What I always say about Paris.

I always say that Paris is so capacious, so gorgeous, so generous, that it can be anyone’s town.

I like to say that Paris can be my Impressionism-loving and DeGaulle-leaning mother’s favorite place on earth and it can be wholly and properly beloved by the anarchist-squatter-Berliner I met there in the 80s. In Paris, there’s always room for actual great writers and for the smart-shopping college girls coming through semester after semester (some of whom are writers, by the bye) and for the art smugglers and the necessary hash dealers. What I mean is: there is enough in Paris for 27 million tourists every year to arrive and find some beauty, or rather to be found by beauty, to be electrocuted it, to let beauty do to them what beauty does to a human. Enough so that 27 million of them, of us, get Paris for ourselves, forever.

But secretly, I know and love the real Paris.