But I’d like you to remove your rose-colored glasses for now as I lead you into the shadows that are the subject of my new VoiceMap audio tour Paris of Dreams and Nightmares: The Dark Side of the City of Light. Along with the charm of its route through the central Right Bank of Paris, this is an unflinching journey through France’s dark past, where torture, assassination and terror are among the building blocks of the beauty that surrounds you.

The route passes major landmarks, vibrant streets, inviting cafés, alluring pastry shops and boutiques, soaring churches, and the playful Stravinsky Fountain, as it reveals both the enchantment of the present and the cruel events of the past.

Watch this video introduction before reading on.

These aren’t ghost stories or legends that I tell; these are historical events that shaped Paris as you see it today. In understanding the terrible building blocks of the City of Light, you’ll gain an important appreciation for how its beauty and brutality have coexisted throughout history.

Here’s one location covered on a tour, a memorial garden inaugurated in the summer of 2025:

The Dark Side of the City of Light now joins my VoiceMap audio tours to the Luxembourg Garden, the Tuileries Garden, and the Champs-Elysées as another of my essential self-guided walking tours to major aspects of Paris and its culture, splendor, history, and life today.

Though VoiceMap is primarily designed to provided GPS-guided audio tour for use on site, I’ve uploaded photos for each of the tour’s locations to allow armchair travelers to fully follow along. So you can listen from your home computer or your iPhone or Android anywhere even if you don’t have Paris plans. Then use the downloaded tour again whenever you do make it Paris.

The VoiceMap Touring App is available from the Google Play Store and the App Store. On your home computer just go to VoiceMap.me. Once you’ve signed up with VoiceMap and purchased the full tour, you can listen to it on your phone, tablet or computer, or all three, on site, on the road or at home.

Even without signing up, you can listen to the first three locations before deciding whether you want to download the full tour.

If, after downloading the app, you don’t land directly on one of my tours, you’ll find them easily by searching “Gary Kraut” in the VoiceMap search block, or by clicking or tapping directly on the author’s page of these Paris audio guides.

© 2025, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Paris of Dreams and Nightmares: Exploring the Dark Side of the City of Light appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Even before you travel you can benefit from some GLK Travel Therapy to get you over the humps of planning your travels in France.

When you’re suffering from a case of Paris-envy, Francophilia, Normandy-mania other regional-minded afflictions, a session or two of GLK Travel Therapy by phone will help lay the groundwork for a worry-free trip. GLK Travel Therapy is also the perfect tailor-made travel gift for your traveling loved-ones.

How do you know if you need GLK Travel Therapy?

Some of the symptoms to watch for:
– You’re restless.
– Your minds wanders frequently to thoughts of Paris and elsewhere in France.
– You’ve been spending hours searching for travel ideas about France rather than doing something useful such as improving your French vocabulary.
– You believe that you have to visit Paris exactly the same way that a friend of yours from work did years ago even though you have nothing in common.
– You dream of food (cuisine, you’d call it)
– You imagine yourself surrounded by great monuments, wandering through unknown neighborhoods, pressing your nose against pastry-shop windows.
– You imagine setting down not to food but to cuisine.
– You see yourself as “belonging” in the heart of café culture.
– You’d rather plan a rendez-vous than any ordinary get-together.
– You panic at having choose between Normandy, the Loire Valley, Provence, the Riviera and all those other places you’ve read about on France Revisited.
– You speak of burgundy as though it were more than just a color.
– You say “baguette,” “boutique,” “macaron” and “champagne” as though no English words for them exist.
– You frequently long to be wished “bon voyage” and to wish others “bon appétit.”

If you or loved one has two or more of these symptoms then you/he/she may have a case of case of Paris-envy, Francophilia, Normandy-mania other regional-minded afflictions that could benefit from GLK Travel Therapy.

The best self-help a traveler can get

A session or two of travel therapy with moi, Gary, Paris’s premier travel therapist (and the editor of your trusty and uncommon web magazine France Revisited).

Your therapy session(s) will take place by phone when I call you from Paris (or wherever I may be) whenever you feel a bout of Paris-envy or Francophilia coming on. That typically occurs in the weeks or months before you travel abroad but could be a matter of days.

