On the face of the Palais de Chaillot, just across the river from the Eiffel Tower, the
In this perfumed light the city seems full of promise, and the effect is especially strong if you’re down three glasses of Pinot Noir, which you should be by now. I’ve been staring at monuments all day, each more grand than the last, and my vocabulary for describing architectural grandeur is more tired than my feet. All that is left in my head is an intoxicating promise about this city, which has desire etched so unabashedly across it.
When I arrived in Paris, I had desired only to understand what all the fuss was about. I had packed plenty of scepticism that any modern metropolis could have such undiluted charms. I hopped off the airport shuttle-bus like a tax auditor: badly dressed and keen to cut things down to size. I looked around. I was at the foot of the Grande Opera, bobbing under the curl of a monster-wave of gallant baroque art, foot upon foot, frieze upon frieze, angel stacked upon golden angel. I stepped back. The wave crashed down on my head. When I came to the surface again, I changed my mind about Paris.
First thing first. “This is the first place everybody come,” the line attendant confirmed, “And the one place everybody come.” In fact the Eiffel Tower is the most-visited tourist attraction in the world. For a structure of wrought iron and rivets, it is terribly tall, soaring up and up and up and getting in a good prod at the belly of the sky. You immediately want to get to the top, to survey the full expanse of the city. Unfortunately, in the summer, the queues are so long you are expected to spend up to two hours eating frites with mayonnaise and waiting for your ticket. This implies a leisurely pace that few visitors to Paris ever enjoy.
The view from the top of the Eiffel Tower is stunning, and I didn’t see it. Instead I took the metro to the Tour Montparnasse, the tallest and most disliked building in the city, with the fastest elevator in Europe. The viewing gallery at the top is not exactly as high, but the wait is less than thirty seconds, it costs less to go, and there is a bar. Best of all, the view from the top includes the lovely Eiffel Tower (whereas the view from the Eiffel Tower includes the unlovely Tour Montparnasse).
From this lofty post, the first thing to strike you is Paris’ uncanny uniformity, raked into perfect isosceles triangles, and the triangles into larger triangles, like an obsessive Zen garden. This accounts for much of the splendour of the city viewed from the ground: tall buildings with stately façades, flanking the long, wide boulevards, which converge in spacious plazas.
The city looked nothing like this until the 1860s, when Baron Haussman obliterated the medieval city, and raised in its place a grandiose capital: organised, beautified, more resistant to disease, horse-carriage traffic jams and civil unrest. Haussman’s plan became the genetic code for Central Paris, the reason it has the same aesthetic today as it did a century and a half ago. Still, every succeeding era has managed to place its stamp on the city. Paris makes a virtue of the contrasts.
The view from Montparnasse is especially poignant because it superimposes the Eiffel Tower onto the centre of a clutch of modern highrises further in the distance. This is La Defense, the business district, the only area in Paris where multi-storey buildings have that sleazy, glass-plated look popular everywhere else in the world. There is a temptation to sneer at the existence of the area, and most Parisians do.
But I found one of Paris’ most superb monuments at the heart of La Defense. The high rises circle around it furtively, like a group of conservative suits at an anarchist poetry-slam, guarding the newly hatched Grande Arche de la Fraternité. The Grande Arche is a modern response — high, smooth planes and clean joints — to the Arc de Triomphe down the same street. It is startling, the architectural equivalent of a snap of static electricity from a metal banister on a cold day.
The Arc de Triomphe was a monument to martial virtues and military victory; the Grande Arche is a monument to humanitarian values. It currently houses the ministry of ecology, energy and sustainable development: the gesture to the future is obvious. There is no more city beyond La Defense, and all you can see through the Arche is a windowful of sky and a fringe of wooded hills. It sets you thinking, what Arch will appear next, two kilometres and one century away, and what values will it celebrate?
