Wilfred blazer (similar)
Almada Label top (similar)
Zara jeans (similar)
Mango belt
Dior heels
Chanel handbag
Celine sunglasses
Agape Studio necklace (c/o) (similar)
Linjer rings (c/o)
Maris Pearl Co. earrings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Place Saint-Sulpice – Paris, France
Paris, May 29, 2023
Dear friends,
When I read about Paris, before visiting for the first time, I took for granted that I would love the Left Bank of the city most of all. The assumption was a natural one – the rive gauche, as it’s known in French, is the literary heart of the city. It’s also the former home of so many of my heroes, Simone de Beauvoir among them. And yet… in reality, I’m a Right Bank girl through and through.
It’s hard to explain, even to myself. So many of my favourite places in the city are across the river. The Musee Bourdelle, just for a start, and the Cafe de Flore, which I never miss an opportunity to visit. My favourite used book shop is here, near the Jardin du Luxembourg, and, of course, the Librairie Gallimard, which is a treasure trove of cream tomes printed with red titles. We’ve spent hundreds of happy hours wandering the narrow streets near Place Saint-Michel in search of an inexpensive lunch. I always go for a traditional Breton crepe, while Ian prefers what Parisians call a “sandwich Grec.” We take them to the garden at Place Rene-Viviani, and eat there in the sun. But I’m always happy to leave again. My heart is across the bridges.
I’ve tried to love the Left Bank. I fell so easily, and so completely, for the Right Bank. But the thing is, if you have to try, it’s not going to happen; you can’t force yourself to love anything, there’s no way to engineer or cultivate that kind of emotion. In 2019, we stayed in a beautiful (albeit somewhat fustily decorated) apartment in the fourteenth arrondissement. The building was a Parisian dream, and the place itself was done in the same style, with a winding carpeted staircase, classic parquet floors and wide windows looking out over the street. Two doors down, an award winning bakery made some of the best pain au chocolat I’ve ever had. The metro station was just across the road. It should have been perfect.
But instead, we felt far from everything. The places we loved were at such a distance that the cost savings – because if you want to do Paris on a budget, the fourteenth arrondissement is your place – didn’t remotely justify it. The sixteenth arrondissement, where we’re staying this year, is just as far flung… but we love it, immediately and without hesitation. It’s on the Right Bank, and it feels like home.
Life is full of these small surprises, moments that teach us that we never know quite as much, even about ourselves, as we think we do.
Maybe it’s in my love of the Right Bank that I reveal myself, finally, as a tourist – an educated and well-informed one, but a tourist nonetheless, someone just passing through, not a real Parisian. But then again, I’m not sure that Mary Butts’ words are quite as relevant now as they were when she wrote them in the late twenties, when the landscape of the capital was almost entirely distinct from what it is now, apart from the placement of the churches and landmarks. The Right and Left Bank are equally full of foreigners these days. But if you get up early, as we always do, you’re likely to cross paths with relatively few of them. We arrive at Place Saint-Sulpice just as the sun is rising over it, and meet relatively few people while we snap these photos in the cold morning wind.
It’s not so bad, really. The Cafe de Flore, our destination, which promises steaming cups of coffee accompanied by warm cream, served almost the instant after it is requested, is just a few blocks away. This is why we come to the Left Bank. And why we love it, in our own way. But at the end of the day, we always gladly go home again. The literary history of this side of the river isn’t enough to keep me here.
I took for granted that I would love the Left Bank, but that’s the thing about imagining the future. What we imagine excludes everything else – including all the wonderful possibilities that we aren’t creative or clever enough to come up with on our own.
