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Paris was next on my whistle-stop tour, and I threw it in at least partly because I overdid it on Hemingway this fall. Well, not just Hemingway; there's also Rilke, who wrote: "I am in Paris. People who hear this are glad; most of them envy me. They're right. It is a great city, great and filled with strange temptations." While here, I visited the Musée Rodin and learned that Rilke and Rodin were friends, and wondered, as I ambled past shops and brasseries, who of these writers and artists had been here, or here, or here. But I also wondered about our ideas of Paris, the way the city is structured in our minds. I hadn't entirely wanted to come here. I didn't need to see the Eiffel Tower (though now I have), and something about this city's reputation--pretentious, romantic--never quite captured me. Except then--reading about the Lost Generation, reading Rilke's 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge'--it did. So I added Paris to the itinerary.
I rented a shoebox apartment for the handful of nights I was in the city, on the fourth floor of a canalside building on the north side of town, close to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. To reach most of the conventional tourist sites I had to catch the metro or trek several miles, but the neighborhood was lively and I could get a baguette and an almond croissant from the bakery on the corner for just over two Euros, which is a privilege that shouldn't be discounted. The New York Times recently ran an article called 'My European Ritual,' which asked the residents of various European cities to describe their rituals. For the few days I was there, my Paris ritual was as simple as this: going down four flights of spiral stairs, walking to the corner, buying a baguette and an almond croissant, eating the croissant for breakfast while I drank tea and made the baguette into sandwiches. It's the sort of touchstone that makes away feel a little bit like home. And then I would walk out into the city, which was awash with sun, which was very old and very large and had plenty of stories to tell. I didn't have time to listen to all of them, but I heard a few--most notably in the small, idiosyncratic, Musée National Gustave-Moreau--and that was enough to convince me: Paris is a great city, and so much more than I had (naively, I think) anticipated.