Turning back to the city, the Grande Arche is one terminus of the Axe historique, the historical axis. Down the road is the Arc de Triomphe, and from there unfurls the boulevard Champs-Elysées, whose very name sounds like a romantic exhalation. Sadly, the Champs-Elysées is now the capital’s main capital-trap: I personally only laid eyes on two McDonalds in Paris, both on the Champs-Elysées. They looked not at all out of place between the megastores and multiplexes advertising blockbusters with Brendan Fraser. Eventually, there it was, a Virgin Megastore, sealing the verdict: the Champs-Elysées is the new Times Square.
The boulevard bears on — past the glass-domed Grand Palais, through the Place de la Concorde — and pulls up at the foot of a long manicured park, the Jardins des Tuileries. Beyond is the Louvre. The halls of the Louvre itself are vast, but they seem to overflow onto the Tuileries, which are studded with sculpture, as though art were music, and the Louvre a powerful boombox. Between the fountains, the Rodins and the sunbathers, the Tuileries in the summer fit a pretty uncontroversial idea of paradise. Given the horizon-to-horizon expanse of things to do in summertime Paris, there is only one categorical imperative: eat sorbet. Your basic lemon sorbet, eaten in the sun, is so electrifyingly good it leaves the mouth tingling like a bell for seconds after each lick. If you’re thirsty afterward, or homesick, find the pack of lads from Haryana, here illegally via Moscow, who control the bottled-water trade in the front courtyard of the Louvre.
In an ideal world, every visitor to Paris would have a week to spend in the Louvre alone. In this world, most people have about an hour. A visit to Paris is usually a race against time, an exercise in cultural triage, and the Louvre is the most vivid example. Many visitors storm through it, whizzing past Etruscan sculpture and Rembrandt canvases, their eyes fixed on the museum map, panting after one postage stamp of a painting. In the end the Mona Lisa, seen through the bullet-proof glass barrier and the lightning-storm of camera flashes, looks like nothing so much as a bleary-eyed housewife, bemused by her throng of paparazzi. Whatever her magic, it was lost on me, especially after Delacroix’s masterpiece of High Romantic sex and violence, The Death of Sardanapalus, in the previous room.
Behind the Louvre is the Opera area, the fashion district, where clothing boutiques are so intimate and specialised that there are showrooms dealing exclusively in ribbons. Others sell high-end bric-a-brac, such as a stuffed and mounted polar bear (30,000 euros — “Very expensive,” the saleswoman said to me, “They are almost finish in nature.”).
Eventually I got tired of worrying that every building I walked by was something famous I ought to know. I turned toward Montmartre, where the seams of the Haussman order gently come undone. This is the Paris of Amelie, of sloping cobbled streets curling one way and then another in a lazy anarchy that it is easy, and rewarding, to get lost in. Painters work in the square. Shop-fronts are decorated with drowsy Art Nouveau maidens. Vineyards are still tended here.
My appetite hopping after the stairways up the hill, I realise how the French have hung on to their reputation as the paragons of good eating. The narrow streets of Montmartre are jammed with pâtisseries, boulangeries, fromageries and charcuteries (pastry shops, bakeries, cheese shops, butchers), everywhere and irresistible. To an empty stomach, it is as if Paris sits above a deep aquifer of good eats, which are forced up through vents into a million streetside locations, where smoked hams and raspberry éclairs and quiches spill out on the street. And down in the Metro, in the dingy corners where shops usually sell chewing gum and dirty magazines, they sell fresh fruit.
It is a quick eastward Metro ride from rosé-tinted village Paris to the postcolonial cosmopolis in Belleville. Paris is still predominantly a Caucasian city, which is surprising, given the media sensations regularly caused by France’s struggle with multiculturalism and immigration. The fact is, of course, that most minorities are relegated to the banlieue, the suburbs, and not necessarily the friendlier ones. So Belleville, the melting pot of Paris, is a great place to catch a glimpse of a future, multiracial French nation. I arrived in Paris with the obvious, limited picture of who the French are. It was nicely enlarged by the sight of Vietnamese, Arabs, black Africans, Eastern Europeans, Orthodox Jews and even some South Asians rubbing shoulders with each other with seemingly little friction, and none of them understanding a word I said.
