Remember the movie Casablanca? And the scene where Humphrey Bogart is just about to part from Ingrid Bergman forever and she’s weeping, and he reminds her of the good times they had together, saying “We’ll always have Paris.” Well, I’m not about to part with my wife Sylvia. But we also have memories of Paris, and I’d like to share a few…

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Sylvia’s teenage son had become addicted to drugs, and after several failed attempts to treat him locally, we sent him to a rehab facility in Utah. We visited every two months—that was the only visiting that was allowed, and it was mandatory—so by 2002 we had accumulated enough frequent flier mileage for a trip to Europe.

We signed up for the spring term at the Alliance Française—me in the beginner’s class, and Sylvia at a more advanced level, as she’d studied the language and spent a summer there as a teenager.

If you’re on a limited budget, the best time to visit Paris is in August. French law mandates five to six weeks paid vacation per year, and because it’s the hottest month, a lot of Parisians spend August on vacation somewhere else. Quite a number of them rent out their apartments to tourists.

Workers in every country except the United States must receive a certain amount of paid time off, anywhere from a miserly 10 days in Japan to 45 days in Yemen.  Even poverty-stricken Indonesia, where I had visited in 1983, provides 29 days. Only in the United States are we dependent on the generosity of our employers, or what our union can fight for—if we have a union.

Sylvia and I were able to rent two apartments in Paris, for two weeks each—much more reasonable than staying in hotels. Rents in Paris were comparable to what they would be in San Francisco.

We didn’t really want to eat a lot of rich French restaurant food, and we didn’t need to, because I had my own kitchen. I would walk to the nearby marché biologique on the days it was open and fill a couple of shopping bags with organic groceries. That way the trip cost us only one month’s extra rent, plus hiring a cat sitter, plus loss of income as I was a contract worker. I believe Sylvia was between jobs at the time anyway.

Our first apartment was on the top floor, five flights up. It had formerly been the servant’s quarters. The building had a tiny elevator; two people could fit in it if they were very friendly. However the apartment had lots of light. Outside our windows the sky was full of swallows, and in the evenings we could watch flocks of pigeons circling before they came to roost.

The second apartment was in the Belleville neighborhood and directly above an excellent boulangerie, the one that supplied bread to the presidential palace. I’d go downstairs in the morning, pick up a loaf of fresh bread, and pack sandwiches for our excursions. We did eat out occasionally—once at a French restaurant, and the other times at less pricey North African and Senegalese places.

We frequently took the Paris Métro, which is quite comparable to the New York subway as they were both built around the same time. The station near our apartment had an escalator that groaned like a wounded elephant, and we found that very amusing. But we noticed immediately that the French subway system isn’t wheelchair accessible (except for the most recently built line), while a third of New York’s subways have been updated, and San Francisco’s BART is now totally accessible.

We loved the aroma of fresh bread drifting up from the boulangerie, and from other bakeries we passed on our excursions. We were less pleased with the stench spreading from the street-corner pissoirs, designed for men and used exclusively by them. (The city has since replaced them with self-cleaning booths, available to both sexes and free.)

We did some typical tourist things, like inching through the halls of the Louvre along with swarms of other tourists, their cameras constantly flashing, many of them posing in front of the art so they could show the folks back home that they’d really been right next to the Mona Lisa. I was horrified, thinking about the long-term damage to the paint. Flash photography is against the rules there, but the museum guards did nothing.

The Musée d’Orsay was less crowded. The van Gogh collection lifted me into the stratosphere. His paintings appear to breathe, to be alive. Seeing them in person was utterly different from seeing reproductions, and worth the entire trip. If I were the kind of person who wants to own art and was given a choice between a van Gogh and the entire contents of the Louvre, I’d take the van Gogh. I’d fly back tomorrow, even for just a weekend, to gaze at one of those paintings again.

We also visited Sainte-Chapelle, a 13^th-Century royal chapel. To me it’s one of the two most beautiful buildings in the world, second only to the 7^th Century Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Both seem to have as much stained glass as solid wall and are flooded with light and color.

