Encore,

I
T HAD BEEN DECADES SINCE MY FIRST VISIT, but the café Les Deux

Paris!
Magots was just as I had remembered: all the tables and wicker chairs facing
out onto the boulevard, as if waiting for a parade. Not a single Kir Royale
imbiber or Gauloises smoker wanted to miss the stream of life passing by,
not a second of it. It hardly mattered that the late-summer sky threatened
to storm. We were here for it all. Even the deluge.

A boy-faced maître d’ dressed in a suit grabbed Sophie, an old friend I like to refer to as my favor-
3 menus and waved me over. “Mademoiselle, which ite London gypsy, and Nathalie, the daughter of a
table do you prefer? Pour toi, anywhere.” former Australian ambassador to Paris, had joined

The once-dimmed City of Light “Hmmm, which is best?” I asked, lifting my

shades onto my head and scanning the crowd of
finds its way back, just in time amazing-looking French people—jewel-toned eyes,
strong noses, goatees, good shoes.
for the Summer Olympics “Eh bien, each one, it is a seat for the theater of
me, all designer shopping bags and rouged lips.
Our Cambodian French waiter brought by flutes of
Champagne and plates of cantaloupe crisscrossed
with San Daniele prosciutto. (Did it matter that half
a melon cost 17 euros?)

BY ALISON GEE happiness, no?” With that, he placed me front and
center. Handing me a menu, he smiled and winked.
I glanced up at him—with his tie askew and his
golden floppy hair, he looked about 21, my daugh-
ter’s age. Mais, did it matter, really?
“Merci, it’s absolument parfait,” I replied in my
best Franglish, and winked back. Because, when in
Paris …
I had first sat at one of these tables when I was
20 and a Cambridge exchange student, counting
out francs from my backpack pocket until I had
enough for a café crème. Who could resist being
part of this? It was legend that Ernest Hemingway
wrote several chapters of The Sun Also Rises on
the café’s second floor. Pablo Picasso met his muse
Dora Maar here, finding her irresistible after she
plunged a knife into their café table, right between
his fingers. The Doors’ Jim Morrison idled on this
terrace, downing caffè Americanos (though not
Taking in the show playing out in front of us,
Nathalie raised her flute and cooed: “Paris is back.”
My local friends had told me that recent years
had done a hatchet job on the City of Light. The
city’s cost of living and increasingly crowded con-
ditions had been driving residents away. According
to a 6-part series published in early 2023 by Le
Parisien newspaper, the city’s population declined
by 122,919 over the past decade. Les Deux
Magots has
By many accounts, the once-glorious French
served as a
capital had reached a physical and psychological front-row
nadir. Slothful civic services meant that heaps of seat to Paris’
trash bags lined the sidewalks, even in posh neigh- “theater of
happiness”
borhoods. Graffiti exploded on city walls. Well-
since it opened
meaning lovers clamped padlocks (a symbol of in the late
eternal amour) on the stately bridges spanning the 1800s.

FROM LEFT: CHESNOT/GETTY IMAGES; © SÉBASTIEN DUBOIS-DIDCOCK

beer—he was in Paris detoxing).
On this evening, decades later, this same the-
ater of happiness, the Paris café, was very much
open for business. The sky was like a Eugène Boudin
landscape, strewn with gray clouds and streaked
with a fading sunset. A woman dressed in claustro-
phobically tight jeans and towering heels strutted
by, her 3 sausage dogs sporting tiny berets—red,
white, and French blue. Two teen boys preened in a
vintage convertible Porsche, blasting Francophone
rap. Four Kardashian wannabes, all sheathed in
The Olympic rings were unveiled shades of pink, sashayed over and seized the table
on the Trocadero esplanade on next to me, tossing about oh-là-làs like rose petals
September 13, 2017, when it was
announced that Paris would host into the air. The maître d’ gave them all the same
the 2024 Summer Games. blue-eyed wink.                         

