Fodor's Paris 2001: Completely Updated Every Year, Color Photos and Pull-Out Map, Smart Travel Tips from A to Z (Travel Guide)

Articles on the history and culture of the French capital augment information on tourist attractions, hotels, restaurants, and shopping facilities throughout the city.

DESTINATION PARIS

Stroll along formal footpaths in the Jardin du Luxembourg and lose yourself in the halls of the Louvre. Meander through Montmartre and promenade down broad boulevards off the Arc de Triomphe. Master métro lines and river curves. Immerse yourself in the city's patchwork of villages. Linger in a Left Bank café and indulge in gastronomic delights. Admire the architectural filigree -- the woven metal of the Eiffel Tower and the plastic tubing encasing the Centre Pompidou. Listen to vendors hawking the season's produce in the markets of Montorgueil and Mouffetard. At every turn Paris envelops you in its spell of history, proportion, harmony, and visual delights and compels you to return.

A City For Walking

Along age-old cobblestones of fabled boulevards such as the rue de Rivoli and twisting medieval streets that fan out from the banks of the Seine, Paris hides all sorts of secret treasures that can be discovered only on foot. In your random wanderings you may come upon a thrilling street market or old men playing boules, perhaps on rue de La Tour Maubourg in front of the Hotel des Invalides. Or you might amble into a street market like the one at Bir Hakeim, where the shoppers prove that Parisians do spend much of the day in pursuit of gastronomic pleasures. The Marais still resembles the neighborhood in which Molière and La Fontaine scurried along narrow streets to the salons of 17th-century aristocrats who built the quarter's magnificent hôtels particuliers, as its mansions are known. No doubt these enlightened gentlemen of letters paused a moment or two to take stock of the urbane beauty all around. Few can resist the urge.

Museums

Not just repositories of masterworks, the museums of Paris also reveal the endlessly fascinating nuances of French culture. Art has always flourished in Paris; now the city benefits from French government efforts to keep its citizens' masterpieces perpetually within its borders. Near the Museé d'Orsay, the Museé Rodin bears testimony to the sculptor who, with the admirable shrewdness that Parisians have elevated to an art form, arranged to live and work at state expense in the 18th-century Hotel Biron in return for leaving his work behind in its airy rooms and lovely gardens. The Museé Picasso, occupying the 17th-century home of a financier who made his fortune collecting salt taxes, also arose from a compromise -- Picasso's heirs gave France 230 paintings, 1500 drawings, 1700 prints, and many sculptures in lieu of paying death duties. And it was the French Revolution that opened the Louvre to the masses, so that all can now view the extraordinary collection amassed in good part by seven centuries of monarchs, while imagining the history-shaping intrigues that once fermented in these same salons.

Shopping and Markets

Quotidian activities are elevated to high art in Paris, and shopping is no exception. Sophisticated city dwellers that they are, Parisians approach this exercise as a ritual, and an elaborate ritual at that. Picking produce at the open-air markets, or searching for haute couture, they cast a discerning eye on the smallest detail and demand the highest quality -- which may explain why the city's shopkeepers are so famously grouchy.  Browsing through old books and maps in the stalls of bouquinistes (booksellers) on quai de l'Hôtel de Ville, or prowling through castoffs at the Marché aux Puces St-Ouen, Parisians show their practicality, their sense of economy, and their ability to turn even a piece of junk into an inventively chic treasure.  Though a short visit may not give you time to develop a Parisian's innate sense of taste and style, you are sure to be indoctrinated into the pleasures of worldly goods and to come home with some glittering prizes.

Literary Paris

Over the centuries Paris has fueled the genius of no small number of men and women of letters. You are likely to encounter the ghosts of many of them in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, where Baudelaire may well be exchanging bons mots with Maupassant, Sartre, and Beckett amid the riot of statuary that honors them, or in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, where rocker Jim Morrison rests alongside such luminaries as Gertrude Stein. Oscar Wilde, one of many foreign writers to have sought refuge in Paris, complained of his hotel on 13 rue des Beaux-Artsin St-Germain-des-Prés, "I am dying beyond my means." A plaque commemorates his passing, shortly before which he eyed the wallpaper and uttered one last quip: "One of us has to go." He would be pleased that the surrounding quarter still draws literati who work in publishing houses or frequent the small book-shops such as Shakespeare and Company, the city's noted outpost of expat, bookish bohemia.