Sainte-Chapelle was built with two levels, the higher one for les privilégiés, that is, the royal family and members of their court, while the lower was for the servants. The old sign marking the separation is still there. By contrast, the Dome was open to all Muslims. Also, since Islam prohibits making images of humans or animals, stained glass in the Dome forms geometric patterns and verses from the Quran. The windows in Sainte-Chapelle depict scenes from the Bible, and culminate in an image of King Louis IX asserting his divine right to rule.

I was less taken with Notre Dame. It was too massive (over 11 times the size of the Dome, 32 times the size of Sainte Chapelle!) and dark and gloomy, almost black inside. Turns out the black walls were the result of centuries of burning candles. After the 2019 fire, both inside and outside were restored, and from photographs I see that the interior is white again. I’ll be sure to stop by next time I’m visiting van Gogh.

As it happened, we were at Notre Dame on August 14, the day the city’s Catholics hold a procession for the Feast of the Assumption. Now that really impressed us! The priests carried a silver statue of Mary out of the church and through the streets, followed by thousands of people, mostly women. The priests called out Mary’s many titles and virtues, one by one. After each item was called out, the thousands of voices responded, nous marchons vers toi (we walk toward you). I can still hear their chant, in descending tones, still see in my mind’s eye the paralyzed young man, his mother pushing him in a wheelchair, no doubt hoping for a miracle.

On another day we were sitting outdoors in a park across the street from a MacDonald’s, and noticed some pigeons feeding on the scraps people dropped. Unlike other birds we’d seen everywhere else in Paris, these poor creatures looked really, really sick. (I was reminded of photos in my high school biology textbook, one of a healthy chicken, the other of a chicken fed a vitamin-deficient diet. Even then I was shocked by the cruelty of the experiment.)

As it happened, Sylvia’s daughter Betsy was dating a young Frenchman whom she’d met in college, and they were in Paris at that same time. While rushing to meet her, Sylvia tripped on a cobblestone and injured her ankle. We didn’t know if it was a bad sprain or a fracture, so after briefly visiting with Betsy we caught a taxi to the nearest hospital.

The waiting and exam rooms were quite shabby compared to those in the U.S.—as I remember, they were direly in need of new paint—but everyone was kind and efficient. We didn’t have to wait long. While Sylvia was being X-rayed, I filled out a form with her name and address. We figured they’d send us a bill, and we could present that to Kaiser when we got home.

It was just a bad sprain. They prescribed a painkiller and told her to buy crutches and use them while it healed. When we returned to our apartment I looked up the words in my pocket dictionary, went to the nearest pharmacy, and asked for cannes anglais. Stumbling over the pronunciation, I explained that my friend had injured her cheval.

The pharmacy clerk frowned disdainfully as she corrected my French. “Cheville,” she said—her ankle, not her horse.

“Oui, madame, merci,” I replied.

She was the only rude person I encountered during our stay, but she did bring me the correct item.

Sylvia healed rapidly. A few days later when we went for a stroll in what the guidebook said was a nearby forest, but was actually a manicured grove, she realized she could walk on her own. “I’m glad I don’t need the crutches anymore,” she said, cheerfully quoting Pollyanna. I don’t remember how we disposed of them.

On our last day in Paris we had dinner at a café on the Rue de Belleville, the late afternoon sun streaming gold on us, on residents out for a stroll, Orthodox Jews along one side of the street, the North Africans and Senegalese in glorious native dress along the other. We wished that hour would never end…

…but all too soon we were on a plane back to San Francisco. No hospital bill awaited us upon our return. We thought most likely her medical care was covered by the French government and paid for by taxes, though possibly the fee was so trivial that they didn’t bother submitting the paperwork. (See below.)

As I write this, more memories come back to me. I still dream of returning, but that seems unlikely for a number of reasons, not least of which is that our government appears to be hurtling us into World War III. Yet Oscar Wilde once wrote, “When good Americans die, they go to Paris.” So perhaps we still have a chance.

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Today a tourist in Paris would have to pay up front for that urgent care visit: 30€ for the doctor and 27€50 for the X-ray, or $34.62 and $31.73 at the current exchange rate. In San Francisco it would be $100-$250 for the exam, plus $200-$400 for X-rays.