Impressions

A vignette is a short text that focuses on a moment, a mood, a scene, a character, an encounter, an idea or a place. Here are three Paris vignettes that involve shopping, gift-giving and biking.

Dear Friends and Fellow Travelers, January 19, 2017. We gather here today to recognize and affirm our place in the world. We gather not to walk lock-step towards a single destination, but to wherever our interests, whims and desires may lead us, without willful harm to others. Where are we? Let us consider:

In a startling and macabre discovery, archeologists in Paris discovered this week what appears to be a mass bicycle graveyard on the site of a portion of Canal Saint Martin in the 10th arrondissement. The City of Paris gave France Revisited special access to photograph and report on the extraordinary find.

The year 2015 ends on a bright and hopeful day in Paris. I’m relieved to feel no compulsion to come up with resolutions for 2016; I can simply reuse those of 2015 since none of them was realized. Something about this makes me happy.

France Revisited congratulates travel writer and faithful contributor Corinne LaBalme for receiving one of the top journalism awards given by the Association de la Presse...

On a bright December morning I was headed across the footbridge the Pont des Arts to the Institut de France to learn about the 350th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences and about Louis Pasteur's archives, recently listed in the Memory of the World Register.

The terrorist attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis on November 13 killed 130 people and left hundreds more wounded. The immediate target was joie de vivre in the City of Light: the pleasure of sharing a drink or a meal with friends, of listening to music, of strolling down the street, of kissing on the sidewalk, of men and women mingling and dressing freely, of gathering comfortably with strangers, of being young in years or young at heart, of openly celebrating life. Those are all things that you, the visitor and the return traveler, look forward to when you imagine (re)visiting Paris.

You know it’s summer in the capital when… you’re walking along rue des Francs-Bourgeois on your way to get ice cream in the Marais and you notice the seagulls celebrating the return to their Paris pieds-à-terre in Paris. (See videos)

On January 11, the day of the massive march that followed the terrorist attacks, news networks set up shop on Place de la République, the square whose central statue became one of the unofficial memorials for the attacks. CNN was among those networks. Visiting the square in the evening as the crowd dispersed, I came across...