Missing Paris

You’ll always have Paris,” quipped my friend Marc as he saw me off at Charles de Gaulle airport with a bottle of champagne. But to someone wrenching herself away from her adopted city after twenty intensely lived years his words brought little comfort. I knew I would return and enjoy the boulangeries, the bistrots, the markets and the sidewalk cafés once again. But everything—including the insanely good tartelettes au chocolat at Pierre Hermé—would taste slightly different from now on, because I would be experiencing the city as an outsider. Stepping onto my Qantas flight that fateful May 30, I knew I was relinquishing my unofficial citizenship and giving up Paris as a lifestyle.

So what do I miss? The cobbled streets of the Marais. Zinc rooftops in the rain. Afternoon light glancing off the honey-colored stones of Second Empire facades and l’heure bleue—that intoxicating interlude between daylight and darkness—anywhere along the Seine. I miss cycling home a little bit drunk on a Vélib’, scooting round the Place Vendôme on a mobylette and taking a bateau-mouche to work during the general strike of 1995.

But why is it, I wonder, that whenever I reminisce about Paris, I get all Amélie-Poulain? Anyone who knew me during my two decades in the City of Light knows I spent my time complaining about the surliness of shopkeepers, the bureaucratic necessity of lettres recommandées (registered letters) and the maddening sound of stiletto heels tapping on the parquet floor upstairs when I was trying to write. But now that Paris is 10,543 miles away I find myself missing the most unlikely things.

I’m craving Monoprix (the inexpensive store-that-has-everything), a croque-monsieur and yes, I admit it, even the grimy old subway. When le Métro was part of my daily commute, I hated those tightly packed trains and that distinctive waft of pee-and-old-perfume. But all my poor nostalgia-addled brain conjures up now are images of Hector Guimard’s Art Nouveau entrances and the Jules Verne-inspired copper-porthole fantasy that is the Arts-et-Métiers station.

One of the most thrilling things about living in Paris was the iconic architecture that formed the backdrop to my everyday life. My son’s part-time nounou—nanny—was married to a policeman who lived in the gendarmerie behind the Place des Vosges. This meant that every afternoon I turned up to find my three-year-old playing in the sandbox in a 17th-century park surrounded by vaulted stone arcades and historic mansions. What better start to life could he have than whizzing down the slide in front of Victor Hugo’s former townhouse (No.6) and eating ice cream outside the birthplace of Madame de Sévigné (No.1 bis)?

Keeping the ghosts

Catching the bus home from Radio France, the public radio building where I worked, was another reminder that I was living in the most beautiful city in the world. In one 40-minute trip along the quays of the Seine I’d be whisked past the city’s Great Historic Monuments, catching glimpses of the Eiffel Tower, the Palais de Chaillot, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, the Louvre, the Conciergerie, and the Gothic towers of Notre Dame before alighting at Hôtel de Ville. General von Choltitz, the German military governor of Paris during the Occupation, must have had that very same hit list playing in his head when he disobeyed Hitler’s order to leave the city in ruins.

Paris is a city that likes to keep its ghosts alive. That’s one reason why the plaques commemorating the resistance fighters killed in the liberation of Paris are regularly decorated with fresh bouquets. I miss living in a city with such a sense of history, one that infuses everything from the pavés (cobblestones) of the Boulevard Saint Michel, uprooted in revolutions and riots from 1789 to May 1968, to the granite slabs imbedded in the street opposite the Square de la Roquette. I walked nonchalantly over those five slabs every morning on my daily school run, but it was years before I found out that les dalles de la mort marked the spot where the guillotine carried out its sinister work.

On a lighter note, in the five glorious years we lived in the Marais, our bedroom looked out onto the stained-glass windows of the Musée Carnavalet. After spending years of my student life grappling with the grammatical complexities of Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, it gave me great satisfaction to bed down opposite the museum’s re-creation of Proust’s cork-lined bedroom just across the street.

The art of flânerie

Another of the great joys of living in Paris was learning to become a flâneur—literally,  a “saunterer”. Walking in Paris is never just about getting from A to B. As the 19th-century poet and flâneur extraordinaire Charles Baudelaire observed, a flâneur is “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”. And that’s what I did, adopting the quintessential Parisian pastime of ambling about with no particular destination in mind, my steps guided by caprice or curiosity. Once I mastered the subtle art of flânerie I discovered all kinds of fascinating places, including the vineyards of Montmartre, the Passage des Panoramas and the area called La Campagne à Paris. On my most epic flânerie I boarded a random train at Gare du Nord and ended up at the Abbaye de Royaumont, a picturesque spot 20 miles outside of town.

There doesn’t seem to be a French word for people who loiter in cafés, but I became one of those, too. In fact, top of my list of Things I Miss About Paris is café culture, that wonderfully laissez-faire ambience that allows you to linger for an hour over a déca crème (decaf with milk) or snatch un petit noir at le comptoir on more hurried days. Drinking a café in Paris is a ritual experience, one where the particular brand of coffee in your cup matters less than the daily drama of local life unfolding around you. Parisians all have their regular haunts, normally a few blocks from their appart’, but I used to enjoy changing my pit stops to soak up the atmosphere of different arrondissements. The Café de la Mairie in the 6th, Le Progrès in the 3rd and Le Petit Château d’Eau in the 11th always provided fantastic people-watching opportunities—another essential ingredient of Parisian café culture.

