And so back to Paris. And this time it felt like “home.” I went straight to the hotel, dropped off my bags, and set back out on (limping) foot to run some critical errands, starting with replenishing my cologne and related personal care items at Hermès (even though I was dressed like a pig), which was the top of the list.

This time, Paris welcomed me. I felt like I was back home in the place I’d always been and everything was right. She even gave me a few gifts by way of apology, it seemed, to make up for leaving me so adrift last time: after the Hermès trip I walked by the church of Sainte Trinité, almost by force of habit, and found the pastry shop that I couldn’t find with Ian two weeks before. And there were my figues. I almost screamed in surprise and joy when I turned the corner and saw them. I went inside, bought two, and tried to express to the politely baffled woman working the cash register that I’d been enjoying these since 1989 and have never found their like anywhere else…. Then, just as I often used to do in 1989 and 1998, I crossed the street and ate one of the figues in the little park in front of the church. And I was deliriously happy.

Imagine my surprise when I found Liptonic, the carbonated iced-tea I used to drink back in 1989, at the Franprix down the road from the hotel…I haven’t seen or tasted that stuff in 13 years but it was exactly as I remembered and have missed.

Another surprise I got after visiting Hermès was when I turned a corner at a major intersection and looked, in some confusion, at a big building I didn’t recognize at all. It was the Garnier Opera. Ian had mentioned that it had had a full exterior cleaning sometime since my last time in Paris, but nothing prepared me for the magnitude of its transformation. It was ornate before, all grey and copper-green and black, and little else save flashes of gilding; now it’s bristling with exuberance and color to such a degree that Carpeaux’s lovely “Genie de la Danse” (one of the pieces I loved at the Musée d’Orsay on first viewing, in 1989) is almost an afterthought now. REALLY impressive.

Back in the Caulaincourt neighborhood, I started a load of laundry and, despite my aching foot, I walked down rue Caulaincourt and around to the Place des Abbesses, where a sort of street-fair atmosphere was coloring the dusk with a small-town ambiance which Montmartre’s “belt” still can pull off. Small white cylindrical speakers were mounted along the buildings and joined with wire, and these speakers were discreetly filling the street with party music and encouraging the crowd to relax and enjoy things. I gathered this was one of Delanoë’s initiatives to enliven the city, but perhaps it’s more local than that.

I strolled up to the parvis in front of Sacre Coeur and stood there for a long time looking at the city stretched out before me. It wasn’t the classic Paris view, as it was a bit after sunset and the sky was dark, only dusty rose along the horizons, but even in its darkness I could enjoy Notre Dame and most of the Eiffel Tower. And Sacre Coeur itself, of course, when I was done “drinking in” my favorite place in its evening gown.

It was a lovely night, only a little sad as I thought about the fact that I would soon be back in Seattle, up to my neck in irritations and anxieties again in no time. But I’d had a strangely full journey, and I would return to Seattle armed with experiences and thoughts of better places to get back to…not a very optimistic return attitude, but a pragmatic one.

That should have been the end of my Paris visit and of this narrative, but in fact I had another day to spend there. And the next day I managed to walk my limping foot nearly to pulp just because I couldn’t stay in one place under the circumstances of my stay. Initially it was meant as a quick shopping trip to BHV for shirts (which was successful, actually, though far more expensive than I had intended), but shortly after that it turned into a wandering stroll in unhurried search of a good place to sit and write in southeastern Paris.

If I had paid sufficient attention to my maps of that section of Paris, or even recalled my own memories of it from 1989 and 1998, I would have headed to any other part of town. But I didn’t, and that’s how I ended up walking along the Seine’s freeway flanks searching first for a bridge to the south bank and then for a green space where I could not just write but even REST, limping as I was by that point. The only real benefit of this painful, fruitless odyssey was that I got to walk through a few construction sites which combined from-ground-up chantiers with renovation projects. The bulk of what I walked through was just upstream from the recent Mitterand library (at the Tolbiac terminus of the new Métro; line 14, which incidentally I rode within hours of its opening in 1998, but that’s another story), and it seems destined to be a mass of ritzy apartment blocks crowded too close together. There was an old mill of some sort there too that was indicated as being set for renovation, but I didn’t get an idea of what was planned for it from the signage….

Eventually I took the Métro to Parc André Citroën, which I decided I liked last time I was in town, and took refuge there to rest my feet awhile. When I finally did get back to the hotel I was unsure of how to end the day except with a little dinner at the foot of Montmartre…I probably took a nap, but I don’t recall at the moment. What I remember for sure is dining at Préface (see sidebar) and having a nice quiet Montmartre evening of it. And then I headed out to have my last night farewell view of the city, starting with my favorite view of the Eiffel Tower from the Chaillot Palace…except that it didn’t happen. I had dined too late and forgotten about the hotel’s curfew…the exact hour of which I then couldn’t remember for sure.

In a near-panic, I rushed to the Métro and hastily calculated last-minute viewing options. Under the circumstances it seemed I would have time only to get to the Place de la Concorde and back, and I was quite disappointed by this discovery. Nevertheless I went. It turned out to be easily the next best thing to the intended view. Somehow I had completely forgotten that the Place de la Concorde is a major nexus of the city’s grandest axes: from there you can see half of Paris’s major monuments at least in part if not in full. And I revelled in it—the Arc de Triomphe, alight at the other end of the Champs Élysées…the Eiffel Tower, just down the Seine…the National Assembly directly across the Seine…the Louvre through the Tuileries, with a bit of Notre Dame just beyond…the Madeleine…Sacre-Coeur atop Montmartre…and of course the obelisk and fountains of the Place de la Concorde itself, ringed by the statues on their thrones and the gold-tipped spears of the Tuileries fencing. I just stood there, slowly rotating and glorying in everything I could see. It was an immensely satisfying night, and I wafted off to sleep back at the hotel without another thought.

Took the RoissyBus out to the airport the next morning, this time calmly, almost dreamily, watching the city wake up and get moving as the bus passed through the suburbs. No trouble at CDG…no trouble on the flights…no trouble getting back home in Seattle…only the dread of going back to my office in the morning clouded this last leg of the trip.

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Text © 2003 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted