Returning to Paris, October 2021

Every visit to Paris is an encounter with the inexhaustible ideal of style. Even though I once lived here, I find myself tipsy with the sights and smells and sheer beauty of it all, even before I sip the crisp Pouilly-Fumé that somehow tastes better in Paris. 

Here, life is lived on the streets in the most swirling and satisfying ways. In this city I am always hungry: the smells of coffee and patisseries surround me as I run along the Canal Saint Martin; on rue Montorgueil we are torn between multiple bistros for dinner, our mouths watering with the possibilities of fresh fish and autumn’s mushroom bounty.

We visit the newly reopened le Musée Carnavalet — the city’s oldest museum, dedicated to celebrating the history of this illuminated city. The current retrospective exposition of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson reminds us how his work is so embedded in the history and vision of Paris that my friend, who thought she was not familiar with his work, kept murmuring, ‘I know this picture . . .’ With his images in my mind, I am thinking about how an artist can shape our idea of a place — Paris becomes the time-misted, complicated, fleeting glimpses that Cartier-Bresson captured: the days of liberation, the children on Paris streets whose poverty does not diminish their intense play, the women walking as though they aren’t being watched, knowing very well they are watched . . . All his images catch moments of motion and hold them frozen in time: I am aware of a tilting skirt, a leaping man, a glance across a room. None of these movements may be remarkable in themselves, but by being captured in the instant they become eternal. In this and many other ways, our visit to the Carnavalet has me thinking about Proust’s explorations. Finding on the rue de Sevigne the entrance to the building that was home to Mme Sevigne, the 17^th century journalist beloved by Marcel’s grandmother, is only the start of the threads of connection to Proust. 

Travelling is different in these pandemic days. Each café requires proof of our vaccinated status; I find this is reassuring. I wonder if I am also newly alive to the allure of foreign spaces and unknown faces. The months of enclosure have made me hungry – and Paris feeds the senses voluptuously.