When we got back up, the street below our open window was growing shadows and buzzing with happy hour.

Groggy, giddy, and hungry, we wandered two blocks and settled randomly on a bar called The Frog & Rosbif, where we attempted to order neither frog nor rosbif in French. The server replied, kindly, in English, but we kept trying, drinking in all the chatter around us along with a beer and champagne. Not prosecco; not cava; champagne. I was still stupefied. How were we here, finally, on the continent of Europe, casually eating a burger and a banh mi taco? How could such a long gauzy dream have come to crystalize across the solid frame of reality?   

After dinner, under a moody sky, Phil led me on a walk through the second and first arrondissements. I wish I could call it a stroll, but that’s not how people get through the streets of Paris. “Walk” is a generous characterization. It’s a zigzag crush where accounting for the walkers around you is useless; you are nothing to them. But we jostled merrily down the stream until we saw a charming rat run across a corridor that lead to the piazza of the Louvre.

The iconic, incandescent pyramids were familiar -- from screens and cards and imagination -- but I did not know them in 3D, under the real twilight sky with me. I didn't know you could see the Eiffel Tower from the southwest corner of the Louvre, from nearly everywhere. We walked on to get a real-life look at the Seine, dark and speckled now with reflected stars. It beckoned us down a cobbled ramp to the quay where we drifted hand in hand to the next ramp, and then it was time to find a night cap near home. But how to choose which sidewalk seat at which café was best in the boundless sea of them? One answer: wherever there were seats available. There were several at the little Agadir Bar a block from our flat, and Phil was drawn by its Latin beat. The manager chatted with us over vin blanc and Japanese whiskey until we left, utterly enchanted, at the demure hour of 10pm.  

If you are a seasoned world traveler, this story will be a bore. Too bad for you. Knowing a precious place for the first time, with a child’s eyes even in middle age, should be a shareable treat. (Or a moveable feast, if you prefer, but that’s plagiarism.)

**

Thursday, dixieme anniversaire. We hit the cobblestone mid-morning, and two blocks away stumbled upon Rue Montorgueil, a resplendent farmer’s market street. Amid the flowers, fruit, fish, jam, chocolatiers, charcuteries, fromageries, and boulangeries, we got a front row table at eponymous Café Montorgueil for our first pain au chocolat. The croissant basket came with very fresh orange juice in slender glasses and coffee in tiny cups. We watched a spectrum of charming people and their charming children zigzag by, rowdy vagrants and clanking garbage trucks dunking nonchalantly into the fray.

After brunch we went toward the river and past the long stretch of the Louvre with no plan except to keep walking and absorb it all. When I paused to put tactical band aids on my heels, I realized we were in Catherine Medici’s Jardin des Tuileries, which was on my list. We slowed to contemplate sculptures atop tall pedestals, while grandparents reclined in green chairs around a fountain and kids played a tile game under the Chestnut trees. We saw ducks in a flower-fringed pond, and a goat strangely chained to a stake in a gulley. We went right past L’Orangerie with its Water Lilies to the Place de la Concorde with its Egyptian obelisk and twin Fontaines des Mers. Like the Louvre pyramids, these were so familiar from reproduction, so astonishing under the actual Paris sky with the actual Tuileries behind them and the city all around.

We could see miles up the Champs-Elysees to L’Arc de Triomphe but decided that was for a different day. Instead we went back through the garden, crossed Pont du Carrousel, and studied the books and posters in the green vendor boxes that lined the left bank. We reveled in the timeless singularity of everything we saw. Even the drinking fountains were exquisite.

     

At the edge of the sixth arrondissement, I checked the map for a few literary locales. Down Rue Mazarine I found Cafe Procope, the purported birthplace of Western coffee, Rousseau’s revolution, and Voltaire’s Candide. Phil said we should get a drink inside, but I was intimidated by the dim formal foyer and not compelled to explore further. We circled back toward the river to Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s acclaimed American bookstore. I was thrilled to be standing inside it and to find it so quaint, but I was also daunted, again, by the reality of its hallowed shelves. I quickly picked out late novels by Hemingway and Fitzgerald, took them to the register, and said yes, please, to the logo stamp on each first page. Phil, less starstruck, spent more time perusing titles and picked a Patti Smith memoir for my anniversary gift.

We crossed Pont au Double – full of street performers poppin’, lockin’, and blowing gigantic bubbles for the clinking euros of the tourist throng – and there was Notre-Dame. Hundreds of people were in line to enter the cathedral, so we loitered in the courtyard, checked the map for the south end of our Rue St. Denis, and headed back toward the flat. Having eaten nothing since this morning’s croissant, I was temped by street pizza every few steps. At the place I chose, the first vendor who did not (or would not) speak English put my slice in the oven and poured Phil a coke. Then he signaled that his credit machine would not accept my card. Or any card we tried. I signaled that we would forgo the slice and coke, but he made it clear that since the slice had been heated and the coke poured, forgoing was not an option. Phil took his second jog to the bank. The pizza was delicious, though. Walking with a paper-wrapped pizza slice on a Paris afternoon is a delicious thing.