AAA.COM SPRING 2024 WESTWAYS | 45


From top left: Seine, obscuring Paris’ sparkling views with rusting
Stretching for metal. Pollution choked the air. Fumes rose from
miles and lined
the Seine. As if responding to the collective despair
with trees,
benches, and in 2019, the Notre-Dame, Paris’ iconic 12th-century
food stalls, the French Gothic church, combusted into flames.
path along the And then came the pandemic. COVID not only
Seine attracts a
isolated a population of bons vivants in their often-
steady stream
of pedestrians cramped apartments but also shuttered café soci-
and bicyclists; ety, one of the city’s most defining aspects. “In Paris
the author there is such a strong culture of people watching,”
(left) relaxes
Nathalie told us that evening at Les Deux Magots.
with friends
Lisa Anselmo “COVID destroyed that. We didn’t know if we’d ever
(center) and get it back.”
Sophie Benge But if the scene at Les Deux Magots was any
(right) at a
indication, Paris was indeed back. And not only
bistro in Canal
Saint-Martin. back, but also arguably heading into its most ambi-
tious period since it was modernized in the late
19th century.
Paris today was not content just to regain its
sparkle. It was also determined to rise as the green-
est city on the planet—if the city’s mayor, Anne
Hidalgo, had anything to say about it. Since her
reign began in 2014, Hidalgo has led efforts to
assertively greenify urban spaces and infrastruc-
ture, converting the Seine’s banks into promenades,
limiting daily traffic into the city’s borders, and
turning entire neighborhoods into pedestrian- and
cycling-only zones on Sundays. The controversial
leader proposed ripping out concrete spaces sur-
rounding the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées
and planting thousands of trees and parklets there.
46 | WESTWAYS SPRING 2024
“This is the city we want to show the world
during the Summer Olympics in Paris in 2024,”
Hidalgo wrote in a 2019 Time magazine essay.
The plan is to transform the whole city into one big
sporting festival. I was already seeing artist render-
ings of sporting events taking place in the Eiffel
Tower’s shadow and at the Place de la Concorde
(never mind that this massive public square was
also the site of Marie Antoinette’s guillotining). In
fact, Paris officials had invested $1.55 billion to clean
up the Seine, with the idea of hosting several swim-
ming events on the famous river as the city had
done for the 1900 Paris Olympics. (Unfortunately,
even after an extensive de-polluting effort, 2 recent
triathlons were nixed due to poor water quality.)
Paris is expecting millions of international tour-
ists to descend on the city for the Olympics, but
in response millions of les vrais Parisians may exit.
“Lots of friends say they plan to rent out their small
studios for $500 a night,” Nathalie told us.
FRENCH IMMERSION
This generous city has been my touchstone for
decades. And during this second-act season of my
life, I found I needed the city again, her beauty and
joy. Her eternal light. Traveling from L.A., I yearned
to step back into decades of memories—I had been
AAA.COM
to Paris with my college boyfriend, my Cambridge
mates, my brother, my mother, the man I almost
married, the man I did marry. My 1-year-old daugh-
ter Anais (yes, named after the French writer) had
taken her first steps in the Tuileries, and we returned
together 15 years later when she had transformed
into a dazzling teen. So on this trip I wanted to do
the things I’d always loved to do in Paris, but I also
longed to do things I had never done.
“Ali, get off that phone and get on your bike!”
barked Sophie. “You can snap photos of the Eiffel
Tower later.” She was on my case again, and I
half-wondered why I had even invited her on this
trip. But Sophie had been to Paris some 30 times
and could navigate the route between the Bois de
Boulogne and the Bastille without consulting a map.
For this trip, we had made a pact to shun taxis and
rely solely on the Métro, bicycles, and à pied, like
classic Parisian flaneurs.
Both wearing dresses and berets, we jumped
on Vélib’—the city’s bike-share wheels—and sped
off. Becoming one of the world’s premier bicycling
cities was also one of Paris’ new grand ambitions,
and the city had shifted radically because of it. Two-
way bike lanes crossed the city, inviting all sorts of
wheeled chaos. Bicycling not only got us to where
we were going, but also invited us to be part of the
city’s natural flow.
Our first stop was Canal Saint-Martin, the hip
neighborhood du jour. My friend Lisa Anselmo, the
author of the memoir My (Part-Time) Paris Life:
How Running Away Brought Me Home, had insisted
we see it. We met her for a bistro lunch at Chez
Prune, where everyone looked fresh out of a Zadig
& Voltaire ad. Afterward we wandered along the
canal, no set plans. Canal Saint-Martin is a photo-
genic arrondissement that had served as a back-
drop in Amelie and so many other movies.
FROM LEFT: GREATSTOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; EYE35/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
FROM LEFT: HEMIS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; COURTESY ALISON GEE
AAA.COM
The post-uni crowd sat along the canal picnick-
ing, reading Camus, strumming guitars. The chest-
nut trees reflected off the water, and even the
functional locks and iron bridges appeared pictur-
esque in that distinctly European way. Inspired by
the beauty around me, I ducked into a boutique
and bought some quintessentially French tops and
skirts. We stopped about a mile upstream at yet
another bistro for a citron pressé and a gab about
Madame Hidalgo. It was the perfectly French after-
noon I had always dreamed of having, but I never
knew where to have it.
The next day, I put on one of my new French
ensembles, and Sophie and I walked a couple of
miles across town to l’Opéra Garnier, which the fic-
tional phantom of the opera famously haunted. The
whole palace, with its glowing 19th-century cande-
The opulent
labras and marble balustrades, stunned me with its l’Opéra Garnier
opulence. But the real gasp moment came when (below left) is
we entered the theater and looked up: In 1964, the setting for
the Phantom
Marc Chagall painted a 2,400-square-foot fresco
of the Opera.
of winged characters and heavenly gardens on the The Sacré Coeur
ceiling. The artwork was so joyful and expressive basilica (below
that it felt like a gift to humanity—and, in fact, it right), set on
Paris’ highest
was. Although the work had taken the then–77-year-
hill, offers one
old painter a year to complete, he refused any pay- of the city’s
ment for it. prettiest views.
SPRING 2024 WESTWAYS | 47
 In the afternoon, Sophie and I met up at
a Vietnamese café for pho before embarking
on the road going up Montmartre. Both of us
downloaded a walking tour that took us past
the neighborhood’s bright spots: the studios
of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí; the pink
restaurant La Maison Rose; the Wall of Love
(a public artwork composed of 612 tiles mor-
tared onto a park wall, with the phrase “I love
you” written in 250 languages); and into the
town square, Place du Tertre, where street
artists painted tourists’ portraits. No matter
how frenetic my visits to Paris were, I always
took time to visit the Sacré Coeur. With its
cloud-like domes and home at the top of
Paris’ highest hill, this remarkable church,
completed in 1914, is for me one of the city’s
beating hearts. I walked into its cool expanses,
lit a candle, and said a silent prayer.