As a professional, I’ll help you turn the dreams of your visit to Paris and/or your travels in France into an exciting and delicious reality by providing the advice and the self-help tips that will enable you to:
– plan your itinerary,
– choose the lodging and the restaurants that are right for you,
– understand the logistics of your upcoming trip, and
– make the most of your vacation time.

I’ll further provide you with personalized tour ideas, child-friendly travel advice and other discreet remedies not found on WebMD.

A 50-minute phone session

As a France specialists, I recommend starting your travel therapy before entering the hellish spiral of spending countless hours searching online for tours, hotels, restaurants and itineraries and before letting your friend who once spent three days in Paris five years ago tell you exactly how you should live your dream of travel abroad.

Treat yourself (or your friends or loved ones) to a 50-minute session of travel therapy with Gary for only 65 euros.

If you or they have got a severe case of Paris-envy, Francophilia or multi-region-fantasies, consider purchasing two sessions for 120 euros.

And for that special someone on your holiday list, humor their Paris fantasies by offering them one of the unique and personalized tours listed here.

Get informed and you’ll suffer no longer from indecision

So don’t just sit back and suffer (or let your loved ones suffer) from Francophilia or Paris-envy or Normandy-mania and other regional-minded afflictions. Get on track to the trip that’s right you with a session or more of GLK Travel Therapy with me by phone, or in person. Yes, you or they can have travel therapy in Paris over café or wine.

Write to me personally at gary [at] francerevisited.com to arrange a session of travel therapy or to purchase a travel therapy gift certificate for your friends who may be suffering from Paris-envy.

Be kind to yourself, get travel therapy with a professional Paris-based travel specialist.

Gary

Gary Lee Kraut
Editor, journalist, travel therapist
gary [at] francerevisited.com

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Writer, inspirational speaker, radio personality, wife, mother, friend, stranger with a tolerant gaze and a kind word, Maura is a native of New Jersey, a longtime Floridian and an inveterate traveler who wants us all to carry a passport from the State of Happiness.

I got together with Maura and her husband Jim, a buddy of mine from high school, when we were all visiting family in New Jersey.

Maura makes interview videos and sight videos and inspirational videos on whatever theme strikes her fancy at the moment. You can see many of them on her terrifically upbeat website Maura4u.  She creates these snippets of happy living whenever she travels and has her cameraman (Jim) handy.

Well, there were all were. So Maura took a few notes, asked to see a copy of my old guide to Paris, and said “Jim, film.”

Here is Maura’s 7-minute interview with me, whom she calls “a cultural facilitator and travel therapist,” terms I quite like.

You can see Maura’s videos and texts and learn more about her work (including her e-books) on her website Maura4u or on the very likable Facebook page of the same name.

And if you’re a sports fan of any kind check out Jim Sweeney’s site Mike on sports!, featuring the animated figure and comic book big-mouth Mike Rafone, “the ultimate talking head on sports.”

The post A Bend in the Road with Maura Sweeney appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Beginning in March 2012, you’ll also be able to take advantage of highly personalized travel and touring opportunities that I’ll be creating in the spirit of France Revisited.

The result is travel experiences that are exclusive, entertaining, insightful and relaxed.

Having written five travel guides to France and Paris along with hundreds of articles, as well as editing France Revisited, I find myself in a unique position to help travelers and travel planners create highly personalized travel experiences in Paris and in the diverse regions of France.

I’ve been called upon to assist travel professionals and cultural institutions seeking tailor-made tours and exclusive contacts for their preferred clients.

I’ve enjoyed the challenge of designing specialty tours and arranging cultural encounters for clients from Wall Street to Hollywood and from West Virginia to Oklahoma, for art-loving foodies from Florida and Georgia  and wine-loving professionals from New Jersey and Oregon, for a literary agent in New York and a best-selling author in San Francisco, and for many curious travelers in between. Thanks to France Revisited international reputation, I’ve also been called upon by professionals from Mexico, the United Kingdom, Israel and Australia.

I’ve additionally had the honor of assisting charitable organizations in the U.S., enabling them offer added-value, tailor-made Paris and France tours (e.g. Normandy, Champagne, Bordeaux, Southwest France) for high-end charity auctions and donor tours. My particular interest is in helping causes related to cancer, autism, education, and the arts.