At six o’clock cute Judy, an expat friend of a friend, met us at our apartment and led us on a café crawl through the neighborhood. She explained how it began as a district of fringe philosophers and how its Saint Denis arch was the gate of a 17^th century city wall. We had some wine in a vacant alley, then some more crushed between after-work locals on a cacophonous Rue Montorgueil, then a late dinner – so late we had to plead for a seat on the patio where food service stopped at 11 – at Gros, across from a billiards club in the tenth arrondissement, a district of hip youngsters. We shared plates of rillete de cochon, burrata with grilled eggplant, and an oeuf avec carottes mousseline. It was among our best meals. We made one more stop at the Italian cafe next to our apartment, where another reluctant maître d’ felt it was too late for new customers to sit down. But the street was still lively. Thursday night would last until nearly dawn, and we would fall asleep with our window open listening to it pleasantly recede.

**

All the jet lag and jubilation caught up with us Friday. We slept and slept and did not emerge from the apartment until 2pm. Late lunch was a pair of the best looking and tasting chicken Caesar salads I’ve ever encountered, at Le Petit Carreaux. I cannot overstate the transcendence of the French chicken. I also ordered iced tea, and the wonderfully frothy house-made option was peach-flavored. (Tea fans take note: the bottle of Lipton I got from a cart in the Tuileries the day before, and the one I would get in the Champ de Mars tomorrow, were peach-flavored as well. Paris iced tea was all peach!)

At the grocery store next door, our wine, toothpaste, and exotic potato chips were rung up and returned to a scale next to the register. After triumphantly completing my credit transaction, I requested un sac. “Five cents,” said the checker. We still hadn’t learned well enough to have five cents on us (much less a sac of our own), so we offered a 10€ bill. She side-eyed the manager behind her and waved us away quickly; we whispered merci. Things were easier at the fromagerie, where the vendor patiently helped me choose a camembert and a truffle chevre, and at the boulangerie, where I paid just 1.15€ for my first warm baguette.

We took our provisions to the flat and sketched an itinerary for the remaining week. Versailles, Giverny, St. Michelle, Rouen… we could see now that they would swallow whole days hurrying, so we decided to stay in the inner ring of the city this time. Saying “this time” was phenomenal. All the years we’d been thinking of France, it had taken so long and become so mythological that we were thinking of one shot. But now that we had crossed the ocean and settled in to the bliss of being here, we knew we would come again. As easily as we had agreed about coming a decade before, we agreed that returning was real and was a priority, and we began to sketch that plan -- to start on the north coast, have a car, take our time cruising back to Rue St Denis.  

This revelation let us luxuriate in the sites nearby. We annotated our museum list by days they were closed and nights they were open late. We examined the metro map color codes to see which attractions could be clustered into walks from the same line, then looked up essential eateries and matched them into the clusters. My research turned up a Seine cruise departing from the Pont Neuf every hour until 11:00, 14€ for a 1-hour tour. This would be the perfect excursion for tonight, I ventured, and Phil was game. With baguette and sweaters in a proper sac, we re-traced our path from the prior afternoon, now in the effervescent dusk of Friday, surrounded by celebration. At our boat’s ticket house on the left bank quay, we also got hot cocoa and whiskey in paper cups before boarding. We sat on the port side of the half-empty deck, up front, close to the honey-voiced tour guide.

She began her highlights in French and then repeated in English, so we could first try hearing everything as it should be heard. The churches, castles, and monuments we glided by were lit from below as the bridge lamps came on. Passing under each bridge we could see its ornamentation and the ancient rafters that held it, and everything was luminous in the dark mirror of the water. We went east first, past a park where flocks of people danced in pockets of rumba, salsa, or tango in the moonlight beside the Seine. We went around Ile de la Cite and St. Louis, a view of Notre-Dame from both sides, and then west all the way to the Tour Eiffel. The gradual approach was ideal, closer and closer, led by the lilt of the gentle guide. Under the Pont Marie she told us to get a kiss, close our eyes, and make a wish, and I did, for many long healthy years more leading us back to this place. When we came out from under the Pont De L’Alma, the sky filled with Eiffel, aglow. Our boat puttered as it turned around, giving maximum time beneath the tower as the clock struck ten and the lights began to twinkle.    

           

Please take this easy cruise, at the sunset hour, next time you are in Paris and tell me if it’s not the most magnificent 14€ you can spend.

**

Saturday it was time to confront the metro. Compelled to stay on the Eiffel Tower track, we made the Trocadero our morning destination, and set out for the line number nine on Rue Strasburg three blocks from home. On the way, I popped into the closest bakery (Bo & Mie, which became my favorite) for croissants and café cremes, proudly completing the whole transaction in French. Then it was down to the train tunnel. It took two tries to buy the day’s tickets, and some dispute about which direction we needed on the line 9, but we ultimately reached our platform. It was not crowded because the train magically appeared every few minutes. We lurched on and scrabbled for a pole, and I won a seat before the second stop and then relished the people-watching, admiring clothes and shoes, nibbling my croissant. No one looked to me like a tourist; everyone was listening to earbuds and looking at phones. A voice announced each stop with an affable sleepy inflection, Bonne Nouvell, Chaussee D’Antin La Fayette, Saint-Augustin, and by the time we reached Alma Marceau, I believed I had known how to ride this train all my life.

