… her streets were cold and gray. It was March 1952. My husband had been recalled for the Korean War and sent to France as part of a bomber wing Eisenhower promised NATO in the early days of the Cold War.

Twenty-four years old at the time, married almost a year, I arrived in the city of my dreams ready to be seduced by her warmth and historic charm. Expecting beauty and light in a city with echoes of Victor Hugo, Degas and Maurice Chevalier, we got somber darkness and bone chilling weather. We drove through grim streets, rundown houses on either side, to our hotel, a turn-of-the-century hostelry with a shabby lobby and a cage elevator. My husband had selected the one-star Napoleon Bonaparte, partly for its price, 3500 francs (about $10) for a double room, and partly for its view. The 1952 Michelin indicated that it overlooked the Arc de Triomphe. Obviously, M. Michelin had made his notes on a clear day. On this day, fog and drizzle prevented us from seeing more than an outline of that venerable monument or anything else. Looking out the hotel window, my only thought was: what was all the fuss about? I had traveled thousands of miles on the North Atlantic in February, retching all the way, to celebrate our first anniversary in this renowned citadel of love. For this? In 1952, my feminism had yet fully to emerge. Tired and disappointed, I had only one recourse. I burst into tears.

Luckily, my husband, who was also let down at his first view of Paris, had been trained for bravery in World War II. In his if-we-have-to-be-in-Paris-for-our-first-anniversary-let’s-make-the-best-of-it voice, he said, ”Let’s go out to dinner.”

We did, and even before we had our first sip of French champagne and realized it wasn’t imported, the joy of being together, wherever, prevailed. In the remaining three or four days of that first stay, although the dreary weather didn’t lift, our spirits did, and despite the gloom we started to feel some of the magnetism Ernest Hemingway or Gertrude Stein must have felt.

Notwithstanding the gloomy weather, it was heartbreakingly apparent France had still not gotten her act together. In 1952, six and a half years after the end of World War II, the grime of war coated even the most beautiful buildings, causing them to appear proud but worn. The Louvre, Notre Dame and Sacré Coeur were like elderly actors who hadn’t worked for a long time. The Champs-Elysées was only beginning to wake up with a few fashionable shops occupying some of the large storefronts that had been shuttered for many years during and after the war.

Even if I had not been wearing a bright yellow topcoat (from my trousseaux) when all the Parisian women were still in black, we would have been very conspicuous driving our 1950 Pontiac. Few Frenchmen had cars at the time, and we had ours only because the Air Force, which wouldn’t pay my way over to join my husband, was willing to pay his car’s way over. So much for family values in 1952.

Because there were so few automobiles in Paris and so little traffic, diagonal parking was allowed on the sidewalks along the Champs. Wherever we parked, we would come out to find our car surrounded with curious onlookers. The French were fascinated with American cars. People would touch the doors, the hood or the windows as if to share ownership for a moment. These observers who had no idea how our car had gotten there must have seen us as a rich American couple. Little did they know that the car was owned mostly by the bank, and the exchange rate was so advantageous that a Second Lieutenant’s salary allowed us to, if not quite live it up, indulge in a few more ooh-la-lahs than we might have at the same time in the U.S..

We could afford to eat in restaurants then we could only dream of today: Lapérouse, La Tour D’Argent, Lasserre. We could walk right into any museum or the Eiffel Tower, no waiting. We bought fine leather gloves for $5 a pair and with the purchase got a handful of samples of the leading French perfumes: Chanel #5, Arpège, Shalimar.

On that first visit, VE Day was still a living memory, and we were the symbols of liberation. We were treated with respect and admiration; the general thinking of the day seemed to be: if we were American, we had to be good. Not too hard to take for a young soldier and his bride. Rain and all, Paris had begun to claim our hearts.

The next time I saw Paris was in May of that same year. We drove up from Bordeaux, where my husband was stationed, with a windshield that had been shattered by May Day demonstrators. The Communists were expressing their opposition to the American military presence in France. Spare parts for our car were only available in Paris. Tough assignment. We had to go back.

The sun shone for the four or five days we were there. The trees were in leaf, the flowers were in bloom, the Boulevards looked Grand: the buildings that had appeared grim and sad only two months before, although no cleaner, now seemed resplendent with their softly rounded corners, balconies and mansard roofs. Lovers walked along the Seine, kissing in public. We held hands. Book stalls dotted the quays, and the Bateau Mouche had begun regular trips back and forth on the river. We were smitten. We hated to leave.