THE EIFFEL SPARKLES ETERNAL

WHERE
It was close to midnight, and Sophie and I in my 20s, I scrutinized my angelic mother’s
were walking along the Seine once more. outfit and informed her that her head-to-toe

TO STAY
Since its greening, the river’s banks had denim look and fanny pack were simply not
become a low-key meeting ground for good enough for me to associate with.
Parisian twentysomethings. They sat on Or the time when my brilliant and hand- Hôtel Rochechouart
Emily in Paris As it turned out, opera would be the theme of benches, grooving to techno, sharing bottles some first love and I stood at the tower’s Located at the base
devotees will our entire day. That evening, we walked along the of Beaujolais, basking in the golden lamplight base, ready to ascend, and the early spring of Montmartre, this
delight in
Seine until we reached Bel Canto, a cozy Paris eat- shimmering off the dark river. skies started to snow. With the frost collect- beautiful art deco
the Christian
Dior Museum ery with an opera concept. As we waited for our Sophie glanced down at her Cartier. “Oh, ing on his hair, he clutched his Armani scarf to boutique hotel has
(above) and the meal, a handsome server waltzing past us with Ali, get ready for this!” she gushed, waving his neck and grimaced. He looked so miser- très French rooms and
Ladurée pastry plated appetizers suddenly turned around and northward. A second later, the Eiffel Tower able, so averse to adventure, so unwilling to spectacular rooftop
shop (right).
started belting out “Libiamo ne’lieti calici” from erupted into a glittering light show. laugh at life’s little inconveniences. He said no views. Rates start at
La Maison
Rose (opposite La Traviata. “C’est incroyable!” I squealed and reached to the theater of life. It was then that I knew $228.
page) is a Throughout the 4-course meal, several exquisite over to hug her. “Paris, I love you!” Sophie we had reached the beginning of the end.
popular eatery performers—professional opera singers—serenaded when I saw a blocks-long line of adorable teen girls beamed. I shook off the creeping melancholia Paris Marriott Champs
in the artsy
us, acting out embraces and feuds, which seemed fancied up in selfie-worthy dresses. They were part “So, do you think Paris is a man or a and steadied my hands, and Sophie and I Elysees Hotel
Montmartre
a bit wacky at first. One of the singers explained to of the Emily in Paris phenomenon—this new gener- woman?” I asked. whooshed upward in the lift. At the top, I

