The City of Light gets its shine back

It had been decades since my first visit, but the café Les Deux 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 3 menus and waved me over. “Mademoiselle, which table do you prefer? Pour toi, anywhere.”

“Hmmm, which is best?” I asked, lifting my shades onto my head and scanning the crowd of amazing-looking French people—jewel-toned eyes, strong noses, goatees, good shoes. 

“Eh bien, each one, it is a seat for the theater of 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 daughter’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 beer—he was in Paris detoxing).

Since her reign began in 2014, Hidalgo has led efforts to assertively greenify urban spaces and infrastructure, 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 surrounding the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées and planting thousands of trees and parklets there.

“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 renderings 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 swimming 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 tourists 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. 

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 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 daughter 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 photogenic arrondissement that had served as a backdrop in Amelie and so many other movies.

The post-uni crowd sat along the canal picnicking, reading Camus, strumming guitars. The chestnut trees reflected off the water, and even the functional locks and iron bridges appeared picturesque 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 afternoon 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 fictional phantom of the opera famously haunted. The whole palace, with its glowing 19th-century candelabras and marble balustrades, stunned me with its opulence.

But the real gasp moment came when we entered the theater and looked up: In 1964, Marc Chagall painted a 2,400-square-foot fresco of winged characters and heavenly gardens on the ceiling. The artwork was so joyful and expressive that it felt like a gift to humanity—and, in fact, it was. Although the work had taken the then–77-year-old painter a year to complete, he refused any payment for it. 

As it turned out, opera would be the theme of our entire day. That evening, we walked along the Seine until we reached Bel Canto, a cozy Paris eatery with an opera concept. As we waited for our meal, a handsome server waltzing past us with plated appetizers suddenly turned around and started belting out “Libiamo ne’lieti calici” from La Traviata. 

Throughout the 4-course meal, several exquisite performers—professional opera singers—serenaded us, acting out embraces and feuds, which seemed a bit wacky at first.

One of the singers explained to me that centuries ago at the Italian opera house La Scala, audience members would sit in the theater 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.”

The Emily effect

On day 6 of our 8-day visit, Sophie awoke early and headed off to the famed Paris flea market Porte de Clignancourt, while I readied to visit Paris’ hottest new museum, La Galerie Dior, also known as the Christian Dior Museum. When I arrived, I smiled when I saw a blocks-long line of adorable teen girls fancied up in selfie-worthy dresses.

They were part of the Emily in Paris phenomenon—a new generation of French capital aficionadas inspired by the popular Netflix series. You could see it all over the city, the girls flooding the Tuileries to snap photos next to the 18th-century statues; the flirty queue for pastel-colored macarons outside Ladurée; and the cafés now beautified with bouquets of effusive silk flowers, all to attract the Baby Emily crowd.

Opened in 2022, the museum features the legendary Christian Dior’s designs, childhood photographs, and historic images of celebrities wearing his ensembles. In one room, artisans showed how they hand-make Dior’s signature handbags.

It was the city’s most-coveted museum ticket, and rightly so. La Galerie Dior taught me not only about the next-level refinement of this sartorial genius, but also about Parisian history and evolving perspectives on beauty and female liberation. 

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 mortared 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.

It was close to midnight, and Sophie and I were walking along the Seine once more. Since its greening, the river’s banks had become a low-key meeting ground for Parisian twentysomethings. They sat on benches, grooving to techno, sharing bottles of Beaujolais, basking in the golden lamplight shimmering off the dark river. 

Sophie glanced down at her Cartier. “Oh, Ali, get ready for this!” she gushed, waving northward. A second later, the Eiffel Tower erupted into a glittering light show. 

“C’est incroyable!” I squealed and reached over to hug her. “Paris, I love you!” Sophie beamed.

“So, do you think Paris is a man or a woman?” I asked.

“A woman,” she replied. “Definitely a woman. Her elegance, her charme. What do you think?”

“A woman for sure,” I answered, still gazing at the luminous Eiffel, my beacon. “This city is forever offering gifts that you never knew you needed.” 

We returned to the Eiffel Tower on our last evening in Paris. We were standing in line for the elevator when I noticed my hands were shaking. I soon realized why.

Sure, l’Eiffel had been the backdrop for some of my most cinematic French experiences—whooshing 905 feet upward in a glass elevator to the highest platform and staring out onto tout Paris, for one.

But it had also been the scene of some rather regrettable moments. Like when, in my 20s, I scrutinized my angelic mother’s outfit and informed her that her head-to-toe denim look and fanny pack were simply not good enough for me to associate with.

Or the time when my brilliant and handsome first love and I stood at the tower’s base, ready to ascend, and the early spring skies started to snow. With the frost collecting on his hair, he clutched his Armani scarf to his neck and grimaced.

He looked so miserable, so averse to adventure, so unwilling to laugh at life’s little inconveniences. He said no to the theater of life. It was then that I knew we had reached the beginning of the end. 

I shook off the creeping melancholia and steadied my hands, and Sophie and I whooshed upward in the lift. At the top, I stood at the tower’s rail and stared. “Wow,” I whispered to myself.

In the middle distance was the only French history lesson I would ever need: Le Panthéon, Les Invalides, Pont Alexandre III, Notre-Dame—my old friends of so many decades. Sprawling before me was a 3D map of a great civilization.

Paris was now on the verge of a grand encore. And so was I. The first star of the night popped into view, and I caught its gaze. It twinkled brighter by the moment, this star above Paris, bathing me in its forever light. 

Frequent contributor Alison Gee is the author of the memoir Where the Peacocks Sing and a lecturer at Scripps College.

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