To be or not to be: A Francophile in Paris

Everyone who learns that Gene and I went to Paris last month asks the same questions: “Where did you go?” and “What did you see?”

Did we scale the Eiffel Tower, spend days in the Louvre, stroll through the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Jardin des Tuileries, or seek out le cancan at the Moulin Rouge? Did we take the nighttime Illuminations Tour or cruise down on the moonlit Seine? Uh, no.

I feel as though I disappoint friends when I say our trip wasn’t like that. Gene and I didn’t go with the express purpose of seeing the sights, hopping off one tour bus and onto another, calculating how many monuments and museums we could cram into the fewest number of minutes. We employed no guides to show us around. Instead, we went simply to be in Paris.

Being in Paris did take us to several notable landmarks, but only as the spirit moved us. We had no fixed itinerary. The only schedules we had to meet were a 5:49 p.m. train from Rouen to Paris and a 11:46 a.m. TGV from Paris to Nice -- and we nearly missed those!

For four days we chose to dispense with deadlines and just let life happen, opening ourselves to adventure where and when it found us.


Desperate for a second cup of coffee one morning, we staked out a spot on the Boulevard Saint-Michel -- aka Boul’Mich -- at the edge of the Quartier Latin and watched pedestrians scurry by. Frantic to escape the hordes of tourists and school groups disrupting the calm of Notre Dame, we crossed Île de la Cité to Louis IX’s celestial Sainte-Chapelle. To view Claude Monet’s complete series of La cathédrale de Rouen (we’d seen one painting in the “Monet in Normandy” exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art in 2006), we spent a rainy afternoon at Musée d'Orsay. To check on train departures to Rouen, we visited the famed Gare Saint-Lazare.

We tried a new restaurant each night. By the fourth evening, we'd seen most of the sixth and seventh arrondissements and a good bit of the fifth -- but not by design. We repeatedly consulted our pop-up map but still got turned around and completely disoriented in the warren of criss-crossing alleys on the Left Bank. It didn’t matter. We got to relish Parisian nightlife and practice our French by asking for directions. And we eventually got to our chosen destinations: La Petite Chaise, Le Petit St-Benoit, Le Petit Zinc and Au Pied de Fouet.

For me some of the thrill was being able to read Le Figaro over a leisurely breakfast each morning. To speak French with the various desk clerks at Hotel Lindbergh, where we stayed. To shop the store windows stocked with antique faïence, avant-garde light fixtures and artfully arranged patisseries. To stumble upon the puppets of the Chat Noir Shadow Theatre that even the Musée d'Orsay claims is "an unlikely object to find in [its] collections."


No doubt Gene and I could've seen more, done more. But being in the moment as life is happening around us, being part of it, delighting in the spontaneity and feeling of discovery, that is the greatest adventure.

Perhaps Jean Paul Sartre said it best: This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events: I have proved it. It's rather the way in which the moments are linked together.

© 2009 by Lorin D. Buck