I finally met somebody who could explain the abstract feeling of promise on that evening. Julie was a doctoral student studying Paris, so she spoke with authority. “This city is about chance encounters,” she said, “When you go out, you never know what will happen. You keep finding these conversations, connections with everyone. It is completely unpredictable — and exactly what was missing in my life before.”
I had my own serendipitous meeting that day. It seems incurious to go to Paris to visit an English bookshop, but I needed a book, and Shakespeare & Company is no ordinary bookshop. It is a metaphor for the way this city has shaped English literature, as much as it has French. Downstairs is full of the dignity of literature and smell of old books. Upstairs is a jumbled library full of impossibly rare books, and tucked in corners, some thin-mattressed beds and sleeping bags, a nightly resting place for any tumbleweeds blowing through, ragged young writers who can live there for free.
That evening I was tired of walking, tired of awesome beauty, deeply tired of parlez-vous Anglais? I tramped up the stairs and there at a desk, under a spear of sunlight, gloriously illuminated as any miracle, was a fellow named Beckett whom I had known years before. When we were in college, we drank together on Sunday nights and talked literature. Now I had found him again, in the very room in which Ethan Hawke re-encounters Julie Delpy in Before Sunset.
Beckett was one of the tumbleweeds, spending his days pecking at the oxidised keys of the typewriters lying around the shop. “Sort of a residency for hobos,” he said, and told me the story of the place. Shakespeare & Company was founded at the beginning of the last century, and became the literary adda for the writers of the Lost Generation floating around Paris — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, James Joyce. The shop was shut down by the Nazis, and when it reopened it became home base for the writers of the Beat Generation floating around Paris — Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. The new shop was run by an American named George Whitman (“the illegitimate grandson of Walt,” I was told) and his motto, inscribed above a door, is: ‘Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers, Lest They Be Angels in Disguise’. So he provides a roost for both writers and wanna-Beats.
Beckett took me to a dinner of steak tartare. He told me about how, according to Roland Barthes, the French intellectual’s taste for eating steak raw is “a magic spell against the association between sensitiveness and sickliness”. We talked about what was happening with the youth, which in a word is bobo — bourgeois boheme, yuppies who dress up like impoverished artists. It has been a long time since 1968. We went drinking, to a bobo salt-lick called La Perle, where three-quarters of the tables indoors were empty, but the sidewalk outside was so crowded that the bar had a guy just walking up and down, keeping drinkers’ feet off the road (smoking has been banned at public establishments since January, and the shock is still settling in). We did Paris. He wasn’t Julie Delpy, but it was serendipity sure enough. By ten o’clock, when that perfumed light descended again, it felt like a promise kept.
The must-do list
> The Louvre (+33-1-40-20-57-60, www.louvre.fr) first, of course: 35,000 pieces across 60,000 sq m. Next the Notre Dame cathedral. And finally the Sacré-Coeur Basilica atop Montmartre.
> If you enjoy your art away from the madding crowd, Paris is full of personal museums — Rodin, Picasso, Delacroix, Dali. The Musee d’Orangerie holds a mounting of Monet’s Les Nymphéas that curves around on all four walls. If you’re going museum-hopping, get a Museum Pass (2-day: € 30, 4-day: € 45, 6-day: € 60), which can be bought online at www.parismuseumpass.com.
> Paris is an awesome city for communing with the dead. Among its prestigious cemeteries: Père Lachaise (Oscar Wilde’s tomb is covered with lipstick-kisses, Jim Morrison’s with beer cans), Montparnasse (Baudelaire, Baudrillard, Beauvoir, Beckett — and that’s just the Bs) and Montmartre (Nijinsky, Truffaut). National heroes rest at the Pantheon (Voltaire, Rousseau). The greatest is Napoleon’s tomb in Les Invalides: not since the Pharaoh Khufu has a mortal received such a majestic place of burial.
> In between chasing monuments, rest your feet in the gorgeous parks. The prettiest is Parc des Butte-Chaumont.