Once my husband had been transferred to Laon and we lived in nearby Soissons, 62 miles northeast of Paris, we were only an hour by train or car to the capital. Weekends, we would pack a bag, toss it in the car, and drive into “town.” Since our living costs in the small hotel where we were staying in Soissons equaled my husband’s salary (married couples without children were not given living quarters by the Air Force, just an allowance for housing) we depended on the small commission checks forwarded by my husband’s previous employer, and the favorable rate of exchange, to finance our weekend excursions. Mindful of our limited resources, we would find a small hotel, nothing as grand as the Napoleon Bonaparte, ask to see a room, check it out for fleas by shaking the curtains and bedspread, and if it proved to be insect free, check in. From here we would get dressed in our stateside finery and go out on the town to the Follies Bergère, the Lido or a small club with walls draped in dark red velvet where Edith Piaf, the Little Sparrow, sang in her sad waifish voice. Very often we would end up at Les Halles for onion soup at two o’clock in the morning before returning to our creepy but flea-less room.

By the time we were shipped back to the States, or rather my husband and his car were—I went on my own—Paris had become a part of us. Never mind the tourists who had come before. Forget those who would come after us. It was our town; our love.

The last time I saw Paris, her streets were cold and gray. It was April 2001. My husband and I had celebrated our fiftieth anniversary in March and decided to go back to the scene of our first anniversary. Remembering the weather on our first trip, we decided to wait until April. But the day we arrived was misty and overcast, and that was the best day of the week. On the drive in from De Gaulle Airport, we saw industrial plants, hotels, ordinary buildings. Except for the signs in French, we could have been entering any American city, until, all at once, in the distance the Eiffel Tower came into view, and then the street names became familiar: We were crossing the Rue St. Honoré, the Rue de Rivoli. We were at the Place de la Concorde, and suddenly we were driving over the Seine to the Left Bank. Our taxi driver took us to the Boulevard St. Germain where he turned onto a narrow street, Rue de Jacob. This is where our small Hôtel des Marronniers stood. This time I didn’t cry, but a few tears did gather as we entered the lobby and the tiny garden restaurant beyond. Because we were not alone. Having an early breakfast was our whole family: our two daughters and their husbands, and their children, our grandchildren. They had come to help us celebrate our fiftieth anniversary.

It rained off and on all week, even sleeted one day. The temperature hovered at 50; the lines were blocks long at the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and the Eiffel Tower. Our umbrellas dripped as we entered the Café de Flore for an aperitif. The view from the top of Notre Dame was mostly of other tourists. The banks of the Seine were flooded because of the “unusual” rain. It didn’t matter. We were here surrounded by our family. Paris never looked lovelier.

© 2021, Lyla Blake Ward, for first publication on France Revisited, francerevisited.com.

The post 1952: The First Time I Saw Paris… appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Photographs from nearly half a century ago lead Elizabeth Esris to revisit her first encounter with Paris with her then-boyfriend (now husband) and to rejoice in the timeless nature of travel discovery.

* * *

During lockdown I can travel virtually anywhere with a few clicks: to a book club in Pennsylvania, to an aperitif with friends in France, to an opera at the Met, to exercise with Olympic athletes, to meditate with Oprah. But I miss real travel and find myself journeying through memory as I spot mementoes around the house.

Two such souvenirs remind me of my first trip to Paris when I was 21, in 1971. With backpack and boyfriend—later my husband—I had set out on a “grand tour” of Europe.

Reaching up to a high shelf in a closet, I find a cherished copy of “Paris Match” that I had bought in Center City Philadelphia in August 1970. The tattered cover proclaims, “La Mini-Jupe est Morte” and foretells of radical changes dictated by the capital of fashion. From the mid-60s to that summer, mini skirts were de rigueur for young women. I remember being angry at the thought that mini-skirts, emblematic of the freedom, defiance and promise of my generation, could be so easily dismissed. But when I went to Paris the following summer, I saw calf-length skirts that I would soon be wearing and long, knit triangular shawls that draped the shoulder and reached down the back to the sandaled feet of beautiful Parisians. For me, it was the most romantic look I had ever seen. When I came home, my grandmother made a long shawl for me, and I wore it in the fall with my peasant skirts like an acclamation for haute couture on my college campus.

