Many of us have a fantasy place where the world is a cut above our everyday lives. Maybe we’ve only read about this place or seen it in movies. Maybe it doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s as if we need somewhere to dream about when life turns out not to be what we’d hoped. For a lot of people, that place is Paris.
My niece, who until recently had never been east of Billings, Montana, used to be obsessed with Paris. She’d even considered getting a tattoo of a bluebird pulling a banner reading “la vie est belle” around the Eiffel Tower.1 In Paris — the dream Paris, that is — every café serves homemade cassoulet, women are chic (and thin) and buy their groceries at a farmers market, windows have pink geraniums and views of the Eiffel Tower (or of roofs and chimney pots), and romance lurks on every metro ride.
My dream Paris goes a step further, into the world of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn movies. In my dream Paris, every coffee cup feels good in the hand, and every bed sheet is made of linen and was stored with lavender sachets. Lighting is moody. Cute dogs and charming jewel thieves abound. Julia Child is still whipping up soufflés in her “roo-de-loo” apartment. There’s no crappy 1980s architecture.
I don’t need to tell you that the real Paris isn’t like that. It has its marvels, of course, but Paris is a gigantic, cosmopolitan city with all the crime, frozen entrées, pollution, and poverty that you’d expect. The milk and coffee are second rate, and be careful about where you buy those baguettes everyone raves about, because you just might get a mouthful of cardboard.
I still think Paris is wonderful. Both the real Paris and my fantasy Paris. I need them both. I need the dream Paris to remind me to infuse my life in Portland with the things I love (lavender sachets in the linen closet!), and I need the real Paris to feed my hunger for the bizarre and beautiful.
Just this afternoon I saw maids at the hotel across the street fluffing pillows and changing sheets in rooms on two different floors. A woman in a full head scarf took a selfie on the balcony of another room. Just above her and to the right, a teenaged boy pulled back the curtains and mimed the cha cha. Church bells rang. A dove cooed. Reality is pretty great.
Since these is supposed to be a smell diary, let me leave you with this smell portrait: room-temperature reblochon cheese, good Burgundy, and a hint of rain in the air.
1. Crisis averted. She seems to have moved on. I'm not sure if I could have stomached seeing the name of that perfume, no matter how lovely the sentiment, on my darling niece's skin.
Ha!
Living in Paris causes the dream Paris to crash and die a glorious death. The reality is so much more interesting, creative and thoughtful.
Unless you have a handy list of tips, you will get industrial bread, indifferent coffee, and very high prices for cassoulet that has been served straight out of sous-vide pouch.
But the strange and bizarre – Paris does that so well. I am so glad you are discovering that!
What a perfect way to sum it up! I see the value in having a dream place that never really exists, but for Paris, reality is better, if sometimes more of a challenge.
One possible approach for nieces considering a tattoo is the following: “Think about your favourite earrings you wore at 16. Think about never being able to take them off again…”
Crafty! Thank goodness, the tattoo thing was more talk than action. Really, it’s a good idea to visit a place before you get it tattooed on your body.
God, you are brilliant. Am using this line with the teens in my life.
AnnieA is a practical gal.
My favorite eros-free memory of Paris is of a late November morning at Angelina, my table next to an older woman, dressed to the nines, with her tiny Cairn Terrier, under the table, drinking water from an Angelina bowl brought by the waiter. As wonderful as the food was, nothing compared to the tinkle of his collar buckle against the porcelain and the whiffs of L’Heure Bleue (I think) as she removed her rings, then took off her gloves, and then put her rings back on her glove-freed hands before sipping her coffee.
I forgot the most important thing! Thank you for your scent portraits.
You’re welcome!
I love that! I love the detail with the rings and the clinking collar, especially. Thank you!
I have only been to Paris once years ago but my stay was for several weeks. I always dreamed of going back…until I went to Italy. Rome, Florence, Venice, Siena, Amalfi, Sicily (especially Taormina) have taken Paris’ place in my heart and soul. Not that I wouldn’t want to go there again, but if in the future I can ever afford to go to Europe, it would be to Bella Italia,
It sounds like you’re an Italian at heart! Maybe Italy is your dream place, with all it’s fantasy and reality.
I’ve really enjoyed this series, Angela! It’s like a little vacation in Paris for me to read about what you’re experiencing.
My first trip to Paris was in the sixties, and I am just now wondering if it really was the way I experienced it at the age of ten. It felt so glamorous and exotic, and I think it really was. Then again, most places were to me at that time! We took an airplane! People ate different food and wore different clothes and spoke a different language and their buildings and parks were different!
