Ah, Paris!

     Ah, Paris! City of sensual delights and of history—political, literary, and from the arts—at every turn.

     The interior of La Sainte Chapelle was drenched in color. The tall, narrow, stained-glass windows that form the walls of the narrow nave saturated the chapel with rich reds and blues that floated on currents of music as the pianist played Schumann, Grieg, Massenet, something from a contemporary composer who was in the audience, and another Schumann piece that she played from her heart and from memory. The air was filled with aural color, and if the hundreds of small sections of stained glass told Bible stories, the chords and trills of the piano created other stories. It was a concert of sensual delights.

    The best of French cuisine was also a sensual delight. The lunch my traveling partner, Will Holton, and I had at the one-star Michelin restaurant la Granite started with an amuse-bouche in three parts, to be eaten in a particular order as directed by the wait person, each with such a complexity of tastes I had to stop with each bite to allow my mouth to contemplate the experience. And so it went, course after course. Something with rooibos. Turbot in a red sauce (that might have been the rooibos). Ice cream in a salad. Burned bread crumbs on a side dish that somehow didn't taste burned. Textures as varied as the flavors—crunchy, smooth, liquidy, thick, thin, creamy, hard, soft—on and on. Each dish a marvel. Something sweet with main dishes. Vinaigrettes with a dessert. How did they make it all work?

    At the Musée d'Orsay, I saw, among other famous Impressionist paintings, Manet's "Déjeuner Sur l'Herbe"—the one with the naked woman picnicking with two clothed men—and another version by Manet in which the three women at the picnic were clothed, in long, heavy, Victorian dresses and bustles. No wonder, I thought, the other woman had taken off her clothes. I would have, too.

   In the evenings people thronged the streets and crowded the outdoor cafes and restaurants, drinking, smoking, talking, flirting. I had read how hard it was on Parisians not to be able to sit at their cafes during COVID, but I didn't understand quite what that meant until I saw how Paris comes alive at night. It was a young crowd, as though COVID had left only young people in Paris. And they all seemed to smoke. We could hardly eat dinner, at these outdoor places, without cigarette smoke drifting around us. 

    Driven around the city on a Tuk-Tuk tour, in a little open-sided electric vehicle wielded by a driver named Habib, I felt like I was in Midnight in Paris. Here we were at the excavated Roman arena, where gladiators fought lions. Then we were at Le Procope,

Le Procope

the cafe where coffee was introduced to France in the eighteenth century and where revolutionaries plotted the French Revolution and Benjamin Franklin charmed French women. And, of course, Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower and Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe, but my favorite stop was at Les Deux Magots, the famous cafe of literary greats whom I had read as a student of French literature. Here Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Gide, Giraudoux, Picasso, Hemingway, Sartre, Beauvoir, and, now, Diana Coogle, Will Holton, and Habib, have had their tiny cups of espresso. 

At Les Deux Magots                (photo by Habib)