Where to eat
> The morning staple is coffee and a sandwich — baguette with jambon (ham) and/or fromage (cheese, often Camembert) — from a neighbourhood bakery. Don’t underestimate how satisfying these are. In Montmartre, visit Le Coquelicot (24, rue des Abbesses, 18e). Rue Montorgueil in the 2e is a hip promenade lined with bistros and delis. Le Maison Stohrer (51, rue Montorgueil) is renowned for inventing the rum baba.
> Parisian street-food is more the child of tourism than tradition, but crêpes (with fruit, chocolate or preserves) are an excellent snack. Sorbets and Italian gelatos are unmissable.
> Find a brasserie for sit-down meals. Classics you might want to try include onion soup, escargot and steaks. Steak is quintessentially French, usually with frites on the side, and its preparations can vary from crispy brochettes of beef to steak tartare (raw marinated beef). Brasserie Balzar (49, rue des Ecoles, 5e) is famous for its steak tartare and other old-fashioned dishes like pigs’ feet and calves’ livers.
> Brasseries are always generous with their options of wines and beers. If you’re on a budget, be wary of being served Evian (billed at around € 5 and can add up to more than your wine tab).
> Every immigrant wave has added a piece to Paris’ culinary mosaic, so consider these areas for non-French cuisine: Rue des Rosiers in the Marais is the Jewish district, great for Middle Eastern food. Try Chez Marianne, which is hugely popular for falafel-on-the-go. The Barbes is the Arab district, and has a large Saturday morning street market on Blvd de la Chapelle, full of Senegalese in boubous and Algerians in jallabeyyas. Have couscous at Restaurant Milano (86, Blvd de la Chapelle, 18e). The Chinatown in the 13e speaks for itself; a better-kept secret is the cluster of Sri Lankan Tamil restaurants near Gare du Nord station.
Getting there
Virtually every major airline connects Indian cities with Paris. Air France and Air India offer direct flights between Delhi/Mumbai and Paris. But fares get a lot lower if you’re willing to settle for one-stop flights: Aeroflot and Gulf Air usually offer the best fares (as low as Rs 21,000 for a economy-class return ticket). Our team flew very comfortably on Etihad Airways, with a convenient connecting flight in Abu Dhabi, for approximately Rs 33,000.
Getting around
Paris is one of the easiest cities in the world to get around. With its densely knit Metro system, you never find yourself more than three blocks from a station.
Still, in the summer, you want to spend as much time as possible above ground: the best sightseeing happens in transit. Walking is popular. Some souls opt for city tours on Segways, the two-wheeled personal transporters.
Parisians themselves are avid bikers. The cycling tradition recently received a shot in the arm in the form of Vélib: vélo liberté, the freedom bicycle. The city is dotted with Vélib stands, and with the swipe of a card, members can take a bike from designated stands in any area and stash it in a stand elsewhere in the city. Tickets can be bought online at www.velib.paris.fr (one day: € 1; seven days: € 5).
Tours
If escorted tours are more your thing, several companies offer a full range of services — from guided minivan tours (with pick-up and drop-off at your hotel) to lunch and dinner cruises on the Seine to private vehicle tours. Minivan tours typically cost € 56 for a 3.5hr tour; the Hop On Hop Off tour is much cheaper, at € 29 (one day)/€ 32 (two days), and a choice of four routes. Tours can be booked at the Paris Tourist Office website
Where to stay
High end Paris has arguably the world’s most delicious collection of grand hotels. Most of these occupy formidable real estate in the heart of Paris, and offer extreme luxury for very high prices indeed. Le Meurice (from € 720; +33-1-44-58-10-75, www.lemeurice.com) is located between the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre, a landmark of Art Nouveau architecture and décor (see pg 71). There’s a long list of other hotels in the same bracket: leading the pack is of course the enduringly elegant Ritz (from € 680; 43-16-30-30, www.ritzparis.com). Then there’s Le Bristol (from € 710; 53-43-43-00, www.hotel-bristol.com , Four Seasons Hotel George V (from € 695; 49-52-70-00, www.fourseasons.com), Hotel d’Aubusson (from € 305; 43-29-43-43, www.hoteldaubusson.com), Plaza Athénée (from E520; 53-67-66-65, www.plaza-athenee-paris.com).
