As with Dickens’ London, when I write about Paris she is not the backdrop but the main character.
One of the things I love about Paris is its public squares. They are places where you can stop and sit, spend some unproductive time and enjoy just being.
The best public squares in Paris are triangles. Tiny and hidden away, you can stumble upon them by chance again and again, sometimes years apart, and recognise them like an old friend.
It’s Springtime in Paris!
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At Place St Sulpice, a horny pigeon reminds me of me. A surfeit of attractive females surrounds him but his approach is clumsy and his banter ineffective. He receives no “come hither”.
But unlike me his ego is made of the same granite as the very foundations of Paris.
He is happy to play the numbers game, engaging group after group of reticent hens, unperturbed by his growing number of rejections, nor in the least minded to refine his technique.
I’m well aware that I can’t see Paris straight. It is too caught up in the romance of a much younger me - a sensitive young man seeing the world for the first time, a brain too big and heart too open for their own good, feeling and absorbing everything.
This nostalgia is not the fading sepia kind, nor memories captured and pinned like exotic butterflies housed in the dusty archives of a museum’s botanical collection.
Rather, I am blinded by the light and colour of memory - revisited, layered and added to - like the Monet’s, Gauguin’s, Seurat’s and Van Gogh’s that hang in the Musee d’Orsay.
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My first visit …with the beauty I graduated from law school. Champagne and dinner at Les Clos de Lilas (one of Hemingways favourites, I later discovered), followed by a stroll through Jardin du Luxembourg in the twilight. My most pressing objective of the moment unmet - much like my pigeon friend - but in its place something else and beautiful that I did not yet understand.
Later, inevitably, Parisian girlfriends.
One in particular, on and off for a couple of years, her father - quite the raconteur - conducted my initial interview at the family’s stone cottage deep in the Normandy bochage over a local Calvados and an extremely ripe Pont l’Eveque.
Later still, brothers in arms, who took it upon themselves to make me Parisian. ‘Faced with a rule’, I was instructed ‘Australians look for a way to comply. A Parisian looks for a way to circumvent’.
I learned quickly. We didn’t do queues. Or tickets. We jumped the metro barriers and ran. We were young, fit and fast, and no representative of the system could possibly catch us.
The soundtrack of my youthful Paris is lustful, yearning, epic, soaring, raw, stripped down. Portishead’s Glory Box, Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy, Jeff Buckley’s Last Goodbye, Tricky’s Hell is Round the Corner, Leftfield’s Open Up.
I learned the language because I love its sound and the rhythm with which it is spoken. In it I hear echoes of history, art and culture, of a time when the aesthetic and the instrumental was not yet completely separated.
Nowadays, I like to lodge in the 5th when I’m here. The Paris of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Stein. The Sorbonne is here and, being a student hub, it has genuine pubs like Le Requin Chaquin (the Sad Shark) and Asian restaurants, as well as the usual Parisian cafes, tabacs, bistros and brasseries. The food markets and the poissonnerie, fromagerie, boulangerie and boucherie at Place Maubert are exceptional.
This is old left bank Paris by the Seine, near the Île de France, Notre Dame, the Marais, and the medieval gardens at Cluny.
It is better to stay a bit further up the hill from Boulevard St Germain and Rue des Ecoles to escape the sound of traffic and the metro.
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This afternoon I stumbled onto a triangle shaped public square, a Gothic spire in the distant background framed by Spring blooms and the buildings of a narrow alley. The light catches it in its unique Parisian way. A pretty, confident young woman, marches across the space, shoulders back, hips swaying, lithe, sultry, effortlessly stylish.
And, just like that, I am 25 again.
In another world and in another life perhaps she would sing silently:
“Give me a reason to love you …”
Paris, you never cease to amaze me.