It’s wonderful that many of us can vicariously experience different cultures through various media and in our local stores now, but that repeated exposure also makes the exotic feel a lot more familiar in some ways. I love reading about your singular, simple pleasures as you go about your days, and about what you want to take home with you to continue to enjoy a bit of Paris in Portland.
It really is amazing how technology makes travel feel less “foreign” somehow. When I first traveled, in the 1980s, there weren’t ATMs or email. I brought traveler’s checks. Money had to be carefully thought out, then exchanged at little currency bureaux. To communicate home, I actually wrote letters (telephoning was for emergencies!). Now, here I am sitting in a Paris apartment making instant communication with you. I can buy a pastry and post its photo on Facebook and have people commenting on it before I’ve taken my first bite.
That said, I still do feel far away.
I’ve truly enjoyed your Paris posts, Angela, they brought me right back to my first – and only – visit thus far about a dozen years ago. Thank you! We were only there 3 or 4 days and walked and walked everywhere. My most lasting memory is that no matter where we were, everyone – young, old, male, female, dressed up or dressed down, – always wore a scarf looped or tied artfully around the neck. As a scarf lover who can’t wear one without constantly fidgeting/adjusting it, I thought it the essence of tres chic!
I still see lots of scarves, although they’re more likely to be light cotton with an ethnic pattern than be a big silk square.
Walking is one of the best things to do here, in my opinion!
I love Paris, but my memories have tempered my love, and I tend to love very much in the plane of reality. Crowded youth hostels. Waiting for the right train. Getting to the right train station in the first place. Cigarette smoke. Dog poop. Hot buses. Insulting “portrait” artists on Montmartre…But I love it anyway because I love travel. If I was going to France, I’d rather be anywhere in Brittany anyway, but I’d still be happy to visit Paris again.
My “Paris” is actually your fair city, Portland. And I was very lucky to live there in some great apartments at one of the best times of my young life, post divorce, post grad school, right at freedom, from 1998 – 2001. It was the best of times before they ripped the Henry Weinhard’s down. Before the Whole Foods condo craze ruined the deep NW. When you still have respect for the masses of homeless and soup line people before they shushed them away to camp at the airport. Before the rents made all the weird crazy shops have to move out of any block from SW Morrison to SW Oak. My Portland is foggy evenings watching the construction lights in the steel grid of the Fox Tower while it was being built, and listening to Miles Davis Kind of Blue. My Portland is the lady who used to sell pom-pom animal magnets at the Saturday Market, and having martinis at the Blue Note on SW Burnside before it became just another boring gentlemen’s club. Breakfast at Boxcar Bertha’s and pastries from Zupan’s. Checking out the cute staff at Art Media. My Portland is having a Ruby Ale at the Baghdad theatre. I don’t know if I could ever live there again, but I always dream I can (if I hit the lottery), and my dear husband who is a PDX born native is my own reminder every day of what the best of PDX used to be to me. The fact there is a Target downtown breaks my heart. So I am only in love with the Portland that was, not what it is now. Keep Portland Weird. RIP.
Hey, Portland is pretty fabulous! Coming home, I’m always reminded how great we Portlanders have it.
It’s true, though, that some of the grittier Portland is getting smoothed away in jillion dollar condos, new Land Rovers, and curiously similar expensive restaurants. Housing is ridiculously expensive. The next time you visit, be sure to let me know and I’ll show you where you can still buy groceries and get a lecture from an elderly hippie on the merits of pastured eggs, and where you can get a cheap beer in a comfortably decrepit Chinese restaurant lounge.
Portland is still weird, I promise 🙂 it’s just that everything cool is past 82nd now because the rent is so damn high. Anybody who bothers with anything (other than work or maybe the good vintage stores on Hawthorne) between East 39th and West… 17th or so is either independently wealthy or lost.
….or got there in 1994, like me!
I lived in France for a year after finishing school, and before starting at Medical School. I lived in the South of France, even further removed from the French capital than I am now. I made my acquaintance with Paris much later, and it wasn’t instant love. It is beautiful, very beautiful, but I love the French countryside much more. I’m still loving your diary about your life in this city.
I love the French countryside, too! In my dreams, I’d be cat sitting there instead, with long afternoon walks and lots of productive writing in the morning.
I love the French countryside too, especially the southwest. Planning a trip back there next year. The atlantic coast is magic.
I’d love to be able to spend a few weeks there, writing and walking and taking naps….I hope you nail down that trip!