The tourists materialized to fill the esplanade at the Trocadero, crowding the lines at the many crepe and galette carts, shrugging off the vendors who stalked them with novelty key chains and berets. All of them were taken aback, as were we, by the vista that opened between the columned wings of the old palais. Here was the site of a zillion photographs (Hitler’s perhaps the most famous) declaring “I am at the Eiffel Tower”. I swooned. We spent an hour lounging on the upper terrace and another in the 23-acre garden below. On a bench in the sunshine, we made a video sent immediately to family. At the Eiffel Tower. Okay.

Next, we joined the jam of foot traffic crossing Pont d’Lena to get even closer. Many of those people were moving toward the incredibly long line for the multi-elevator ride to the top, but we were not. We broke out of the jam into Champ de Mars, a flat green park with plenty of room to disperse the crowds, where we meandered more and Phil snapped endless pictures. I confirmed with the map that we were an easy walk from Les Invalides, which held Napoleon’s Tomb and the Musee de l’Armee.

The seventh arrondissement was more contemporary than the other neighborhoods we’d explored so far -- its uniformly tree-lined streets and even pavements were wider, its unbroken rows of apartments and offices more polished. In Les Invalides’ lobby we debated buying the city’s all-museum pass. I wasn’t motivated to do the discount math; it was a commitment, and our non-committal approach felt good so far. Phil pocketed the brochure and bought two 14€ tickets for the day. As all the Paris tea was peach, all the Paris tickets were 14€. 

Napoleon’s absurdly opulent shrine to himself, under the highest church dome in Paris, was a spectacle which took half an hour to appraise in full. Outside, at a patisserie cart in a shady green nook we appraised a jumbo framboise macaron and a chocolate éclair, which was filled with fluffy chocolate frosting rather than the thick vanilla custard of the common U.S. eclair. My éclair enthusiast diplomatically declined to name a preference. At the Army museum, which had several sections, we spent the rest of the afternoon in the first one – armor and weapons from the 13^th through 17^th centuries. The inventory of shields, blades, and projectiles including pistols, rifles, cannons, swords, and spears was astounding. The rows of armor included helmets and chain mail suits for boys and horses. The sun filtered into the glass cabinets and lit the intricate, medieval designs so nicely that Phil couldn’t stop his camera shutter, until the ushers were sweeping us past the artillery courtyard and into the gift shop for closing time.

We got an early dinner at La Commanderie, on a corner teeming with commuters. The patio offered a view of the Eiffel Tower, or more precisely, of the progression of light on it, to help Phil get back to the Trocadero by the time the setting sun was just so. Our croque monsieurs were served fast, but as usual it took a long time to acquire l’addition s’il vous plait. There was another “broken” credit card machine, too, but by now I had the cash, and by galloping through the Champ de Mars, we were stationed on the north side of the bridge in time for a hundred pictures of Eiffel in a pink sky. On the grassy slopes of the garden, the pestering vendors now had bottles of wine for sale. I watched three of them lift a drain cover from the grass and draw out buckets of more bottles to replenish their supplies. Lovers and families were setting up picnics under the popping stars. I might have petitioned for a carousel ride, but Phil had carried his onerous camera gear as far as he could for now and my own bag was growing heavy, so we returned to the metro that whisked us home. We finished the day at Agadir, devouring peanuts our host, Zaid, kept delivering in eclectic saucers, watching the casual parade of chic people and imagining how we might live here with them.    

**

When I woke up it was our only Sunday. It also happened to be the first Sunday of September, and on first Sundays at most Paris museums, so the travel guides told me, admission was free. I waited on the couch for Phil to wake up -- finishing Patti Smith and listening to the shops below me unfold their tables and chairs -- and when he did, I said, “Let’s go to the Louvre.”

“I thought the Louvre was not on your list,” he said wryly. It was most definitely on his.

“Well, but it must be kismet that the only Sunday we’re here happens to be the first Sunday of the month, and it must be stupid not to go to the Louvre for free.”

It was also stupid not to have had crepes for breakfast yet, so we did that first, at Briezh Café. The petit dejeuner on the chalkboard was a crepe sucre: a flawless folded pancake with brown sugar and butter or light caramel sauce, served with apple or orange juice (throat-dazzlingly fresh again) and tea or coffee (you get a shot and a pot of hot water when you say “café” at this place). Unstuffed and unfussy, it was a long way from stateside crepes for breakfast and I loved it. Not merely because it was Parisian, but because of what that meant, which I now owned: simple greatness, a sidewalk hour in the morning breeze.

