Paris, Je t’aime!
Paris, I embraced you the first time I visited in 1984. There was something enchanting about you that I hadn’t felt visiting any other city. It was like a magical aura that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Over the years, I have read about you, visited you over and over and the affair continues.
“J’ai deux amours. Mon pays et Paris” I have two loves, sang Josephine Baker… My country and Paris. Like Josephine Baker, a black American who absconded to France to find freedom of expression and from racial discrimination in the 1930’s, you have welcomed people from many countries seeking the same. Marc Chagall came to Paris from Russia the first time in 1910. He once said, “If I had not gone to Paris, I would not be who I am. There was no greater revolution of the eye than the one I found when I arrived. The sun of art shone only in Paris.”
When I hear the song “J’ai deux amours”, my heart becomes full and my soul becomes replenished. Because, Paris, you are the City of Light. You have the ability to bewitch us, especially if one loves the arts, food and fashion, as I do. You pull us into your beauty, your secrets and if one is curious enough, you pull us into your history.
There are many who just come to visit your famous monuments, your famous Tour Eiffel, your Arc de Triompe, the iconic symbol of French national identity. Or they marvel at your lady, Notre Dame.
But I come to you for more. I love to walk down your streets, or follow the Seine, walk over your many bridges as you connect me to your Left Bank or your Right Bank. I discover plaques on the walls, secret passages, read your street signs and metro signs that are named in honor of your people and places that formed your history. I look up to see your unique architecture or visit your little boutiques with items showcased in the windows that pull you into the store to try on, to touch and maybe to take your money. “Bonjour Madame, pouvez-vous m’aider”…Good day, Madame, can you help me? Inevitably, when she does, I bring home shoes or clothes or little things that have the “stamp” of being Parisian, French.
Each of your 20 arrondissements shows different sides of your personality, each having its own monuments, cafes, restaurants, museums or parks. For example, there are the posh 16th and 8th arrondissements lined with designer boutiques and ateliers. Or the Jewish section of the Marais, the 3rd and 4th, to name a few. Many of your arrondissements have their own marchés full of colorful fruits and vegetables, smells of fromageries, boulangeries, patisseries.
Ah, French fromageries, each emanating its unique smell and taste. It’s like trying to decipher a secret language. Some cheeses taste “barnyardy”, “yeasty”, “grassy” and “nutty”. Describing the flavor and aroma of cheese can be challenging but the tastes are uniquely sensual.
Your boulangeries send waves of smells unto the street that draw you in for a fresh baguette still warm from the oven or a sandwich that when you bite into it the crust crunches between your teeth but the inside is soft.
Your patisseries showcase decorative pastries of beautiful colors and shapes filled with custards, cream or they just have delicate, flaky crusts. The chocolate of some pastries paint the inside of our mouth with a flavor that you suck on till it is sadly dissolved.
Your cafes fill the streets. I walk by some thinking that those cafes have housed, nourished and incubated some of the 20th century’s most significant artists and thinkers such as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Picasso, Janet Flaner, Ernest Hemingway.
A visit to your museums display art and modes of fashion in such a way that I come away wanting to know more, delighting in the exhibits of colors, explanation and imagination.
And finally, the people of Paris are a mixture of natives and tourists absorbed in getting from place to place, rushing up and down the stairs of the metro, crowding into buses. I love coming to you in the early morning and taking time to sit at one of your cafes with a coffee, a tartine with butter and confiture or a flaky croisssant, mindfully observing the people scurrying about, your street cleaners washing the streets, the sounds of the trucks picking up the trash.
Your essence is all that is desirable in city life, in art, fashion, literature, history. Your culture is unique in this way. It is the singular spot I go knowing the avant-garde continually shaped your society, our society. This is your distinctive alchemy that you provide. Je t’aime Paris!
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