The pain and purgation of Paris guilt

by David Benjamin    “…  Even the pigeons are dancing, kissing, going in circles, mounting each other. Paris is the city of love, even for the birds …”  ― Samantha Schutz   PARIS — We were barely awake yesterday before we were plunging through Métro tunnels, beneath the Seine, resurfacing at the place de la…

Read More

When you’re in love, there’s no way out

by David Benjamin    “… The Italian novelist Federico Moccia appears to have been the catalyst for turning the custom into a romantic gesture after his popular book, I Want You, which was made into a 2012 movie, featured a scene of two love interests attaching a padlock on the Ponte Vecchio Bridge in Florence…”…

Read More

Paris in an American

by David Benjamin    “They’ll never want to see a rake or plow/ And who the deuce can parleyvous a cow?/ How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm/ After they’ve seen Paree?” ―Sam Lewis & Joe Young    PARIS — Among my grandfather Archie’s four brothers, my favorite was Uncle Harry, partly because…

Read More

Loo-ie, Loo-ie … Me gotta go now

by David Benjamin  “The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo … where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?” —Sarah Turnbull, Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris   PARIS—Anyone who has…

Read More

How to behave in the stoic reserve

by David Benjamin “I have against me the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats, and for me, only the people who take the Métro.” — Charles de Gaulle   PARIS — Hotlips and I indulged last night in our fifth or sixth viewing of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Charade, during which the two…

Read More

L’épitaphe d’Au Chai de l’Abbaye

“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different.”  — C.S. Lewis   PARIS — We’ve lost an oasis. We had a pretty faithful routine. Each time we’ve flown into Paris, we climb to our aerie atop the Fifth Arrondissement, settle in and take an afternoon anti-jet…

Read More

Notre escalier

by David Benjamin  “Stairs can kill us, if we do not walk circumspectly.”  — Blaise Pascal   PARIS — When I’m out and around, I don’t think about the stairs. I just face them when I get home and slog my way up—more slowly than when we bought this place—five floors up and just beneath the…

Read More

Le chat qui se faufile dans chez nous

by David Benjamin “When it rains in Paris, it bleeds into swift little gutters. You can see your reflection over its mercury embryo.”  ― Sneha Subramanian Kanta PARIS — An apartment in Paris is like Nietzsche’s abyss. It looks into you, senses your weaknesses and spoils for its chance to pounce.  Twenty-five-odd years ago, in…

Read More

An oasis of culinary discourse

by David Benjamin “… It is aways advisable to remember that Paris is a city of brilliant light, and corresponding shadow which cloaks many strange things.” — Netley Lucas, Criminal Paris PARIS — In the early 1920s, a reformed British crook named Netley Lucas undertook a perilous tour through the underworld of Paris, guided —…

Read More

Why a Brouilly? Why a no chicken?

by David Benjamin “Groucho: I say, here is a little peninsula, and here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland. “Chico: All right, why a duck? “Groucho: I’m not playing ‘Ask Me Another,’ I say that’s a viaduct. “Chico: All right! Why a duck?… Why a no chicken? “Groucho: Well, I don’t know why…

Read More