I was aware of the Louvre entrance with the shortest line through the shopping center, but before we reached that spot the pyramid’s gravity tugged us for the second time. The line was short enough there, too -- sure, because today you could walk in without stopping to pay. But in the sun-drenched concourse under the pyramid was a room full of ticket machines where people were buying tickets. Phil gave a machine our 14€ while I sputtered incredulously. Free first Sunday! Mais non, that was only off-season, I learned at the information desk, which began on the next first Sunday, in October.

“Shake it off,” Phil said, “we’re going to see the Mona Lisa.”

We went, with the 10-fold accordion map in hand, into the Richelieu wing, which did not house the Mona Lisa. We did see many striking sculptures in the first sky-lit room there, and up some stairs we saw the Hamurabi Code, a 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian law digest. Phil stopped awhile for that, and around a corner I came upon a group of enormous Assyrian Lamassus who looked like they guarded gates in The Neverending Story. Around more corners and up and down more stairs we saw more French sculpture and Near Eastern Antiquity. We were not coherently decoding the map, which was more confusing than the train system, so we left the Richelieu wing and went to the Starbucks to get our bearings. Phil ordered a Frappuccino, which felt like a bad idea, and indeed what he got was not a Frappuccino. But while he tried to drink it, we did get a better sense of where we wanted to be.

In the Denon wing I was welcomed by Cupid and Psyche, which made my day. With persistence we next found Mona, Venus with the Three Graces, and many other masterpieces around corners with dead-end hallways in between. The Louvre is not for the easily exasperated or highly anxious. It is crowded, yes, but not suffocating; we eventually got as close as we liked to things. The real trouble is the labyrinthian design and difficulty of exit -- sortie signs everywhere, but no sortie doors. Phil and I were on a trip two lifetimes in the making, though, so we were not to be exasperated, we were done being anxious, we were holding onto elated for as long as possible.

We discovered the glorious Winged Victory of Samothrace in a refreshingly open gallery. It’s a room so marvelous, in fact, that the steps leading to the statue have their own name -- the Daru staircase -- and on the way out my sandal slipped, and I bounced down a few of its time-worn marble stairs. I took the fall mostly on my left posterior, avoiding a broken tailbone but blooming a bruise I knew would be the size and color of an eggplant. The crowd displayed a stunning indifference. Phil pulled me up by the elbow and we moved slowly to a bench in an adjacent room, where no troubled usher or armed guard approached. A faux-pas is designated with an air of disgust for a reason here. Moments later we saw a danger sign over a different marble staircase, averting all liability.

We went on to find the Sphinx of Tanis, the Venus of Milo, and a few other beauties. But I ran out of steam fast after the fall and Phil, who had also worn a wrong pair of shoes, agreed by 5pm that it was time to go. We exited through the Carrousel shopping center, squinting as we sloshed into the evening sun, stopping only for Bo & Mie sandwiches. Our flat was a perfect harbor where we happily passed this midpoint evening in pajamas, decadent cheese and wine on the living room table, Phil with so many photos to review and me with so much Hemingway to read. There was a rugby match on, and we listened to raucous fans at the corner bar all night. Rue St. Denis was a fine radio, ending my only Sunday as it began, with a book and some background street music, at home. 

**

My behind and Phil’s back were sore Monday morning, so we were off to another slow start. The plan was to head east on the metro line 3 to Pere Lachaise Cemetery and the Picasso museum. On the busy Reaumur/Sebastopol corner we detoured for brunch at the Capitol Café. Another croque monsieur and a scrumptious salmon tartine; another friendly attendant, too, and our French kept improving. In the train tunnel, we bought two tickets again, but on the way back we would finally decide the metro multi-pack was a necessary commitment. Though it was standing room only for the whole ride and Phil was sweating under his gear, I was light at heart, feeling like a pro by the time we surfaced in the 20^th arrondissement.

A hundred acres on the city’s eastern edge, Pere Lachaise lodges over a million dead and welcomes more visitors than any other cemetery in the world. Napoleon wanted it to be an egalitarian resting place, so relatively few of the tombs are illustrious enough to attract the 3.5 million annual sight-seers. The most attractive aspects to me were unexpected, though.

It was terrifically quiet. I could glide along the cobblestones without another living soul in view. It was green as an arboretum, too, full of different geographies: tangled gardens, tidy meadows, woodsy hollows flecked with crows, whimsical terraces, tropical ravines. The mystical shrine of Jim Morrison turned up in an arid, dilapidated alley. We stood with a small crowd beneath a palm tree whose trunk was covered with tokens of chewed gum, reconciling how much grander the imagination had made this grave. Then we strolled, through winding uneven paths, alternatively sun-drenched and shaded, in search of Rossini, Chopin, Colette, Delacroix, Heloise, Moliere, rarely consulting the map. We only found half those we were looking for but unlike the Louvre expedition, today the getting there, and the beguiling art all along the way, was as good as the eminent checkpoints.

