Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [270]
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Rez-de-chaussée
Remember that in France the rez-de-chaussée refers to the floor at street level, while the first floor—premier étage—is the equivalent of our second floor.
Romance
Paris is likely the most romantic city in the world. And you don’t have to be in love, have a partner, or feel a certain way about a certain someone to know this indisputable fact. A walk along the Seine at night, when all of Paris’s bridges and monuments are lit, a stroll across the Pont des Arts, a respite on a bench in the Tuileries, dinner at the Jules Verne, or merely a glance at Robert Doisneau’s famous photograph Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville is proof enough that Paris is synonymous with l’amour.
If you’d like to plan an especially romantic trip to Paris, with or without a companion, a book you must have is Romantic Paris by Thirza Vallois (Interlink, 2003). Vallois, also the author of the indispensable Around and About Paris series (see this page), here outlines a love history of Paris in addition to providing great tips for a three-day romantic itinerary, restaurants and salons de thé, stores for the heart and senses, cozy museums, sentimental walks, and recommended nightspots. Most importantly, Vallois reminds us that “we come to Paris as to a stage on which to enact an episode of our love life, but before we know it we are caught under the spell and find out, to our astonishment, that it is Paris herself that has gotten under our skin, the one love that has no rival and that even time will never erode. It was when I realized that Paris was my one source of inspiration, the object, in turn, of both my celebration and desecration, that I understood that Paris herself is a tale of passion, full of turmoil and fury and dazzling charm, the very essence of romance.”
One very wonderful romantic site not featured in Vallois’s book is the Mur des Je T’aime (Wall of I Love Yous). The wall was created by Frédéric Baron, who first collected the phrase “I love you” a thousand times in more than three hundred languages in three large notebooks. Baron and Claire Kito, an artist who practices Oriental calligraphy, collaborated on the idea of a wall, and another artist, Daniel Boulogne, specializing in murals, helped to bring it to completion. The wall, ten meters wide, is composed of 612 tiles of enameled lava whose shapes are meant to symbolize the sheets of paper in Baron’s notebooks. The splashes of color on the wall are “the pieces of a broken heart, those of a humanity which is too often torn apart and which the wall attempts to reunite.” The mur is really very cool and very touching, and it’s free. Just take the Métro to Abbesses, and the wall is right there in the Square Jehan-Rictus on Place des Abbesses (if that sounds confusing, it’s not—you can’t miss it).
For the record, some other spots I think are particularly romantic in Paris include the Place de Furstenberg, the little recessed seats on the Pont Neuf, the wall in the little park at the tip of Île Saint-Louis, and the Square du Vert-Galant.
In Love in France
It’s hard for me to believe that anyone, a romantic or not, would not fall head over heels for In Love in France: A Traveler’s Guide to the Most Romantic Destinations in the Land of Amour by Rhonda Carrier (Universe, 2010). I love this book, which is, naturellement, mostly devoted to Paris—“Paris loves lovers,” as Cole Porter knew and Carrier quotes on the opening page. Carrier knows France intimately, as she has lived in and traveled around the country since she was a teenager. Other chapters cover the Loire Valley, Champagne, Normandy and Brittany, and southern France; there are also chapters on “Love and Food” (“Food, like love, can change your life,” she says) and on getting married in France. I consider this book essential, as it is jammed with coups de coeur—her passions, places she fell instantly in love with—even as Carrier wisely notes, “Paris is also oversubscribed, and thus I’ve tried to point you in the direction of some of