Flirting and haggling

And then, of course, there’s the food. God, how I miss the food. I’m not talking about haute cuisine or Michelin-starred glamour—just the simple culinary pleasures like soupe à l’oignon at Le Bistrot du Peintre, steak frites at Le Café des Musées or the plateau de charcuterie at Au Vieux Chêne. But most of all, I miss discussing my meal as I eat it. I miss living in a neighborhood where I could walk out the door and find a fromagerie, a poissonnerie and a fantastic boulangerie all within a stone’s throw of my apartment.

And now that my supermarket run involves the soullessness of multistory parking lots, how I long for the carnival atmosphere of Paris’s open-air street markets. I miss the fact that flirting, tasting and haggling were all part of food shopping at the Marché Raspail, Marché des Batignolles and Marché Richard Lenoir (now called Marché de la Bastille), and I miss the marchand de fruits at Place d’Aligre who could always make me buy an extra kilo of cherries by calling me Mademoiselle instead of Madame. I miss the general excitement and enthusiasm around food and the menu posted at the gate of my son’s nursery school every Monday morning. Visiting friends from Britain, raised on a school lunchroom diet of fish sticks and tapioca pudding, would stand and salivate at the promise of émincé d’endives, gigot d’agneau and haricots verts followed by a cheese course and île flottante.

I miss the fact that I could get a wonderful bottle of Macon from a chain store like Nicolas for a mere €6—I now pay three times that for something not even half as good. And boy! do I miss the sound of champagne corks. Now that I live in a land where champagne is reserved for birthdays, promotions and other special occasions, I long for the days when we popped a bottle of Veuve on a whim. In France, champagne is drunk in victory and in defeat or, in my lovely circle of Parisian friends, because someone had a bad day at the office. Sitting down for l’heure de l’apéro—the hour (or more) the French devote to celebrating the end of the working day—was one of the highlights of mes années parisiennes. For a girl whose working days in London had generally finished up at the pub with a pack of crisps, I never got over that little frisson of sophistication as my host brought out bowls of Provençal olives, torsades au gruyère (cheese twists) and copious platters of charcuterie.

Tea and chocolate

As with so much else in Parisian life, those platters were always impeccably arranged. I love the way the French, and particularly Parisians, place so much emphasis on aesthetics, to the point of getting dressed up even if they’re just nipping out to buy a baguette (a saving grace for a freelance journalist who could otherwise have spent all day in her bathrobe.)

Shopping in Paris is, of course, an art in itself. It is the ultimate city in which to indulge in a spot of lèche-vitrines (literally, window-licking). There are no shop windows in the world as beautiful, as creative or as breathtaking as those in Paris, and I’m not just talking about les grands magasins at Christmastime. Walk past Fauchon, Cire Trudon or a first-class florist like Odorantes any day of the week and you’ll be devouring the display with your eyes. And beyond window-licking, I miss Paris’s unique blend of specialty shops and niche boutiques. Where else in the world would you find a store selling teas inspired by famous writers (Le Thé des Ecrivains), handcrafted watch straps (L’Atelier du Bracelet Parisien) or a store devoted to the little black dress (Didier Ludot’s La Petite Robe Noire)? These are all on my list of Products I Cannot Live Without, together with Astier de Villatte candles, Nuxe’s Crème Fraîche de Beauté and orange-blossom-scented savon de Marseille. I am thankful that these can all be regularly shipped off to me in food-and-essentials packages. Sadly, Roquefort, foie gras and Patrice Chapon chocolate bars have never made it past Australian customs-office sniffer dogs.

JULIE’S LIST

Pierre Hermé 72 rue Bonaparte, 6th, 01.43.54.47.77

Monoprix www.monoprix.fr

Musée Carnavalet 23 rue de Sévigné, 3rd. www.carnavalet.paris.fr

Passage des Panoramas 10 rue Saint Marc, 2nd. www. passagedespanoramas.fr

Vineyards of Montmartre Rue des Saules, 18th

La Campagne à Paris Rue Irénée-Blanc, 20th, Métro: Porte de Bagnolet

Abbaye de Royaumont www.fondationroyaumont.com

Café de la Mairie 8 pl Saint Sulpice, 6th, 01.43.26.67.82

Le Progrès 1 rue de Bretagne, 3rd, 01.42.72.01.44

Le Petit Château d’Eau 34 rue du Château d’Eau, 10th, 01.42.08.72.81

Le Bistrot du Peintre 116 ave Ledru Rollin, 11th, 01.47.00.34.39

Le Café des Musées 49 rue de Turenne, 3rd, 01.42.72.96.17

Au Vieux Chêne 7 rue Dahomey, 11th, 01.43.71.67.69

Open-air markets www.parisinfo.com

Fauchon 26 pl de la Madeleine, 8th, 01.70.39.38.78

Cire Trudon 78 rue de Seine, 6th, 01.43.26.46.50

Odorantes 9 rue Madame, 6th, 01.42.84.03.00

Le Thé des Ecrivains 16 rue des Minimes, 3rd, 01.40.29.46.25

L’Atelier du Bracelet Parisien 28 pl du Marché Saint-Honoré, 1st, 01.42.86.13.70

Didier Ludot’s La Petite Robe Noir 125 Galerie Valois, Palais Royal, 1st, 01.40.15.01.04

Astier de Villatte 173 rue Saint-Honoré, 1st, 01.42.60.74.13

Chocolat Chapon 69 rue du Bac, 7th, 01.42.22.95.98

Originally published in the April 2012 issue of France Today