Near Edith Piaf’s grave, in the corner opposite where we began, I glimpsed some curiously postmodern metal sculptures. Closer inspection revealed them to be both delicate and macabre; we had come upon a heart-rending holocaust memorial. There were monuments for Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Drancy, for all interned children and for all resistors. Some were austere marble columns of inscriptions, dates, or names; others depicted skeletal workers, forlorn silhouettes. Europe had obviously transformed my worldview within hours of landing, but here in this cemetery my small perspective was most profoundly framed; this is how you remember a generation of people taken from where you are, tormented where you are, lost all around you. This is the vivid unflinching expression of a country physically torn by war, and I would learn that this is only one of the city’s several memorials for this cataclysm. You can come to Pere Lachaise, as we did, for your music icons and your Oscar Wilde lipstick tributes if your like, but you must come for this corner as well.

It was 5pm again when we made our way out to the street through the main gates. It was too late for Picasso now, but there was time to shower and change before a rendezvous with Seattle friends who’d just arrived in the Opera district. I suggested we meet at Harry’s New York Bar, the famed hangout of Hemingway, Gershwin, and a bartender who invented the Bloody Mary. That’s what I ordered, in a small Collins glass, and it was superb. So was the Mai Tai Phil had, and now I’m the sort of person who never wants to order those cocktails anywhere else.

Harry’s did not serve dinner, though, and our friends Kayla and Dan needed more than mixed nuts after their long travel day. We wandered into the night, and I got the impression that this opera district, its wide, relatively deserted streets full of high-end retail, was best enjoyed during the day. We sat at a sprawling pastel café where only one other curbside table had customers. We waited and waited, but after delivering drinks and menus our host never ever returned. Typical, according to Dan, but I insisted that such treatment had not befallen us anywhere else (and, in fact, it would not again). We paid for the drinks and parted ways, they to the Korean barbeque below their apartment, Phil and I to the Italian café next to ours. With 30 minutes left of menu service at Kuccini, we shared a plate of puffy gnocchi floating in luscious sauce, and a goblet of tiramisu. It was almost my favorite meal and hour; the Peroni and prosecco sparkled. When we retired upstairs Phil wanted to sort through pictures again, so he pulled up a Chopin concerto on his phone and played me into another charming slumber.

**

The morte d’Paris theme continued Tuesday when the main agenda was the catacombs with Kayla and Dan. Before that, though, we slept in again. We felt the days fleeting, for sure, but we also felt comfortable just living them, sinking in. Phil put laundry into the kitchen machine while I went down to my dear bakery for café cremes and a bag of pastries, and then we explored the north side of our garment district neighborhood. One door after another was open to rack upon rack of clothing all made of the same or similar fabric, more of the fabric on rolls to the ceiling, shelves of notions, and proprietors barking at delivery guys in Slavic or Arabic. This is where haute couture came from.      

With the pastry bag stowed on our counter and laundry hung on the drying rack, it was time for the line 4 that took us into the deep south side of town. The 14^th arrondissement looked much like the 20^th to me, but in fairness, my observations were confined to the few blocks visible from the catacombs line, in which I spent two hours. Yes, I had read that the wait would be exceptionally long. But we’d barely waited in a line even at the Louvre, and this was a cave full of bones, so the hundreds of people in this line still bewildered me. These were two hours I could have been at Gertrude Stein’s salon or Luxembourg gardens.  

The weather was overcast, though, good for standing interminably beside a shade-less park, and our friends helped pass the time. We tore at a baguette and hunk of bleu cheese supplied by Dan, talked of travel, and theorized about whether this could be worth the wait, and how did we ever measure that anyway? I avoided considering how creepy or claustrophobic it could be where the line ended, down 130 steps to a one-way mile-long subterranean passage.

The steps were the scariest part. I have not gone thoughtlessly down a staircase or let go of a handrail since the Winged Victory, and the catacombs descent added the vertigo of a tight spiral to the usual slip-risk. But I made it down and through, and spent the self-guided tour translating tablets of poetry between bulwarks of femurs and skulls and whatever was stuffed behind them. There was nothing but bones, poems, and empty corners with an iron gate or a guard in front of them. The guard’s job seemed boring but not ominous; I felt nothing sinister prick the air. It was another strolling place where I was mostly alone, with Kayla and Dan zipping ahead affecting disinterest, and Phil behind me halting every few steps for a picture. The tourists around me behaved more like they were in a museum than in a crypt; it actually felt to me like we were somewhere in Disneyland.

Once we all lumbered back up 83 more spiral steps, we were hungry. We were also a mile away from where we’d started and none of us had our bearings in this neighborhood, but the café we landed at this time was accommodating even for such an improperly early dinner. We laughed over lager and Aperol spritzes, pizza and duck confit, and two hours later said our Parisian goodbyes as we split up again for our separate metros.

To extend the night, Phil suggested we disembark the line 4 a few stops early, and since Centre Pompidou is closed on Tuesdays, we went to Les Halles: a colossal shopping mall with movie theaters, gyms, and plenty of American stores, including another Starbucks for Phil to attempt another Frappuccino (still a bad idea). Les Halles is designed like the Louvre, a maze of discreet boxes validating this city’s labyrinth love affair. We pretended we were at a museum, circling through fluorescent corridors and gazing into glass displays. I tried on a pair of French Adidas, and then the mall closed. Empty-handed but happy to mark a full week here and a life full of love, we walked up the best street in Paris, our street. On the couch we read catacombs history and ate lemon tartes by the clamor of the Tuesday night street party.

