Historically, the French have had a romantic attachment to their bikes. Though the first functioning two-wheeler is thought to have been invented by a German in 1817, it was the French who popularized...
Paris . . . is loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry; it belongs to the dreamers, to those capable of amusing themselves in its streets without regard to time when urgent business req...
Consuming alcohol in public is allowed in France, which means drinkers overflow onto the sidewalk, especially on the Montmartre stretch. But it rarely gets out of control.
He called him (it was always a man) a flâneur. The crowd is his habitat, as air is for the bird or water for the fish, he wrote. His passion and his profession is to wed the crowd. . . . To be away fr...
An American writer who had come to visit France . . . asked quite naturally what it was that had kept me here so long. . . It was useless to answer him in words. I suggested instead that we take a str...
He told me it was First, by Van Cleef & Arpels.