Author: Anne Schwartz
Location: in the Square Trousseau, 12th arrondissement

It was a Paris summer morning like many others, hot when I woke up, the air in my apartment stuffy with sleep.  Outdoors, it was cooler but gray.  Not a promising start.  But there was marketing to be done.  A métro ride across town to the Marché d’Aligre and a couple of transactions later, the sun had come out, my canvas bag had been filled with Middle Eastern specialties, fresh fruit, and poulet rôti^[1], but my mood had only somewhat improved.

I stopped in at a boulangerie^[2] on Square Trousseau for a pain au chocolat^[3], my reward to myself for making myself understood in French, counting out the right change.  Tucked in off the busy rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine, the park across the street beckoned.  I crossed over, opened the hip high gate and found a green wooden bench in the shade. 

Sitting there, I tried to put my finger on what was bugging me. Complaining about living in Paris is something akin to high treason.^[4] So lucky to be living in Paris, how dare I have even one negative thought about living in the City of Lights?  The cafes, the boulevards, the fashion, the wine, the pastries, the art, the light as it filters through the chestnut trees— this is the stuff of legend, of dreams, I told myself, you ungrateful boor.

But for me, the joy and wonder of those first months had been fizzling away.  Alone for much of the time over the last few weeks, my new friends scattered to the four winds for the summer, I was learning that Paris is also the city of trash and worse on the sidewalks, the stench of urine in the metro, the homeless men sprawled in the doorways in even the most upscale parts of town.  Nary a smile on the street and people standing so close behind you in line that you feel the stickiness of their skin against yours and the stale smell of cigarette smoke on your neck. 

From my seat on the bench, though, life looked calm, quiet, and cool.  The traffic from the avenue seemed distant.  The air felt crisp.  The sidewalks around the square were freshly washed. The stores were just beginning to open, the grafitti disappearing as metal grates went up. In the park, a man sat at a table, tapping on his laptop.  The mothers at the playground were freeing children from their strollers who then rushed headlong for the sandbox and slides.  Empty ping pong tables gleamed silver in the filtered sunlight.  I took a deep bite into the buttery pastry, the warm chocolate, and felt a wave of renewal. 

Author: Catherine Vreeland
Location: near the Jardin du Luxembourg

On a late afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens I was relaxing in a metal armchair with a Cara Black mystery when I was distracted by a grubby girl, 20ish, who seemed to be looking for something to eat. She nimbly snatched the pain au chocolat^[1] a little boy had set on his au pair’s^[2] lap, and then plucked an apple resting at the top of an open backpack. She didn’t run away or fuss at all, so the au pair and the backpack boy did not realize their food had gone.

Graceful, secretive and stony-faced, the girl’s body language belied the message of her muckiness. I wanted to give her a dress and invite her to a party. She disappeared, I went back to my book, and then suddenly she was standing in front of me with her dirty, sticky hand out. I hesitated, but passed over a 20-euro note and watched her crumble it. She didn’t move. I read another couple of pages. She still didn’t move.

“Do you want a meal?” I asked in English.
“That’d be bang on,” she said, and I caught the irony of a possible design. An educated ragamuffin? And with the secret of solo survival? More than mystery, she seemed to have promise, to be living (or rehearsing a role?) at a very interesting way station, but I didn’t know what it was she had that I wanted.
“Let’s go across the street,” I said, getting up and walking toward the fountain, heading for Le Rostand.^[3] She came along, silent.

In the big, noisy café, I was careful not to suggest she wash her hands. I looked over the menu, ordered first, and got several dishes, to be encouraging. The girl ordered lots of meat, and wine.

“Do you speak any French?” I asked offhandedly, as if continuing a conversation, hoping to get her story to flow.
“I just got here,” she tossed back, “and I’m sleeping rough. This is good rôti^[4], but the wine is a little off.” She went back to eating, like a spy decoding a particularly difficult communiqué. I remembered my first days in Paris forty years earlier. I hadn’t had a shred of her élan. Could she show me what it felt like to be her?

Suddenly she stood up, bowed slightly with a sardonic grin on her face, said “Merci, Madame,” and scooted out of the restaurant. The garçon appeared instantly. I asked for l’addition^[5], feeling oddly bereft.

