A Padlock on the Louvre and Twenty Years in the City of Light

The First Thing I Do in Paris

The first thing I do when I arrive in Paris is light a candle for my Dad. Every time. It's not a complicated ritual or a formal one. It's just something I do because my father was the person who first brought me to Paris, 27 years ago now, and I've been coming back ever since. He gave me this city, he gave me the gift of seeing a world outside of the tiny bubble I grew up in, he gave me that feeling…the feeling that I need to leave my hometown, try new things, experience new cultures, in order to grow. Lighting a candle is the least I can do.

Notre Dame has always been where I do it.

Notre Dame is still under construction. It has been since the fire in 2019, and it will be for some time yet. The scaffolding surrounds it, the cathedral is closed to visitors, and if you're someone who has stood inside that building and felt what it does to you, the sight of it wrapped in construction equipment is its own particular kind of sadness.

I couldn't light my candle there. So I found Église Saint-Merry, just a short walk away in the Marais, and I lit it there instead.

I stood in the quiet of that church, lit the candle, and said thank you to my father for changing the course of my life by bringing me here the first time. Some moments on a trip are private ones. This was one of those.

Our Paris, Revisited

We stayed in an Airbnb with a rooftop view of Paris, which is the right way to arrive in a city you've been to before. Not a hotel lobby, not a view of an alley. A rooftop, with the city spread out around you, lit up in the evening in that particular golden way Paris manages even when it's being completely ordinary about it.

We walked to Notre Dame our first evening, not to go in (impossible) but to see it, to check in on it. The construction is jarring and also somehow moving, evidence of a place so important to so many people that the whole world decided collectively that it had to be brought back. We stumbled upon a great little restaurant know for its wood-fired rotisserie chicken and had a nice meal before coming “home” to the rooftop.

Tuesday: Wine, Cheese, and a Full Day of Favorites

We started Tuesday with a French wine class paired with regional cheeses, which is an activity I will recommend to anyone visiting Paris without qualification or hesitation. You learn things. You drink good wine at an hour that would seem unreasonable at home and seems completely reasonable in France. You eat cheese that reminds you why the French are the way they are about cheese. It's an excellent morning.

Then we walked. We always walk Paris. Les Invalides, with Napoleon's tomb in that enormous gold-domed cathedral that somehow manages to be less about hubris and more about genuine grandeur in person. The Eiffel Tower, which I know sounds like the obvious tourist thing and is the obvious tourist thing and is still worth doing every single time because it's the Eiffel Tower and it never stops being improbable.

Musée Rodin. If you haven't been, it's not what you expect. The sculptures are inside but the gardens are where Rodin really gets you, The Thinker sitting outdoors with the gardens spreading around it, Burghers of Calais in the open air. It's a museum you can actually breathe in.

Wednesday: The Unicorn Tapestries, Montmartre, and a Jazz Club

Wednesday was one of those Paris days that strings together so many good things it stops feeling real.

We went back to Musée de Cluny for the Unicorn Tapestries, which is one of our favorite things in the city. They're housed in their own dedicated room in the medieval museum, six tapestries depicting a unicorn and a noblewoman in an allegorical setting that art historians have been arguing about for centuries. The colors shouldn't still be that vivid after 500-plus years. They are. You walk into that room and something about it quiets you down immediately.

Then Montmartre. Up to Sacré-Coeur, which earns its reputation from the outside even if the inside is less remarkable, and over to Place du Tertre, where artists have been selling their work for decades. We ended up buying another painting. This has become something of a pattern when we visit Paris and I don't intend to stop.

We wandered St. Germain-des-Prés, more fruits de mer, and then, through whatever combination of instinct and luck that good travel days sometimes produce, we found a jazz club.

I don't mean we looked one up. I mean we turned a corner and there it was, warm light coming through the windows, music audible from outside, and we went in. Great music and a great dinner in the same room. Some of the best nights in Paris happen this way.

Thursday: Rain, the Louvre, and a Lock on a Bridge

Our last full day in Paris started rainy, which is fine. Paris in the rain is still Paris. We waited it out, and when it cleared late afternoon we headed to the Louvre courtyard, one of our favorite outdoor spots in the city.

Two musicians were playing. We stood and listened for a long time. I don't know who they were or what they played specifically. I know the light was good and the Louvre pyramid was doing its thing behind them and it was one of those unplanned perfect moments that Paris produces with annoying regularity.

Then we put a lock on a bridge for our twentieth anniversary.

The Pont des Arts doesn't do the Locks of Love anymore officially, the weight of all those padlocks was genuinely becoming a structural concern, but there are still places along the Seine where you can add yours, and we did. Twenty years. One lock. It felt right to do it in the city where we've returned more than any other, the city my father gave me, the city Matt and I have made our own over two decades of coming back.

We wandered until it was time to leave. That's the only way to end a Paris trip. No agenda, no final destination, just more streets and light and the particular feeling of a city you love that you're not quite ready to say goodbye to yet.

Au revoir, France. You were, as always, everything.

Back home, I made Julia Child's Sole Meunière two nights running and then Chicken with Morel mushrooms. It's the only reasonable response to coming home from two weeks in France and being expected to cook for yourself.