I fell in love with France when I started reading Australian writer Janelle McCulloch’s fine words about the city.
Take this, for example:
It’s early autumn as I write this in my tiny apartment near the St-Sulpice church, and the season is settling comfortably over the Left Bank like a woollen scarf wrapped around the city’s neck. Most people don’t realise that Paris is more beautiful going into the colder months than at any other time. Under a dignified sky of Dior grey, you can see the ‘bones’ of the city, including its noble architecture, through the brittle branches of the trees. Somehow, the city seems finer, grander, more spectacular. The shimmering cognac shade of the Seine under the morning sun (which changes through the day to a luminous petrol blue and, finally, to a silver the colour of evening slippers at twilight), the grand grey of the famous cobblestone avenues and the fine oyster-shell grey of the buildings combine to give the city an almost gentlemanly feel. The city is distinguished, poised and more handsome than a Frenchman in a black tie.
This morning, as I walked out into the place St-Sulpice, where the morning light was still blinking in bleary reluctance over the buildings, you could smell the new season in the air. In the Luxembourg Gardens the park was being redressed for autumn with a light coat of copper leaves, while over in the organic market at boulevard Raspail, plump pumpkins and squashes were replacing strawberries, cherries and lavender on the open-air stalls. The rain, which had fallen lightly like pearl-grey tulle through the night, had stopped, although the streetlamps still shone like Carrier diamonds in the pale light. And everywhere you looked, there was a compelling beauty that made the ‘oh’ catch in your throat. The city was, in all its autumnal splendour, a romantic pastiche of poetic gestures, and it was perfect. Just perfect. The kind of day that makes you believe the ideal can be real.
I am not the only one who feels this strange and all-consuming seduction. All over Paris, people ― even the Parisians themselves ― are rediscovering and remembering how beautiful and sensual their city can be. Call it dalliance français, if you’ll forgive the pun, but everyone’s falling a little in love with Paris all over again.
Doesn’t it make you want to go, immediately? To enjoy the kind of day that makes you believe the ideal can be real? To sit and have a wine (or three) and soak in the city of love and lights?
You can. And what better way than with a French river cruise? Just say those three words again: French River. Cruise.
I can’t understand why you’re not already packed.
Infographic created by Cruiseabout.