**

We set an alarm Wednesday and were standing at Notre-Dame ahead of the crowds. We noticed the ornately carved doors and a statue of our neighborhood’s patron Saint, the martyred Denis, holding his head in his hands. There was no line or ticket, just a quick security check and we were free to roam the cathedral. In the first alcove Phil lit a candle for his bestie Jim, gone four years. In the next one there was a glass box confessional; in the next a cluttered alter where a visitor knelt in prayer. We regarded the window mosaics in each one, read the plaques about every statue and painting, the lessons on Gothic evolution and how the tower bells were hung.

Groups passed us wearing matching scarves or holding sketchbooks, their guides gesturing in low animated tones. In the center of the church people gathered among the pews for we knew not what. The lights flickered as if to signal something. I considered filling my Hydroflask from the holy water vessel but did not. Nor did we climb the stairs to face the gargoyles or the ghost of Quasimodo – we didn’t want to snub our many blessings today.  

Outside we dug up 2€ each and went down some ruined stairs to the poshest public restrooms you can imagine. (Rightly so, since we’d just spent a complimentary hour in the planet’s most famous church and now were paying to use a bathroom.) There was a plaque for the antique tile that paved the hallway, a sundries kiosk where an attendant helped put your euros in the turnstile and select which air freshener to spritz in your stall, and there was a giant glossy photo of the presumed opposite sex taking your photo over every toilet -- fortunately one of us had the presence of mind to capture proof of that sassy décor.

The noon sunshine followed us over Pont Archeveche and we walked east on the left bank to the Jardin des Plantes, the second oldest zoological garden in the world. We considered getting tickets for the menagerie, a third of whose species are endangered, but decided our time was better spent among the flowers. After jambon-beurre baguettes at a picnic table, we went slowly down the garden’s splendidly landscaped aisles. Patches of dahlia, marigold, and black-eyed Susan, rows layered with hostas, aurelias, bluebells, sunflower stalks, and a perimeter of box hedges, meticulously designed but not too precious.

It was another fine quiet stroll, until an air raid siren began to wail. I looked for Phil down the aisle behind me, moving briskly with concern in my direction. There aren’t still air raid sirens in Paris, though, are there? Could we be here at the end of the world? Phil looked at his watch and observed, “It’s noon.” Was it a call to prayer? Since nothing was falling from the sky or exploding in the distance, we strolled on. The Natural History Museum was here, with its Gallery of Evolution at the end of the center aisle, but it would likely take hours to explore, and only churches would draw us away from Paris’s fresh air today.

After the garden we located nearby Arenes de Lutece, a first century amphitheater where gladiators once entertained the crowd. Today the crowd was sparse – we sat on the warm stone bleachers with a few toddler-tending grandmas and a pack of school kids on lunch break. The entertainment was a diverse group of guys playing petenque, a more serious, silver-balled version of bocce that was apparently the national street game. A mellow fall in the wings on a regular Wednesday in the fifth arrondissement, and we just coasting through.

On our way back to the river we happened to pass the Sorbonne, and on the other side we lingered in leafy Jean XXIII square behind Notre-Dame. It was canopied by white flowering trees, with a carpet of grass and sandy gravel. The benches were half-full of elderly locals reading and snacking on stone fruits and fromage. From our own bench, we admired the vibrant presence of Paris’ oldest generation and paused in gratitude for how much of this adventure was being spent outdoors, beneath the clouds and stars of the planet’s other side.  

Our last stop on this most Zen day was the breathtaking St Chapelle. It was a secret hidden in the courtyard of what was once the royal palace and was now a government complex with plenty of armed guards milling around. I was intrigued by its 10€ ticket and slightly confused as I stood inside a chapel a tenth of Notre-Dame’s size. The ceiling was the best part: rich navy fabric flecked with gold fleurs de lis and carved by gold buttresses. My neck got sore and I was calculating a dollar per minute when Phil noticed the staircase – only one spiral flight. At the top was the jewel of the city. Soaring stained glass on three sides with the thinnest bundled columns holding it up, it was less a room than an ethereal floating shield. The glass depicted an intricate chronological narrative of the gospels, and the front arch was built to hold Christ’s crown of thorns. Whether there ever really was such an artifact here, the space was certainly consecrated. A staff person was on hand just for the purpose of periodically shushing the rising din of the crowd. Neither Phil or I uttered a sound except the faint click of the camera shutter.