The “Paris Match” further reminds me of the worn copy of Julie Child and Simone Beck’s, Mastering the Art of French Cooking tucked between the French cookbooks in my kitchen. I purchased it when I returned from Paris that summer. I was determined to make croissants for my family, to amaze them by baking the most delicious pastry I had ever tasted. After twelve hours and endless handfuls of butter, I produced a cracker-thin crescent that brought me to tears. Still, I smile when I recall it and realize that my journey to Paris was more than a visit to monuments and literary mystique; Paris infused me with an urgency to make it part of my identity.

When I met Mike in college I confided in him a resolve that had been with me since devouring Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Balzac and Hemingway and being introduced to Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel in Madame Cooperstein’s French 1 class: I was going to explore Europe and see Paris while I was young, no matter what. I was leaving at the end of the spring semester with or without him.

By June we had a copy of Arthur Frommer’s Europe on 5 Dollars a Day, Eurail Passes and our paltry savings from after school jobs along with his Bar Mitzvah stash. We planned that the final stops on our travels would be the South of France and finally Paris. Paris was to be savored and left to steep within us for the flight home and beyond.

Mike and I purchased backpacks that are unrecognizable in today’s wilderness outfitted world. They had bulky, exterior aluminum frames onto which was strapped a thick nylon bag. As we crossed borders from West Germany to Poland and back into the free world on our summer journey, we bought and sewed patches on our packs to declare our wanderings. They hang in our basement today as mementoes of two travelers landing in Frankfurt so naïve that we didn’t know to exchange dollars for Deutsche Marks before trying to pay a bus fare.

Preparations for the trip also led us to buy matching pairs of the first true athletic shoes we had ever seen—Adidas. They were made of white leather with three distinctive black stripes and had a sturdy, supportive construction unlike the relaxed canvas sneakers we had worn since childhood; we were confident that our feet would survive the extensive walking we anticipated. Adidas were new to us, but they were sensations in Eastern Europe where people stopped us to see the shoes up close and to ask how Mike could have cut his jeans to make shorts. Levi’s and Lee’s and Wrangler jeans were highly prized by young Europeans who were fascinated by everything American.

We finally reached Paris after more than six weeks of travel, arriving at Gare de Lyon on a night train from Nice, a diesel that lumbered on for 12 hours and clanged into the station. We were tired and anxious to reach the pension we had selected from our guidebook. With map in hand we walked across the Seine on Pont d’Austerlitz and followed the Quai. Our eyes were drawn to the river, to Notre Dame, and the bouquinistes on the Quai de la Tournelle, but what imprinted itself upon me was the fountain at Place Saint-Michel as we turned left to head toward rue Saint André des Arts. Place Saint-Michel and the fountain were alive with young people—meeting, reading, embracing, walking, and looking like the literate, involved intellectuals that I had imagined. My literary passions may well have played a part in my perspective.

We were headed to Pension Eugénie on rue St. André des Arts, described in Frommer’s as offering cheap but decent room and board in the heart of the Left Bank, near to literary shrines that I wanted to visit. We booked a room for ten days with a shared hallway bath and WC for 8 Francs a night—about $2.50. The room was a tiny space that must have once been part of a bathroom; there was a defunct bidet about a foot from our bed. We had never seen one nor did we know how it worked. Other friends who traveled in those days said they used bidets to wash their jeans.

Our room had large windows that overlooked the noisy street. On most nights we watched a group of Hare Krishnas who chanted and smiled up at us. The most wonderful thing about Pension Eugénie was the breakfast of a large croissant with butter and preserves and delicious café au lait—included in the price—delivered to our door each day. We were cramped as we sat on the bed and bidet to eat, but we could not imagine more beautiful mornings. Years later, as parents with kids in college, we returned to the street to find a refurbished Hotel Eugénie offering rooms for over 100 Euros—breakfast not included. (It is now up to about 300 euros a night!)