Moderate and budget If you don’t have the means or the inclination for the super-luxurious hotel, you have a choice of broadly two kinds of accommodation. One is the traditional Paris small hotel — charming rather than opulent, old-fashioned rather than trendy, these old hotels offer a lovely way to experience the world’s most charming city. There are literally hundreds of these around town, with room rates ranging from about € 60 to over € 200. The Hotel des Grandes Ecoles (€ 113-138; 43-26-79-23, www.hotel-grandes-ecoles.com) is a haven of peace in the middle of the student area with a lovely garden. Other recommended hotels include Hotel Saintonge (€ 105-170; 42-77-91-13, www.saintongemarais.com), Hotel Saint-Merry (€ 160-400; 42-78-14-15, www.hotel-saintmerry.com) and Hotel de la Place des Vosges (€ 90-150; 42-72-60-46, www.hotelplacedesvosges.com). An even cheaper option are the MIJE youth hostels (€ 29-47; www.mije.com): the association has three beautiful 17th-century buildings in central Paris.
If you’re impervious to the charm of the small (and generally small-roomed) hotels, the vast Accor Hotels chain has no less than 158 hotels dotted around the city. Their Ibis and Mercure brands, in particular, offer good, clean rooms for very moderate prices — doubles, even in the high season, cost from € 49 onwards. See www.accorhotels.com.
Resources
The Paris Tourist Office is an excellent resource when planning a trip. Their website allows you to book hotels, buy tours and museum passes, Seine cruise tickets and more at www.parisinfo.com. There are also suggested itineraries for short-stay visitors. Altogether highly useful.
Summertime
As lovely as Paris is in the warm weather, the city is never its usual self in the summer (between July and mid-August). Locals abandon the city in huge numbers. Loud ‘SOLDE’ (sale) signs go up in the shop windows. The outdoor life of the city — cultural as well as leisurely — takes wing. A tiny sample:
> On June 21, the excitement begins with a literal bang — and plenty of other acoustics — with the month-long Fête de la Musique, a massive, free, communal musical outpouring, in streets, parks, train stations and castles.
> Through June until early July, the Foire Saint-Germain recreates a traditional medieval street fair by the same name in the plaza before Saint Sulpice. In the same period, the weekends belong to the Paris Jazz Festival.
> June 14 every year is Bastille Day, commemorating the beginning of the Revolution and the modern French nation. Expect spectacular fireworks, a military parade, much nationalistic (and not much revolutionary) sentiment.
> Paris has no coast, but since 2002 it has had a beach. From mid-July, the right bank of the Seine is covered in sand, creating the Paris Plage, with palm trees, beach shacks, entertainers and millions of spirited sun-bathers present to complete the picture.
> On weekend evenings in July and August, the grounds of the Château de Vaux le Vicomte are illuminated with 2,000 candles, recreating festivities for the Sun King Louis XIV. Add champagne and classical music for unparalleled romantic ambience.
> Most Parisian theatres close for the summer, but this is also when there’s a major classical and contemporary dance festival, Les étés de la Danse de Paris.
Le Grand Hotel
My room at Le Meurice appeared to have been transported, carefully so as not to move anything, from a palace of the Ancien Régime (notwithstanding the broadband and iHome sound system). Sitting down on the bed I felt embarrassed, like my gross, fleshy body was violating the pristine, artfully-laid counterpane. Later that night, of course, getting in was like slipping into a sensuous silkworm cocoon. But first I ate a dish of pistachio-cream macarons, ran a hot, deep bath and floated in the tub dividing my friends into those whose lives I would or would not save in exchange for the bathroom. Le Meurice has occupied the swankiest real estate in Paris — bang opposite the Jardins des Tuileries — for well over a century and a half, and in this time has hosted Queen Victoria, FDR and Baron de Rothschild. The hotel’s favourite guest was Salvador Dali and, after a lobby redesign by Philippe Starck, it has appropriated enough of his surrealist chic to avoid ever looking stuffy. As though the immaculate, uncreased creatures moving through it were not surreal enough. Thank god for rich American schlubs.