Avenue de Camoens (Again)

The Curated coat (similar)
Wilfred sweater (similar)
Mango jeans
Mango boots
Vintage Birks handbag (similar)
RayBan sunglasses
Linjer ring (c/o) (similar)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Avenue de Camoens – Paris, France

Paris, October 10, 2021

Dear friends,

Some once said that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But planning is not a guarantee of success. I should know; I meticulously plan my life, especially when we’re travelling, mapping out logical routes from point A to B and scheduling stops along the way. Every minute of most days is accounted for – especially when we’re in Paris. But there is just so much you can’t plan for or predict, no matter how advanced Google’s Map and Calendar tools become. And although they turned out beautifully, these photos from avenue des Camoens are, in fact, a perfect illustration of that fact.

Back in 2016, Google Maps was still relatively new – at least to me. At that time, blogging was very serious business. The need to find the perfect location for every set of photos was very real, and very urgent. But it wasn’t as simple as spending an hour on street view to find the exact spot you had in mind. Bloggers were covetous, rarely willing to share exactly where “their” perfects spots could be found. It took me eons to track down avenue de Camoens, which I’d first seen on the blog Hello, it’s Valentine. Still, somehow it made taking photos there for the first time all the more satisfying.

We’ve been back to avenue de Camoens in the intervening years. We stumbled upon what became one of our favourite Italian restaurants in Paris the day of that first shoot, and go back often. (In case you’re wondering, since I do not covet particular places or want to keep them to myself, it’s called Marcello.) Once, I took an improbably pink dress there. (While I actually think I pulled it off, every time I look at those photos, I find myself wondering who the girl in them was and what she was thinking when she ordered that dress.)

We don’t always go to take photos, though. More often, it’s just a lunch date and look out at the unique view of the Eiffel Tower while we’re in the nieghbourhod. I love a good Parisian cliche, and avenue de Camoens is nothing if not one. But there are so many, it isn’t necessary to go back to the same one over and over.

It doesn’t feel like over and over when it’s been two and a half years since your last visit to Paris, though. So during our trip this year, we planned a shoot on my beloved little avenue. It made sense in the day I’d mapped out for us today, which also included breakfast at the Cafe de Flore and a visit to the Musee Rodin. Unless you stay on the rive gauche, which we almost never do, avenue de Camoens is, at best, out of the way, accessible only from the metro station Passy, which is serviced by a single train line that we rarely otherwise take. (Basically, I love it but not enough to live there. Or even mover closer.)

But everything today takes longer than planned. The sun comes up later. It’s Sunday, so the metro runs slower. We are forced to join an appallingly long line to wait for a table at the Flore – and do, rather than eating breakfast elsewhere. On the walk to the Musee Rodin, we stumble upon an outlet of Philippe Conticini’s pastry shop, where we stop to browse (and pick up a copy of his new book.) It’s all wonderful and a bit whimsical, but in the end, we arrive at avenue de Camoens around one-thirty in the afternoon rather than at eleven in the morning.

…and we arrive in this, our year of Google Maps, 2021. Which is to say, a year in which no matter how anyone tries to hide their location, it can easily be found. Everyone knows exactly where avenue de Camoens is, now. And the cliche Parisian fantasy, the one that bears no resemblance to life in the French capital unless your bank balance is infinite, is more popular now than ever, perhaps because after two years of living through the worst of what we reality has to offer, we all need a bit of pretend. The reasons don’t really matter, I suppose. The fact is, we climb the stairs to find the avenue packed with would-be influencers and their iPhones. Photos with the Eiffel Tower in the background will be impossible.

Maybe we’ll go for lunch first, we think. But it turns out that Google is not always reliable, and Marcello no longer opens for Sunday lunch. So we return to the still-packed street that I love. But watching all the young girls try to get their perfect shots in this spot, it occurs to me that I’ve already had mine. I found this “secret” place six years ago. My first photos here will always be the most special because of the effort it took for me to get them. And while we can keep coming back, and the snapshots we get will still be beautiful, that moment, for me, has passed.

So we finnd a sunny corner with no Eiffel Tower view. And, with very little fuss, we take our photos. In some ways, I actually prefer these shots. They give you a different perspective, one you’d otherwise only see if you visited the spot in person. The whole exercise takes just a few short minutes.  When we’re done, we visit a nearby wine shop that Ian likes, the Cave de Passy. And then we hope back on the metro, taking the train in the direction of our own neighbourhood.

Paris is a whole city, but in many ways, it’s also a collection of cities. And it has a unique way of showing you which of those cities you belong in. The 16th arrondissement, and La Muette, where avenue de Camoens, is nice to visit. But it will never be my place. I feel it as soon as we walk up the steps at Saint-Sebastien-Froissart metro station. Le Marais, and the Enfants-Rouges neighbourhood within it. That’s where I belong. That’s my Paris. It didn’t plan it, but there are some things you just can’t plan.

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