Travel in the Spirit of France Revisited is now available to three types of clients:

– Individuals, couples and families interested in benefiting from highly personalized travel, touring, and consulting services.

– Certified travel agents and trip planners for educational and cultural institutions interested in trips designed specifically for their clients, students/faculty or donors.

– Meeting planners looking to create special off-meeting events and seminars.

You can learn more about these services see a schedule of small-group tours that I’ve designed for 2012 on the Touring & Consulting page of France Revisited. The request form is also found there.

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A flâneur is a man about town, often alone, out to experience the city not so much as a gathering place for a dense population but rather as an anonymous and varied space where he encounters buildings, streets, shop windows, parks, gardens and cafés. Every visitor who has spent more than a few days in Paris understands how well the French capital lends itself to “flanning.”

“Flanning” is a dreamy state, bemused though not ironic, perhaps melancholic though  never depressed, often witnessing but not reflecting too deeply or at great length—there is always another scene or another street to draw his attention away from a singular thought. On his slow, idling stroll through the city, the flâneur abandons himself to the sights and sounds and scenes and views and oddities of the moment.

Paris Photos – Paris Walks, a handsome 176-page, hardback, black-and-white photographic essay, is the fruit of O’Toole’s “flanning” in Paris between 1996 and 2007. O’Toole lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The book was printed in Minneapolis.

As a flâneur, O’Toole rarely stops to talk with people (we encounter few in his photographs), though occasionally he observes them. Mostly he avoids crowds, except to occasionally view them from a distance.

Does he wish that he could enter into or be a part of a social scene? I don’t know. But in the absence of a willingness or ability to take part in the social life of the city, it appears from these photos that O’Toole would rather have the streets of Paris himself.

In O’Toole’s Paris it is mid-spring (tulips are coming up, and the linden leaves are budding the garden of Palais Royal) or summer (the roses are out in the Bagatelle Garden and the trees provide full shade in the Boulogne Woods) or September (the leaves of the horse chestnut trees have begun falling in Place Dauphine). In any case it is light jacket weather. There is often dampness in the air.

The long shadows in many images indicate that the photographer is especially fond of Paris within an hour or two or sunrise or sunset.

Tourists are avoids: the courtyard of the Louvre is empty, the top of Montmartre is quiet. Yet as a flâneur Peter O’Toole is clearly a visitor, so even if he doesn’t necessarily seek out the clichés of Paris, he does have a romanticized view of the city.

His gaze in the book’s 150 tri-tone black-and-white photographs, some grainy depending on the film speed, seems to seek out Paris of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. One could easily mistake these images as coming from earlier decades. Whether shot from the hip or with a tripod or with camera to the eye, his Leica is a tool for nostalgia.

Most of the photographs, O’Toole says, are presented full-frame and uncropped, but he has nevertheless shielded his lens from any indications of a contemporary evolving city. Woody Allen shares that view in presenting the city’s easy-going and “natural” beauty in his film “Paris at Midnight”; Allen’s streets and shops and cafés, like O’Toole’s, are always inviting, rarely crowded. The city employees, waiters and tradesmen work earnestly, unobtrusively, without complain.

There is tendency in such a collection of photographs or such a movie to gloss over the realities of city life, but whereas Allen’s characters are fatally stuck in their search to simultaneously express private wealth and personal fulfillment, O’Toole, to his credit, seems to enjoy the romanticized city without visible angst.

The 150 photographs of O’Toole’s book are ostensibly presented in the form of a series of promenades, with each of the 14 sections preceded by a map outlining the photographer’s route and a brief introductory text in both French and English. However, Paris Walks shouldn’t be seen as a call to take specific routes but rather as an invitation to flâner on your own.

Paris Photos ~ Paris Walks by Peter J. O’Toole is 176 pages hardbound, with 150 tri-tone black and white Paris photographs arranged in 14 chapters each representing a separate area of the city. Published in 2009, with a first printing of 1700 copies, it is available in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and on Amazon.com. Retail price: $44.95.

© 2011, Gary Lee Kraut

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