Returning to Rue St. Denis, we decided to have our first proper, planned neighborhood dinner. We chose Le Pas Sage, a cleverly named spot in an atrium alley of boutiques I’d been appreciating all week: the Passage du Gran Cerf. The inside of the restaurant was handsomely appointed with dark wood and beveled glass, but we couldn’t break our outdoor dining habit; we took a table on the sidewalk ten minutes before dinner service began. We had steak entrecote and risotto (which in Paris is a decadent mac and cheese), and the most divine buttery potatoes (which in Paris they all are). After this remarkable meal we returned to Agadir, where we met elusive Gigi, the bar’s little black cat, and learned more about her owner, Zaid. Raised in Morocco, he had traveled the world, most recently around Thailand and Egypt. He was a guy who knew something about everything, including how to make an excellent Cuba Libre and find all the songs on Spotify that reminded Phil of his own homeland. It was a night we delayed ending for a long while.

**

On Thursday we woke with the wistful sting of only 48 remaining hours. As I had supposed, any less than two weeks here was inadequate; but consolation came with the new clarity that we would return in no time. We ate the last of Tuesday’s pastries in bed, because who cares about crumbs now? Then we rode to my favorite enunciation by the silky-voiced line 9 announcer: Franklin D. Roosevelt. I was eager to finally exit here, and more so with each step up to the street until I stood on the Av. des Champs-Elysees. I don’t know if it was the balmy wind that swept across the storefronts and rustled the sycamore trees, or if it was the legacy of the Elysian Fields, but something here was painting jubilation across our penultimate day.

The Arc du Triomphe, six blocks ahead, was the axis of the 16^th, 17^th, and 8^th arrondissements, but I felt like I was back in the 7^th. The wide street and smooth sidewalks, even as they underwent revision behind temporary construction panels, evoked the same affluence, and here they doubled down with a mile of luxury shopping. We dipped inside for souvenirs at the Renault dealership, the kaleidoscopic Kusmi tea shop, and the gilded Guerlain parfumerie. We walked 180˚ around Rue de Presbourg amidst executives striding to lunch. Phil paused for pictures of L’Arc from every perspective and I haggled with street vendors for a set of abstract drawings. Eventually we realized that access to the monument was through a passageway under the road. A bargain 12€ got us back up to Place de L'Etoile, where we observed France’s tomb of the unknown soldier and eternal flame and stared up at the inscribed columns. Then it dawned on us that we had paid for the spiral stairs to the top.

It was far more stairs than St. Chapelle, twice more than the catacombs. It was a 284-stair climb. Along the way a woman ahead of me flattened herself into a tiny niche to catch her breath, but I made it to a holding chamber where there were bathrooms and a mythical sculpture. Five minutes of fortification and we pressed on to the top, where the searing quads completely paid off. The view – as Napoleon had planned -- was incomparable; all of Paris unfurled below us. There were the avenues and squares, the cars and highway, the river and bridges, the gardens, apartments and cafes, all of it looking like a train set miniature tableau.

The perimeter of the Arc’s roof was reedy steel fence rails five feet high, for safe yet barely obstructed viewing. It was crowded but tranquil; once each group got the selfie they wanted, they moved politely on. Sheltered by another overcast sky, we were in no hurry, sharing schmoopy kisses above the city while we inched toward our own selfie-apt spot in front of the Eiffel Tower. By now I’d known at least a dozen unique views of it.

Halfway down the exit stairs there was a bigger break chamber with a WWII fashion installation, a historical video, and a gift shop. We dallied awhile there before descending to subterranean level and surfacing from under the road right back on the Champs. We had lunch in a covered sidewalk satellite of Visuvio: onion soup and Kir Royales, with rain drizzling on the glass roof. I could have sat there looking at the Arc until sunset.

But there was more to do this day, including smell every French-milled bar in the Marseille soap shop before choosing which five to bring home. We got back to the flat and spent an hour sorting through souvenirs, brochures, and the contents of our refrigerator. There were a hundred things we had not yet done, and above them all Phil wanted to go back to the places we now knew and shoot them by the moonlight. While he organized equipment, I filled my sac with the remains of the cheese, nectarines, and a half-baguette, and we were standing crammed on the number 9 once more.

The Trocadero was full of couples tonight, some of them posing in wedding garb or other finery for professional photos. The closer I scanned, the more models I saw; one woman even pranced by with a preposterous bouquet of red balloons. Meanwhile, Phil stood at the center-most point with his tripod periodically clicking frames of the Eiffel Tower in the darkening sky. I sat snugged on the stone bench behind him, dipping shreds of baguette into another cup of cocoa. The 10pm tower light show started and there was commotion on the steps below us – a pair of fire dancers. Bonus shots. When their set ended, we got back on the train.

We stopped at our apartment again to add boozy provisions to my sac. We jostled through the neighborhood with them and set up the tripod at the south end of Pont Archeveche under a street clock that said 11:15. Teenagers on the quay below us danced around a boom box blasting American pop. We were joined by a Swedish tourist, with his wife and a local friend in tow, who set up his own tripod next to Phil’s. Not only was this a popular spot to shoot Notre-Dame, it was also the famous bridge covered with locks left by every Paris visitor in love -- until the locks weighed enough to threaten the bridge and were removed a few years ago.