FROM LEFT: FREDERIC REGLAIN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; HEMIS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

district.
me that centuries ago at the Italian opera house
La Scala, audience members would sit in the the-
ater in their haute finery and dine while enjoying
the opera. “At La Scala, you could laugh, you could
cry, you could talk without anyone shooting you
a dirty look,” she explained. That night ended up
being Sophie’s favorite of our entire visit. “There’s
usually something aloof about opera,” she said after
we left the restaurant, “but at Bel Canto, I felt I was
in its pocket.”
Where Parisian flair
ation of French capital aficionadas. You could see “A woman,” she replied. “Definitely a stood at the tower’s rail and stared. “Wow,” meets American service,
it all over the city, the girls flooding the Tuileries to woman. Her elegance, her charme. What do I whispered to myself. In the middle distance this elegant Marriott
snap photos next to the 18th-century statues; the you think?” was the only French history lesson I would offers a great location as
flirty queue for pastel-colored macarons outside “A woman for sure,” I answered, still gazing ever need: Le Panthéon, Les Invalides, Pont well as comfort and style.
Ladurée; and the cafés now beautified with bou- at the luminous Eiffel, my beacon. “This city Alexandre III, Notre-Dame—my old friends of Rates start at $440.
quets of effusive silk flowers, all to attract the Baby is forever offering gifts that you never knew so many decades. Sprawling before me was a
Emily crowd. you needed.” 3D map of a great civilization. Paris was now Renaissance Paris
Opened in 2022, the museum features the leg- We returned to the Eiffel Tower on our last on the verge of a grand encore. And so was Vendome Hotel
endary Christian Dior’s designs, childhood photo- evening in Paris. We were standing in line for I. The first star of the night popped into view, Sophisticated, fun, and
graphs, and historic images of celebrities wearing the elevator when I noticed my hands were and I caught its gaze. It twinkled brighter by
MIHAI BARBAT/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

situated across from the

his ensembles. In one room, artisans showed how shaking. I soon realized why. Sure, l’Eiffel had the moment, this star above Paris, bathing me Tuileries and the Louvre,
THE EMILY EFFECT
Your AAA travel
advisor can help they hand-make Dior’s signature handbags. It was been the backdrop for some of my most in its forever light. this boutique hotel also
you plan and book On day 6 of our 8-day visit, Sophie awoke early and the city’s most-coveted museum ticket, and rightly cinematic French experiences—whooshing has an indoor pool. Rates
your next trip. headed off to the famed Paris flea market Porte so. La Galerie Dior taught me not only about the 905 feet upward in a glass elevator to the start at $494.
Visit a AAA branch,
de Clignancourt, while I readied to visit Paris’ hot- next-level refinement of this sartorial genius, but highest platform and staring out onto tout Frequent contributor ALISON GEE is the
call (800) 814-7471,
or go to test new museum, La Galerie Dior, also known as also about Parisian history and evolving perspec- Paris, for one. But it had also been the scene of author of the memoir Where the Peacocks
AAA.com/explore. the Christian Dior Museum. When I arrived, I smiled tives on beauty and female liberation. some rather regrettable moments. Like when, Sing and a lecturer at Scripps College.

48 | WESTWAYS SPRING 2024 AAA.COM AAA.COM SPRING 2024 WESTWAYS | 49