“Paris is a moveable feast.” — Ernest Hemingway
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“When we are young, we travel to see the world, afterwards to make sure it is still there.” — Cyril Connolly
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I arrived back at the Hotel Plaza Athenee for a soothing lunch in the clubby, chair-filled corridor of the freshly remodeled lobby. The prior month, back in New York, a bomb had gone off on a block I regularly walk — lucky me that I was elsewhere. Paris, which I visit often, and the city of Nice, where I had spent summer holidays, had just come through a spate of terrorism. You would not know it at the hotel; the lunch was as good as always, and everyone in the corridor was as relaxed as I had remembered them to be; at the great old hotels that have retained their greatness, you either do keep running into the same people or imagine that you have.
Paris is my favorite destination in the world. I was not going to have the lifelong pleasure of being there taken from me now. On foot now and later by Metro, I took my usual Parisian route, down the fashionable Avenue Montaigne, then across to the Champs-Elysees. I dodged the cars that race through the Place de la Concorde like atoms through an accelerator, at last to inject myself bodily into the foliated womb of the Tuileries Garden. Tourism may be down, but I was greeted here by a chorus of foreign voices, assuring me that my love of Paris and determination to show solidarity with the Parisians was not unique. Buoyed by the unspoken companionship of strangers, I pushed on.
At the end of the garden, I descended the glass pyramid that sits contemplatively, as if in the lotus position, in front of the Louvre. I was soon at the Mona Lisa — which you reach by waiting for about 30 others in front of you to finish taking their selfies with the most famous painting yet made. In order to capture the moment, your fellow art aficionados will graciously ignore a dozen or so masterpieces that have altered art history and that are to be found just steps away in either direction. As always, I enjoyed quiet moments with those companion works before exiting through a gift shop, buying things I never expected I needed. A subterranean shopping mall, the Carrousel du Louvre, extends from under the pyramid, which is how I re-caffeinated at Starbucks before heading east.
The district of Le Marais, once stalwart and Jewish, now trendy and gay, now awaited. As I do every visit to Le Marais, I entered the Mariage Freres tea shop as if entering a shrine. I ignored the cliche French music piped in for tourists and took a seat at my usual spot in the crowded cafe at the rear, there to order a pot of Darjeeling Bloomfield. In the shop in front, its wood-paneled walls fragrant with decades of tea, I bought about 3 pounds of leafy ambrosia, in different varieties, to take back home. The bilingual manager, pleased by my enthusiasm, wrote on the label of each small black bag the correct steeping time, temperature and weight of tea in grams per 25 centiliters of water. In Paris, protests may flair, traffic may snarl and barbarians may try to shoot up the place, but the culinary arts are pursued inviolate.
The next day, another personal tradition took me to lunch, of course with a charming Parisian woman, at Market, which is Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s only Parisian restaurant. Dedicated to specialties featuring market produce, the decor is minimal but the dishes always innovative and — as the name promises, resoundingly fresh.
The still quite new Fondation Louis Vuitton lies on the other end of town but a shuttle bus leaves from just outside the circle enveloping the Arc de Triomphe — or so I was told. So were quite a few others told, and we got to know each other quite well, waiting for a white shuttle bus that never arrived. I summoned an Uber and invited the first three people who could understand me and wanted to go along — but we got precisely nowhere because the circle proved to be itself encircled by police barriers — posted there due to another protest, the origins and purposes of which were never revealed.
Relying on the Metro, I arrived a bit late for my rendezvous with a Parisian friend and colleague who is talented as both a lawyer and photographer; together, she and I strolled through the museum, its jagged Frank Gehry frame now gently glowing in shades of fuchsia, blue, green and more, all provided by transparent panels installed by the artist Daniel Buren over many of the 3,600 sheets of wall and roof glass panels. It was as if a Gothic cathedral had been reinterpreted as contemporary architecture.
I treated myself to dinner at Le Celedon, which holds a Michelin star. The waiter chatted with me quietly in English and German between serving a table where a couple from the Midwest was being chatted up for commercial purposes by a dapper American businessman. I had a dessert of exotic fruit with papaya sorbet and meringue, and made an early night of it.