The Swedish photographer’s friend doled out city trivia and his wife shivered, imploring them to go; we departed shortly after them. At midnight we were standing in the familiar cathedral plaza, its Ratatouille reputation suddenly on display. Long-tailed vermin scurried by the dozens around brimming trash bins and into holes below the concrete bench on which I perched. It was no longer charming and now I was imploring my husband to go, but truly more out of tiredness than fright. I had not been frightened here yet, of rats or ghosts or even more practical midnight dangers. It was still delicious to be outside, by the river and its swishing palms in the moonlight, all the people still wandering the streets around us feeling like a world of friends. 

**

I woke first on Friday and instead of waiting for Phil I put on a sundress, black cardigan and ballet flats, and roamed my second arrondissement alone, passing for Parisian I was sure, so long as I didn’t speak. I made my own bank withdrawal, dawdled in many shops and checked all the gifts off my list – jam, jewelry, scarves, chocolate, and one French outfit from the MonoPrix (French Target) for moi. I leaned against a centuries-old wall, with my petite takeaway Earl Grey in one hand and a cigarette in the other, shopping bags dangling from each arm. I had arrived.  

Phil was up and about in time for one more train ride, to Saint Germain and the Latin Quarter. We might have spent a whole day exploring there but the more urgent call was to one more museum. We walked along the river (too far after all yesterday’s walking) to the D’Orsay. And it was the best thing.

An intimate blue room of Van Gogh; another of Gaugin; Dega’s little dancer. Architecture and Art Nouveau furniture; a plaster model of Rodin’s Divine Comedy, originally commissioned to be the museum’s doors. All of it radiant under the skylight dome of a Beaux-Artes railway station. On upper floors, clearly navigable, were the Monets, Cezannes, Seurats, and best of all the Renoirs; Dance in the City made my heart sing. Manet’s Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets was my Mona Lisa. We missed Whistler’s Mother but enjoyed the opulent restaurant and cushion-filled rooftop lounge, with its patio statues and Sacre Coeur view through the train clock window.

I instinctively took a picture of every great painting, which is a strange thing to do since you can see such a picture anywhere online, but somehow my own picture would help whisk me back onto my own feet standing in front of it. Only exhaustion constrained me from staying longer.

The bright sun was baking the afternoon on the arduous walk back, our last along the Seine; at the end of it we rested at Agadir for an hour. Then we sluggishly packed up the flat, setting two changes of clothes aside – one for the morning and one for a protracted dinner at Café Montorgueil tonight, ending where we began. Phil had another entrecote, and I had my first French burger, topped with a slice of foie gras and worth every decadent bite. The impeccable frites recalled to me the repellent notion of “freedom fries,” and how thickheaded ‘Mericans – no doubt including me sometimes -- could be. Now I knew.

A Friday night mob slowly swamped the tables all around us, but we did not want to leave. Since the Frog & Rosbif that first mystified night, aside from pastries and snacks in the flat, we had eaten every meal and drank most beverages on the sidewalk. To be so much outside was heaven. I wanted to find the perfect dessert at a new place on another sidewalk somewhere, but it was not meant to be – and really not needed; each sweet I’d sampled throughout the trip had been perfect. Instead we closed out, of course, at our home bar, where Zaid was glad to see us a second time today because it was our last. My dessert was spiked cocoa, and after I took a picture of Phil with our host, I left him there to file away all the pining he could. The long lovely walk had come to an end.

On Saturday we wanted no rushing, so the Uber arrived first thing. He careened through traffic the same as our first driver had but dropped us off at what seemed like a different airport – Departures at CDG was serene and strewn with flower pots. The ride back to Reykjavik was a mirror of the ride there but we had a much broader encounter at that airport, too, including being abruptly separated while Phil got randomly detained in some antechamber, being radically overcharged for rations at a food court resembling an extreme Ikea cafe, and finding the most convenient in-terminal smoking breezeway on earth. We took a bus across the tarmac to the plane again, so I can attest that the Iceland atmosphere was completely unchanged.    

It was only 10pm on Saturday when we walked in our own front door, so I guess that was the longest day of my life so far. On Sunday it was good to be home at home, with a huge new room in our minds completely decorated. Instead of looking through the window we now sit comfortably inside it whenever we like. We turn the missed things into plans for next time… Picasso and Cluny, Harry’s and the Opera, L’Orangerie, La Menagerie, the Carousel and Gargoyles, Les Deux Magots and Luxembourg and Gertrude Stein. Sneaking a lock onto Pont Archeveche at dawn, leaving a piece of me as payment for all the precious things I took away. Now that I’ll know where I am, I want to walk from Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe to the Trocadero and back along the droit quay. Because the metro is for errands and party appointments, but walking – even while zigzagging -- is the thing in Paris. And orange juice, crepes, potatoes, chicken, fashion, bike riding, sidewalks, smoking, bocce, grandparents, cats, cemeteries, sirens, bar food, bathrooms, glass, and water fountains.

There’s a hole left where the long dream was when the dream comes true, and then there's the art of lived experience that collects beside the hole, filling it when any memory appears, bolstering the melancholy heart.