Today, I’ve set up our old slide projector to match my memories with images. As the slides click by, I see all the tourist stops: views from the top of la Tour Eiffel, Sacré Coeur, and Notre-Dame; the Louvre without the Pyramid; Jeu de Paume and the Impressionists before Musée d’Orsay became a reality; Napoleon’s Tomb, Versailles, Samaritaine; and the obligatory stops at 27 rue de Fleurus, where Gertrude Stein lived with Alice B. Toklas, and La Closerie des Lilas, where Hemingway regularly drank and wrote at one of its marble-topped tables. We certainly could not afford a meal at La Closerie or any of Hemingway’s haunts, so there are no restaurants to note, but I remember savoring steak frites in unnamed cafes and vin rouge ordinaire that Frommer’s taught us to order. Like Hemingway, I had given the address of The American Express at 11 rue Scribe to family and friends as a point of contact. On the morning after our arrival we made our way there, marveled at the Paris Opéra and picked up mail feeling like heirs to The Lost Generation.

In the photos, structures in Paris appear grayer than today, with soot marring limestone walls or outlining sculptures such as those on the Arc de Triomphe. I am surprised by how light traffic seems to be in my pictures. There are many photos from both day and night where the streets seem quiet compared to the congestion and speed of Paris that I’ve witnessed on subsequent trips. Most cars in the pictures are small and boxy except for the occasional elongated Citroen or dilapidated VW bus, and I recall the many scooters and Solex mopeds that navigated streets and, occasionally, sidewalks.

Visible in all our slides are reminders of the endless walking we did in the summer of 1971 and the places we stumbled upon. Historic Les Halles, the legendary food market, had recently been torn down, but we would visit the Flower Market on Île de la Cité mentioned in Frommer’s—or so we thought. We were surprised when we arrived and found what looked and sounded like a jungle; we did not know that on Sundays it became the Bird Market. Walking through row after row of colorful birds in cages, in cars, and in the hands of those who came to buy, we reveled in exotic bird calls as well as the more familiar sounds of chickens. But it was the enthusiastic pedestrians who were drawn to them that captivated us. This was not the scene of a reluctant parent taking a child to buy a pet; it was a dynamic venue that existed because so many people delighted in birds of all kinds.

Birds intrigued us again when we walked to the Jardin des Tuileries and saw a gentleman in a dark suit feeding groups of frenetic birds and then enticing them to perch on him. Among the birds were pigeons and sparrows. Passersby were interested and a few stopped to chat, but they did not surround him as if he were an oddity. Years later we read that he was part of a long tradition of Tuileries Garden Bird Charmers, as they were called, with roots that date back to the 19th century. The original bird charmers were street performers who had been featured in French, British and American periodicals, including Scientific American in 1885. Whether this gentleman regarded himself as a performer or as someone who simply loved birds, we did not know; to us he was yet another wonder in a city that surprised with every turn of a corner.

In 1971, the Eiffel Tower did not sparkle with twinkling lights; rather, it was illuminated with a dramatic amber glow. Still, the image I see in my slides is as iconic as the bridges, the boulevards, and the churches. Without the intrusion of dated cars or clothing styles on pedestrians in photos, Paris’s beloved landmarks are timeless.

Among my favorite pictures is a long shot of a man in jeans sitting on the bank of the Seine. One leg hangs over the wall, the other is pulled up to his chest. This young man, my peer, depicts so much of what I find compelling about Paris. He seems at ease and thoughtful. His moment of intimacy with the river is natural. Surrounded by history and beauty but not constrained by it, he is part of a complex city that endures as well as changes. His sanguine presence, like that of the old bird charmer, suggests that Paris embraces the individual as vital to its identity.

My afternoon immersed in Paris 1971 includes the predictable nostalgia for youth and life about to unfold. It also validates my belief that Paris is alive and changeable yet cultivates a dignified permanence that seduced me then as it does today. In my adolescence I was drawn to Paris by literature. My first visit fulfilled my girlhood aspirations as reader and dreamer but also left me wanting to learn more about its history, read more of its literature, cook its food, find streets not in guidebooks, and visit again and again. My first trip to Paris ensnared me and I have been a willing captive ever since. This vicarious journey during quarantine allows me to savor the decaying pages of a 50-year-old “Paris Match” and look forward to my next moment on the banks of the Seine.

Text © 2020, Elizabeth Esris.
Photos © 1971, Michael Esris. (Photos taken with a Pentax Spotmatic.)

More of Elizabeth Esris’s illustrated personal essays about travel in France can be found here.

Readers interested in contributing an illustrated personal essay about their own long-ago travel experiences are invited to write to the editor at gary [at] francerevisited.com.

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