Author: Lily Templeton
Location: near the Eiffel Tower

The métro stopped at Bir-Hakeim^[1] and showed no sign of moving again. It was irritating, like everything in this awful city I could not wait to leave. After the requisite time of impatient waiting with my fellow travellers, I got out of the crowded car and into the brisk night air. It would be a quick walk, at my usual speed. La Tour Eiffel stood her luminous vigil, her beacon tracing evanescent circles among the clouds.

My pace slowed at the middle of the bridge^[2] and I cast a resentful glance over my shoulder. She was still there, with her shining coat of orange and the green belt of the RER C at her feet.

A breath of air I did not know I was holding escaped me. I leaned against the railing and for a moment, we watched each other.

“I hate it here,” I told her to break the silence. “I’m leaving this place as soon as I can.”

Her light swept all of Paris.^[3] The Left Bank to where my high school stood, the Right Bank to where I live, and everything in between, those familiar places rife with memories.

Like my mother, she let my lie slide without reproach. Another sweep of her light and I was aware that it was getting late. My hands were cold. With a final sweep, she motioned me home. I knew what she meant. She should have been torn down at the end of the World’s Fair, and yet there she is, still standing, in a town that didn’t want her at first. Conceding my defeat, I gave her a wry smile before walking home.

Author: Tory Hoen
Location: in Montmartre and a taxi

I had gone out for a drink and, eight hours later, I was still out, shimmying around an impromptu dance party at an artist’s apartment in Montmartre, amazed at how an evening in Paris could suddenly morph into a perfect parody of itself. I was still new to this city, and many of my early nights here went this way.

One apéro^[1] led to another, which, on this night, led to an art opening, then to a cheese plate—shared by all of us—and then the bartender reached behind the zinc bar to pull out a special wine he wanted us to try; the conversation escalated, the group became more and more delighted with itself, with the city, with the world at large. We sauntered over cobblestones. My friend stopped to pick up a playing card from the ground—a lucky sign. We passed Sacré Coeur and slipped through the apartment’s doorway, dancing through the halls of what seemed like an alternate world perched atop the city. Samurai swords hung on the walls and bossa nova floated through the secret garden in the courtyard. Paris itself felt like an alternate world, and I was incapable of separating the reality of it from the dream of it, if there is a difference.

I tumbled out of the magic apartment onto the cobblestones, where a taxi idled quietly. I jumped for it, knowing the Metro had long since stopped running for the night. As we descended, Sacré Coeur loomed higher and higher behind us, and the taxi driver asked the fatal question: “Qu’est-ce que vous faites à Paris?”^[2]

At this point, the truth still felt ridiculous. I was twenty-four. I had left everything familiar in New York to move here without knowing why. To write a novel, I told myself. To discover something. To stumble upon an opportunity that I could not yet anticipate. I wanted to tell him how New York had drained me of energy and how, as soon as I set foot on French soil, I knew I could create any kind of life I wanted.

But my limited French and the long wine-soaked evening prevented me from articulating all that I wanted to say. As we neared the Bastille, the Spirit of Liberty floated ahead of us, star-like in the black night.^[3] I had fifteen seconds to come up with something.

There is room to breathe here. Everything begs to be written down. You can be young and unpublished and a writer; these are not oxymorons. Paris wants writers; it helps them. “Paris est plus…” I tried to put a thought together.

“C’est plus…” he searched for words as well.

“C’est plus inspirant.”

“Vous avez trouvé le mot,” he confirmed.^[4]

Paris is its own reason. 

