Carnet de Voyage: Bridges in Shadow, City of Light

Travel notes from the real France. Carnet de Voyage is a weekly personal travel story in France sent in by readers. If you’d like to write a story for Carnet de Voyage, head here for details on how to submit.

I. 

The Pont de la Tournelle cradled my photo at daybreak, 

its stones slick with August’s amber, sultry breath. 

Below, the Seine wore vanishing night like a velvet scarf, 

stitched with rippling gold— 

the river’s pulse against my ribs,  

a cadence I’d seldom known. 

Here, peace is not a word but a slow unfurling: 

Paris pressed its thumb to my restless soul 

and said stay. . . 

I am yours. 

II. 

A café chair becomes a chantry. 

Steam curls from the cup like a votive thread, 

as hours dissolve from people-watching and 

the murmur of strangers knitting their stories 

into the air. The parks, posed like open palms, 

each bench an affirmation, each quartier a dialect 

of memory. I walk until the centuries 

blur—Haussmann’s bones, medieval shadows— 

and I am both pilgrim and ghost in the labyrinth. 

III. 

America lives in the marrow of my spine: 

its sky a yawning basilica, highways 

like arteries through our cities’ thirst. 

There, I am a speck in the eye of the horizon, 

swallowed by cornfields and city canyon breath. 

Smallness there is both cage and catalyst— 

no cobblestone grip, just the mountain’s hymn 

urging my veins to echo its boundless key. 

I forget a bagel’s doughy weekend embrace,  

a taste of home that Paris cannot surpass.  

But when French pastry sweetens, it steals the memory. 

Yet I crave the American art of overflow—  

strangers who offer their lives like open books,  

their laughter loud as klaxons, and smiling. 

IV. 

Two geographies now orbit my pulse: 

One, a city of elegance and quayside stars,  

where time flows like its languorous river; 

the other, a land of unbridled sky, 

where the bodies swell like a rising Wonderbread. 

Paris offers me stillness, America—it’s just supersized. 

I carry both in the cradle of my stride, 

a citizen of thresholds, forever translating 

the grammar of bridges, the syntax of light. 

V. 

I love how France turns time to honey— 

slow-dripped in the boulangerie’s ocher radiance, 

where flour-dusted hands cradle the morning’s first pain, 

its crust coarsened by fire and patience. 

I love the way the Pont Saint-Louis musicians 

splay Bach across the Seine, their notes 

colliding with the crowds crossing from Île to Île, 

as if even on the pavement, beauty insists. 

Paris, you are a language I taste: 

Amorino glacé melting on autumn tongues, 

the rasp of a bookseller’s bouquin 

opening to foxed pages of Jean Cocteau. 

Your streets are a glossary of iron balconies, 

apricot light pooling in porte-cochères, 

and the soft sh-sht of shutters closing 

like my last whisper to my mother:  

à bientôt; à demain ma mère ! 

I love the arrogance of her history— 

how a flower stall blooms beneath Napoleon’s arch, 

how the ghost of Piaf still stumbles 

through Belleville’s banlieue fog.  

In the marché aux puces, 

centuries huddle in dust: a rusted key, 

a 1912 postcard titled “Je t’attends à la Tournelle…”, 

like warped vinyl spinning my grief with ashes. 

You teach me to live slantways to the present, 

to curate my days like a flâneur with no destination. 

And France, beyond the city’s grasp— 

your lavender fields stitching the south, 

the Atlantic’s brine carving Normandy’s cliffs, 

Bourgogne where grapes swell with stories 

older than borders. I love how your earth 

remembers: Gaulish bones, Resistance hymns, 

the ink of Sartre’s pen still wet on the sidewalk cafés  

where he rewrote the world. 

VI. 

Yes, Paris, you scoff when I call you gentle— 

your winters gnaw, your bureaucracy bites. 

But what is love if not choosing the grit 

beneath the glitter? J’adore your contradictions: 

the chic femme d’un certain âge  

with her poodle and cigarette, 

the clochard who recites Rimbaud 

to pigeons on the Quai de la Mégisserie,  

where tanners made their medieval dwellings. 

You are a mirror that fractures me into truer shapes. 

America lives in my lungs, vast and brash, 

but France, you flow in my veins— 

a quiet vinification of grapes and terroir, 

of stone that pulsates when the moon licks the Seine. 

I long not to be just as a guest here. 

But when the chestnuts bloom their pink delirium, 

I want to be the root; when the bateaux-mouches glitter, 

I want to be the water lapping their hulls—  

the Seine’s patient tongue,  

whispering, “You are both root and ripple.” 

The bridge is neither river nor sky,  

but the breath between— now,  

I knead my days like dough:  

half bagel, half baguette,  

split down the seam of longing. 

Read our other Carnet de Voyage entries here. 

Lead photo credit : Île St Louis and the Tournelle bridge in Paris © shutterstock