There was an art fair on at the Grand Palais. Two floors were filled with galleries of contemporary art, much of which I struggled to understand. That is disquieting because, as a member of the Paris-based Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art, my job is to explain contemporary art to anyone who cares to listen. I had better luck within the deliberately industrial-looking Centre Pompidou — the once-daring fortress of modernism that has started to take on a familiar, period look. Featured was a marvelous retrospective of the surrealist works of Renee Magritte.
In a rainstorm, I made it to the Metro stop for the Opera Bastille in time for a quick dinner nearby and then on to a performance of “Tosca.” One of the unwavering delights in opera is to hear so many rather ordinary-looking people sing their joys and sorrows in full voice and then either kiss or draw a knife. For a touch of the familiar, the diva’s character will perchance commit suicide, which (spoiler alert) is the fate of Floria Tosca. Productions may differ, but the music is always familiar; grand opera is international cultural comfort food. I munched happily on Puccini all through the evening, exchanging opera trivia with my seatmate, a charming young woman from Moscow.
E-cigarettes are the trending bad habit in Paris. You see many middle-aged people sucking on them, all looking quite grim, as others strain to ignore them. Food tastes better to me without all that wafting nicotine. That is especially true in rooms filled with stuffed chairs, which, in the days before clean-air laws, acted like vitrines for the collection of stale smoke. They are all over the living-room-like setting of La Pagode de Cos, in the new La Reserve hotel, where I met an old and dear friend for a terrific gourmet lunch she had so kindly booked for us. Ducking incoming smoke as if dodging a gas attack is also no longer necessary at classic pastry-centered restaurants, such as Angelina, the landmark on the rue de Rivoli where another Parisian friend and I met for the obligatory afternoon drop-all-for-chocolate break — on her wise recommendation. As surely has been going on here since the turn of the last century, tourists and locals waited patiently for tables; the offerings are still marvelous and are still redoubtably Parisian.
Bismarck’s army once laid siege to Paris, and after he got hold of it, Hitler futilely ordered the whole city burned. Paris has seen toughs come and go. That has never stood in the way of essentials such as my Mont Blanc pastry, its meringue center waiting to be given light as I spooned my way through the chocolate ball around it. I left Angelina ready for just about anything.
But the next couple days I was kept busy with business — at the legal conference that had brought me here this visit. Over lunch the first day, a woman chairing a panel asked me to fill in after a cancellation. That is how I had the Hemingway moment all writers dream of having, sitting in a cafe on the Ile de Cite, scribbling out my portion of the outline. And that is how I made my debut speaking on the topic “Women in the Law” as the only man on an international panel of seven.
That evening, I had my final dinner in Paris. Robert, who has been a friend since high school, now lives as a tax exile just across the border, along the shore of Lake Geneva, in Switzerland. We met at the Left Bank apartment he still maintains with his girlfriend and emptied a bottle of 2005 Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande and then had a dinner at a neighborhood restaurant that had a particularly fine kitchen. Night had settled over Paris, and the city had switched to that unhurried nocturnal sophistication that it does so well and that New York, with its worship of business and with its boastful anxiousness, cannot seem to master. Robert charmed the waitress in French. At a nearby table, a young couple purred quietly together. A faint clop of footfalls sounded through the emptying street. As a taxi pulled me away, church bells sounded the waning day’s penultimate hour.
The Hotel Plaza Athenee, which is where I most enjoy staying in Paris, recently underwent a full renovation and expansion. Old favorites such as the Ice Bar and the clock in the Alain Ducasse restaurant that had only one abstract hand — to dine well is to forget the time — have been replaced with decor in line with the hotel's design mission: to harmonize old and new elements within the frames provided by distinct and defined public spaces. 25 Avenue Montaigne, 75008 Paris, +33-(0)1-53-67-66-67. Or reserve through The Leading Hotels of the World, +1-800-745-8883, www.lhw.com.
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Food and Dining
Angelina, 226 rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, +33-(0)1-42-60-82-00.
Le Celedon, 15 rue Daunou, 75002 Paris, +33-(0)1-47-03-40-42.
Mariage Freres, 30 rue du Bourg Tibourg, 75004 Paris, +33(0)1-42-72-28-11.
Market, 15 avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris, +33-(0)1-9-67-03-19-94.
La Pagode de Cos, 42 Avenue Gabriel, 75008 Paris, +33-(0)1-58-36-60-60.
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