Author: Jennifer K. Dick
Location: near the tip of Île de la Cité

Paris gathered under huddled packs.  Bridges or arabesques.  She, the late, of the… And who has been between the blonde floorboards? Remembering stories, afternoons (she) fanned night into water. The purloined letter and the patchwork clock ticking heart underfoot.  What did she store in there? Buoys in our thoughts, weights and average body height between streetlamps.  She in dreams, on the heat, takes down the packaging list and labels for supply crates. Things we’d need as cadavers: moccasins, candles, a good Hardy Boy novel. She wonders what Peter collects, bodies in underwater grottoes netted below bronze support beams, though she herself is steeled for the leap. To push past the Pont des Arts ^[1] in the off hours. Prefer to eat, to read, to ….? Huddled caverns and she cannot think. She had not reflection on this hand (to hard) surface. Which to palpate mid-street? She sounds between voices. Gilded angels taking off from Châtelet, Bastille, Invalides. Raft-like, Charon’s^[2] rotted wooden mass pontoons past Napoleon’s stashed mummies: canauxrama, ^[3] damp rags or a season. It seems her invalidated choices irritate a cumbersome number of well-wishers.  She leaves a note anyway, stuck under lion-paw. Cities or combustibles raked like raku pots crackling under pressure. She picks at the pieces, in tears, muttering spells to call them back to herself. Abracadabra. Melopoeia^[4]. “Tressle tables and incarnations of incandescence,” she asks, “and if the body is ink glowing slow into devise?” This scheme rooting for itself.  Why not?  Rapid incapacitation is like this stroll down Beaumarchais, round Printemps.  Pockets empty.  Carvaggio’s decapitated carcasses coming to life in the Louvre. She clamors onto the Tuileries.  She knows this is her doing, undoing, done because too many masses were in the shopping. Round the tables she gives over her coins.  Flipped heads up, a monkey tail’s writing back in the Cluny,^[5] writhing the back-handed permission behind the tapestries. “Where,” they repeat, “where did you” (numerical responsibility) “store…?” Admission in admonishment or rather.  She steadies herself.  Vaguely.  A contusion displaced.  Or places where things take off: Charles de Gaulle, Orly, a dug-up set of bones on a turn in Les Halles^[6].  Investigation leads her back and forth, bright then faded. For hours she licks the walls, reads the captions. This epoch’s insistence on a blank state.  She’s tabula rasa with a laugh. “This is the toe-tag labeller,” she says, “this is the job I want.” No use. Held up hand dismembered from its handout. Mice barrel down on the quais making their getaway. What was that again under the sweaty spotlight? Occupants stashed in the annals of her story?  If threats entreat response, letters cut from newspapers blacken skin. We feed on the Parisian, Le Monde, Libé, Le Figaro.^[7].  What out of hand is getting to?  This towards meandering.  Inadmissible relations and circumstantial books in an opened case. Squint towards a batch of things suspended, gathering round. It’s just a tourist trap, a treatise on a universe composed of tiny lights. Things, like her dialogues, just under the Seine. A pulse in hindsight trickling. 

Author: Jussara Nunes
Location: in the middle of the platform, direction Chateau de Vincennes.

It was quite late at night. I had just parted from my friends at the entrance of the station, each one of us taking a different metro line. Even though it was late in the evening, there were tons of people on the line 1 platform, some waiting, like me, to go home; some going somewhere else to continue partying. The Châtelet metro station^[1] is weird at any time of day or night and I don’t like it at all: always crowded, with its smelly-dirty corners, and strange people lurking about. There is some nice music to be heard now and then through the corridors, which function as some sort of performance space. Then there are the people like me who go there to take the metro. Châtelet. Such a nice name.^[2] Such a strange flora and fauna of nightlife.

I was standing there, earplugs tucked deep into my ears. I was away listening to some music. My earplugs serve as a shield to protect me against the violent world out there. I can’t hear, but I can see. And people can see me. He saw me.

I was leaning against the wall, midway down the platform. He passed once in front of me, going left.  He passed again going right. He crossed my field of vision again and again, until he saw that I had definitely seen him.  He caught my attention. He smiled. I pretended not to notice. He stopped and said something. I read a ‘Hello’ in his lips.

He was about 1,55m tall.^[3] Dark hair, quite long. He was wearing red lipstick, in a clownish style, the red had passed his lips, and had make up on his eyes. He insisted. Who knows why, but I take off my earplugs and stop the music. And listen to him. A dialogue out of nowhere and from the 5th dimension begins.

—You are beautiful. Don’t worry, I won’t harm you.

—Of course not, I wouldn’t let you.

—You are beautiful, I love your eyes. You’re Latin American right?

—Yup.

—Me too. I dance and sing.

—I see.

—Do you?

—No. So, that’s why you are wearing this make up.

—I love you, you know?

—No I don’t.

—Well, I really do.

—Ok.

—I will love you forever.

—Really? I’m sure you will say the same thing to someone else tomorrow.

I smile. He smiles.

The train pulls into the station. He waves goodbye and blow me a kiss. I blush. The crowd is looking at me.

I tuck my earplugs back in my ears.

Off I go. I never think of him. I think of him when I happen to take the metro at the same station around the same time. I wonder if he still dances somewhere nearby.

Author: Richard Nahem
Location: in the Marais

I went to the bank on a Wednesday during the summer.  Sweating profusely, I anticipated what excuses not to take my deposit the teller might invent today.

