Paris - França Parte 2

In these weeks preceding The Passion, we all need a snapshot of La Madeleine.

A Pernod on Les Champs Elysees by L’Arc de Triomphe, sans doute.

Sacre Bleu, it’s Sacre Coeur!.

And a kid at your table at lunch in Montmartre will get every goddamn portrait artist in the
arrondissement pestering you every ten seconds!

It helps if you can stay with people whose apartments share those three cardinal virtues –
location, location, and location. Some of the American blondes stayed at one:

Some stayed at another

And why not let a Fifth American Blonde take you out for dinner in Montparnasse, where
Hemingway and Picasso used to drink the night away?

With hostesses like those, who can withstand Paris’s siren song. Yes Paris, where innocence

and sin walk hand in hand.

On my first trip to Paris, when I was 11, my father and mother and youngest sister and I were walking near Le Moulin Rouge on the Place de Pigalle, after visiting Montmartre.  My father and I typically walked several paces ahead of the wimminfolk.  A rather elaborately done-up prostitute threw out her ankle and tripped the Da.  As she caught his elbow and braced herself against him and his stumble, I heard her whisper, in French: “I’ll do things your wife never will”.  I was in an accelerated language program, and already knew enough French to understand her precisely.
How my young imagination raced!  This woman, with her high heels and fishnet stockings and skimpy dress and bustier and fox stole, would probably dangle her feet out the window of a little red roadster convertible, lie way back in the seat, and take long slow draws off a cigarette, held in a holder, no less, the smoke curling round her painted lips and eyes, and blow it out in a long cool fish-lipped O.  My mother would never do THAT!  What a decadent treat she was offering the Da!
Paris is like Achilles.  And like that prostitute.  It will do things for you that no other city can.  No matter where you wander, make sure to go back to Paris.  Again and again.  No, really, think about what you’re missing.

O artigo acima é uma cortesia de seu autor, A.C., direto da França para nossa redação.