Julien Goldstein for The New York Times
The Seine divides Paris into left and right banks.More Photos »
By AMY M. THOMAS
Published: March 25, 2011
I’VE always been one of those girls. A die-hard Francophile. An American helpless in the face of Parisian charms and pleasures. A New Yorker who could never seem to shake the City of Light. I went for a college semester, I went with boyfriends, I went to eat chocolate. And finally, for a two-year period beginning in 2009, I went to live my dream.
Emmanual Fradin for The New York Times
Paris, however divided, is for lovers; on the Pont d'Arcole. More Photos »
Now that I’m back home in New York, my vision of Paris has been altered. What was once mysterious is now intimately understood. What was once mythical is now more real (though, admittedly, still magical). To some extent, Paris will always belong to the Truffauts, Fitzgeralds and Bernhardts of the world. But now some of my own history runs through its streets too.
Weaned as I was on “A Moveable Feast” and “Memoirs of Montparnasse,” when I moved to Paris, I saw it clearly divided between the artsy Left Bank and the buttoned-up Right Bank. The Left Bank was for thinkers and dreamers; artists and musicians; students and stargazers who famously sought inspiration — and, peut-être, absinthe. It’s where Josephine Baker shimmied, where Hemingway feasted and where Sartre and de Beauvoir had endless philosophical debates.
The Right Bank was for bankers at the Bourse and flâneurs on the grand boulevards. It was where manicured gardens, symmetrical squares and majestic monuments reigned supreme; a mélange of foreign embassies, tony boutiques and chichi cafes, all steps from where King Louis XVI and thousands of others were guillotined at the Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution.
I made my home in the center of the Right Bank, off the Rue Montorgueil. On an amazing market street filled with patisseries, fromageries and boucheries, nothing made me happier, or feel more Parisienne, than meandering up and down the pedestrian blocks, inhaling the irresistible smells of roasting chickens, stinky cheeses and warm, yeasty baguettes. On more occasions than warranted, I’d treat myself to a crème-filled pain aux raisins from Stohrer, one of the oldest bakeries in Paris. Not too far away in the Marais, at a bread stand inside the Marché des Enfants Rouges, the Cornet Vegetarien — a sandwich of fresh greens, grated carrots and fennel, marinated onions and thinly sliced avocado, dressed with olive oil and honey and dusted with chives and lime zest — was like nothing I’d ever eaten. And the man who prepared it, Alain, a barrel-chested maestro who was given to bursts of song and dance, always made my day.
For macarons, I learned there was only one place to go: Pierre Hermé on the Left Bank. If I was alone, I took the delicate ganache-filled meringue cookies to the Square des Missions Étrangères, a small spot of green in the center of the well-to-do Rue du Bac neighborhood, and ate them in gleeful silence. But if I were bringing friends from out of town for the petites douceurs, we’d savor them together near the central basin in the Jardin du Luxembourg, where tourists and Parisians alike crowded around to watch the motorized sailboats skate across the water.
Back over on the Right Bank, inside the Palais Royal, I found a welcome solitude among the rows of trees pruned into perfect squares. I loved the Technicolor flowerbeds during late summer and how the rosebushes miraculously bloomed in winter, the buds like drops of blood against the white snow. And in the spring, the green fields and gold dome of Les Invalides opening before me when I zipped across the Pont Alexandre III to the Left Bank never failed to make me sigh.
As my circle of exploration expanded from the city center, I started seeing Paris itself growing in new ways. Cashmere emporiums and Costes brothers cafes were infiltrating the Left Bank, nudging it away from “bohemian” into the realm of “haute bourgeois,” while neighborhoods like Belleville and the Haut Marais, with their emerging artists and galleries, infused the Right Bank with creative juice. Apparently, my staunch division of Paris based on riverbanks wasn’t so black and white. And by the time my two-year stint was up, two other sides to Paris were luring me: the east and the west.
The Edgy East
I was first introduced to Canal St.-Martin on Paris’s east side by a friend who lived there and took me on my maiden Vélib’ bike ride, guiding me past the waterway’s peaked iron bridges and enchanting locks — where Amélie had skipped stones — to the flat and sprawling Parc de la Villette just north of the neighborhood. The boomerang-shaped canal was once Napoleon’s conduit for supplying fresh water to Paris. Later, the surrounding area became home to the working classes. But since the millennium, as my friend pointed out — and I couldn’t help but notice as we wended our way through picnicking Parisians flaunting Ray-Bans, iPhones and flashy baskets (sneakers) — the quartier has attracted more and more artists and writers, young couples and hipsters (or bobos — “bourgeois bohemians” — in Parisian parlance).
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