I had first gone on Monday, to deposit money for the rent, but the sign said it was closed on Mondays in July and August. I went back the next day, but they were closed for lunch. I returned after lunch with all of my cash carefully counted out, even listing how many 20s, 10s, and 5s there were on my deposit slip. I waited for about 15 minutes since there was only one window open, practicing in my head how I was going to say “I want to make a deposit” in French. My turn came, I said my phrase, and the teller smiled at me and understood. She said “I‘m sorry but we don’t accept cash deposits on Tuesday.”

Flabbergasted, I said what do you mean? and then she said it again. I scratched my head and thought: this is incredible.  Société Générale, ^[1] the second largest bank in France, doesn’t want my money. I took my pile of bills and put them in my pocket, leaving the bank feeling defeated and bewildered. I tried to imagine if I had gone to the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and they had refused my deposit, and laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea.

When I first moved to Paris in 2005 from New York, I was told by a number of friends that it was hard to open a French bank account and that banking in general was a difficult affair in France, to say the least. I thought I was proving them wrong when within 10 days of moving here I painlessly opened a bank account in less than 30 minutes. I told everyone I didn’t understand what they were talking about, and they said wait and see.

So there I was, Wednesday before lunch, back at the bank. I had even remembered to fill out the “special” deposit slip they said I needed in order to deposit “so much” cash. I got to the window and handed the teller my deposit.  She said “I’m sorry, but you can only deposit an amount this large at your own branch.” I looked around for the hidden cameras to see who was playing this cruel joke on me. Alas, there were none. This time I wasn’t defeated or bewildered. I started screaming New York-style obscenities.

I had to admit sheepishly to my friends that they were right, and they grinned that “I told you so” grin so proudly.

Author: Tom Frozart
Location: 5th arrondissement

Cluny - La Sorbonne, 7:50AM – The front carriage is packed out with schoolgirls looking down at their knees, revising lessons, or reflecting on the virtues of silence and humility.  No males in sight; nannies or elder sisters shepherd the younger ones.  Would they raise their eyes, they’d get a glimpse at their fate, in the shape of a ghastly figure standing by the door.  Navy blue skirt, bottle green tights, no defined age, repeated pregnancies have taken their toll; her soul is okay though, she’s just received Holy Communion at Saint-Nicolas, one station before.  From Boulogne they’ll cross the river in procession and climb to Saint Pie X, the Roman Catholic sanctuary across the street from my office.  Behind its high walls, nuns instil the blessings of motherhood in innocent minds, at bay from the nefarious influence of Babylon-upon-Seine and its wagonloads of sinners.

The two next carriages are full up too; Africans and Eastern European escapees, Chinese and Turks, West Indians and Arabs, all trying to catch up on their sleep.  A Gypsy plays an accordion on a screeching mode.  The underground artist composes his face to suit each fragment of clichéd tune chosen to cheer up any dozing audience; he locks his eyes onto a first traveller, shifts at random to another one in the hope of extorting a smile of compassion that a kid in tattered clothes will convert into petty cash.  Yet the begging cup will stay empty; might have studied psycho-musicology under the late Ceaucescu, too early for Piaf, Lemarque, and Katchaturian.  No space for the Holy Trinity in non-Christian lives, not the right line, not the right time.

I’m tucked between a pram and the door in the second last carriage, standing on the last free spot, looking through the glass into the last wagon.  A space-time enclave where boys and girls call out to each other and show off in the latest cheap and hype gear fallen from the shelf; final destination: Boulogne’s coed Jewish complex.  They won’t cross the Catholic girls getting out at the opposite end of the platform.  Sephardic Jews, exiled en masse to their foster motherland, after France lost its colonies in North Africa.  No au pairs looking after pre-schoolers, mothers and aunts as required.  Most belong to families in the rag trade; boys in kippahs and Nikes; tarted up teen girls exposing midriffs, muffin waists and inflated boobs; flesh ranks high on the womanhood scale, no catwalk material.  Wedding photos pass hands, giggles will be heard all the way to the terminus.  Within a few years they’ll work in some fashion shop, marry, come back to Line 10 at 7:50, in mum’s seat and shoes, last carriage.

7:51AM, doors slam shut.  A black hole sucks away the white and turquoise time capsule; Cluny station shrinks to a pinhead in the distance.

Et voilà.

Author: Chris Huntington
Location: in the Marais

For twelve months after my wife left me, I lived in the Marais, on the Rue Vieille du Temple, in a tiny room the size of an American car.  My single window looked down four stories to a corner market that once sold horsemeat and still had a sign advertising as much on its wall.  Every night, I would lay down on my folding couch— sometimes collapsing in my jeans and collared shirt— and stare at the wooden beams in my ceiling and thought about the century or two they’d been floating there above the street.  I would think about how long my lonely room had existed before I’d gotten there, how I was just a bee without a hive and that soon this city would be alive without me.  I wasn’t planning suicide exactly, but it felt like if things continued the way they were, my body would disintegrate.  I felt wholly incapable of feeling anything except sad.

The afternoon before I moved out, a friend of a friend dropped by. She was just moving to the city and I had told her the day before that she could have a box of plates and frying pans I would otherwise be throwing away.  When she arrived I had been cleaning the shower, and stood there barefoot and shirtless in the doorway.  Laura was ten years younger than me and asked to see the view from my window.  I showed her the long street and how we could lean on my rail and watch the bald spots and dogs on leashes and umbrellas go by.  We were sitting knee to knee on my couch when the realtor came by to show the place.  The realtor had a kind of Gallic horror at interrupting anything chemical between a man and woman.  The realtor, the client, and Laura left at roughly the same time, in a mixture of awkwardness and humor.  Laura wished me well and a good life.

That night, I said good-bye to my friends at a bar up the street.  My friends— French, American, English— each sat shoulder-to-shoulder with me at the a tiny table in the Klein Holland ^[1] and we all knew we might never see each other again.  After each one squeezed me good-bye and left for the last metro, I went up the four flights of stairs to my apartment, where I lay down and watched the headlights make huge shadows out of the roofbeams.  It was one in the morning my last night in Paris when the window said my name.  I rose from bed and went to the rail.  On the opposite sidewalk, Laura and a friend were staring up at me.  I raised one finger: wait, wait.  As I moved away, I saw the friend hug Laura good-night and then Laura’s red hair was crossing the street to my door.  And I had a sudden, incandescent certainty that I would never die and would always be loved.

Author: Catharine Hewitson
Location: a bench on the left-hand side of the church, L’eglise St. Gervais et St. Protais

I had been alone in Paris for thirteen days. It took a dreary, uneventful morning for it to finally sink in that my family were hundreds of miles away. Although my first couple of weeks in the City of Light had been a song and a dance, I was craving human contact and conversation.

Like any other day, I left my little apartment on the rue de la Verrerie^[1] to spend the day with my sole companion: Paris. Turning onto the busy rue de Rivoli, I crossed over, intending to head to the quai{ref2} but instead of trying to fight the traffic running around the Hotel de Ville, I turned left onto the place Saint-Gervais.

L’Eglise St. Gervais et St. Protais^[3] stood before me; its flaking red doors beckoning me. I think I sought some kind of sanctuary. Despite the solitude, it was getting pretty noisy in my head.

For a moment I stood staring up at the immense church, then I pushed open the doors and stepped into the huge hall. On instinct, I turned left and tiptoed halfway down the stone-flagged pathway. I sat myself down on a bench looking into the nave of the church.

In front of me, on the opposite wall, was the most beautiful stained glass window I had ever seen: a riot of colour and pattern in an otherwise tranquil space.

At once I felt a flood of emotion: of respect for such a building steeped in history, of desire for something to believe in, of helplessness and above all, loneliness.

At 12.59pm I wrote in my journal: “I have been fine until now, I think.”

I felt a heightened awareness of not only the sounds that were around me, but the sounds that weren’t; the cacophony of horns and sirens I was so used to hearing had been drowned out and the voice in my head that kept reciting a perpetual to-do list had finally quietened.

In a way I wanted to hear the sound of my own wail reverberate around the cavities of this huge edifice. Instead I sat in silence and stared at the panes of glass and their pretty kaleidoscopic patterns, as though they might give me answers.

I couldn’t work out what I was looking at, but it reminded me of an Yves Saint Laurent dress, of mermaids and of Christmas.

Although I felt the cold emptiness of isolation, looking at that window I also felt warm inside; as though my body were a glass jar filled with glow worms. I sat for a while, gazing into the myriad of scarlet, gold and cobalt configurations. After a while I felt content; as though the colours had spoken to me and comforted me.

I don’t know what it was about that window, but I found solace there on that lonely day in Paris.